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Popular Culture Review
Lindhome), an unwed mother, and her brother JD (Marcus Chait), soon to be
released from jail. Now, whose stereotypes are these? Maggie’s mother and
siblings are cartoons of welfare-state parasites, the kind of sly poor folk whom
conservatives theorize are sapping our nation of its vigor. Maggie’s family is
portrayed without a shred of sympathy. We do not feel for their poverty,
ignorance, or lack of options; instead, the one-dimensional scripting encourages
us to see them as selfish, ungrateful, and criminal.
Following the debacle with Maggie’s mom is a scene which plays a key part
in foreshadowing coming events. Maggie tells Frankie about the time her father
euthanized her beloved dog as an act of mercy, and then the pair stop at a diner
and have some lemon pie. They bond. Subsequently, Maggie demonstrates her
loyalty to Frankie by refusing to abandon him in favor of a more successful
manager with better connections.
Frankie’s key piece of advice to Maggie, which he repeats several times
throughout the movie, is this: Always protect yourself. That is the same advice
Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration invoked to justify
going to war in Iraq: we had to protect ourselves from weapons of mass
destruction. Despite the constant reiteration of this advice, Maggie fails to keep
her guard up and is clocked by a nasty boxer identified as a former East German
prostitute (Trifecta: a figure not only representing two major military enemies of
the U.S.A. in the 20th century, but also moral turpitude). After getting suckerpunched by her opponent, Maggie falls, sustaining spinal cord injuries that leave
her permanently paralyzed and bedridden. She then requests that Frankie treat
her as her father had treated her dog. It is at this point that it becomes clear that
the film is about Frankie, and not about Maggie. The balance of the movie is
about the difficulty of Frankie’s choice. As a Catholic, Frankie thinks mercy
killing is a sin. As Maggie’s surrogate father, he cannot bear to see her suffer.
What, then, to do?
Well, thank God our patriarchs are old and wise, and are capable of making
the tough decisions. The entire narrative logic of the film endorses the
assumption that our elders know what they are doing, and the young do not.
Frankie’s priest is a younger man, whom Frankie treats mostly with disdain. In a
sub-plot of the film, Scrap is called upon to defend Danger, a hapless wannabe
boxer who is pummeled by a gym bully. The skilled, older boxer (even when
reduced to the status of a janitor) is more than a match for the guileless youth of
the bully; in fact, Scrap puts him away with one hand. For her part, Maggie
demonstrates that she has finally learned Frankie’s lesson about defending
herself when she refuses to sign her financial assets over to her parasitic family.
In every instance throughout the film, the logic of the narrative supports the idea
that the combination of age and male gender confers wisdom.
Frankie ultimately decides to end Maggie’s suffering. In their last
conversation, Frankie tells Maggie that the Gaelic nickname he gave her, Mo
Cuishle, means “my darling, my blood.” Family feeling triumphs over religion
and law; Frankie knows that euthanasia is illegal, but he does it because he feels