A Reel Conundrum: One Film, Three Catholic Opinions

It’s Not Propaganda; It’s Art!
by James K. Fitzpatrick

I feel a bit ill at ease admitting that I agree with something that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written. A few years back, I wrote a column describing her as a classic “narrowback.” I stand by that statement.

A narrowback? Probably most of you have never heard the term. In fact, I don’t hear it much anymore, myself. But I used to hear it quite often from the older Irish in my neighborhood in New York City. They would use it to describe an Irish-American “without shoulders broad enough to bear the traditions of the Irish people,” someone trying too hard to “make it” in America by expressing a disdain for his old-world roots; a social-climber.

I sometimes wonder whether, in her private moments, Dowd realizes that this is her role at the New York Times, to say things about Catholics and the Church that the non-Catholic editors and owners of the paper hesitate to say themselves, and that she would not have risen above the other women journalists in this country to her place on their editorial page if not for her willingness — as an Irish Catholic — to, alternately, nag and belittle Catholics; to be a narrowback.

That said, I maintain that Dowd has it right about Clint Eastwood’s movie Million Dollar Baby. I say that, knowing full well that many conservative and traditional Catholic commentators are on the other side. You know the clichés: even a broken watch is right twice a day; even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut. It is Dowd’s turn to get the nut. I went to see the movie a few days ago. I liked it a lot. I don’t think it was anti-Catholic. Quite the contrary.

Million Dollar Baby tells the story of an aging fight trainer, played by Eastwood, who, in spite of his opposition to women boxing, takes on a struggling woman boxer, played by Hillary Swank, and guides her to a championship bout. A strong and pure, father-daughter love develops between them. Morgan Freeman plays an ex-boxer who sweeps up around Eastwood’s gym. Even the most disapproving Catholic commentators concede that Eastwood, Swank and Freeman turn in outstanding performances. Eastwood directed as well as starred in the production.

What the Catholic critics object to is the film’s message. They see it as a defense of assisted suicide. You can see why they would think that. In a match with an unscrupulous opponent, the Swank character, “Maggie Fitzgerald,” is hit after the bell and driven head-first into the stool just placed in her corner by Eastwood. She is rendered paralyzed from the neck down, doomed to a life of breathing tubes and feeding tubes, bed sores and amputated legs. She pleads with Eastwood for him to “put her to sleep.”

Eastwood’s character is a Catholic, a daily communicant who takes his faith seriously. He blames himself for consenting to train the young woman, for putting her into the situation that has ruined her life. He agonizes over the decision he faces, going to his parish priest for guidance. He rejects the priest's warning that he will be violating God’s law if he ends the young woman’s life. He decides to risk the loss of his own soul, rather than see her continue to suffer. He sneaks into the hospital, removes her breathing tube and administers a powerful overdose of adrenaline.

Why doesn’t this amount to a defense of a Dr. Kevorkian-like assisted suicide? Because, Dowd argues, great drama does not ask us to put our seal of approval on the moral decisions of the characters in the plot. The goal of the playwright is to draw us into the protagonists’ predicament, to probe why they do what they do, not necessarily to condone their choice. Dowd: “Ophelia drowns herself; Cleopatra kills herself with an assist from two asps; Lear’s wretched daughter Goneril does herself in, as does Lady MacBeth. Brutus kills himself by running onto a sword held by his servant Strato (another assisted suicide), and his wife, Portia, dies by swallowing a burning coal; Othello stabs himself. And don’t even start with the lurid family values in Greek drama and myth, rife with patricide, matricide, fratricide, and incest.”

One might object that Clint Eastwood is not in the same league as Shakespeare, but that is irrelevant. He is serious about his work as a modern filmmaker; he is an artist. Dowd: “The purpose of art is not always to send messages. More often, it’s just to tell a story, move people, and provoke ideas. Eastwood’s critics don’t even understand what art is. Politics — not art — is about finding consensus with the majority of the audience. Art is not about avoiding controversy or ensuring that everyone leaves feeling morally uplifted.” I find it hard to disagree with her.

If I had to guess, I would wager that Eastwood approves of mercy-killing, at least in cases like the one depicted in Million Dollar Baby. But you can’t be sure of that as you watch his character in this film brood over what he intends to do. The film stands on its own. The fight trainer’s dilemma in the film is similar to those I have seen good Catholics confront my entire adult life: What do you do when you sincerely think God will make an exception to a violation of well-founded moral principle, because there is something unique about the situation you face? Aren’t we all doubtful about what we would do if placed in a situation such as Eastwood’s character? I know that I pondered the thin line between when the Church permits life-support to be withdrawn for a terminally ill patient and when it does not, as I witnessed the treatment my wife received over the final days of her life in a hospice, where she was dying of cancer.

