Not everyone thrilled with plot twist

Warning: This column reveals the twist at the end of the boxing movie “Million Dollar Baby.” If you don’t want to know it, don’t read past this first paragraph. My editors made me put that warning in. But my real belief is that you should read this before you see the movie. It will make your viewing experience an enlightened one.

In the movie, Hilary Swank becomes a boxing phenom, thanks to coaching by a reluctant but ultimately loving Clint Eastwood. In a title fight toward the end of the film, she’s paralyzed and rendered a quadriplegic, dependent on a respirator to breathe. She lives in a rehab facility and eventually loses a leg due to a bedsore. She then pleads with Eastwood to kill her. He obliges.

While movie reviewers rave, disability rights activists fume. My column regular, Marshall Mitchell, who teaches disability studies at Washington State University, alerted me last week to the outraged Internet buzz about the film.

So what’s wrong with the twist? For starters, it spreads some lies about the physical realities accompanying spinal-cord injuries.

“When you use a respirator, you can’t talk with ease like she did,” Marshall says. “You can only talk on the ‘out’ breath.”

Also, Swank’s character is living in a first-class facility. No way her pressure sores would get that bad so quickly. “And very few people ever lose a leg over a bedsore,” Marshall says.

But the big problem with the twist is the way it perpetuates the misconception that people are better off dead than disabled. In Marshall’s classes, he shares studies that show that spinal-cord injured people often want to die the first few weeks after their injuries. But within a year, following rehab, these suicidal thoughts disappear.

The twist also rings false, because it doesn’t match Swank’s character.

“Why make a character who has an incredible spirit to (box) against all these odds, yet when she becomes a quad, she gives up. She would fight that just as she fights anything else,” says Marshall, who has used a wheelchair since a diving accident 36 years ago.

The fictional Swank character even has advantages over most real-life folks with similar injuries. She has plenty of money from her successful boxing career, and she possesses great support and love from Eastwood. She’s obviously smart, yet when Eastwood suggests college courses to her, she dismisses the idea immediately.

And then the mercy-killing plotline punches in. As assisted-suicide groups grow more powerful in the United States, Marshall believes people with disabilities will become more vulnerable to pressure to commit suicide. He contends that mercy killing has its roots in Nazi Germany when disabled people were among the first to be dispensed with.

“We are fighting very hard against the assisted-suicide trend,” Marshall says. “This (movie) gives advocates one more weapon. When are we going to stop trying to kill people who are not like us? When is the madness going to stop?”

Disability-rights Internet sites (check out raggededgemagazine.com) claim Eastwood chose the plotline out of revenge. He’s been outspoken about what he perceives as greediness by lawyers who search out claims against businesses not complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Eastwood denies the revenge charge. He counters that disability rights groups are using the film to garner their own publicity.

Unfortunately, the movie perpetuates other stereotypes, too. Swank’s Southern poor family is living every imaginable white-trash cliché. And the Morgan Freeman character borders on being an all-wise “Magic Negro,” a movie stereotype black groups protested a few years ago.

Still, Marshall and I urge people to see “Million Dollar Baby” in the hope it will generate important conversation about disability stereotypes and misconceptions.

“Don’t go with your eyes wide shut,” Marshall advises. “Go with eyes newly opened.”