I left the movie fairly disturbed, not because of its misrepresentation of life after disability (I am too ignorant to be upset by that) but because of the other tale it told. I'll sum it all up for those who haven't seen the movie.
Swank, a "white trash" thirty something shows up in Eastwood's boxing gym eager to be trained as a boxer. Eastwood declines repeatedly, but eventually takes her on. Morgan Freeman, Eastman's Friday and boxing gym janitor, tells Swank that Eastwood is shy to train another fighter because of what happened when Freeman was a fighter himself (under Eastwood's coaching)....he fought too long, and wound up losing sight in one eye. Eastwood blames himself for this, but not so much that he is willing to do very much more for Freeman than to let him mop floors in his gym.
Swank works very, very hard....just like in all the Hollywood biopics: the calendar pages turn, she punches the bag harder and harder, she starts winning bout after bout. Finally, she gets set up to fight a German woman, who is known to fight dirty, for a million dollars. The woman lands an illegal punch when Swank isn't looking. Swank falls, breaks her neck, is paralyzed from the neck down, and is finally "mercy" killed by Eastwood -- who is tough enough to kill the one he loves.
The movie is basically a riff on the rags-to-riches story but hardly a critique of its logic. You are rich or you might as well be dead. Swank and Freeman are presented as worthy aspirants & Eastwood as the middle-white-professional man who can help make it happen if the grunts are willing to work hard enough, to suffer enough, and to want it hard enough. Nothing new here.
But this is no Rocky. If "Rocky" was the bugle call for the white working class "hero" to claim his own again, if it presaged the Horowitzes of our time, the hero of "Million $ Baby" is actually Eastwood, and what is being celebrated here is his betrayal of both Freman and Swank....though, of course, his betrayal is not portrayed as a betrayal but as a salvation.
If Easwood stands in for the managerial layer of the working class, what this movie tells us is that in response to the innocent faith and brutal work of Swank, the greatest thing that her "boss" can do is to liberate her right out of this world. And though the movie pits Eastwood against the conventional religiosity of the Catholic church -- it is clear that the solution he offers the disabled Swanke is meant to be understood as a "higher" solution than that allowed by the church itself, and therefore in a sense, also holy.
All in all, a very scary message.
Joanna
Marta Russell wrote:
> This is so important with wounded/impaired soldiers coming back from
> Iraq. Marta
>
>
>
> CONTACTS:
>
> John B. Kelly Alyson Perry 617-536-5140 857-523-0255
> John.B.Kelly at Verizon.Net
> saintsaddle at Yahoo.com
>
> For Immediate Release February 25 , 2005
> NOTE: THIS RELEASE CONTAINS "SPOILERS"
>
> Not Dead Yet to Leaflet Oscar Gala: "Million Dollar Baby" Gets
> Disability Dead Wrong
>
>
> The Resistance
>
> Clint Eastwood's latest film, "Million Dollar Baby," has been
> nominated for seven Academy Awards, including the five leading
> categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading
> Role, Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Best Supporting Actor. The
> Boston Globe called it "sublime," "Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece,"
> and the Boston Herald hailed Eastwood's "glory." Other critics gushed
> that it was "remarkable,"<>[i] "joins the honor list of great fight
> films,"<>[ii] "a model of unadorned precision,"<>[iii] a "heartfelt
> story about human frailty and the power of redemption,"<>[iv] "a
> breathtaking human drama that will leave you speechless,"<>[v] and,
> from that dean of American movie critics Roger Ebert, "a masterpiece,
> pure and simple, deep and true."<>[vi] No major film critic has
> noticed anything awry about the film's presentation of life after
> spinal cord injury, which disability rights activists are ridiculing
> as absurd and insulting.
>
> In order to correct this basic misrepresentation, the Boston chapter
> of Not Dead Yet, a nationwide grass-roots group resisting the
> promotion of assisted suicide and the "mercy killing" of disabled
> people, will be be gathering outside the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston
> on Sunday, February 27, at 6:00 p.m. to educate the guests and media
> attending the Massachusetts Film Bureau's 14th Annual Massachusetts
> Movie Awards Gala. The hotel is at 200 Boylston St.
>
> This is not a protest, nor are activists calling for a boycott of the
> movie.
> "Please go see this movie, but keep in mind how dead wrong it is about
> disability" said John Kelly of Boston. "Like the character Maggie
> (Hilary Swank), I have a high spinal cord injury, but audiences should
> know that while Maggie received cartoon care, and got cartoon skin
> ulcers leading to a cartoon amputated leg, real spinal cord injury
> patients get real care and keep their legs. In real rehab centers, we
> get up in our wheelchairs every day and we drive them ourselves, we
> get counseling and learn how to live independently, we get excited
> about ever newer and better assistive technology, and most
> importantly, we do all this in the community of other spinal cord
> injured people learning the same."
>
> To dramatize how criminally neglected Maggie was, the group has
> produced a "brochure" describing Maggie's rehabilitation center,
> "Serenity Glen," which, so the audience was told, "took good care of
> Maggie." The "brochure" parodies the dismal stereotypes "Serenity
> Glen" promotes, along with such crude plot devices as Maggie's
> complete isolation and devastating bedsores, as just what audiences
> and critics expect about life after spinal cord injury.
>
> "Every aspect of Maggie's stay at 'Serenity Glen,'" Alyson Perry of
> Medford said, "is set up to flow swiftly to one lethal
> conclusion--that Maggie is better off dead than disabled."
>
> The Los Angeles Chapter of Not Dead Yet and other LA-area disability
> activists will be making exactly this point at a press conference
> Sunday outside the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, where the Oscar
> ceremony will take place. As Not Dead Yet research analyst Stephen
> Drake said, "This movie is a corny, melodramatic assault on people
> with disabilities. It plays out killing as a romantic fantasy and
> gives emotional life to the 'better dead than disabled' mindset
> lurking in the heart of the typical (read: nondisabled) audience member."
>
> Diane Coleman, Not Dead Yet founder and president, pointed out the
> potential deadly consequences of this message."The biggest problem
> with Million Dollar Baby is that some of the audience will be newly
> disabled people, their family members and friends, swept along in the
> critically acclaimed emotion that the kindest response to someone
> struggling with the life changes brought on by a severe injury is,
> after all, to kill them."
>
> Not Dead Yet has been joined in condemning the film's "better dead
> than disabled" message by the National Spinal Cord Injury Association
> and the American Association of People With Disabilities, the nation's
> largest nonprofit cross-disability member organization.
>
> Bill Henning, Executive Director of the Boston Center for Independent
> Living, is concerned about the denial of independent living in the
> movie. "I'm disappointed, if hardly surprised, that 'Million Dollar
> Baby' apparently ducks consideration of services that would have
> enabled Maggie to live a meaningful life. For thirty years we've
> helped thousands of disabled Massachusetts residents to live and
> prosper in the community, but Eastwood had to resort to a 'Hollywood
> ending,' one whose fundamental tragedy is not the actual storyline but
> its utterly false statement that a disabled life is not worth living."
>
> "Imagine" added Kelly, "if in the boxing scenes, it was obvious that
> all the punches missed their targets by three feet, yet the characters
> fell down and suffered injuries anyway. The film would be laughed
> out of the theaters and disgraced in the academy. Well, The Mayo
> Clinic reports that there are up to 200,000 people living in the
> United States with a spinal cord injury, not one of whom seems to have
> been consulted for the making of this movie. The question is how
> could audiences and critics not even notice Clint Eastwood's
> cartoonish, negative depiction of the rehab experience?"