We all could come up with other examples. Should a young woman who has been abandoned by her abusive husband have to turn down a marriage offer from a good man and spend the rest of her life as a single woman, never knowing motherhood or family life? Should parents forbid their daughter from procuring an abortion to end a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest? Do we think our relatives who miss Mass occasionally are going to Hell if they die without going to Confession? In every case? What about young Catholic couples who practice artificial birth control? Is the soldier who tortures a prisoner to get the information that saves hundreds of his comrades’ lives a sinner? In every case?

Don’t most of us believe that God will make exceptions for a good many of those who appear to be guilty of serious sin, even if we find it hard to articulate why? Don’t we proceed in life under the assumption that God can see into the human soul in ways that the most learned of us cannot? Isn’t that the point St. Thomas Aquinas was making in his exploration of the concept of invincible ignorance, when he contended that there are instances when people must follow their consciences even when they are in error, that they must do what they think is right, even when the action is objectively wrong?

That, it seems to me, is the theme of Million Dollar Baby. It is a theme suitable for Catholic audiences, as long as we keep one thing in mind: There is no need to speculate on whether there is a slippery-slope in this matter. There is. Consider a story that came out of Holland a few weeks back, reported on the Australian web site, BioEdge. It read: “Doctors should be allowed to kill patients who are ‘suffering through living,’ the Royal Dutch Medical Association has recommended after a three-year inquiry.”

There you have it: a recommendation for assisted suicide… for people with psychological despondencies.

© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange

James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.

Propaganda with Critics Playing Along
by James Bowman

The extraordinary thing about the critical commentary on Million Dollar Baby, including Eastwood’s own, has been the denial that the movie has any political point at all. A.O. Scott of the New York Times, who called it “the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year,” went on to praise it in particular as “a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.”

Nothing to prove! It has nothing but something to prove, and something that Hollywood proves so routinely that it has by now become rather a bore for me, at least, to see proved again — namely that our lives are our own to do with as we please. God and any of God’s putative “laws” don’t come into it.

And yet here is Frank Rich, also writing in The New York Times: “What really makes these critics” — by which he means Michael Medved and others — “hate Million Dollar Baby is not its supposedly radical politics — which are nonexistent — but its lack of sentimentality.”

I confess that when I read these words, I was gobsmacked. Surely Frank Rich is not insane, is he? Of course we can understand why the politics hardly count as radical anymore to him. They’ve been around so long and are so much taken for granted in the circles he moves in that they don’t even look like politics anymore, just common sense to all but the fanatics, as he sees them, of the Right. But “lack of sentimentality” is so obviously, so overwhelmingly false that there must be something else going on here.

Rich is himself a critic, and for him to say there’s no sentimentality in Million Dollar Baby is equivalent to his saying there’s no sentimentality in — oh, I don’t know, Forrest Gump. It suggests he doesn’t know his business.

An even better example than Rich’s of this now-familiar conceit of the poor deluded right-wing paranoiac was provided a week before by his New York Times colleague, Maureen Dowd who — rather foolishly, I thought — chose Shakespeare as her example. “A friend of mine emailed me Friday to see if I wanted to go to the Folger Theater production of Romeo and Juliet,” she wrote. “I emailed him back, fretting: Doesn't that play promote suicide?”

Well no, actually, it doesn’t. The fact that there is a suicide in a work of literature no more makes it pro-suicide than the fact that there is a murder makes it pro-murder. All depends on context, and in learning to read complex texts we all must learn to tell from the context which way the author is pointing us. You’d have to be a very poor reader indeed to read Romeo and Juliet as promoting suicide. On the contrary, it treats Romeo’s suicide as yet another of his rash and foolish acts and Juliet’s as, in spite of its pathos, equally regrettable. Indeed, the suicides are what makes the play a tragedy, as they are in the other half-dozen Shakespearean examples she cites as she warms to her task. They leave us with a sense of devastating loss and waste — not with the feeling Eastwood intends to convey, that the characters have behaved admirably.

But Miss Dowd, like him, has a political point to make, and so she pretends to think that the critics of the film’s moral point of view are mere philistines: “I don’t want to get on the wrong side of the Savonarolas,” she says ironically, since of course that’s exactly what she does want. And yet she also wants to oppose them not on moral grounds, which would require making a serious argument, but on that of her own sophistication as compared to the moralizing rubes and hicks who don’t understand “art.” For “Michael Moore and Mel Gibson aside,” she writes, putting on her aesthetician’s hat, “the purpose of art is not always to send messages. More often, it''s just to tell a story, move people and provoke ideas. Mr. Eastwood's critics don't even understand what art is.” Ha ha. Good one, Maureen. Right on cue, the right-wing boobs she first invents and then ridicules week after week in her column come on the scene to make the same point, the only point she is able to make anymore, namely that of the incomparable intellectual superiority of herself and her chic and artistic friends to all those who disagree with them, particularly on matters of faith and morals.

