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Eastwood’s Right Hook at Bush

You’ve had enough time to see ‘Million Dollar Baby.’ So we can give away its ending, and politics.

Michael Fellman 5 Apr 2005TheTyee.ca
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Director and star, Hilary Swank

The peculiar etiquette of movie reviewing—don’t give away the surprise ending—has meant that there has been little discussion in print of the deeper themes of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. But the film has been around a long time now and so I feel free to violate that rule in the name of analysis. I will get to that ending several paragraphs below.

In his last three films, Eastwood has inverted genre films as well as his own career. Unforgiven was Eastwood’s anti-Western; his critique of the assumptions of heroism depicted in American Westerns, including his own earlier efforts. Thirty years ago Eastwood celebrated the silent, violent, solitary macho hero who rode the range in Italy-as-Mexico, coming into town and blowing away the bad guys without any discernable affect on his face or doubts about his actions. In Unforgiven, he rethinks and recreates this type as an anti-hero, who, called back from retirement into his violent trade, ends up by destroying everything of value in a kind of self-blinding and wildly destructive nihilism.

In Mystic River, Eastwood deconstructs the socially marginal urban tough guys of the type he had portrayed in his Dirty Harry movies. Harry was famous for his line “make my day,” as he prepared with considerable sadistic pleasure to blow away an evildoer, using the biggest pistol in the armory. In Mystic River, his anti-hero, brilliantly realized by Sean Penn, blows away an old friend whom he suspects had killed his daughter, only to find out that he had been wrong in drawing this conclusion. So much for the vigilante tradition, Eastwood is saying. It seems pretty clear to me that in Eastwood’s mind Dirty Harry was as much a mistaken hero creation was the gunman of The Untouchables, as complex and ultimately evil a figure to use to negotiate American society.

(Professor’s aside: The best analysis of the isolated killer in American mythology is the magisterial three volume work of the literary scholar, Richard Slotkin, particularly Gunfighter Nation, which deals with the sorts of figures Eastwood used to celebrate and now rejects.)

Close your eyes for the ending

Million Dollar Baby, a much weaker film than its predecessors, mainly due to a cliché-ridden script, takes apart the rags-to-riches fable, the up-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks tale so dear to American legend makers. His hero is now a heroine, though she is definitely a tough guy from the American rural outback, making her way with her fists. Her manager and her trainer are crusty old coots who have been in the fight game for several decades too long. Once again, Eastwood is a loner in a world of violence. There are some odd and unconvincing turns in this version of the story—Eastwood’ old coot reads Yeats and is a hyper-pious Catholic obsessed with sins committed decades ago—but he essentially suffers in a very private way.

(Film Buff’s aside: No actor since Gary Cooper has been able to convey so much pain in his eyes when words always fail him. I think that Eastwood has gone to school on Cooper, who played similar roles many times.)

Now to disclose the secret. After punching her way to a championship fight, The Tough Girl gets clobbered in the back of the head as she walks to her corner at the end of a triumphal round, cracks her head on the stool Eastwood has placed in her corner and falls into a coma, only to awaken eventually as a quadriplegic. Interestingly enough The Tough Girl is white and the dirty fighting champ is half-German, half-black, probably born as the by-blow of an affair of an African-American soldier and a German prostitute. Nothing more is made of this sort of racial inversion, but the champ is clearly evil by nature while The Tough Girl is a bit innocent despite her violent trade.

The other part of the secret. Eastwood nurses The Tough Girl, who, when she realizes what the rest of her life will become, begs him to disconnect her breathing tube and kill her for the sake of mercy. After much internal agony, as shown in those Gary Cooper eyes, knowing as a deeply believing Catholic that he is committing a mortal sin (and no other religion would have done), Eastwood disconnects the tube and shoots poison into The Tough Girl’s IV. He then takes off for the territory, where he will live out his days in solitary and isolated pain.

So much for rags-to-riches. So much for the self-made-woman. Realistic human suffering trumps legendary triumph.

Clint’s right stuff

I would argue that all three of these remarkable films are the creations of a conscious and highly intelligent auteur. Eastwood knows exactly what he is doing with the genres dearest to the hearts of the American public, and he is at the same time committing acts of contrition for his earlier promotion of virulent values that he had once embodied. He is by far the most interesting mainstream American filmmaker, the most significant director/actor of anti-triumphalist schlock.

But it is also clear that Eastwood’s critique of American myth comes from the right, not the left. His films are still grounded in individualism and toughness of the independent spirit; they are not in any way collectivist or liberal-minded.

In this context, Million Dollar Baby is Eastwood’s clarification of just what sort of right wing critique he is making of American society. He knew full well before he started that the religious right would violently reject the denouement of his film—they hate euthanasia as a violation of the sacred Right To Life. As the current terrible Schiavo story in Florida is also demonstrating, the American right is divided over euthanasia—as it is on abortion. The religious right, including the Catholic right, believes all life should be preserved, as a public good more important than private choice. Haters of the state when it comes to things like paying taxes and helping poor people, the religious right embraces the state when it comes to right to life. With keen insight, Eastwood has an obsessively Catholic figure make the choice of private over governmentally reinforced public morality. His position is far more Barry Goldwater than George W. Bush. Individuals must make decisions of conscience, even if (or especially if) those choices go against collective moral codes, whether of the state or of a political movement. Eastwood thus attacks the religious right from the libertarian right.

Ironically (or not), this film probably won the academy awards because liberals in Hollywood embraced Eastwood when the religious right attacked him. What Eastwood makes of this turn of events no reporter has asked—not that any one would mind winning the prize no matter who voted for him. He may even have been a bit cynical about some of the likely inferences others would draw about the politics of the film in order to stir up debate and win new friends.

White hats?

It doesn’t really matter what motivated Eastwood, who I suspect is a pretty complex guy. What might matter to me at least is that Eastwood has shown a way to drive a wedge between the forces of the right, a wedge that the obtuse Democrats might actually learn to exploit by 2008 (though John McCain is perhaps better positioned to drive in the stake, and George W. Bush himself is backing away from the Right-to-Lifers after reading in the polls over the Schiavo case that 63 percent of Americans want the state out of private life).

In the meantime, I find Eastwood’s critical individualism a significant political move in the realm of mass culture. His is the best currently available critique of the worship of American violence. In his three films he has developed a deeply thoughtful undermining of the abiding and utterly self-righteous faith that Americans always wear the white hats when employing mass violence against each other and the rest of the world.

Historian Michael Fellman is Director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Simon Fraser University.  [Tyee]

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