Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, US)

By Andrew McIntosh

Like his multiple-Oscar winning, revisionist Western Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby is easily interpreted as an attempt by the iconic actor-turned-director to explore the consequences of violence, and in many ways atone for the violent nature of his past films—indeed, his whole star persona. But to claim that Million Dollar Baby—and for that matter Eastwood’s previous film, Mystic River, which also focused on characters either torn by remorse for a past crime or irrevocably twisted by crimes committed against them—is a revision of Eastwood’s attitudes towards violence and the people who practice it is to glaze over the film’s highly problematic politics and ideological allegiances.

Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan was a front for Nixon’s law and order doctrine, a persecutor of blacks, hippies and other subversives in the name of maintaining social order. Indeed, he’s always struck an unnerving balance between liberal allowances for what constitutes entertainment and right-wing ideals governing how violence and power should be exercised. These two factors have helped make Million Dollar Baby frighteningly conducive to the current American Zeitgeist, thereby earning it such inordinate praise from left-leaning outlets like the New York Times. But despite all the film’s pretensions towards the rights of the victim and its depiction of Eastwood’s Frankie Dunn as a man burdened by the sins of his violent, careless past, Million Dollar Baby essentially espouses the very same beliefs that have provided the thematic foundation of Eastwood’s entire canon: (a) that being a victim is a fate too horrible to ever accept or admit to; (b) that vicious, aggressive violence is natural, acceptable, and not to be contested; and (c) that a man with the strength and fortitude to kill when no one else is willing to do so is noble and heroic—a good thing to have in one’s corner, in boxing or in life.

It’s no surprise, then, that a film purporting these ideals should be so in tune with the current cultural pulse in the US, nor is it odd that it has been so widely embraced. Eastwood’s ridiculously simplistic and one-dimensional melodrama seems to have provided a way for many liberal-minded Americans to swallow the sour medicine of George W. Bush’s foreign policies and accept his dictatorial approach to being president. (It’s worth remembering that the denouement of Eastwood’s acclaimed Mystic River [2003] also hews closely to this line of thinking, with Laura Linney telling Sean Penn—who is questioning his faith in his ability as a protector and as man—that, “You’re a king. And a king knows what to do and does it, even when it’s hard.”) Prior to the Academy Awards, City Pages film critic Rob Nelson accurately observed that Million Dollar Baby is “a perfect best picture winner for wartime. Its message is really strong: We send our young and poor off to fight and die for ‘freedom,’ whatever that means, whatever the cost. And if it’s freeing for them, if it’s about glory for them, who are we to tell them it isn’t? War movies are always hard or impossible to make in Hollywood during wartime, but boxing movies are always popular then. I suppose the ring is as close as you can get to the battlefield without being ‘political.’”

That Eastwood’s film should possess such an inherently pro-war message is not surprising coming from the long-time Republican actor-director. (It’s also not surprising that Eastwood, who actively lobbied against a National Disability Bill in 2000, would make a film in which death is depicted as preferable to life with a disability.) What is surprising is the extent to which the film has been heralded—and with the Oscar victory, virtually canonized —by those on the Left, who seem to be swallowing Eastwood’s supposedly revisionist view of violence, while being demonized by those on the Right, who have oversimplified the film’s message as pro-euthanasia. Eastwood supporters also point to the director’s famously efficient directing style—hailed as a throwback to Warner Bros. films of the 40s— though this is really more the product of a lazy approach to technically demanding sequences and a lack of complexity and inquisitiveness where the finer points of human nature and emotion are concerned.

The overwhelming praise Eastwood’s film has received, then, is more a sign of the fragmented and virtually schizophrenic extent of America’s current cultural identity crisis. Though always an integral aspect of America’s national character, the victim/hero dichotomy of the country’s psyche has, since 9/11, become perhaps the defining factor in all issues related to the nation’s perceived strength and vitality. There is no strength in being a victim if one elects to take responsibility for one’s victimhood, either through a person’s pursuit of a violent endeavour or a country’s pursuit of global domination. The power of the victim arises when he or she is completely innocent of any infraction and undeserving of any injury. In this situation, the victim can be redeemed by the hero, who valiantly, nobly, and selflessly restores within the victim a sense of strength and power.

Thus, Million Dollar Baby never seriously considers the possibility that Hilary Swank’s Maggie could lead a healthy and productive life with her disability. In fact, many observers have noted that a person in Maggie’s condition would be admitted to a physical rehab centre, not a care home, and that the development of pressure sores, which in Maggie’s case result in the amputation of a leg—a factor intended to win audience sympathy for Frankie’s final act—simply never happen in such top care facilities. It has also been pointed out in numerous publications that, rather than gnawing off her own tongue—which presumably leads Frankie to believe that killing her is the right thing to do—it would be perfectly legal for Maggie to request the disconnection of her respirator, which, combined with proper drug administration, would result in a painless and humane death. In contrast, the adrenaline overdose administered by Eastwood’s Frankie, apart from being entirely unnecessary, would result in an extremely painful death.

But, of course, like few Hollywood films today, Million Dollar Baby does not take place in reality. It takes place in a contemporary American culture where an aggressively powerful right-wing administration manipulates reality to cast itself in the mold of the Hero, and a battered, weakened, and listless opposition lies on life support, begging—in the eyes of the Hero—to be put out of its misery, to be retired once and for all. The willingness of much of the audience, and indeed the Hollywood establishment, to ignore the film’s cartoonishly villainous perpetrator of violence (who simply fades out of the picture, free from punishment and even criticism) and equally cartoonish distortion of reality, and focus so indulgently, almost pornographically, on the weakness of the victim reflects a society’s willingness to revel in its own victimhood and helplessly accept the leadership of a self-appointed hero. It would seem the Bush agenda has won over liberal America after all.

Andrew McIntosh

Million Dollar Baby

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