Euthanasia is not the theme of Million Dollar Baby

I’m back from the dead. Since I’ve got nothing to post these past few weeks, I may post  some of my IMDB writeups regularly because I may not find them anymore in the near future. IMDB apparently is deleting some old threads.  I just found out recently that some of my old posts in IMDB are gone.

While checking my posts, I have stumbled upon this funny post in Million Dollar Baby messageboard:

To all of the contributors on this board who believe in God:

How can you justify ending someones life? It was God who created them, and ONLY GOD can decide when to end them! What makes YOUR compassion better then God’s? If God didn’t need Maggie anymore, he would not have kept her!

The message in this movie is all wrong, and i think that if Clint Eastwood is religious he should go find another priest. If our hero “Maggie” did indeed live a meaningful life, she would not by any means want to end it. She would cherish every moment of it. She should have taken the advice of her (selfish) mother and found a good man and have some children – THAT is something to be proud of! What is the accomplishment in beating the crap out of women all over the world?

Why didn’t Clint Eastwood bring people to cheer her up while she was lying there like a vegetable? Why was she sitting in the dark all the time? She could have at least spoken to a psychiatrist. She could have definitely been happier!

Clint Eastwood should stick to westerns.

I love stupid folks in the internet. They are constant source of laughter if not annoyance. Here’s my response:

It is pretty obvious that you did not get the movie at all. Eastwood is NOT justifying “ending someone’s life”. He is not talking about “compassion” here. If that’s the only thing you can get out of this movie, I wonder how you can talk about God. Eastwood has said many times that he doesn’t want people talking about the political correctness of this film simply because it was not his intention. The movie transcends such shallow category. He’s not trying to justify euthanasia. He just used it as a tool to portray complex relationships of people in this predicament. Their struggles, their journeys, their joys and sorrows.

Clint Eastwood’s religiosity is completely irrelevant and out of context. If you are religious, you “should go find another priest.” Yes, Maggie had experienced a meaningful life for a very short span of time. She wants to remember it that way. If she keeps on living paralyzed and slowly losing parts of her body, do you honestly think she could “cherish” the best life she had experienced? Not that I am justifying her choice. I simply RESPECT her decision.

Everyone has his own dream. If you cannot understand what’s that dream means for Maggie, I wonder no more why you did not the understand the whole film itself.

It’s Maggie’s choice. Maggie is a character. A fiction in a movie. A reality in life. This is not about Clint’s beliefs or principles in life or his religion. It’s about life’s harsh truths and realities portrayed in a masterfully crafted film that we should have an OPEN MIND on.