Posted on 03/10/2005 1:59:03 PM PST by Mr. Silverback
The story is, by now, a familiar one: A female boxer from Missouri takes a terrible beating in the ring and winds up brain-damaged. She’s initially suicidal, but with the help of family and friends, she rallies, takes up painting, and speaks out about her life and the value of all life.
Wait a minute, you say: That’s not how Million Dollar Baby ends. In the Academy Award-winning film, the injured boxer begs her coach to kill her because she can’t face life as a quadriplegic, and he complies. But a real-life boxer, whose life story likely inspired the film, says the ending is bunk.
Like the boxer in Million Dollar Baby, Katie Dallam was a Missouri girl who grew up in poverty. In 1996, Katie began boxing. After just two months of training, her trainer urged her into a professional match and Katie stepped into the ring with a far more experienced boxer. By the end of four two-minute rounds, the referee stopped the fight, but it was too late. Katie had received 150 blows to the head and was comatose by the time she reached a hospital. Doctors told Katie’s sister that she “probably wouldn’t make it, and, if she did, would most likely be a vegetable.”
But Katie survived. She had to relearn how to walk and read. And her injuries affected her vision and memory. Deeply depressed, she attempted suicide. But instead of helping her sister kill herself, her sister, Stephanie, moved Katie into her home.
Unable to go back to her counseling job, Katie took up an earlier interest and began painting again.
Seeing Million Dollar Baby gave Katie nightmares. But it also led to her decision to talk with others about life after a devastating brain injury. As Katie told the New York Times, the fictional coach in Million Dollar Baby “took the easy way out by killing [the boxer] rather than having to deal with what her life would have been like.”
Katie’s sister, Stephanie, is convinced the film writer, F. X. Toole, now deceased, based the film on Katie. Too many similarities, she says. So Katie wants to set the record straight. People, you see, can live on after terrible injuries and live rich, productive lives—people like Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic who suffered a spinal-cord injury, who also paints and has a wonderful ministry.
As Joni and Friends journalist Sanda Allyson writes, “In the face of devastating injury, many people feel they want to die. But they move from depression and feeling that there is nothing for them” into a new hope and even joy.
“We can have peace and happiness,” she writes, “in the midst of situations that might have previously been thought of as unendurable. That is just one reason why virtually all disability advocacy groups . . . are so vehemently opposed to this idea of ‘helping’ someone die, which may sound warm and fuzzy, but in the searing light of truth, is just murder.”
So tell your neighbors that the real-life story behind Million Dollar Baby that exposes the Hollywood fiction and its values for what they are: propaganda. We can live life to the fullest, even with great disabilities, if we don’t fall for the secular siren song that says that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived.
The film Million Dollar Baby may have won Academy Awards, but the true-life story wins a much greater award for courage and human dignity.
Female Boxing!?
For the record, I didn't really like MDB and didn't think it was the best film of last year or even of the films that were nominated. But complaints against it should be made by people who have seen it towards it. Not by people who haven't seen it...towards all American film making. That's all I was objecting too.
No offense, but it's pretty clear you didn't read the whole article:
Katie’s sister, Stephanie, is convinced the film writer, F. X. Toole, now deceased, based the film on Katie. Too many similarities, she says.
We don't have enough evidence presented here to say whether her accusation is right or wrong, but we certainly don't have any evidence here that Toole couldn't have taken the story. Note that Katie's injuries occurred in 1996, and Rope Burns was published in '01.
Also, it should be noted that unless we're sure the original story had the euthanasia in it, it can hardly be said to be Toole's fault, and the euthanasia is not propaganda if he heard about Katie and wrote it during her depressed phase. Further investigation is warranted.
Some have argued that way. But having seen the film, I think it's pretty clear that the supposedly intelligent and sober character, unlike Freeman, unlike the 'priest', reluctantly agrees to the only 'humane' course open to him, against 'all of society's rule. The anti-hero is a villain, at last. But he is supposed to have behaved heroically. It's not presented as happy, but it is presented as positive, and even moral - that is, murder by adrenalin overdose shot, to a suicidal victim. The tragic hero killer disappears into the night, and we see an exterior shot of the 'pie-diner'. Is he there? Is he buried in the back? Who knows? Scene.
