Movie asks the 'Million Dollar' question

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. • E-mail

(Spoiler alert: This column could ruin the movie "Million Dollar Baby" for you.)

There are two warnings about this column. First warning: Extreme P.C. danger. If your politically correct sensibilities are easily offended, then read no further. This column discusses a topic that really gets people’s ire up, namely attitudes about those with severe disabilities.

Second warning: The ending of the movie "Million Dollar Baby" is revealed. If you don’t want to know the ending, then read no further.

"Million Dollar Baby," starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, has already won a variety of honors. It has received seven Academy Award nominations including best picture. And well it should. It is a fine movie that offers a touching view of an evolving relationship between an aging fight manager and trainer, Frankie Dunn, played to the hilt as a craggy, old-school grouch by Eastwood, and Maggie Fitzgerald, a late-to-the-game, white-trash girl who has seized upon boxing as her ticket to self-satisfaction. She is played with great poignancy by Swank.

A controversial twist
What has made the movie controversial is the twist it takes at the end. Maggie goes after the championship title against a tough, veteran boxer who is willing to do anything to win. The older pro cheap-shots Maggie after the bell rings and she falls, breaking her neck.

Paralyzed, bed-bound and permanently on a ventilator that pushes air through a tube in her throat, Maggie decides that her life is no longer worth living. She asks Frankie, who has become her closest friend and a surrogate father, if he will kill her. Frankie resists. His conscience and his Catholicism make mercy killing ethically off-limits.

Eventually though he decides that he owes it to Maggie to help her die. He brings a massive dose of adrenaline to the hospital where Maggie lives, disconnects her ventilator, shuts off the machine’s warning alarm and injects her with the drug. She dies moments later. Frankie heads out of town presumably to escape any legal action that might ensue.

The very idea that a severely disabled person might decide that their life is not worth living has driven various folks in the disability advocacy movement, as well as a few highly visible figures on the right-wing talk-show circuit and some in pro-life circles, into a frenzy.

Marcie Roth, director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, said she hates the film’s ending because so many people still think that “having a spinal-cord injury is a fate worse than death.”

"Unfortunately," she told The Associated Press, “the movie is saying death is better than disability."

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, who has struggled with addiction to painkillers without feeling the need to defend his moral lapse, could not contain himself from ranting about how bad "Million Dollar Baby" is. He bashed the movie as the product of left-wing, secular thinking.

Michael Medved, another right winger who seems to think Hollywood exists only to find ever more sleazy ways to corrupt the morals of the American public, has seethed about the movie as well. And the Web sites and blogs of pro-life groups across the country are teeming with gripes that Hollywood dare promote a pro-euthanasia movie for so many Oscars.

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