To me, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby is just
routine Hollywood product but with a much higher-than-usual
schmaltz content. It’s not even worth a review. Quite obviously,
Hilary Swank’s character never had a chance. She was conceived,
born, brought to adulthood and finally killed off for no other
purpose than the evocation of pathos in her sad ending. From her
dirt poor beginnings in a Missouri trailer park, the good daughter
of a welfare cheat and an absent father, to her job waiting tables
for minimum wage to her burning ambition to box to her apparent
friendlessness and lack of any romantic interests, Eastwood and his
screenwriter, Paul Haggis, have designed her solely to be the
sympathetic victim she turns out to be. We know from the start how
it’s going to come out because everything is created so as to make
it come out the way it does. Meanwhile Eastwood himself is so taken
up with his own posturings as “The Unforgiven” — haven’t we seen
that somewhere before? — and the romantic pose of the Byronic
hero, in love with the idea of his own damnation, that he can’t see
how obvious it is that his picture is rigged, like a rigged
fight.
In fact this is the very definition, in my book, of movie
fakery. Pathos must be earned. The characters have to persuade us
that they are real human beings first and not strike us, as these
characters do, as having been invented only for the sake of their
pathos. And, of course, to make a political point. Let’s not forget
that. As is usual in the movies these days, the presence of a
Catholic priest is a sure tip-off to its political message. And if,
in this movie, Father Horvak (Brian O’Byrne) is not quite the lurid
caricature that we find again and again in movies from El
Crimen del Padre Amaro to The Magdalene Sisters to
Bad Education, he is no less political in his purpose. The
movie puts him there with his fussy, humorless, faintly ridiculous
ways, to be the voice of traditional morality, advising Eastwood’s
fight trainer that if he grants his now crippled
protégé’s wish to end her life he will be
lost forever. Naturally the priest fails to recognize that, to this
guy, that is an irresistible invitation. Like many another
anti-clerical before him, Eastwood wears the assurance of his
eternal damnation as a badge of honor.
Yet the extraordinary thing about the critical commentary on the
film, 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. Clint Eastwood’s libertarianism becomes cosmic in its
dimensions, an existential demonstration of human freedom as the
only response to our loneliness in the universe. It is a venerable
movie theme, to be sure, and the very foundation of the
noir cinema of the 1940s, where it also had a strongly
political dimension — although then it was more Marxist than
libertarian, and not marred by the cheap sentimentalism of Clint’s
essay in the form.
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. Sure Frank
Rich is an unreflecting, knee-jerk leftie, but he’s 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.
But the denial of any political content is a long-standing
strategy of the cultural left in America, one going back to the
days of McCarthyism when committed and believing Communist
screenwriters were hauled before Congress to justify themselves and
claimed, in the words of their apologist, the late Arthur Miller,
that “they wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a
mildly liberal cast, but most of it mindless.” Miller, of course,
backed up such a preposterous claim by writing The
Crucible — a play which is still being read and performed in
American schools by your children and mine, and treated with the
same reverence that Miller himself was in a spate of recent
obituaries and encomia — in order to pretend that there were no
more Communists in America in 1953 than there had been witches in
Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Ever since then, it has become
customary to greet any criticism of leftist politics in the movies
or other works of drama or fiction with similar charges of
right-wing paranoia.
Of course the left is no longer threatened by McCarthy (though
you would never know to hear them tell it), but a similar imposture
has become a way of adopting protective coloring for their views in
a land mainly populated by religious believers who do not share
them, and it allows them at the same time to paint those with whom
they disagree as right-wing boobs who don’t understand anything
about “art.” It’s only a movie, for heaven’s sake. You
must be paranoid to find all this political stuff in it. This was
the reaction that greeted Mr. Medved’s book, Hollywood vs.
America, again and again when it came out back in 1992, since
characterizing him as a right-wing wacko was easier, given the
cultural predisposition of our times, than actually answering his
arguments. Of course his critics themselves were capable of
positively Stakhanovite labors of overweening subtlety and
ingenuity when it came to finding the political subtext in
Shakespeare and other classic authors who have long been recruited
by our university literature departments into the ongoing
revolutionary struggle, or when it came to finding “Ten Quick Ways
to Analyze Children’s Books for Racism and Sexism.”
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 e-mailed me
Friday to see if I wanted to go to the Folger Theater production of
Romeo and Juliet,” she wrote. “I e-mailed 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
here as in so many other areas — the question of media bias, for
instance — 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.
