Camera And Action, page 21
Altman explained his motive. He never intended his films to make political statements. Rather, he filmed like an artist painted. He was more "interested in the look and feel of a film," in the audience's emotional work as active viewers of his stylistics."
Certainly Altman's talent as a boundary breaker goes unquestioned in terms of "Now Movie" qualities, but the new realism in film standing in as progressive social agency is less clear.
"Telling it like it is" is not a transparent transmission of experience but a re-presentation, an interpretation, a meaning-making action, too. In one scene, Hawkeye and Trapper John, for example, have been summoned to Japan to perform surgery on an American congressman's wounded son because "Trapper is the best there is." They travel in golf attire to Japan, taking their clubs and expecting to play golf. As the military jeep approaches the course, Trapper and Hawkeye engage in a conversation in what is supposed to be Japanese. Meant for comic effect, the scene pokes fun at the sound of the language, much in the style of an old Jerry Lewis movie. Certainly this moment also works to expose the ethnocentricity in people who behave like the two renowned surgeons. On the other hand, viewers have already identified with Hawkeye and Trapper as the best there is, the representative men of the new antiestablishment. Thus, the scene's antics betray mere realistic comedy.
Five months after release in America, at the twenty-third International Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 1970, by a vote of six to three, Cannes Film Festival judges gave M*A*S*H the Golden Palm for best motion picture of four hundred entries." Over ten thousand viewers and eight hundred journalists participated in the two-week event. At the end of the week, Robert Altman stood on stage in the Festival Palace with producer Ingo Preminger and actresses Sally Kellerman and Jo Ann Pflug (Lt. Dish) to receive the grand prix at the awards ceremony.20 By the end of May, the film was showing continuously at the Rialto in London. As was advertised, "following the Cannes Award and the unprecedented popularity of the film in the United States, special arrangements were made by the Rialto with the G.L.C. Authority to allow the film to be shown round-the-clock from the opening. 1121 M*A*S*Hwas the first film from overseas to get that kind of approval for a twenty-four-hour straight run at the Rialto Theatre in London. It was liked because it was fashionable in the sixties style of rowdiness: long hair on men, obvious antiwar stance, and anti-authoritarian in attitudes. Londoners continued to praise its "fast-cutting modern style" and its "actors, writers, directors and of course the producer who had the nerve to make the film."22
Alongside the approbation, several renounced the film's true mission. "I hope nobody will tell me," Dilys Powell wrote in The London Times, "that M*A*S*H is anti-war. 1121 In Europe, Altman and producer Ingo Preminger were booed when they went on stage to receive the Cannes Festival awards. The jury president, Miguel Angel Asturias, boycotted the award ceremony in protest against the decision to award Altman and Preminger the grand prize, but the award stood.24
What some saw as iconoclasm, others saw as anesthesia. Graduate students at New York University, for example, questioned the film's social commitment in view of its commercial tie. A flyer from "the Graduate Cinema Strike Committee of N.Y.U." implored students to ask, "What is the price of your entertainment?" The committee argued that the film industry "is frantically diluting, commercializing, and exploiting the political and cultural revolution taking place in this country." More pointedly, "Directors who claim to have a social concern make films which distort and exploit the socio-political ideals of youth in a greedy attempt to capture the `youth market."' And following that statement, advocates asked, "why is M*A*S*H about Korea instead of Vietnam?"25
The N.Y.U. flyer argued from an anti-capitalist perspective declaring, "Ironically, the exploitation films produced by these powers are largely supported by those whom they exploit; the young, the blacks, the women, while at the same time perpetuating the lack of comprehension common to the misinformed `middle American."' If only enlightened, America would be governed by a new morality of nonexploitation, ultimately redeeming and empowering the socially abused. Objecting to popular film's duplicity, this flyer highlighted the flawed agency in M*A*S*H and its exploitative, capitalist character and circulated a directive: that viewers resist and reject Hollywood projects.21
Not everyone was willing to resist the likes of Hawkeye and Trapper John when a cultural revolution meant shaking off the authority-driven past. How that was understood at the time was up for grabs; venues from Hollywood to NYU graduate students mediated its meaning. If, as Altman told reporters, his goal was "emotional" rather than "literal accuracy" and if he was correct in assuming that "no company would have financed a film about Vietnam," then the internal structure of the film doggedly did subversive work.27 On the other hand, if Altman's iconoclasm merely exploited changing attitudes, then a harder question of its antiestablishment achievement remains to be asked. The process of reconstructing America to fit changing attitudes and social pressures meant deconstructing American manhood. Like the Western, iconic narratives such as the war story no longer stood as the unequivocal perspective of American history. M*A *S*H entered into theaters as that kind of cinematic rebel, product and producer of the displacement of convention. Yet its ideological break is not so clear and in some ways the film remains guilty of the perpetuation of convention, typical and predictable. Somewhere in between a rejection of all popular films and a filmmaker pleading innocence through art stood the reason for M*A*S*H's success and failure.
