M*A*S*H (1970)

Insolence is tricky, like violence. We bask in the blood we see so we can get it out of our system, much like how schoolboys play sick practical jokes on girls to cope with pressure and systemic submission. Rebellion, however unhealthy, was an act of emotional outlet, and slurs were thrown not because the boys believed in misogyny, homophobia, or racism, but precisely because they didn’t, like how it would be preposterous to say that we indulged ourselves in actual sadism by allowing the bloodshed to exhilarate us. It’s the dialectic of reaction formation: we felt liberated in violation, and violated in liberation, like sex. The acrid smell of gunpowder can excite us like a low-rent horror stinker does, with enough insanity to help us find our distance and alienate ourselves from the experience on screen, or it can sensitise us to that experience and the wounded psyches underneath.

Only a few action and war films have been willing to confront the reality of victimisation, because they risk the otherwise sound box-office draw by touching a raw nerve and disturbing the audience from the inside, without giving them any refuge in detachment. Even more anomalously, M*A*S*H has found an odd sort of balance between that excitement and sensitisation. As a result, it became more offensive to some people than the harshest of the exploitation flicks. Its sin was for having made us feel what gorier and more showily depraved movies couldn’t.

The simple yet wayward, cheeky yet chivalrously high-spirited material is originally a Richard Hooker novel, which was adapted into a screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. (one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ blacklisted by the HUAC). But it’s the then-unknown director Robert Altman and his then-unknown cast who brought it to life (in turn, M*A*S*H put them on the map). As “Hawkeye”, “Trapper John”, and “Duke”, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt were the brattish bunch of drafted surgeons miles off the front lines in the Korean War. (The title is an acronym for “Mobile Army Surgical Hospital”). A thick-faced, giddy prank on jingoism and traditional American values, the film captured an episodic, slice-of-life vision of people in war, echoing the sense of chance, that feeling of incident found in the French New Wave pictures like Shoot the Piano Player (1960).

I can’t think of another comedy director who could care less if the audience laughed along with him. To Altman, if something’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for the film. Strictly speaking, he’s no comedian. Technical comedy is too conscious for spontaneity, and spontaneity—his insignia—is too panoramic to be just humorous. Roger Ebert wrote in a raving review that the reason the movie is “so funny is that it’s so desperate”. I couldn’t agree less: it’s exactly the je-m’en-foutisme off-handedness that provided the film with such snap and precision. Most of the gags here were underplayed, thrown away, yet they weren’t deadpan. No one tried to seem funny, they just were: while “Hawkeye” was sawing off a leg, he instructs a nurse to use clamps to scratch an itch at the tip of his nose; it may take a half-second or two to dawn on you why “Hawkeye” moaned in dismay “OH, MAN!” when the Asian boy (Kim Atwood) who does all the errands for him was taken away for health reasons.

Altman has been experimenting with techniques for a while now, and it is here where his style first comes into shape. There was a blissfully confused atmosphere to elevate the humour. Right from the start, you almost immediately register the liberal use of sound: very little is cut or filtered out, not an ambient hiss of the background or a casual swear word in a football game (it’s the first time where the F-word is heard in the dialogue of a major studio film, a detail so forgettable when juxtaposed with other, more outrageous obscenities), and everything is overlapped, like Jo Jones’ swinging drum beats—the dialogue, the loudspeakers (which were heard throughout and gave the episodes a sense of unity), the creaking beds, the clicking surgical instruments—and it grounds you and transports you. In an Altman set, you rarely know where the mics are going to be or when the cameras will point at you or zoom in on you from afar, and a lot of times you couldn’t even spot them if you tried. Self-consciousness is more difficult here than appearing natural. Even when someone inexperienced seemed awkward, it’s probably not because they didn’t look natural, but because they did.

Years into the Vietnam War and the nationwide movement against it, frustrations are at a boiling point. This film channelled young people’s anger, and made a semi-sadistic anti-establishment fantasy out of it, hoping they would respond to it. And respond they did. M*A*S*H was a smash, the third highest-grossing film of the year, warmly received at the Academy and the Golden Globes, and outperformed both Patton (1970) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), the two more patriotic war pictures that 20th Century Fox was banking serious money on. If it did age poorly, it’s not really that women’s and LGBTQ+ issues had become more salient, but because people are now more moralistic about what should be portrayed and in what way.

Probably no normal human could stand 12 hours a day of witnessing unending misery and gore while performing laborious and meticulous operations without breaking down in agony. So our heroes chose to break up. Sanity is kept only by dissociating from all the senseless horror that’s in front of you, and you’ll need it to keep saving lives. It’s the absurd paradox of the job: to do good, you have to not care, to find the risible in the consecrated, to dare laughing in the face of death. How can you have a life here except by making the most out of it? How do you even see straight? The movie is from the perspective of those who have seen the worst (Hooker himself served as an army surgeon in Korea and took directly from the experience in writing the book). What may appear gross and vulgar by our standards they probably wouldn’t even bat an eye at. It’s not surprising that it’s one of the first war films to really have got the boyish perversity in the armies without holding back or moralising it against these men. Nor was it any surprise that women are treated like objects, like how it really was in war. Would you rather have the pranks taken out or played down for politeness when you very much know that the reality is much sicker and harsher than what’s shown here?