In fact, she is the one who appears not to understand art, since it is as stupid to say that Romeo and Juliet promotes suicide as it is to say that Million Dollar Baby does not — at least assisted suicide for the severely disabled. It’s not a point of view with which I agree, but it’s a legitimate point of view. Why doesn’t Maureen Dowd defend it? Why does even Clint Eastwood persist in his denial of the obvious instead of showing the courage of his convictions as the Spaniard Alejandro Amenábar does in The Sea Inside, which came out at about the same time and made the same point?

I can only conclude that they and others on the cultural Left have grown so accustomed to disingenuousness in such matters that they prefer to keep up the pretense of their own political non-partisanship for the sake of the imagined extra authority it confers on their obviously partisan views. It’s always easier to remain pleased with oneself for the intelligence of one’s beliefs if one starts from the assumption that only stupid people could believe anything else.

James Bowman is the movie critic for The American Spectator, American editor of The Times Literary Supplement of London and media critic for The New Criterion.

This segment was excerpted from a column on his website,

JamesBowman.net, and is used by permission.

Compassion We Can Live Without
by Mary Kochan

Hollywood has long taken pride in its ability to influence the culture. But let’s pretend that Hollywood has no such influence. Play along with me a moment.

Let’s pretend that Sidney Portier’s roles in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, A Patch of Blue, and In the Heat of the Night weren’t intentionally designed to challenge racial stereotypes. Let’s pretend that racism was not a theme, not even hinted at, in To Kill a Mockingbird.

While we are at it, we’ll disabuse our minds of the idea that Schindler’s List came from any moral position on the subject of Nazis and the Holocaust. Ditto for Apocolypse Now and The Deer Hunter when it comes to the Vietnam War.

Are you finding this whole thing a little hard to swallow? Does the suspicion that movies have (quietly now — let's make sure no one is listening) “a message”, still occupy some dark corner of your mind?

Yeah, mine too. Which is why I have real a hard time buying it when Clint Eastwood says of Million Dollar Baby that — get this — the film was “not about the right to die.”

Marcia Roth thinks it was. She is the executive director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. “The movie is saying that ‘death is better than disability,'” she told Associated Press.

Diane Coleman, founder of Not Dead Yet, a disability activist group, agrees: “The biggest problem with Million Dollar Baby is that some of the audience will be newly disabled people, their family and friends, swept along in the critically acclaimed emotion that the kindest response to someone struggling with the life changes brought on by a severe injury is, after all, to kill them.”

Research analyst for Not Dead Yet, Stephen Drake, called the movie “a corny, melodramatic assault on people with disabilities. It plays out killing as a romantic fantasy and gives emotional life to the 'better dead than disabled' mindset lurking in the heart of the typical (read: non-disabled) audience member.”

Robert David Hall is himself a Hollywood success story. He suffered a near-fatal accident at the age of 18, when a tractor-trailer came across a dividing line and crushed him in his small car. The disabled actor, who plays Doc Robbins on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, is the national chairman of the Performers with Disabilities Caucus for SAG, AFTRA and Equity. After noting that many of his disabled friends are deeply concerned about “this idea that the noble choice is to kill yourself if you become disabled,” he recommends a counter-message: “I think somebody has to say: Even if you are severely disabled, life is still worth living.”

The beautiful people are having a hard time with the disabled right now. That’s a bit of a turn around. Last year, before his death, wheelchair-bound Christopher Reeve was the toast of Tinsel Town for his advocacy of embryonic stem-cell research. Actors waxed eloquent on their concern for the disabled whose “hope for a cure” was being held captive to the “religious ideology” of the Bush administration. (And what about this whole ostentatious event, the Academy Awards? Is this the same Hollywood that was sputtering over the “cost” of the presidential inauguration?)

Hollywood’s hypocrisy is quite transparent. The disabled are “useful” when they can further a “progressive” political agenda, but not useful enough to themselves to posses an inherent right to life; not useful enough to society to possess an inherent right to the protection of the law.

But now the disabled are off the reservation. They are going to be protesting at the Oscars.

Imagine that: a minority group protesting against the Hollywood elites. Paraplegics, quadriplegics, people who suffer from spina bifida, muscular dystophy, cerebral palsy — demanding civil rights. Like the right not to be put to death. Like the right to get care for depression and assistance for living instead of a “you are better off dead” message.

The cripples are getting uppity with Hollywood. That’ll make a terrific film someday.