Disabled vs. Eastwood

Rating: 1/10 (8 February 2005)

Disabled vs. Eastwood, Round Two
By Diane Carman Denver Post Columnist
There are only a few commandments in journalism. "Thou shalt not reveal the end of a movie" is one of them. And I'm about to break it.
So if you don't want to know how "Million Dollar Baby" ends, now's the time to turn the page.
But at the rate advocates in the disabled community are mobilizing in outrage, the plot won't be a secret for long.
In the climax of the Clint Eastwood film, Frankie Dunn (played by Eastwood) grants the request of the Hilary Swank character, Maggie Fitzgerald, to die. She has gone from prizefighter to quadriplegic in classic slow-motion Hollywood style.
Death is portrayed as the rational, obviously preferable alternative to living with such a disability.
Laura Hershey, a Denver disability-rights activist who uses a wheelchair, says it reflects Eastwood's hostile attitude toward the disabled.
Amy Robertson, a disability-rights lawyer in Denver, calls it "Eastwood's vendetta."
Eastwood, meanwhile, has said, "How people feel about that is up to them."
Fair enough, say Hershey, Robertson and members of the disabled-rights organization Not Dead Yet.
They're feeling furious.
Eastwood has long been considered a villain to the disabled.
In 1996, Diane zum Brunnen visited his hotel in Carmel, Calif., and discovered two violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. When numerous letters of complaint went unanswered, the disabled woman filed suit. Eastwood ultimately was ordered to bring the hotel into compliance, but not before he'd spent $600,000 fighting the lawsuit.
He later testified before Congress in support of a bill to prevent people from suing under ADA without giving defendants 90 days to come into compliance. It didn't pass.
"There are plenty of people who are praising the hell out of this movie," Robertson said. "But if someone was speaking out in favor of segregation or defending the Ku Klux Klan and five years later played a character in a movie who kills all the black characters, would anybody miss that?"
For her part, Hershey objects to the film's portrayal of life as a quadriplegic.
"Nobody's saying it's easy," she said. But the depiction of Fitzgerald bedridden in a nursing home, losing her leg to untreated bed sores, having no mobility, no support, no future, is "nightmarish."
"It creates the feeling that having a disability is ... worse than death," she said.
Hershey, who has spinal muscular atrophy, is proof that's not true. She works for the state in health-care policy and financing, is a successful writer and has been an outspoken activist for the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition.
She said the acceptance of "Million Dollar Baby" - never mind the acclaim - betrays the profound prejudice that informs the right-to-die movement.
"The so-called right-to-die movement raises ... serious alarms," she said.
Instead of offering the disabled assisted suicide, they should be offered help, she said.
"There are other options," she said. "And if it really is about choice, then anybody that wants to should be able to walk into a doctor's office and request a lethal injection. Why restrict it to people who have disabilities and disorders?"
The activists ripped critics for failing even to acknowledge the controversy.
"For most of them, this was not even on their radar screens, whereas any other stereotypical, distorted, inaccurate, screwed-up image of another minority group would be cause at least for comment or debate," Hershey said.
Now, as plans are finalized for Oscar-night protests and other demonstrations, that silence is about to end.
"What I hope - if nothing else - is that this gets people talking and thinking about what's going on in this movie," Hershey said.
And preventing Eastwood from cleaning up at the Oscars, well, that just might make their day.
Diane Carman's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489.