An advocacy group for the vision impaired plans to protest the movie “Blindness” when it opens nationwide Friday. Marc Maurer, the president of the National Federation for the Blind, says that “the movie portrays blind people as monsters.”

I don’t see it that way. The characters lose their sight so quickly–from a mysterious virus–that they don’t have time to develop the coping skills of ordinary blind persons. They’re tossed into prison and starved by their jailers–who are the real monsters.

Based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, “Blindness” is metaphor for the breakdown of society. With no one in control and survival at stake, any person can resort to savagery. The similarly themed “Lord of the Flies,” in which kids stranded on an island develop a Darwinian pecking order, was hardly an insult to children.

I don’t begrudge any interest group fighting for respectful treatment, and God knows the blind have plenty to protest. (For instance, the U.,S. is the only major country on earth that doesn’t have different sizes of paper currency so the blind can tell the difference.) But in the case, I think there’s a difference between a story and a stereotype.