Blindsided: What ‘The Blind Side’ is Retroactively Teaching Us

You know what I like about stories? “The End.”

It’s not that I like stories to, y’know, end. Some I’d love to go on and on. I always get a little sad when I get to the last page of a great book.

But I like that there is an end to those great books—because that’s part of what makes them great. A story might end with, “And they lived happily ever after.” Or it might end with, “And they all poured poison in their ears and died horribly.” But whether the ending is happy or sad, it ends. We know what happens and we can literally close the book on their story.  And because we know how it ends, we can wrap our minds around it more. We can think about the story’s characters, its lessons, its beauty and brokenness.

Our lives aren’t stories. Sure, they’re made of them—millions of them, like an endless parade of sequels. But those stories overlap. They bleed into one another. They become messy. Unmanageable. Conflicting. Our happiest moments can become, with time, our most heartbreaking. What we thought was one story becomes something much different.

I’ve been reading a lot about The Blind Side recently—a movie I reviewed way back in 2009. The story—the one on screen, at least—revolves around Leigh Anne Tuohy, a well-to-do designer who, along with the rest of her family, takes in a homeless teen named Michael Oher. The Tuohys provide Oher with home and security; Oher gives the Tuohys less tangible, but no less important, gifts. And through his influence, Leigh Anne and the rest of the Tuohy family comes to have a far better understanding of love and family.

The movie has a happy ending. The Tuohys adopt Oher, who is able to go to college and ultimately becomes a first-round draft pick in the National Football League. Sandra Bullock, who played Leigh Anne Tuohy, won an Oscar for her work. And for Christians who saw the film and its little dollops of faith, The Blind Side felt extra resonant.

If only the story had stopped there.

On Aug. 14, the real Michael Oher filed court documents alleging that the Tuohys lied to him. Oher accuses them of making him sign papers that made the Tuohys his conservators, not adoptive parents. (He only discovered that he wasn’t adopted earlier this year, he says—though the Tuohys dispute that allegation.) Moreover, he’s never received a dime from the movie, he alleges, and he believes that the Tuohys collected money from The Blind Side movie that was rightfully his. (The Tuohys’ role as conservators gave them, essentially, control over Oher’s finances.)

On Wednesday, the Tuohys announced they’d indeed end Oher’s conservatorship, but their lawyer added that Oher got “every dime he had coming” from the movie. In addition, Tuohys’ lawyers allege that Oher tried to shake down the family—threatening to “plant” a negative news story about the family unless they paid him $15 million. They also say that Oher and the Tuohys have been estranged for “about a decade.”

All that mudslinging, naturally, has hit the movie itself. Critics often pointed to The Blind Side as an example of a “White Savior” film, where Caucasian protagonists sweep in and rescue a non-white person (or group of people): Those criticisms have reignited and redoubled in the wake of the allegations, and some are calling for Bullock’s Oscar to be revoked.

I can’t say who’s right or wrong, of course. I only know that the whole story makes me really sad. I want Oher and the Tuohys to hug it out—to become, truly, the family we all imagined them to be. I want the Hollywood happy ending.

But life ain’t Hollywood, and our world is fallen. Broken. And we are, too. Seems like there are few happily ever afters in the real world. Only the words, “To be continued …”

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” said future villain Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. And sometimes, those words seem all too true. The Blind Side was a movie filled with heroes. And now in the real world, they’ve all been cast—on one side or another—as villains.

And so it is in our own lives, too. We all imagine ourselves as heroes in our own story, but let’s be honest: The roles we play in other people’s stories are more complex. One day we can be Dudley Do-Right, the next, we can be Snidely Whiplash. One day we’re Captain America, the next we’re Thanos.

Hollywood was built on beautiful stories and bald-faced lies (which, if we’re honest, can be one and the same). But perhaps its biggest lie is that we should expect happy endings in our lives. That, perhaps, we deserve them.

And yet, like the most effective lies, there’s truth there too.

Our own stories, after all, are a part of a much bigger story—like the Marvel Cinematic Universe times infinity.

It begins with, “In the beginning.”

And how does it end? For those who love God, it ends with happily ever after.

To be sure, the tale is filled with tragedy and heartbreak, cruelty and disaster. But for all its pain, this story leads to the water of life, “bright as crystal (Rev. 22:1).” It leads to trees filled with fruit. It leads to the very throne of God.

The end? In a way. But God loves His paradoxes, because it’s the beginning, too.

Our world is broken. We’re surrounded by stories not yet done—and sometimes, those stories don’t read like they should. Our own stories, perhaps, are not so different from Oher and the Tuohys. Our pages are filled with misunderstandings and pain, chapters dedicated to bitter betrayal and missed opportunities.

But our bigger story, God’s story, reminds us that even those most tragic of chapters are sprinkled with hope. The page turns, and only God knows what the next page will hold. And inexorably, with each turn of the page, we near creation’s own unfathomable happily ever after.