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by grafdog, Unknown News 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road' Reviewed by Yomama,
If you don't like it, listen, listen again to "Too Cool to be Forgotten", then fuck you. Drop dead. You never had a soul in the first place. Listen to "Drunken Angel", a song about Williams' dead friend, Blaze Foley. If you don't understand "Concrete and Barbed Wire" I am not going to refund your money. Get a refund from those moron teachers who thought they were giving you a little fat back to go with those greens. They were morons. Teach yourself what is what. Listen to this record. What do you think? Million Dollar Baby by Madeline Zane,
I mean it. Stop reading. Go away. Okay, everyone ready? Because here's the big secret about the ending of Million Dollar Baby: The ending of Million Dollar Baby sucked. Or, to be more precise, the end of Million Dollar Baby completely undermined everything that had happened in the movie up to that point, and turned a marvelous heart-wrenching character study into a giant pile of unbelievable misogynist crap. Maybe I should back up a little. In the movie, Hillary Swank plays a tough, smart boxer who is injured in a title fight and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. She becomes suicidal and convinces her trainer and pseudo-father figure, Clint Eastwood, into helping her commit suicide. Okay, very tragic, very sad. Fabulous acting all around. The only problem is that it doesn't make a damn bit of sense. The first 90% of the movie is all about how tough and strong Hillary Swank's character is, and how much she and Clint Eastwood grow to care about each other. In the last ten minutes, that's all thrown out the window. Am I really the only person to notice that Hillary Swank's suicide is completely inconsistent with her character? She's a fighter, for Christ's sake. She's strong, she's tough, she's stubborn. She doesn't give up no matter what the odds. She believes in herself, even after being brought up by a mother who did nothing but try to keep her down. And she wasn't just a fighter inside the ring, either. She fought to support herself, she fought to be accepted in the male world of boxing. But in the last ten minutes of the movie, she suddenly turns into a giant quitter. Yes, she was facing impossibly huge physical and mental challenges. But given how strong she was during the rest of the movie, I just didn't believe that she would give up so easily. And for someone who loved her like his own daughter, Eastwood was awfully quick to decide that her life had no intrinsic value once the boxing was over. Did he love her as a person or as a little wind-up boxing doll? Because throwing out a little wind-up boxing doll is no big deal. But if he really loved her, that means he loved her for who she is, for her character, her sense of humor, her loyalty, her integrity, her stubbornness. And none of those things were stored in her arms and her legs. So what's going on here? Why does the last part of this movie completely contradict everything up to that point? And why hasn't anyone seemed to notice? Well, here's the answer to that question, and this is the part that really ticks me off. The ending of Million Dollar Baby makes no sense if you look at it as a real story happening to real people. However, it makes absolutely perfect sense if you look at it as the ending of a mainstream Hollywood movie. One of the main things that popular culture does is tell stories in which the accepted order of things is threatened during the course of the story. But by the end of the story, the threat is removed, the traditional social order is restored, the mainstream cultural values are reaffirmed. Everyone throws out their popcorn boxes and goes home happy. Thelma and Louise is a great example of this. (If you haven't seen it, skip this paragraph.) There was absolutely no logical reason for those two strong women to drive their car off a cliff at the end of that movie. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are suddenly going to be so bone-stupid that they would rather be dead than arrested? Completely ludicrous ... except as a way to punish them for breaking the rules threatening the social order. This is exactly what's happening in Million Dollar Baby. Hillary Swank's strong female character subverts traditional male-female roles. Because it's a mainstream film, we can't have the strong woman who breaks the rules actually stay strong and successful all the way to the end of the movie. Her suicide is necessary because the traditional social order has to be restored. Hillary has to be put back in her place. And in a Hollywood movie, the woman's place is on her deathbed, the gorgeously suffering victim. Not to mention that Hillary Swank only got about half a dozen lines in the last half of the movie. The tragedy may have happened to her, but it's Eastwood's reaction to it that the movie really cares about. Maybe Swank's character wasn't so much a three-dimensional, consistent person as much as a plot device used to make a point about Eastwood's character. Something about guilt, redemption, old man angst, yadda yadda yadda. Didn't Eastwood win an award for this movie 13 years ago, when it was called Unforgiven ? And isn't it ironic (in a morbid, maddening sort of way) that the film world lovingly celebrates a movie about a quadriplegic's suicide during the same broadcast where Christopher Reeve was part of the "In Memoriam" segment? Nice to know that the entire point of a fellow actor's real-life heroics was completely lost on everybody in the room. So here's the real secret about the big secret ending: the only way it makes any sense at all is as a comment on women's place in society. Social order threatened by strong woman, social order restored by the end of the picture. I was glad to hear that disability-rights groups had problems with this movie. But I can't believe that feminists haven't put up a similar fight. What do you think? |
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