Monday, February 14, 2005
Ebert's Million Dollar Baby
The February issue of "THE WEEK" has a little blurb about the Clint Eastwood movie "Million Dollar Baby". (Warning: Plot spoiler coming). Apparently the movie details the friendship between a female boxer (Hilary Swank) and her coach (Clint Eastwood). As the movie progresses Mrs. Swank's character becomes paralyzed by a "sucker-punch" and ends up bedridden. Swank's character then begs Eastwood's character to pull-the-plug so that she can die. In the end, he not only pulls the plug but gives her a lethal injection of a drug to insure her death.
Sweet, ain't it?
Well the "critics", or the ones that matter anyway, love the movie. It shows the heart of the right to die advocates, they say. Life is complicated, who knows what's the right answer in these difficult cases, they prattle. Hey, I got a suggestion, why don't we treat her depression and show her that her life is just as valuable as any of us who can walk. But of course, who am I to tell another they have quality of life simply because they are alive.?
Now we come to Roger Ebert, the critic's critic, who attempts to for-shame all us low brows with this statement:
We should also condemn all of Shakespeare-indeed, most of our greatest plays, films, and novels, since characters often fail to live up to society's highest ideals. A work of art must be true to its characters and to the complexities of human existence-not to a political or religious agenda. Attacking a movie because Maggie doesn't get sufficient counseling is absurd. We might as well say Hamlet needed a psychiatrist.
If a group were to take up a cause for Danish Prince poisoning, based on Hamlet, then I would be focusing on Hamlet. As it is, the right to die advocates are using this movie's message in an attempt to promote their agenda. So let's cast away Mr. Ebert's strawman and talk about the real issue.
Everyone is looking for that line. The one that Eastwood's character crossed and went from murderer into humanitarian. Well, they won't find it because there is no line. What they will find, as they continue to define-down life deciding what quality thresholds need to be crossed (if there are any) before a life can be extinguished, is that everyone's life gets cheapened.
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Sweet, ain't it?
Well the "critics", or the ones that matter anyway, love the movie. It shows the heart of the right to die advocates, they say. Life is complicated, who knows what's the right answer in these difficult cases, they prattle. Hey, I got a suggestion, why don't we treat her depression and show her that her life is just as valuable as any of us who can walk. But of course, who am I to tell another they have quality of life simply because they are alive.?
Now we come to Roger Ebert, the critic's critic, who attempts to for-shame all us low brows with this statement:
We should also condemn all of Shakespeare-indeed, most of our greatest plays, films, and novels, since characters often fail to live up to society's highest ideals. A work of art must be true to its characters and to the complexities of human existence-not to a political or religious agenda. Attacking a movie because Maggie doesn't get sufficient counseling is absurd. We might as well say Hamlet needed a psychiatrist.
If a group were to take up a cause for Danish Prince poisoning, based on Hamlet, then I would be focusing on Hamlet. As it is, the right to die advocates are using this movie's message in an attempt to promote their agenda. So let's cast away Mr. Ebert's strawman and talk about the real issue.
Everyone is looking for that line. The one that Eastwood's character crossed and went from murderer into humanitarian. Well, they won't find it because there is no line. What they will find, as they continue to define-down life deciding what quality thresholds need to be crossed (if there are any) before a life can be extinguished, is that everyone's life gets cheapened.
# posted by Joe Florida @ 11:19 AM 
