continued
In real life, Maggie wouldn’t need Frankie’s clandestine aid. Courts have ruled since the 1990s that a person on a ventilator can simply ask, and a nursing staffer will administer a sedative and then turn off the vent as consciousness ebbs. Eastwood got the sequence wrong.
It’s the 21st century, and the only place Maggie can live is a glorified nursing home? Even with the best of care, she gets a pressure sore so severe it requires amputation? Literary license aside, had the boxing moves been wrong, critics and boxing buffs would think less of the film. Details of Maggie’s life after injury, though, evidently seem too unimportant to check for accuracy, merely scenes to imprint on us the horror of the paralyzed life.
Even had Eastwood bothered to get his facts straight, it’s hard for us to sit in a theater looking up at the man who continues to fight disabled people in his backyard along California’s Central Coast, vowing to get the state – and Congress – to pass a law forbidding people paralyzed like Maggie to sue businesses over access violations under the 14-year-old Americans With Disabilities Act without first waiting yet another 90 days, even if he is a truly great movie actor and director.
‘‘Baby’s’’ corny, melodramatic plot is engineered to feed a romantic fantasy, giving emotional life to the ‘‘better dead than disabled’’ mindset lurking in the heart of the typical (read: nondisabled) moviegoer.
That mind-set explains why ‘‘The Sea Inside’’ has been such a hit with critics. These are the stories about disability that society wants to believe. The killings are always acts of love, selfless and heroic, fueled by the myth that ‘‘nothing can be done about the undignified lives of people with disabilities except to help them die,’’ as Chapman University’s Art Blaser puts it.
They don’t reflect the typical disability experience, which, for most of us, is just the experience of living our lives. As efforts to gain acceptance for assisted suicide (which is really legalized medical killing) move from the courts into the mass entertainment media, the vehicle they are driving in on is the vehicle of severe disability. In these films, it’s paralysis. Earlier this year, it was the ‘‘United States of Leland,’’ in which the stabbing death of an autistic teen was portrayed as an act of kindness.
**Stephen Drake is research analyst for Not Dead Yet, a Chicago-based advocacy group for people with disabilities. Mary Johnson’s latest book is **Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve and the Case Against Disability Rights. **She edits **
www.ragged edgemagazine.com
How does this compare to the Terri Schivo case? It is really sad how quickly our society is accepting mercy killing of less than perfect people.
