There are stereotypes in Hollywood filmmaking using disabled characters over the history of the cinema. Historian Paul Longmore has written about them but since we are on the Mil Dol Babe theme ... here is John Hockenberry on the film and you can find more commentary if you are interested in disability culture which has set its focus for this week on MDB:
http://milliondollarbigot.org/
[An op-ed column from NBC News Correspondent, John Hockenberry:]
And the Loser Is...
By John Hockenberry
One can barely imagine how relieved the movie critics now climbing over themselves to defend Clint Eastwood were to see the right-wing media going after Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. Suddenly they were free to set the dispute into a broad culture war context as Frank Rich did last week. They were free finally to ignore the true outrage of the movie. These same critics failed millions of Americans with disabilities by accepting as utterly plausible the plot-twist that a quadriplegic would sputter into medical agony in a matter of months and embrace suicide as her only option in a nation where millions of people with spinal cord injuries lead full long lives. No, these critics would much prefer to talk about offenses against poor victimized directors, comparing Eastwood to last year's besieged Michael Moore rather than to talk about their own failings or about a group which has never had any standing in the culture wars.
Plot twist is, in fact, an apt description of Million Dollar Baby's ending. A spinal cord injury followed by a dolorous slo-mo sipping of Eastwood's poetic hemlock avoids the inconvenient truth that a female athlete outside of basketball and perhaps professional mud-wrestling has virtually no opportunity to make a living in America. That might make a more plausible reason for suicide than the rationale Million Dollar Baby supplies.
Hollywood loves this disabled suicide plot and Eastwood is hardly the only director to be enthralled with might be called the crip ex machina theatrical convention.
How delusional is it for Hollywood to spend billions on teen flicks and big budget films where teens and youth culture star and yet there is practically never any mention that suicide is the number one public health concern for American teenagers, one of the leading causes of teen deaths? Somehow teen-suicide seems just nutty compared to depressed quadriplegics offing themselves. Maybe the plot twist Hollywood seems so desperate to defend isn't really assisted suicide. Maybe its Eastwood's own epic saga of slogging to the Oscar summit that gets these critics all misty eyed?
As a right-wing culture war target, rather than an anti- disabled bigot, Eastwood and the critics can certainly avoid mentioning the director's high-profile campaign against the American With Disabilities act after he was sued for owning an inaccessible restaurant. The thought of insulting or offending millions of people who live full lives despite a myriad of restrictions on their freedoms and a palpable sense of impatience that we're "not dead yet" at all enter the minds of these movie culture warriors. Had it occurred to them, they might have mentioned that Rush Limbaugh and his gang were among the biggest critics of the ADA, have endorsed restrictions on healthcare support for people in need of long-term rehabilitation and have eagerly used disabled rights to further their own agenda when convenient.
If Mr. Eastwood is so convinced that his film is grounded in reality then perhaps he might wish to accompany me to the U.S. Army's Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland where there are 1000 or so severely disabled soldiers from Iraq whose lives are changed forever, who were told they fought for Iraqi freedom and are now perhaps wondering, along with their families, who is going to fight for their freedom to live a full life here in America. As a paraplegic for three decades I can help them with that question. Would Mr. tough guy Eastwood and his new pals Frank Rich and Roger Ebert have the guts to defend Million Dollar Baby's "plausible" message of suicidal disabled people? Would they offer to helpfully pull the plug on these soldiers? How's that for a plot twist? Thank God there is another message of hope and strength inside Walter Reed and in pockets of sanity in this country. I pray that someday it's a plausible one in Hollywood and throughout America.
John Hockenberry is an author and correspondent for NBC News. He lives in New York with his wonderful wife Allison, and their equally wonderful kids, Zoe, Olivia, Regan and Zachary.
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===================== -- Marta Russell Los Angeles, CA http://www.martarussell.com/