“Million Dollar Baby’s” Multi-Million Dollar Rip-Off
January 10, 2005
By Debbie Schlussel

“Million Dollar Baby” will win the Academy Awards. 

Not because it’s the Best Picture.  But because it’s Hollywood’s best political propaganda of the year.  More effective than “Fahrenheit 911.”

Think “Baby” is about Rocky in a sports-bra—as it’s being marketed?  You’ve fallen for the “Million Dollar” lie.  What it’s really about, has nothing to do with Rocky Balboa or boxing.  That’s just the cover story to suck movie-goers in for a nefarious message.

“Baby”—which has critics gushing all over each other—is a two-hour, twenty-minute exercise in subtle and then not-so-subtle left-wing diatribe. 

If you plan to see the movie and don’t want to read a spoiler, stop here.

If you want to know the truth and save your ten bucks, keep reading.

“Million Dollar Baby” will win the Oscar because it supports killing the handicapped, literally putting their lights out.

It features legendary Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood, as its director and star.  For roughly the first half, viewers are tricked – thinking they are watching a movie about a champion boxer in the making, who just happens to be female. 

Even those who find women’s sports to be freakish sideshows of little interest, are rooting for Maggie Fitzgerald (Hillary Swank) to overcome her trailer-

trash background and become women’s Welterweight champion of the world.

But they’ve been defrauded, manipulated into what appears to be “The Champ” with estrogen, but is really a promotional ad for the Netherland’s euthanasia policy.  Movie critics—most of whom are complicit in this deception—only hint at this “unexpected, surprise twist.”

“Baby” begins with the hillbilly Maggie trying to learn boxing and get gym-owner/trainer/manager Frankie (Eastwood) to train her.  At first, he resists, saying he doesn’t train girls.  “Women boxing—that’s a freak show, and freaks are in.  I’m sure you’ll find someone else to train you,” he tells her.  Besides, at 31, she’s too old to become a great boxer.

But then, he loses his champion boxer to another boxing manager, and he takes Maggie on.  Soon, she’s winning fights all over the place, with instant knock-outs, and Frank and Maggie develop a surrogate-father/daughter relationship.  Maggie’s so good she’s in the Women’s Welterweight championship fight in Vegas with a million-dollar pot to split.

Maggie, on the verge of winning the fight, gets blindsided and knocked-out cold.  She hits her head so hard on the stool in the corner of the ring, she’s knocked unconscious.

And that’s where we learn what this movie is really about.  Maggie is paralyzed, a quadriplegic who loses a leg to infection – of sound mind, but almost a vegetable.  And since she can’t fight—she can’t even move—the proverbial “her life isn’t worth living” message is hammered home. 

To make the message as black and white as possible, Maggie isn’t just a hillbilly with no future outside boxing.  She’s from a broken home, with family members in prison, a mother defrauding welfare and Medicaid, and the standard trailerhome.  Her abusive family is only after Maggie’s money.  They don’t care about her, nor does anyone in the world.  So, as a quadriplegic, her life isn’t worth living.

Then there’s the religion excuse.  Maggie is eventually euthanized (a sanitized word for “murdered”) by trainer/surrogate-father Frankie.  A devout, but questioning, Catholic, he attends mass every day.  He is no common sinner without a conscience.  He’s the perfect Hollywood murderer of the weak – a whole lot more sympathetic than real-life mercy killers a la Dr. Kevorkian.

Janitors and waitresses die every day, thinking “I never got my shot,” Frankie is told by right-hand man, former boxer Eddie (Morgan Freeman). It’s better for Maggie to die now, having made it to such a high point in her life—the Women’s Welterweight title fight—than for her to face a life of anti-climactic paralysis. Since she's only from a trailer park anyway, her life is now expendable. Sickening.

“Baby’s” version of euthanasia seems honorable and heroic—a sort of noblesse oblige for the 2000s.  But imagine if the real-life euthanized, victims of the Nazis and the Netherlands, were the “Million Dollar Babies” instead of a pathetic, washed up female boxer from the trailer park.

The Nazis victims didn’t just include six million Jews.  They murdered the handicapped and infirm, some as handicapped as “Baby’s” Maggie.  The handicapped, a burden on society and flaw in the master race, weren’t entitled to live, the Nazis posited.  That disturbing message is more palatable when the victim is “Baby’s” broken female Rocky with no future, and a likeable religious father-figure is the euthanasia-committing hero. 

Then there’s today’s Netherlands.  The country that values its legalized prostitutes and drugs has little value for human life.  Anyone can be murdered by their doctors at the request of family members.  There is no requirement the patient’s condition be terminal or the suffering be physical.  Thousands of innocents are euthanized each year at the request of greedy or neglectful spouses and family.  The slippery slope has begun. 

Why can’t Warner Brothers—“Baby’s” distributor—say what the movie’s really about, glorifying euthanasia?  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that no-one wants to go see a depressing movie with such stark politicking.  Americans want to see positive movies, not be exploited.  They think they’re going to see one here.  But they’ve been duped.