The larger power of this film, its discursive function as an agent in social change, can be appraised properly when considering the role and function of its female characters. Improving the social status of women was obviously not the film's purpose, but the question of its pigeonholing of women while liberating men raises the issue of what representations in film were possible. Men's major roles outnumbered women's twelve to one at the time, but that should be of no surprise since the Producers' Guild claimed over twenty-three hundred male members and only twenty-three women. Of course, the popular assumption was that "women's pictures" just didn't sell, especially if they did not star Barbra Streisand at the time.28 It made sense to assume things had changed for women when viewers saw liberated women such as Jane Fonda in Klute (1971), gaining power through liberalized images of sexuality on screen. The breakthrough visuals seemed at the time a measure of success, but for the most part women's roles remained exploitative.
Feminist Betty Friedan responded to the clever way American society answered to her call for unleashing the "feminine mystique." Hollywood had helped take women out of the kitchen and put them onto the streets with lively flair. Friedan asked "that we rate the movies W + or W- or even W---, depending on the image of women in a given movie." Why can't filmmakers come up with a respectful liberation giving women a "new identity as people?" she asked. A mystique of the masculine kind seemed to have sprouted in the years since Friedan denounced the subjugation of women. Friedan called for a more complex discussion of the changes in relationships between men and women and in the effects of those changes in conventional families. Now, in the form of "latter-day Hardy Boys," with "that convenient poignant bullet through the long hair," the new age man was quickly founding his new establishment.21
By mid-decade, Hollywood's distorted treatment of women was so annoying to some that during the New York Film Festival the National Organization for Women and the Screen Actors Guild organized a conference entitled "Filmmaking U.S.A.: A World Without Women" to discuss the matter. Three hundred people packed into a library to hear a panel discuss the situation for women. The contradiction was clear as New York Times journalist Judy Klemes- rud reported: "At a time when feminism seems to be in full flower, there is a dearth of good roles for women in American film." Then, she argued, "when women do get parts at all, they are usually cast as prostitutes, empty-headed blondes, sex kittens or neurotic housewives." At least in the Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis days, audiences saw strong women on screen assert some authority.30
Women's power in Hollywood seemed to be compromised with the studio break-up because producers no longer had to honor women's contracts. Says movie critic Molly Haskell, "When you had actresses under contract you had to find parts for them." In addition, "There were also a lot of women screenwriters in the thirties and they wrote good repartee between men and women." What she called the "mammary gland" fixation, inflated with actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, translated into the sixties version of women as victims and subjects of men's violence."
