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In the Ring with Mildred Pierce: <i>Million Dollar Baby</i> and Eastwood's Revision of the Forties Melodrama

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arq.2011.0002

1558-9595

Megan Williams,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

In the Ring with Mildred Pierce:Million Dollar Baby and Eastwood's Revision of the Forties Melodrama Megan Williams (bio) Disappointingly, most film reviews either Laud Million Dollar Baby for its "unsentimental" message or concentrate on the right-to-life debate surrounding the "controversial" ending and its relationship to the Terry Schiavo case.1 Few critics decode the film as generating a substantial amount of cultural anxiety about women who foray into hitherto male realms—in particular, into activities as aggressively masculine as boxing. Tania Modleski's New York Times "Letter to the Editor" is one exception. She chastises Frank Rich for allowing the "right wing media to define the debate over Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby as one about euthanasia," all the while ignoring "the film's vile gender, class, and racial politics" (1).2 The numerous ways the film interweaves its gender, class, and racial politics are fairly obvious: Billie the "Blue Bear," the demonized Black East-German Ex-Prostitute; Maggie's "white trash" welfare family; and Morgan Freeman's Scrap, manager of the Hit Pit, who provides the film's voice-over narration and yet another example of the black man's recently idealized and God-like presence in film (Colombe 1). While these characters and Eastwood's more general combination of gender, class, and racial politics are themselves deserving of lengthy analysis, time and length constraints force this article to focus more narrowly on the ways the three main characters—Maggie, Frankie, and Scrap—articulate the gender politics of Million Dollar Baby. This paper argues that at the same time that Million Dollar Baby reflects the contentious debates at the time of its release about what constitutes a family and a woman's relationship to violence, [End Page 161] the violence of its final scenes contradicts its previous negotiations of gender. In response to Linda Williams's call for "feminist readings that can be more sensitive to specificities of the historical moment of film production and the situation of its original audience" ("Feminist" 20) in order to avoid an analysis of films as "re-presentation that eternally represses the feminine" (19), this paper reads Million Dollar Baby against two cultural events that defined the public's consciousness at the time of its release: the debate over same-sex marriage and the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In Williams's analysis, female spectators of Mildred Pierce inhabit and understand the numerous and contradictory subject positions Mildred presents as a mother and career woman. This consideration of the plurality of meanings created by the melodrama focuses on "very specific, and historically changing, forms of repression and reflection that operate hand in hand," avoiding an analysis that posits a monolithic repression of the feminine as the only message conveyed by the text (28). A cursory sketch of the same-sex marriage debate and the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs in 2004 reveals that the cultural moment Million Dollar Baby reflects and manages extends far beyond a single woman's right to box—it encompasses the collective rights of men and women to participate in new forms of family and for women to express violence physically. One of the staples of film criticism has been the observation that melodrama, as a genre, taps into the collective drives and unconscious needs of its audience (Haskell 27). Thus the forties melodrama reacts to the Rosie-the-Riveter decade with noticeable ambivalence, alternating between anxiety and praise for the new female presence in the workforce. As Williams suggests, the forties women's film contains both repression and radical potential. Mildred Pierce is allowed to build her restaurant empire, revealing her independence and drive, while her final bankruptcy and the corrupt actions of her daughter Veda suggest an imperative need to reconstitute the pre-war family. Like the forties and fifties drama queens who were profoundly willful, Maggie's ambition is raised at the beginning of the film only to be undone in the final forty-five minutes. In fact, one could argue that one of the narrative purposes of this film is to firmly imprint Maggie's final powerless status on the audience. Writing about Maggie's body, Carloss James...