{"id":2653,"date":"2005-02-15T16:04:59","date_gmt":"2005-02-15T21:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/02\/15\/2653.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:48:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:48:06","slug":"grumpy-grumpy-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/02\/15\/grumpy-grumpy-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Grumpy grumpy me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. Your Humble Blogger saw Million Dollar Baby<\/a> the other day. And the rest of this column is about the plot twist, and its representations elsewhere. So if you want to be surprised by the twist—and I was, more or less, this would be a good time to stop reading. Or now. Before the start of the next paragraph, anyway. Certainly before following the link to Frank Rich’s column, How Dirty Harry Turned Commie<\/a>.\n

The movie’s protagonist is Frankie Dunn, a boxing trainer\/manager and cut-man who owns a run-down old gym. When we first get to know him, it’s clear that he’s a better cut-man than manager. He is seriously risk-averse; he refuses a title bout that his fighter might lose. The fighter, predictably, leaves him for a gutsier, more ambitious manager, leaving Frankie with just the gym. A ... spunky ... young woman named Maggie demands that Frankie train her as a boxer. He does, reluctantly. It turns out she’s great. They bond. He gets her a championship fight; she is winning when her opponent hits her with a cheap shot after the bell. She goes down, hits her head on the stool, cracks her spine (C2-C3, I think), and is permanently paralyzed. She, suicidal, pleads with him to kill her. He dithers for a bit, and then does. End of movie.\n

Now, it’s a seriously well-made movie. I found the emotional stuff powerfully moving, and even knowing there was a plot twist, I was surprised by it when it happened. The foreshadowing didn’t give it away (to me), but was enough that I thought back on it when it happened. Also, the writing brought out various aspects of Frankie’s character very nicely. His risk-aversion costs him his fighter. His only employee is an ex-fighter kept in penance for their youth, when his skill as cut-man kept the fighter in the ring long enough to lose an eye; this too feeds in to the themes of protection, risk, and responsibility. He attends Mass obsessively, passing off his religiosity by making a show of needling Father Straightman. He writes his estranged daughter every week, putting her through the grief of returning each letter, unopened. He offers unsolicited financial advice to his protégée, even snooping through her checkbook, and the advice is, unsurprisingly, to buy a house, cash in hand, no mortgage. He fears risk. He assumes responsibility. Eastwood, directing himself, makes use of his well-known face and mannerisms to hammer home the characters’ inflated sense of responsibility as well as his obsessive, magnificent commitment to upholding that responsibility.\n

Thus, when Maggie is paralyzed, there is no moment of decision, no struggle in his mind. He leaves all other work to take care of her, appearing to move in to the hospital and then the rehab center. She doesn’t (I think) thank him for it, nor does the viewer; we accept it. When her family appears, our fear is that she will foolishly choose her biological relatives rather than Frankie, who has assumed the role of father, protector and support. Of course, she sends them packing. Then, when she demands Frankie kill her, we see that his responsibility tears him in half. Breaking down, he says to his priest that he’s killing her by keeping her alive. He can’t fulfill his responsibility to protect her—to make up for his failure to protect her, in fact—without doing as she asks.\n

Except, of course, that he can. There is no inkling whatever in the movie that the woman is temporarily noncompos, and that her will is not binding under the circumstances. Let me add, by the way, that her family, who are portrayed as awful, vile people who have no love for her, come specifically to bilk her of her estate (although I have no idea how, or to what end, or if she makes a new and probably invalid will to disinherit them after the attempt, or what). And, of course, she goes from the championship fight to the wheelchair, losing her obsessive goal in an eyeblink. And yet, the only response of the medical staff to her suicidal depression is to sedate her to vegetation. The film doesn’t allow any alternatives to Frankie, and not (in my viewing) because he is blind to them, as he might well be, but because the filmmakers want us to be blind to them. Her life was boxing; a wheelchair-bound life is intolerable and death is a release. That’s it.\n

Now, to the political and ethical points, and I’d like to emphasize that they are different. First, we are currently working on under what circumstances, if any, it should be legal to assist someone in committing suicide, so by showing someone doing it without showing repercussions is a little, um, disingenuous. Legally, Frankie commits murder; nobody discusses any legal implications of that. Still, I suppose, it’s possible to claim that the movie should stimulate discussion of whether he made the right choice, and, if we assume that the right choice should be legal, change our views of the laws to accommodate that. Phooey. Hard cases make bad laws. Fictional cases make worse ones. The contribution of this piece of film to the policy discussion can only be to muddy it with Dirty Harry’s face on an issue that is hard enough to think clearly about in the abstract.\n

Secondly, I’d like to make clear that no law will remove the necessity of moral thought. If assisting in suicide becomes legal in some cases, it will still be morally wrong in a subset of those cases. It may even be morally right in a subset of cases where it remains illegal. I do believe (and I can argue this separately) that it is incumbent on a person to take the law into account while making moral decisions, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to make the decision. To me, it then follows that if this film is meant to address assisted suicide legislation, it does so from the wrong angle entirely.\n

In other words, the film has come to be a proving ground for arguments about whether assisted suicide should be criminal, and it’s a bad idea either for the filmmakers or viewers to use it in that sense. It’s just not a good vehicle for that.\n

There remains the question of whether Frankie’s action was right. As I was watching the movie, I felt bad for Frankie precisely because his own character flaws prevented him from making the decision well. It’s possible, just barely, that such was the point; if so, it’s a powerful argument for our own inabilities to make such terrible decisions, for we are all at least as flawed as Frankie in our own ways. In a way, if that’s the view of the film, it’s a defense of the church. Had Frankie leaned on the crutch of the church, instead of standing alone in his pride, he would have made a better decision. As it was, he made a bad one. Perhaps that was why I was so depressed about it.\n

Really, though, I think the movie approves of his action, which I find totally inexplicable. I do believe that there are circumstances where suicide is an allowable option, and assisting someone is the most moral option available. This is not one of those circumstances. Maggie is not dying; with decent medical care (unlike the fictional kind in the movie), she could live for decades, and not in chronic pain, either. She simply chooses not to live in her current circumstances. She doesn’t want to live until she can’t hear, in her mind, the crowds chanting her name (or her nickname, anyway). Fine. All athletes reach the point where they can no longer perform at their peak, or even at all. Is it their right to be killed? Is the difference that Maggie can’t walk? Lots of people are bound to wheelchairs and live; most of those have had suicidal moments. Heck, most of all of us have had them.\n

Look, we don’t know anything about Maggie’s actual medical condition, which is a tool of the filmmakers anyway. But it seems clear to me that she has options. She can choose to live. She can choose to adapt. She can choose to start a new life, with new goals. Frankie is bound, in responsibility, to help Maggie with those choices. But if she chooses death, he is not bound to help her with that. First, of course, because there is no reason to believe that she is of sound mind, but second because there are limits to what a person can ask another to do for a choice. In necessity, those limits are different. This is only a matter of necessity because the movie forces it to be by narrowing our vision.\n

The movie also cheats. By portraying her family as unpleasant, unattractive, unloving and dishonest, it makes a false choice between them and death. By consistently showing Maggie’s development as purely physical, it makes a false choice between physical activity and death. By buying into the championship fever typical of sports and sports movies, it makes a false choice between victory and failure (victory in this movie consists of a title fight, of “getting your shot”, not necessarily of getting the title; it’s a distinction without a difference). And, of course, it ties us into Frankie’s view of the world, and makes us view the decision solely from his perspective, which is not the only one or the best one.\n

OK, enough. Maybe having got it written down, I’ll be able to let it go.\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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