See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)
Directed by Arthur Hiller
No — See No Evil, Hear No Evil is not woke, scoring 15 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
A deaf man and a blind man witness a murder they cannot properly perceive, are arrested for it, and spend the remainder of the runtime outwitting the killers.
Consciousness Markers
A Black co-lead (Richard Pryor) and two protagonists written as disabled (deaf and blind) give the film notable diverse presence for 1989, though the disabled roles are played by non-disabled actors and the diversity is incidental rather than a deliberate statement.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
The lone prominent woman, Eve, is a femme-fatale villainess defined by her legs and perfume; there is no feminist agenda or commentary.
Despite a Black co-star, the film never engages race as a subject; the Pryor/Wilder pairing is treated purely as a comic odd-couple.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
The villains' greed over a superconductor is standard crime-caper motivation, not a critique of capitalism.
No body-positivity themes; the film trades in slapstick gags about physical difference rather than affirming body image.
Deafness and blindness are sensory disabilities, not neurodivergence, and the film offers no neurodivergent framing.
The film is a contemporary fictional crime comedy with no historical subject matter to revise.
A broad slapstick comedy that preaches nothing; there is no didactic or moralizing impulse.
Why it received this score
A deaf man and a blind man witness a murder they cannot properly perceive, are arrested for it, and spend the remainder of the runtime outwitting the killers. This is the premise of See No Evil, Hear No Evil, a 1989 crime comedy that pairs Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor for the third time and asks them to carry a script that critics of the era generously described as idiotic. The film was a commercial success nonetheless, holding the top spot at the domestic box office for two weeks, which tells us something about the appetites of the summer of 1989 that we may not wish to examine too closely.
From a standpoint of cultural consciousness, the picture is a curious artifact. It places a Black man and a white man on equal footing as co-leads, and it builds its entire comic engine around two disabled protagonists, which is more diverse presence than most studio comedies of the period could claim. Yet the film treats these facts as raw material for slapstick. Deafness becomes a gag about missed gunshots. Blindness becomes a gag about tripping over corpses. Neither performer is disabled, and nothing in the writing suggests the filmmakers intended a statement about anything. The lone significant woman is a villainess identified by her legs and her perfume, a characterization the camera lingers on with the enthusiasm of a perfume advertisement. Race is never mentioned. Class is never mentioned. The villains want a superconductor, which is greed in its most generic form.
The result is a film that offends no ideology and advances none. It lectures no one, moralizes about nothing, and reserves its energies for pratfalls. In an era when a comedy could still be merely a comedy, this one was merely a bad one. The classification is straightforward, and the fatigue it induces is genuine.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A murder takes place in the shop of David Lyons, a deaf man who fails to hear the gunshot being fired. Outside, blind man Wally Karue hears the shot, but cannot see the perpetrator. Both are arrested, but escape to form an unlikely partnership. Being chased by both the law AND the original killers, can the pair work together to outwit them all?
Questions about See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Is See No Evil, Hear No Evil woke?
No — See No Evil, Hear No Evil is not woke, scoring 15 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does See No Evil, Hear No Evil have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (35). On Representation Casting: A Black co-lead (Richard Pryor) and two protagonists written as disabled (deaf and blind) give the film notable diverse presence for 1989, though the disabled roles are played by non-disabled actors and the diversity is incidental rather than a deliberate statement.
How does See No Evil, Hear No Evil compare to other 1989 movies?
It ranks #12 of the 68 films from 1989 we've scored; their average is 10. The wokest is Do the Right Thing (72).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.