On Mar 1, 2005, at 11:57 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> alessandro coricelli acoricelli at mac.com, Mon Feb 28 15:19:45 PST
> 2005
>> Frankie is the hand that Maggie lacks. The rest is technicality.
>
> But _Million Dollar Baby_ is a fiction, not a documentary, so choices
> made by characters are not existential choices of real human
> individuals but narrative choices made by the director Clint Eastwood
> (as well as others involved in the making of the film), in
> consideration of his own preferences and what he imagined the
> predominantly able-bodied audience's preferences to be, rather than
> those of disabled individuals in the real world. The director could
> have made Maggie and Frankie make any of countless other possible
> choices, but having Maggie choose to die and having Frankie choose to
> kill her were the choices made by the director.
I can only agree with that. But since the critique, here, is based on what drove the director, the writer of the script, and the writer of the series of stories from which the script has been adapted, I beg to differ with what I read from some people. What I read, from seeing the movie, is a two faceted process. 1) What I think is a slow process of a sentimental education in which the roles of teacher and learner shift from the traditional "forging" characteristic (a one way rapport) to one of osmosis. The end result is the acceptance of the learner's will and understanding of that same will. The learner teaches the teacher something. Moreover, this process, through the narration of yet another "pupil", becomes the cornerstone of the teacher's liberation from his blocking guilty complex (which was the direct consequence of the teacher's "old" beliefs). In a sense, doing what he's been told becomes the opposite of an act of omnipotence. 2) Of course, and this is the most controversial aspect of all, there is an assessment of Maggie's own life. But the message, here, is not, as it could appear, based on the conviction of a future not worth living (which represents the core of the critiques we have read here, and elsewhere, about the movie), but rather of a life that is complete, that is perceived, judged, as complete.
Ok, I can be biased, because I've had to think closely about these issues personally. I have been in a coma for about forty days last year. I remember vividly when I entered in that status. Back then I felt somewhat ready to go 'cause my condition was linked to a chronic illness I've been living with for decades. When I woke up, I had been faced (even if my mind wasn't clear at all) with choices. Tough ones. I don't know, but my thoughts were that there was something missing. Not big things, but small, rather, almost petty. I thought I needed to fix something, before going, so I chose to give it a try. A try to a very painful path. It is ironic, that some of those things were exactly those that crossed Maggie's mind. You see, also that visit of Maggie's family has been, imho, completely misread. She wanted to fix something, too, with her family. She did, in a way. I mean, what happened in the movie is not the celebration of a Rocky's victory, but the completion (with highs and low, both determining factors of her final decision) of a life.
In the history of filmmaking, I would put M$B, not in the category of a more or less accurate depiction of disabilities, rather in that of two movies that now come to mind. One is the even more controversial "Whose Life it is Anyway", and the other "Seeking Asylum ("Chiedo Asilo", by Marco Ferreri). The second one in particular (even if the story of Whose Life it is Anyway would fit better, but only at first sight). In Seeking Asylum, the story between a teacher and his (socially labeled) mentally disable pupil (a child) is even more clearly one of a "sentimental education" which changes dynamically the traditional roles, producing "choices." At the end, Roberto Benigni, the teacher, end up being so convinced by the child's "teaching" (less verbally based, of course) that he "goes" with him. It's a movie worth seeing.
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>
> I don't believe that there are any easy answers to myriad questions
> raised by the cochlear implant controversy.
I do agree. But that's the reason why the reaction of most of the Deaf Culture fell short, and indicated a limit to which the process of what I called autonomy can lead to when it is not able to "hear" the singularities that make the collective movement of the persons with disabilities.
>
> alessandro coricelli acoricelli at mac.com, Sun Feb 27 11:16:01 PST
> 2005:
>> During this academic year, apparently, the fastest growing foreign
>> language of choice of college students is ASL.
>
> "In both our high schools and our colleges, there is a characteristic
> dropout rate of about 50 percent from one year to the next in the
> language study. . . . In both high school and college, the bulk of
> enrollments are in the first or second-year courses. In the autumn of
> 1990, of the 3.2 million public high school students reporting
> language course enrollments by level, 48 percent were in a first year
> course, 32 percent in a second year, 13 percent in a third year, and
> seven percent in a fourth year or above. Similar enrollment gradations
> are apparent in higher education. In the 1989 ACE survey, at the
> university level 62 percent of the enrollments in Spanish were at the
> introductory level, 23 percent at the intermediate level, and 15
> percent at the advanced level. The same situation obtained in French
> and German" (Leon E. Panetta, "Foreign Language Education: If
> 'Scandalous' in the 20th Century, What Will It Be in the 21st
> Century?" 1999
> <http://language.stanford.edu/about/conferencepapers/
> panettapaper.pdf>). That's hardly enough to achieve proficiency in any
> foreign language. Are student enrollments in ASL courses any different
> from those in other languages?
Of course not. They are driven, according to what I've read, mostly by the perceived less level of difficulty in learning ASL compared to other foreign languages. I mentioned it, just to point out the level of penetration (someone would call it "hybridization") of "languages" (in a Wittgenstenian sense).
ciao, alessandro