And what’s more obscene actually? Adultery? Sacrilege? Or the needless killings and deaths? Nothing is more absurd than to heal the wounded only for them to get killed or injured again all for maybe a few inches of other people’s land, and M*A*S*H knows it, which is why our boys stick it to those who thrived under the military bureaucracy and enabled it to go on. Hypocrisy is punished above all else. Sally Kellerman was the cartoonishly overbearing Margaret Houlihan, nicknamed “Hot Lips” after being exposed in bed with Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), a religious narcissist who was incompetent as a surgeon and blamed the death of a patient on an inexperienced kid (Bud Cort). The pious Burns and prudish “Hot Lips” are already in the same bed the first night they meet each other, and the very next morning Burns (as seen through a dumpster fire) is transferred away in a straight jacket after he assaulted “Hawkeye” who made fun of their lovemaking to his face. The movie doesn’t give a damn about the “misogyny” accusation like how those who called Margaret Thatcher or Anita Bryant or J.K Rowling a “slut” weren’t, and it made no mistake about the losers that “Hawkeye” and “Trapper John” were: it prides itself on their shameless honesty.

They were honest in their adolescent profanity so they could control it, and they despise those hiding behind a false veneer of respect and authority, who are in fact just as depraved (if not more so) but in a different, politer way. They want to use their coarseness on the right people. Hence “Trapper John” striking Burns after the latter humiliated Cort; hence their attempt to find out whether “Hot Lips”, who tried to have them fired, was a natural blonde (it’s an ingenious set-up, and I will refrain from spoiling it for you); hence their legal cheating their way out of a football match to win back their bets against General Hammond’s (G. Wood) team. What puts some modern viewers off is the utter lack of moralisation and reservation. Films like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Nosferatu (2024) would’ve been way bigger targets had they been as unabashedly candid about their views of women. There’s not the darkness or cynicism here to give them that double-edged intellectual comfort in Stanley Kubrick’s aloof transgressiveness, and the impishness of it all leaves them a sour taste so they can’t rationalise their way out of it with “that’s the point”. But that is the point with Altman’s M*A*S*H: his perception of America is eternally at war with itself, but it’s his to portray, without compromise.

There are people we know who can please you one minute and offensively drive you around the bend the next. But they are people. Anyone who pretends otherwise might have a higher opinion of themselves than they deserve. The action of M*A*S*H is framed so we are meant to identify with these overgrown boys, but Altman does not sugar-coat their debauchery. We love them for the losers they are, and we may come out in their glory, but we cannot have it easy. There are no clean victories. The off-colour stunt on “Hot Lips” makes us gasp and laugh at the same time. Kellerman plays her like an unstable, off-key pipe organ, and her wailing is made laughable, yet the execution is so naturalistic we are haunted anyway. When she yelled in realisation “It’s an insane asylum”, she was right, and she belonged right there in it.

Her being a comic did not repudiate the validity of her humiliation. She proved that, indeed, she had feelings and consciousness of her own. In most John Ford films, as well as many cruder film noirs, women were just objects. Altman turned that on its head, and he had gone further than both William A Wellman did in Westward the Women (1951) and Howard Hawks in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), though Sam Peckinpah would go even further a year later in Straw Dogs (1971). Women’s experience of being objectified rang true to life despite their shallow characterisation here, because no effort was made to hide, contrive, or intellectualize that fact, which is why they were so quick to object to it. That is Altman’s strength as a revolutionary of the form, and he would go on to make female-led 3 Women (1977) and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), with Kellerman willingly returning for his Brewster McCloud (1970) and Prêt-à-Porter (1994). Kellerman confessed her love for Altman in an interview when she said:

I originally went into read for Lt. Dish. I was dying to get into the movies, and had been auditioning for years. I did The Third Day with George Peppard, which was a big studio film, but it bombed. So I was back to square one. Anyway, I went to read for Lt. Dish. I go into this big room, and there’s Bob sitting at this table with some other people, and he looks at me and says “I’ll give you the best part in the picture: Hot Lips.” I said ‘You will?!’ He always tells the story that I was chewing on his pant leg when I got the part. [laughs] So I go outside, like all great artists, and I check the script to see how much dialogue I have, and there’s like seven lines! I just turned to stone, and went home. My agent convinced me to go back and meet with Bob again. So I go back and I said “Look, I’m a woman. I’m not just a W.A.C. (Woman’s Army Corps), or some bimbo. Why couldn’t Hot Lips be this, or that…’ and Bob just sat there, very calmly, and said “I dunno, why couldn’t she?” I’ll never forget that. I’d just come from TV where you couldn’t change a word of the script. It was just one of the greatest times I’ve ever had, working with a director who loved who you were, and then being as creative as he is on top of that. That’s one of the secrets that a lot of directors don’t get: when you feel like you’re appreciated, you feel free to take chances. And I think that’s why everyone lines up to work with Bob. 

USA | 1970 | 116 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • JAPANESE • KOREAN • LATIN

Cast & Crew

director: Robert Altman.
writer: Ring Lardner Jr. (based on the novel ‘MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors’ by Ricard Hooker.
starring: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Roger Bowen, René Auberjonois & Michael Murphy.