Feb 19, 2015

A Clockwork ERG Simulation: Blind Film #6

Sometimes blindness takes the form of someone being forced to see something one doesn't want to see—something painful…physically, emotionally, or both.

An electroretinograph (onomatopoeically abbreviated "ERG") is a test that measures the electrical responses of  cells in the retina—rods, cones, ganglions, and so on. When they administer it, they dose the patient with some very strong eyedrops that can dilate the pupils (and severely blur the vision) for up to three days. Then they pry the eyes open and insert an oversized contact lens attached to an electrode, along with several other electrodes that get taped to the face and scalp…that's the easy part. Next they subject the patient to three barrages of flashing lights: one minute of metronomic blue flashes (painful), one minute of metronomic red flashes (worse), and then 10 minutes of stroboscopic white light (unquantifiably bad), after which they remove the electrodes and the lens and repeat the whole thing with the other eye.

I've had the ERG three times in my life with varying results. In my teenage years between session #1 and #2, I saw Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange, about a gang of longjohn-wearing protopunk hooligans on a spree of what they termed "ultraviolence." To cure one of them of his psychopathic behavior, they strap him into a cinema seat, pry open his eyelids, and force him to watch footage of Nazi warcrimes while an orderly administers drops of fluid into his eyes, an experience that, from where I sat, was astonishingly like the ERG.

Sometimes blindness takes the form of someone being forced to see something one doesn't want to see—something painful…physically, emotionally, or both. That pain can be illuminating, and it can also be blinding. The line between the two is a fine one indeed.

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