Hollywood is set to honor at the Oscars a violent film that
culminates in murder. The Passion of the Christ? No,
Million Dollar Baby. Hollywood couldn’t bear to see Jesus
Christ suffer and die for man’s sins, but it watches with bated
breath and an approving gaze as Clint Eastwood in Million
Dollar Baby kills a disabled female boxer with a grim
efficiency worthy of Dirty Harry. Criminal euthanasia is an act of
gratuitous violence that Hollywood will celebrate.
Normally fans of “obscenity,” Hollywood luminaries dusted that
word off and used it as a criticism of Mel Gibson’s movie. He had
“obscenely” and graphically depicted the crucifixion of Jesus
Christ. How morbid, they said. But Hollywood’s taste for morbidity
suddenly reappears in Million Dollar Baby, which lovingly
presents an act of euthanasia that is so stark and shameless many
doctors in the Netherlands probably wouldn’t even perform it.
A premise of the movie is that Clint Eastwood’s character, due
to some nameless rift, has been estranged from his biological
daughter for many years. This is intended to give added poignancy
to his friendship with Hilary Swank’s character. The audience is
left to assume that the daughter is an ungrateful brat who won’t
even read his letters. But by the end of the movie, this unseen
character’s aloofness seemed quite astute to me. She had good
reason to stay away from a father capable of homicide.
“Hollywood Homicide” (the name of a Harrison Ford comedy) would
have been a good title for Eastwood’s movie. Euthanasia is homicide
that Hollywood can kid itself into considering the fulfillment of
friendship. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk in Hollywood
anymore (judging by celebrities’ faded MADD ribbons), but friends
do let friends die — indeed, they kill each other. Injecting
someone with poisonous drugs can be both the beginning and end of a
beautiful friendship in Hollywood.
Naturally, Hollywood’s customary distaste for violence against
women is suspended in this movie too. We’re supposed to view
violence against women — isn’t that what female boxers pulverizing
each other to the delight of cretinous males amounts to? — as a
dream satisfied. And suffering worth endurance! But suffering
through life as a disabled person? No, that’s suffering Hollywood
won’t accept. Disabled groups are protesting Million Dollar
Baby with good reason: the upshot of it is that they are
better off dead.
A movie that is supposed to glorify friendship and victory shows
neither. What it shows is false friendship and the defeat of the
human spirit once Hollywood dreams are beyond it. Can’t be a female
bantamweight anymore? Well, might as well get someone to kill you.
Hollywood can’t conceive of a human life devoid of vanity and
glamour as valuable. And the idea of suffering for sin, as Jesus
Christ did, is even more repugnant to its sinless conception of
itself, never mind that Hollywood showcases in its own movies the
very sinful violence that Christ had to endure in order to expiate
it.
The only suffering that makes sense to Hollywood is suffering
for a worldly dream (taking blows to the head for boxing fame,
etc.). But suffering for otherworldly reasons as an act of
obedience to God? Unthinkable. Yet the disabled who don’t give up
on life are witnesses to the truth that human life always has
value, not because of the quality of what we do or what we dream,
but because of what we are, human beings made by God. These
disabled people are heroes. A paralyzed female boxer who abandons
life and brings another human down into her despair isn’t.
Hollywood’s antipathy for selfless suffering means that it can
at once romanticize the violence of euthanasia and suicide and turn
away from the violence of Christ’s crucifixion. And because of its
contempt for the Christian understanding of suffering, Hollywood
can condemn Gibson’s movie as anti-Semitic while honoring one that
belittles Catholicism. That is, Million Dollar Baby
presents Eastwood as the wise apostate, making up the rules as he
goes along, while the movie treats as a buffoon a Catholic priest
who tells him that euthanasia is a sin. The audience knows not to
take this priest’s counsel seriously — and to regard Catholicism
as a grab bag of incomprehensible doctrines — because earlier in
the film Eastwood has puckishly shown up the priest as a sputtering
fool unable to explain basic theology.
In Hollywood’s culture of death, Million Dollar Baby is
a natural Oscar winner, and The Passion of the Christ
(which Hollywood in its comic superficiality has placed in the
“best makeup” category) an obvious loser. As Christ predicted, the
world considers his passion on the cross a scandal, the only
scandal it won’t touch.
