Through Susy’s Eyes

Abstract

The centrepiece of this essay is a close reading of Henry Mancini’s score for the 1967 suspense film Wait Until Dark, starring Audrey Hepburn. Drawing on poststructuralist narrative theory, I explore the implications of a blind protagonist for received thinking about focalisation and propose a music-informed narrative reading of the film. Informed by feminist disability studies and the work of film critics including Steven Shaviro, Stan Link, Vivian Sobchack, Michel Chion, and others, I propose that, unlike other films with visually impaired protagonists, which affirm the stability of visual experience by presenting blindness as an epistemological prop for theorising sight, Wait Until Dark effects a decentring of vision in cinematic experience that challenges traditional associations between sight and selfhood. Based on musical and narrative analysis, I argue that Mancini’s score is significant to this process.