Friedan and other feminists forced the discussion of representation out of their closet and into the mainstream. In the wake of buddy films, "this whole slew of `boys together' movies, in which I also include `M*A*S*H,"' Friedan contended, "women are not seen except as shadowy waitresses, or virtually faceless bodies, call-girls, paid or unpaid - non-persons." With gratuitous sexuality, films "seem to feed death wishes, in sexual disguise," Friedan concluded. As she remarked, "The more explicit the sex, somehow the more anti-human, antilife the movie." Friedan's comments raised the question of whether the extremely popular "Hardy-boy" format of that time was engendering social agency or offering "cheap escapes" from harder issues of gender.32
The magic in reconstructing establishment thinking during Hollywood's most historically liberalized moment lies in the inscrutable way a film such as M*A *S*Hmanages women's liberation. The degrading treatment of women was often buried under the guise of shaking off Puritanism. Puritanism and prudishness were discredited as old-fashioned and limiting for women, while sex outside conventional marriage meant liberating the body from yet another authoritarian figure and therefore regenerating. Reviewers, for example, wrote of Sally Kellerman's character as the "prudish nurse whose Puritanism thaws in the heat of battle."33 Sally Kellerman's "Hot Lips" was a justifiable target of ridicule because she was, as Newsweek described, "the Calvinistic but libidinous WAC."34
To test that Calvinism, the medics played pranks. Houlihan's wondrous thaw began when she was the butt of two humiliating, practical jokes. Corporal Radar O'Reilly (Kim Atwood) wired the inside of Officer Frank Burn's (Robert Duvall) tent and transmitted over the loudspeaker Burn and Houlihan having sex. The medical unit became privy to her sexual ravenousness and hence made her conversion a public goal. To get her to melt even more, the jokesters rigged a cable on the shower tent that lifted the cover to expose a naked and mortified officer Hot Lips. As if at a movie, rows of medics, male and female, applauded as she groveled naked on the ground.
Not everyone ignored the effects of "Hot Lip" representations. One New Yorker protested in a letter to the editor. She objected to New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby including Altman's film in his "Ten Best List" of 1970. As she remarked the "inclusion ... is further disheartening evidence that movie critics see nothing wrong with dehumanizing women in the name of humor." Like the film's logo, "Women ... are regarded not as people but as sexual parts to be patronized and humiliated for laughs." That this misogynistic pattern went largely ignored by public and critics alike speaks to the discursive power of the anti-military and antiestablishment image to take on a male persona at the time. The letter pointed out that the obscenity in such films lies in the endorsement of the film's "blatant misogyny" and its "bland" acceptance. The film's humor further legitimated the wish fulfillment of those gameplayers whose debasing antics toward women get buried in what Canby called "unequivocally funny" pranks.35
Similarly, the book's author objected to another scene when the medic team tricked Captain Walter "Painless Pole" Waldowski (John Schuck) into a "cure" for impotence. Lt. Dish agrees to sexual intercourse while the captain is asleep, preparing to die, but when he finds himself awake after Dish's performance, he finds himself restored to health and manliness. Lt. Dish's sudden change from a virtuous nurse to unpaid prostitute made no sense to Hornberger. As he remarked, "in the finale to Painless Waldowski and Lt. Dish ... [I] think her decision to cooperate based, as implied, only on how Painless is hung -after her virtuous buildup - may be a little too much. Would it be any less effective if she was, fairly obviously, wavering for humanitarian reasons, before the private showing finally moved her?"36 This savior of impotent men - the available nurse - played into male myths and served to reinstate men's sexual identity.
In both Lt. Dish's humanitarian gesture and Hot Lips' mortification, Altman's wish of the Hugh Hefner kind - the forbidden fruit, the virgin and the whore - overshadowed singular protests as the film resonated with the millions of viewers as an American icon over the next few decades, but, practical jokes aside, the last sequences of the film bring the egregious nature of the film's discourse to the fore. Major Houlihan's transformation and liberation from a rigid disciplinarian to a member of the humane community is complete once she joins the surgeons and alienates herself from the quintessential military authority, Major Burns. This membership was confirmed when she became head cheerleader, a non-person, instead of Major Houlihan, a professional nurse in the U.S. Army.
As the publicity folder suggested, those who have the most humanity staged the most games, but humanity in this film turns into saving the impotent dentist from suicide and gets subsumed in bullying tactics. One reviewer, "a minority report," as he called his perspective, saw the style of these "heroes" as ruthless and imposing. "Any admiration their coolness may inspire," he commented, "is torpedoed by the ruthlessness they show in imposing their style on the recalcitrant uncool."37 Their antiestablishment is thus qualified for only those whose "jugular" is exposed when bugging the tent of Major Burns and Major Houlihan. In short, those who can make and take jokes win.