I mentioned the comparison of this film to one of Joe Goebbels from so long ago, which I have not seen but which has been mentioned in various FR threads. Goebbels may have been more candid about the purpose of his work - then again, maybe not. What did he say when he walked up on stage to get HIS 'oscar'? I want to thank the producers, and, tear in his eye, the great actress, etc?
Most of the people calling it depraved haven't seen it.
Where's your backup for this? And even if it's true, those who haven't seen it have made their conclusion based on opinions of trustworthy people who have seen it, like Mike Medved and Terri O'Brien.
The movie doesn't present the outcome as something positive or happy.
When have you ever seen Kate Michelman or Gloria Feldt on a talk show saying, "Isn't abortion just a wonderful, wonderful thing?" Only the most hamfisted treatment would try to present this as not only a right choice but a happy one. So, it may not be propaganda, but the fact that Clint's character doesn't do a jig over it means nothing.
Also, how do you reconcile "The movie doesn't present the outcome as something positive" with the Morgan Freeman letter to Eastwood's estranged daughter at the end?
Saying something fits the values they want to project is not the same as saying it was part of the vast Hollywood conspiracy.
I like Nick!
And they said that because people they trust did see the movie. "You didn't see the movie" is a specious argument.
The Freeman character may think what Eastwood did was noble but that doesn't make it so.
But you said the movie didn't put the euthansia in a positive light, and the last word is a character making a positive comment about it. Is the Freeman character portrayed in the rest of the movie as an immoral person?
It's just the idea of 'immoral art' and what that notion leads to that I dislike. You don't have to agree with the moral vision of a work of art to appreciate it.
As I pointed out to another MDB fan earlier in the thread, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a work of art, too. These things have implications. It's amazing to me when people talk about art but never consider how civilizations are shaped by their art and the stories they tell.
Look I really don't have an inclination to defend a movie I wasn't crazy about.
Then next time don't have an inclination to dismiss people who have formed a different opinion.
She could probably sue and get a bit of money out of them as well as an admission that her injuries were at least part of the inspiration behind the story.
I won't go so far as to compare Clint and Goebbels, but I will point this out: Goebbels made a propaganda film in the 30's that was designed to sell euthanasia to the German masses. One of the characters (whose death was more of an assisted suicide than euthanasia) was a bedridden woman who didn't feel her life was worth living.
Boy, that doesn't sound fmailiar at all...
You are bypassing my point. You said there was no "Hollywood conspiracy" because the screenplay was based on Toole's stories. Well, how does that mean that it isn't Katie's story? You have presented no evidence that it isn't.
If you put 5 marxists in a room and ask them to come up with a solution to a problem, you get a marxist solution. If you put 5 hollyweird liberals in a room and have them do a movie on euthanasia, you get a movie that praises euthanasia and is propaganda for euthanasia.
Black and white? That's precisely why Hollywood embraced it. If you ever watch the Nanny show, with Jo Frost, you'll see her technique involves creating rigor, schedules, certainty, sameness for little children. And they tend to respond well to such conformity. Well Hollywood is no different. They consistently promote the worst sort of vice. And they did not applaud THIS film because they thought it was a conservative non-conformist treatise. They embraced it as comfortably more of the same in a promotion, no doubt similar to that of Goebbels so long ago, for 'mercy' killing; which is uncharitable and not merciful. The characters who object in the film have no basis for it, or seem petulant. The 'logic' of the situation demands 'mercy', supposed mercy, as in 'mercy' killing. And the anti-hero dutifully does the anti-moral thing, seen as 'morality', and the villian is justified for having done the 'right thing' - i.e. he kills, he poisons, and then he runs away and dies or whatever as signified by the exterior shot of the 'pie-diner'. That's why the guy who originally wrote that column suggesting parallels to Goebbels' film seems to have really gotten the point of all this.
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