Paul Haggis often has a way of beating his audience over the head with cultural rhetoric, particularly if we look at Crash as an example. At the same time, a film like Million Dollar Baby – while ostensibly about pugilism and then euthanasia – is actually much more about our cultural obsession with violence, but the hypocrisy we employ by prohibiting euthanasia.
It’s possible the pugilism trope was meant to draw wider audiences, but this effect in and of itself is thematically appropriate in that viewers regularly flock to films about boxing. The sport itself is in a decline thanks to the MMA, UFC, and past thirty years or so of fights with strangely convenient endings. But its appeal on the big screen is consistently high. Two Best Picture winners have centered on boxing: Rocky and Million Dollar Baby. Others like Killer’s Kiss, The Champ, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, The Harder they Fall, Raging Bull, The Boxer, Warrior, Cinderella Man, The Fighter, and Ali received critical acclaim and nominations.
The allure is simple: man versus man in a show of physical superiority. There’s always a champ; there’s always and underdog. There’s a hero; there’s a villain. And, there’s always someone to root for or against. And it’s in Haggis’ use of this trope that he embraces the underdog story: Maggie Fitzgerald, whose lower-lower-class upbringing keeps the trailer park of her youth just over the hills where her state-assisted, 320lb mother, incarcerated brother, and sister who pretends one of her babies is still alive to garner more welfare reside.
Here, the family is the most hyperbolic part of the film. They are cartoonishly villainous and in an almost unbelievable sense. After Fitzgerald is injured during a bout for the Women’s Championship, her body lays paralyzed in a hospital bed, and her reprobated family comes to visit after stopping at Universal Studios and touring California for seven days. Her mother’s insensitivity is astounding and equally unbelievable.
But all this aside, through the family, Haggis illustrates how we differentiate between “win” and “lose” without taking into account the violence inherent in the decision. Moreover, the championing of said violence is a form of acquiescence to its sanctioned form. When the body falls to the mat, the referee is poised to count to ten, deciding when and if the match should continue. The fight is stopped when a fighter cannot hold her gloves waist-high on her own, or if there is too much blood. Here, it seems that too much violence attacks our sensibilities, or, at least, could serve to make us nauseated.
However, when Maggie is paralyzed and parts of her body begin to be amputated – another form of sanctioned violence, only this time, medically — on account of gangrene, the notion that she should be euthanized – or counted out to stay within the boxing realm – is egregious and nefarious. And, it’s here that Haggis meticulously pinpoints the divergence of our fascination with violence, but our refusal to differentiate between violence. The common argument for euthanasia is that one person should not want another to suffer for the rest of their days, and in “suffer,” we think of pain.
Million Dollar Baby bunks this a bit and provides us a character who feels nothing, but is bound – literally and figuratively – watch parts of her body get removed without say so. Here, the unnaturally natural decomposition of Maggie’s body is the infringing violence, but the doctors’ many amputations and the isolation are the resultant violence that is unacknowledged and mistakenly considered saving her life.
Could I do what Frankie Dunn does? I’d like to think so. Do I want to find out? Never.
