Million Dollar Stereotype
I saw Million Dollar Baby tonight for the first time knowing nothing about the plot other than that it was about a woman boxer.
Warning: Spoilers coming.
The story was well crafted, the dialogue was decent, and the acting was amazing, which is really saying something when Clint Eastwood is involved. The first half of the movie was a great story about a woman's struggle to follow her dreams. In the second half, the first quarter was about opening up and growing closer to people in ways you didn't think you were still able. The first three-quarters of the movie were great and moving. During the last quarter of the film, Swank suffers a horrendous accident that leaves her paralyzed, and after being bedridden for several months decides she wants to die, and asks Eastwood to help her. He struggles mightily with the decision and then agrees. The last quarter was about giving up - about feeling sorry for yourself, about letting go when things get rough, and I mean really really really rough, and about forgetting everything you've learned about how to fight. It's about losing your drive, your spirit, your passion. It's about throwing in the towel at a ridiculously young age and giving up on life because you're too materialistic and selfish to realize it's never to late to start over.
Worst of all, the movie perpetuates the idea that there is no "life" for the disabled - that from the moment of tragedy onward, they have nothing left to live for. It's carefully crafted as some sensative story about an old fart who has to make a tough decision, but it reeks of the assumption that the most decent and compassionate thing we can do for the disabled is to kill them. Dirty Harry shows an amazing amount of sensativity in making this film, but in the paraphrased words of Walker Percy from Love in the Ruins, his sensativity and compassion have mistakenly brought him 2 steps away from the gas chambers.
Eastwood, Swank and the rest should be applauded for their acting, writing, directing, etc. skills, and then villified by every activist group for the incredibly offensive statement this movie makes about the quality/value of a disabled person's life.
You want to see a real movie about the disabled? Watch Muderball.
posted by RJ @ 11:00 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
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I framed my question in a Dirty Harry quote to make it the least bit applicable to your post.
"Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Would a disability change the way they interact with the world, in essence, changing their humanity?"
Are you going to post anything again? Ever?
One of the things to keep in mind about the story would be perspective - it is based on the short story, "Million $$$ Baby," by Jerry Boyd (F.X. Toole is his pen name), who was pushing 70 when he wrote it. In other words, the perspective is not that of a thirty-something, but of a hardened, seventy-something professional cutman.
To be honest, though, isn’t this more human than Murderball? Usually, the most poignant expression of humanity is failure, not success. We all like heroes (Christopher Reeves comes to mind) and I think that is because they allow us to forget what we are all about in their refusal to be human themselves. They stand (or, in many cases, sit) as testaments to what we imagine humanness to be all about; Million Dollar Baby is so powerful because it unwaveringly reminds us that life is tragic and humanity is almost always weak imperfection. It forces us to realize that, if we are honest with ourselves, there aren’t any heroes in the romantic sense of it, only in the ironic sense of it. It forces us to realize – albeit in a morbid way – that the most tragic and self-estranged lives are those that cannot accept their own humanness (Christopher Reeves again comes to mind). Anyway, just a thought...
Nice point J. Morgan, you just forgot one thing... I watch movies to escape my tragic and imperfect life, I don't want to me reminded that instead of being a hero I sit in the shop and post crap on my blog.
I disagree. I agree that failure often forces us to face our lives more honestly, but not that it serves as a more defining aspect of what it means to be human. I think it's how we deal with our successes and our failures that define us as people, and that choosing to act, to choose, to will, to be, albeit a somewhat romantic notion, provides more "meaning" than giving up. Surely it is human to suffer, as you've pointed out on our last thread. But is it more meaning-giving, more life-ful, more fulfilling, and thus more human, to live with and through our struggles, or to say it's all too much and end ourselves?
Million Dollar is without a doubt the more romanticized and less human of the two. You won't find Morgan Freeman setting everything aright with his elderly wisdom in murderball, nor a nicely wrapped package of human suffering. Two words: Clint Eastwood. If you can listen to more than 5 minutes of his dialogue and NOT believe it's being overly-romanticized, I don't think there's anything left to talk about.
How can real live quadriplegics talking unscripted about their experiences as disabled people be less realistic and less romanticized than an entirely scripted cast of actors working multiple cuts in an expensive hollywood production of a fictional account?
I don’t know where the disconnect is, but in the past several threads that have dealt with humanity, redhurt and I seem to be talking past each other to some degree. redhurt seems to be arguing the case that being human is how we, as conscious, moral actors, interpret and manage the circumstances of our lives. I, more often than not, am arguing that being human is in large part our circumstances. That is not to say that our circumstances are all that we are or all that define our existence, it is just to say that they are as much a part of it as anything else. Implicit in that, then, is that what conscious, moral actors do to themselves or their environments has a direct effect on who they are and how existence is defined.
In this discussion, I am arguing that the circumstances of living in a society and piecing together meaning in that context are more often than not tragic failures. Now, it is important to note that I am not making any moral conclusions about whether this is a good thing that we need to embrace or a bad thing that we need to overcome, I am just noting that, in my view, this seems to be the case.
Murderball is a story of heroes who fall into the latter category, Million Dollar Baby is a story of tramps who fall into the former. The characters in Murderball are desperately fighting the circumstances of their existence in hopes of clawing out some sort of meaning. Those in Million Dollar Baby, however, are doing so within the confines of their circumstances. My observation that Million Dollar Baby is more poignant and real is based on my observation that most people live life as tramps, not as the heroes who they admire but to whom they cannot relate.
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