[Mb-civic] Eastwood, the Republican pin-up, is new target for the enemies of 'Hollyweird'

[Michael Butler]

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Eastwood, the Republican pin-up, is new target for the enemies of
'Hollyweird'
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
23 February 2005

Four days before the Oscars, one could usually expect the Hollywood studios
to be at each other's throats, bad-mouthing each other's best picture
contenders and taking out full-page advertisements in the trade papers to
defend themselves against the calumnies of their rivals.

This year, though, is a little different. The attacks are in full swing, but
they are coming largely from outside the industry - from right-wing
commentators and broadcasters who relish every opportunity to bash the
liberal lunatics of "Hollyweird" and feel particularly emboldened in the
wake of President Bush's re-election.

Their principal target, oddly, is Clint Eastwood's multi-nominated boxing
film Million Dollar Baby, which struck most critics as being seeped in
old-fashioned American values - rugged individualism, achieving success
against the odds, even going to church and wrestling with big moral dilemmas
- but which has unleashed a torrent of rage from the likes of Rush Limbaugh,
the rabble-rousing radio host, and the author Michael Medved, self-appointed
chronicler of the industry's moral degeneracy.

For the past couple of weeks, the naysayers have been working up a head of
steam about something the critics barely mentioned in their reviews because
it concerns the unflinchingly downbeat ending, which they felt dutybound not
to reveal. (Independent readers might themselves want to consider pausing
here until they have seen the film.) Million Dollar Baby, they argue, is an
apology for euthanasia because the crusty old boxing trainer played by
Eastwood chooses to carry out the mercy killing of his charge and surrogate
daughter Maggie, played by Hilary Swank, after she is reduced to immobility
by a dirty punch during a prize fight.

Limbaugh has denounced the film as "liberal propaganda" and "a
million-dollar euthanasia movie". Medved, in similar vein, has said it is
"an insufferable, manipulative right-to-die movie" and added that "hate is
not too strong a word" to describe his reaction to it.

Debbie Schlussel, a conservative talk-show host, said the film, shockingly,
advocated "killing the handicapped, literally putting their lights out". Ted
Baehr, head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, called it "very
anti-Catholic and anti-Christian".

In Chicago, a disability advocacy group called Not Dead Yet picketed cinemas
showing the film. And Marcie Roth, the director of the National Spinal Cord
Injury Association, lambasted the ending because, she said, it implied that
"having a spinal-cord injury is a fate worse than death". They and others
deluged Academy voters with protest e-mails in the hope of deterring them
from voting for the film or its participants.

Some kind of protest outside the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday night
seems almost inevitable. So, too, does the revival of a long-standing
grievance against Eastwood held by disabled groups since an elderly woman in
a wheelchair sued him five years ago for failing to provide adequate toilet
facilities at a hotel he owns in Carmel on the central California coast. (Ms
Roth accused Mr Eastwood of continuing a "disability vendetta".)

What makes many of the attacks puzzling is that Eastwood is hardly your
stereotypical flaming Hollywood liberal. He is, in fact, a Republican,
served as the Republican mayor of Carmel and was appointed years ago to the
National Council on the Arts by Richard Nixon. To the extent that it has
been faulted at all by professional critics, Million Dollar Baby has, if
anything, been deemed too conservative in its view of race relations, in its
unflattering portrayal of all women except for Swank's character, and in its
swipes at hillbillies and welfare cheats.

The validity of the arguments against the film may be less important,
though, than the desire of social conservatives to keep up their barrage of
attacks on Hollywood in general. During last year's presidential election
campaign, the film industry was repeatedly identified by Republican
grassroots activists and the Bush campaign as part of a pro-Democrat liberal
elite, and targeted as a source of filth, sexual promiscuity and moral
equivocation out of step with mainstream American values.

According to Thomas Frank, author of the most influential political book of
the past year, What's The Matter With America?, the attacks on Hollywood
(whose products are consumed with equal enthusiasm by right and left
wingers) are part of a pattern by social conservatives of picking cultural
battles they are almost sure to lose, all the better to stir up the
resentment and outrage of their prospective political supporters.

Newspaper columnists have suggested that what Medved and Limbaugh have
sought to do is not so much start a conversation on the morality of
euthanasia as destroy Million Dollar Baby's box-office chances by giving
away the ending. For that reason, some of them suspect the attacks will
generate only indignation among Academy voters.

Most years, the conservatives might have had a better target than Eastwood.
The 2005 Oscar line-up, however, features no obvious liberal hate-figures
such as Tim Robbins (last year's best supporting actor) or Michael Moore
(who tried, and failed, to get nominated for Fahrenheit 9/11). Religious
conservatives could not even accuse the Academy of ignoring Mel Gibson's
controversial Passion of the Christ, since it is up for three awards.

It remains to be seen if their attacks will indeed scupper the chances of
one of Hollywood's favourite sons, or whether those bogeyman Hollywood
liberals will live up to their stereotyped image and race to Mr Eastwood's
defence. All will be revealed on Sunday night.
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