Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Taking Representation Seriously: Rethinking Bioethics Through Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby

  • Published:
Journal of Medical Humanities Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this article, I propose a new model for understanding the function of representation in bioethics. Bioethicists have traditionally judged representations according to a mimetic paradigm, in which representations of bioethical dilemmas are assessed based on their correspondence to the “reality” of bioethics itself. In this article, I argue that this mimetic paradigm obscures the interaction between representation and reality and diverts bioethicists from analyzing the tensions in the representational object itself. I propose an anti-mimetic model of representation that is attuned to how representations can both maintain and potentially subvert dominant conceptions of bioethics. I illustrate this model through a case study of Clint Eastwood’s film Million Dollar Baby. By focusing attention on the film’s lack of adherence bioethical procedures and medical science, critics missed how an analysis of its representational logic provides a means of reimagining both bioethics and medical practice. In my conclusion, I build off this case study to assess how an incorporation of representational studies can deepen—and be deepened by—recent calls for interdisciplinarity in bioethics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Million Dollar Baby, DVD, directed by Clint Eastwood (2005; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005).

  2. For histories of the field that confirm this definition, see: AR. Jonsen, The Birth of Bioethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).; H. Kuhse and P. Singer, “Introduction,” in Bioethics : An Anthology, eds. H. Kuhse and P. Singer (Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2006), 1–8.; DJ. Rothman, Strangers at the Bedside : A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making (New Brunswick [N.J.]: Aldine Transaction, 2008).

  3. Rothman, Strangers, 4–10.

  4. On the centrality of “autonomy” see O. O’Neill, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, Gifford Lectures 2001, Cambridge, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  5. Ibid., 37: “What is rather grandly called ‘patient autonomy’ often amounts simply to a right to choose or refuse treatments on offer, and the corresponding obligations of practitioners not to proceed without the patient’s consent.”

  6. JL. Werth, Contemporary Perspectives on Rational Suicide, (New York: Routledge, 1998), 5.

  7. Ibid., 3: “What passes for patient autonomy in medical practice is operationalised by practices of informed consent.”

  8. G. Dworkin, “Paternalism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. EN. Zalta, 2010.

  9. W. Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 34.

  10. P. Lauritzen, “Visual Bioethics,” American Journal of Bioethics 8, no. 12 (2008): 50–56.

  11. AL. Caplan and J. Turow, “Taken to Extremes: Newspapers and Kevorkian’s Televised Euthanasia Incident, ” in Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media, ed. LD. Friedman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 53.

  12. F. McInerney, “Cinematic Visions of Dying,” in The Study of Dying: From Autonomy to Transformation, ed. A. Kellehear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 229.

  13. V. Rideout, “Television as a Health Educator: A Case Study of Grey’s Anatomy” (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2008), 9.

  14. GB. White, “Capturing the Ethics Education Value of Television Medical Dramas.” The American Journal of Bioethics 8, no. 12 (2008): 13–14; MR. Wicclair, “The Pedagogical Value of House, Md—Can a Fictional Unethical Physician Be Used to Teach Ethics?” The American Journal of Bioethics 8, no. 12 (2008): 16–17.

  15. R. Cooter, “The Resistible Rise of Medical Ethics,” Social History of Medicine 8, no. 2 (1995): 257–70.; MLT. Stevens, Bioethics in America: Origins and Cultural Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

  16. O. Corrigan, “Empty Ethics: The Problem with Informed Consent,” Sociology of Health and Illness 25, no. 7 (2003): 768–92; P. Farmer, “New Malaise: Medical Ethics and Social Rights in the Global Era,” in Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 196–212.

  17. G. Belkin, “Moving Beyond Bioethics: History and the Search for Medical Humanism,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 47, no. 3 (2004): 372–85.

  18. Belkin, 279.

  19. JR. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

  20. Slaughter, 78.

  21. Ibid.

  22. SL. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to Aids, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

  23. Gilman, 5.

  24. LJ. Davis, “Why ”Million Dollar Baby“ Infuriates the Disabled,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 2005, http://www.chninternational.com/why%20million$baby_eastwood.htm; S. Drake, "Dangerous Times," Ragged Edge Online, January 11, 2005, http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/reviews/drakemillionbaby.html

  25. Drake.

  26. H. Frowe, ““I Can’t Be Like This, Frankie, Not after What I’ve Done”: Million Dollar Baby and the Value of Human Lives,” in Bioethics at the Movies, ed. S. Shapshay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  27. Frowe, 247.

  28. Ibid., 252.

  29. Million Dollar Baby. All quotations of the movie are my transcriptions. The official screenplay has not been published.

  30. J. Dolmage and W. DeGenaro, ““I Cannot Be Like This Frankie”: Disability, Social Class, and Gender in Million Dollar Baby,” Disability Studies Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2005): http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/555/732 (accessed August 21, 2010).

  31. My inspiration for this criterion of development comes from Paul Verhaehe’s rethinking of “normality as a developmental process.” See P. Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics (New York: Other Press, 2004), 11–13.

  32. I am here performing a psychoanalytic reading of a representation. I believe—and here argue—that cinematic representations and clinical encounters are inherently intertwined spheres of activity. Nevertheless, the immanent logic of the clinic must also be respected, and I feel that it is important to emphasize that applying the model I am developing to clinical encounters is beyond the scope of this paper. I do however believe that such an attempt to use psychoanalysis in clinical bioethical situations is possible, and will do so in future work.

  33. This expression comes from H. Brody, The Future of Bioethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 21–48.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Harold Braswell

Authors
  1. Harold Braswell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Harold Braswell.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Braswell, H. Taking Representation Seriously: Rethinking Bioethics Through Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby . J Med Humanit 32, 77–87 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9130-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9130-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation