By Dave Andrusko
The film stars Emilia Clarke (right) and Sam Clafin (left)
While it should hardly be considered the final word, I often find the reader responses to a given item–in this case, a movie review–to be far more illuminating than what the “professionals” say.
As regular readers of NRL News Today already know, the disability rights community is steaming over the latest example of what some go so far as to call a “disability snuff film”–“Me Before You.”
Kevin Yuill, who is very sympathetic to the film’s opponents, says the film “has sparked protests” [which is putting it mildly] “because it implicitly asks the question: If you were quadriplegic (or severely disabled), would/should you kill yourself?”
That’s quite true, but the resistance the film has generated goes well beyond this, unfortunately not-so- unusual question raised in fiction, novels, and films. It’s that everyone “caves,” as Stephanie Gray wrote, to the desire of the lead character (Will) to commit assisted suicide. “They all encourage, facilitate or are actually present at Will’s suicide the way he wants it,” Gray writes.
I view it (based on reading an extensive number of reviews) as a kind of inverted Pygmalion story, made famous in “My Fair Lady.” Only this time instead of Professor Henry Higgins transforming Eliza Doolittle, the unrefined, dirty Cockney flower girl, into a lady, Will “introduces her [the free-spirited Louisa Clark ] to sophisticated pleasures like Mozart and movies with subtitles,” according to A.O. Scott.
“The operative fantasy is of an ingénue who seduces, and is seduced by, a man who is rich, powerful and also helpless, in need of rescuing by the heroine even as she finds herself in his thrall,” Scott observes. But after Clark spins her magic, Will kills himself anyway. “I can’t be the kind of man who just accepts this,” he tells an inconsolable Clark.
Which drives the disability rights community to remind those with open minds and open hearts that this better-dead-than-disabled theme is cropping up more and more. And is infinitely dangerous.
Keep that in mind as we take a quick look at what two professional movie critics for the Washington Post recently wrote about “Me Before You.” First, care of Jane Horwitz who writes the “Family Filmgoer” reviews for the Post, is this awful opening:
Rarely nowadays do we see a tearjerker that is also a charmer — subtly acted, with effervescent dialogue. “Me Before You” should give romance-loving teens, especially those into (dare we say it?) high culture, a scintillating and emotional experience
Ugh.
But in the same publication, we have Stephanie Merry writing a cogent, thoughtful assessment of the debate: “‘Me Before You’ has a disabled main character — but activists are angry. Here’s why.”
Merry summarizes the plot and then asks rhetorically, “All of this seems like fair game for a bestseller, right?”
But activists argue that seeing the same grim outcome for disabled characters can be damaging. Lawrence Carter-Long, an adviser to the ReelAbilities film festival, became an activist after seeing “Million Dollar Baby” in a theater, thinking it would be “Rocky in a sports bra.” (More spoilers coming.) Instead, Clint Eastwood’s character helps Hilary Swank’s quadriplegic former boxer kill herself. During the credits, to Carter-Long’s surprise, the audience applauded. Viewers he spoke to after the movie thought that even though it was tragic that the main character wanted to die, it was also understandable.
Many of the 67 responders to Merry’s review adopted the “it’s just a movie” position or “it’s all about individual choice” or (combining the two) it’s “one person’s story, a fictionalized one at that.”
However it’s not “just” a movie. It is a recurring theme which is teaching a lesson which is finding an increasingly receptive audience.
I saw “Million Dollar Baby” and the audience I was part of also applauded–vigorously. They approved of the “mercy killing” of the young female boxer (“Maggie,” played by Hilary Swank), who is paralyzed following a cheap shot by her opponent. I remember having a fairly intense debate over the film’s “message” which my friend saw as “life-affirming.”
In case you didn’t see the film, Frankie Dunn, the crotchety old trainer (played by Eastwood) eventually “decides that he owes it to Maggie to help her die,” according to a review, written by a bioethicists [!] for NBC News. “He brings a massive dose of adrenaline to the hospital where Maggie lives, disconnects her ventilator, shuts off the machine’s warning alarm and injects her with the drug. She dies moments later.”
Naturally–naturally— Maggie has conveniently asked Frankie to kill her.
“Me Before You” can have only one redeeming quality. If more reviewers like Stephanie Merry and more everyday citizens can look beneath the sentimental gauze and see a festering wound that is only growing worse.