Blindness=Alienation

After reading Marx's article on alienation, and watching the film Dancer in the Dark, one thing stood out to me over everything else in the film. What is the significance of the blindness? Once I thought more deeply into it, I realized that the blindness facilitates alienation. It helps to further prove the alienation of Selma not only from her country or people around her, but to us as viewers as well.
Selma is immediately alienated from her country and the people around her the second she steps foot on the soil. She is not from the same country as them, so she does not share the same lifestyle or customs, not to mention she is a little strange. And everyone knows how people from a particular country treat outsiders or foreigners... The majority of the time the natives are not nice or courteous to the foreigners, further alienating them instead of inviting them in. Her blindness is nothing but a giant hindrance for her, obviously, throughout the entire movie. It makes her oblivious to quite a few things, and many of these things are extremely important, such as when she hides the money and other characters, as well as the viewers see right where she places the money, and she has no clue anyone saw her.
Her alienation from the audience is not only because of her blindness, but also because of the way the movie is directed. It seems to me that there are many other factors that help to alienate her from everything, and the blindness seems to be that final factor that pushes it over the edge. The alienation of Selma from the audience is mainly due to the camera angles, and the way we view her and the events surrounding her, her blindness just serves as one more thing she has to deal with that the majority of us do not, and makes her even less relate-able.
Overall, even though there are many things that lead the audience and most of the characters in the film away from relating to Selma, blindness seems to be the most apparent one. It is something that is so obvious in daily life, and the majority of the audience does not experience life the way a blind person does, so there is very little we can relate to with Selma, although we may feel for her, and sympathize with her, we do not relate with her.