Major Burns fails the test but Houlihan survives the humiliating prank where she is exposed while showering and passes with flying colors when she sleeps with one of the heroes and joins the game as the cheerleader of men. Sally Kellerman commented on how enthralled she was with the character since Houlihan was the only one to change. Yet, that change meant going from a military officer and competent professional to a subordinate and "acquiescent bedmate," as one reviewer called her. Critics who soured on M*A*S*H repudiated the ending as the return of the "Sigma Nu Frat Party," sixties style.38
M*A *S*H dishonored war games but not game playing. The medics challenged the general to a football game and after a few pranks such as stabbing the opposition with hypodermic needles filled with drugs, M*A *S*H medics win the game and take thousands of dollars in bets back to camp. The football game wraps up the film's American identity and etches the gender lines clearly on the screen. The medics establish male intimacy in their coming together as men to win the hierarchical battle. Women dutifully play their role as cheerleaders, thereby confirming that they are not as deserving of the kind of intimacy as are men. This is the sequence that made Hot Lips feel good enough about herself that her anger subsided. The elimination of women from the narrative's action and their placement on the sidelines of the football game is a sinister reflection of women's place in American society in antiestablishment disguise.
The press book sent to advertise the movie included posters of the picture of the woman's legs and man's fingers with Sutherland and Gould flanked on both sides. Another option for theaters had a shirtless Gould holding a cigar in his mouth and Sutherland with a scotch in hand and, "where newspaper censorship exists," fingers were covered with a glove. Press marketing described the characters as "the best surgeons in the Far East and they are hell-raising lunatics who make a shambles of army bureaucracy" but "never [lose] sight of the purpose and dedication of the three human doctors and the wounded they try to mend and save." They learn to "survive the tragic waste of war ... by cling[ing] to their sanity and humanity" and, for the women, "Major Hot Lips ... whose exposure to the rigors of life in the raw brings about a wondrous transformation" and Lt. Dish is the "sexiest in military history."39
In between representation and the everyman medic, the film refuels the truth and contradictions of a higher authority. They were surgeons not 42nd Street hustlers but in a sense still hustling. In the words of reviewer Richard Corliss for the National Review, "M*A*S*H's heroes are experts at beating the system, not smashing the system. 1140 Hot Lips was a literary tool to shape the unit up, but as in the former logo and a New York Times article, it was all about the legs. The film clip of the actress getting out of the helicopter with her skirt above her thighs, revealing nylons and garter, became a widely circulated photograph for reviewers' articles because that was the film's point. Power to women meant shaking off prudishness and for that they could become the leading man's girl or the next "woman singing the blues," as one feminist complained.41
Robert Altman had once explained to an interviewer for Action that his decision to dispense with much of the script was based on his style and nothing else. "I'm interested in the behavior pattern of the characters," he claimed, "not in what they say [and] if I had done his script the picture would have been a disaster."42 Lardner was not sold on all the "adlibbing" but thankfully received his Oscar in 1971. Renowned filmmaker Francois Truffaut applauded Lardner for his "excellent script" but ridiculed Altman for his "disastrous direction."43 Somewhere between Lardner's objection and Truffaut's insult lies the film's value as a "new breed of movie," distinctly stamping it Altman-made for a Hollywood scrambling to redefine itself.44 Altman's boundary-breaking men reflected his attitude toward the subject of war and film's common treatment of heroes, but in his language of seeming verisimilitude, he reestablished an unforgivable social reality, unambiguously degrading for women. In doing so, he helped his film define the establishment in antiestablishment that protected the power of men's authority.
M*A *S*H subverts the overdetermined war image to keep free the social status of men as the agents of action. If Altman was adventurous in his direction of this film, he was less so in his motives. When pressed to explain why directors have not widened the roles for women beyond "mammary fixation, " losers, or victims, Altman once replied, "well, isn't that the way most women really are?"45 Knight Ridder reporter Judy Gerstel agreed. "From `M.A.S.H' to `The Player,"' she said about Altman, "he's been criticized for the way women are presented in his movies ... women are naked, vulnerable or abused... [but] far from being a misogynist, Altman is a feminist."46 Yes, if only through the slightest of imagination. Perhaps more accurately, The Observer Review reported it best about Altman's iconoclastic truth-telling, "It is perhaps the supreme example of an anti-establishment movie making a box-office coup for the establishment. 5547
