Popular Culture Review Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2009 | Page 66

62 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