on the million dollar cut man
Patching up bruises and Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood’s 2004 film Million Dollar Baby opens with blood. An up-and-coming fighter, resting in his corner, with a gift from his opponent: a newly-busted eye.
The narrator proclaims that Frankie, Eastwood’s character, was already “the best cut man in the game.” He was a man who’d had blood on his hands for years. Not necessarily his own, but those he was caring towards, those he had been gifted the opportunity to patch up, repair, make anew for another day, another round.
It is not with blood, however, that Frankie patches up the protagonist, Maggie, and shapes her into a championship-level fighter. Before her prized fight, the climax of the film, she barely even gets hit. It’s a remarkable feat, watching a stubbornly misogynistic Frankie coach a Rocky Balboa-esque Maggie to a title fight without even having to tend to her wounds.
Thus, it’s a shaky surprise to both the characters and the viewer when Maggie breaks her spine in her pursuit of the title–knocking her out, shipping her back home, and rendering her unable to walk for the rest of her life. Frankie, not only a stubbornly misogynistic man, but also a stubbornly repressed man, is left with the unbearable weight that the process of euthanasia holds.
Films, and people, pride themselves on the Herculean ending. Regardless of how improbable the task seems, we don’t want, but need to believe that our beloved protagonists will succeed. It’s the most remarkable feat of storytelling, how cognitive dissonance vanishes in the face of hope. Disregard the fact that the hero is a talking bear, the alternative is too crushing to bear.
Maggie wants to die. The film makes no secret of that. Why, then, is it so unfathomable to us that she does?
There’s a certain kind of vulnerability that comes with touching someone’s blood. In being the “cut man”, whether literally or figuratively. Holding someone’s blood means you are not holding them, the person, the character, the living, but rather the essence of them, the function, the whole, the dying.
It is so unfathomable to us that Maggie inevitably dies in the way that we are held culpable for such a death. In the way that we provoked, supported, pushed her to take this life’s path. In the way that we have seen her blood but have refused to touch it.
The film does not close with blood in the same sense that it opened with. It closes with the blood of realizing a dream without living it out in its entirety, without reaping its rewards, its realities. The blood of sleepwalking through life and shaking yourself awake just moments after.
The blood of the reality of touching someone else’s.