Camera And Action, page 22
The surface appearance of insurgent authenticity in M*A *S*H is exactly what gave the initial story its afterlife. The M*A *S*H television series began on CBS on September 17, 1972, and ran for eleven seasons and two hundred fifty-one episodes. Its finale in February 1983 drew over three-fourths of the viewing audiences. Major Houlihan's actress, Loretta Swit, was occasionally invited to speak at nursing graduations. Altman was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the seventy-eighth Oscars and appeared on the honorary tribute screen for the deceased a year later at the seventy-ninth ceremony. Hornberger lived his life feeling comfortable with the initial results of the film, but he snubbed the television series' rendition of Hawkeye Pierce. Alan Alda as Pierce guaranteed the life of the original film, but Hornberger, who died at seventy-three on November 24, 1997, "disliked the TV series because of the liberal bent that Alda brought to Hawkeye, the character Hornberger modeled on himself, a political conservative." Said Hornberger, "I intended no messages in the book. I am a conservative Republican. I don't hold with this anti-war nonsense."48
At a dedication ceremony in 1997, the U.S. military closed the MASH unit thirty-five miles from Seoul. "Today you are joining us in making history," unit commander Colonel Ronald A. Maul remarked as onlookers said good bye to "America's MASH."49 The American Film Institute hosted a M*A*S*H reunion in November 1995 at the Cecchi Gori Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills to celebrate both film and television history. What Altman began, the television series etched permanently in American consciousness. Most notably, Korean War vets refer to the story as a personal reference and validation for their sacrifices. A group of fifteen vets staged a "serious" production of M*A*S*H to tell their stories. Among the actors were "Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, combat pins and other medals" recipients, said director Gary Baumgartner. "We wanted the tenor of the show," he said, "to reflect that this was a real war.... These guys are true heroes." With advice from the chairman of the Iowa chapter of the Korean War Veterans, the production provided "an all-encompassing experience" as it combined the movie with live theater. Patrons were able to see artifacts and photographs from the war, forgotten in the aftermath of World War II and used as a narrative tool to engage in the debate about Vietnam.50
The seminal M*A*S*H (1970), a story about a compassionate surgical unit serving in Korea, made Altman "the `new' Hollywood's prodigal son."51 Taking popular movies into the next decade meant deconstructing formulas that had defined Americans for decades. With M*A*S*H, Altman reconstructed the idea of heroism in war and found his subject matter not on the front lines but in the surgical room where men were still in charge. Altman saw to it that the war film would be forever changed, but in a general antiwar social environment, it captured rather than radicalized conventional notions of the other half of the population.
Altman caricatured the military system in a way that resonated with 1970s counterculture attitudes through Hawkeye and Trapper. They were the younger generation's "authentic" and "honest" men who redirected their ideals from obsession with masculine strength to softened professionalism.52 These "easy riding elitists," as film historian Diane Jacobs has described them, brought the new "scruffy, non-verbal heroes of Woodstock" to the screen and updated the image of men in the cinematic war zone. These characters were the men of the seventies, the "peace marchers" who, in Jacobs words, claimed: "If we ran the world, not only would it be a lot more amusing, but a good deal more efficient as well."53
Cheers from audiences immortalized the film's correlation between cool as sanity and anything square as ineptness.54 M*A*S*H's sarcastic medics confronted the gallant warrior image.55 At the same time, Franklin J. Schaffner's "anti-war and anti-Patton" picture inadvertently reaffirmed conventional male identity with George C. Scott's portrayal in Patton and gave "Americans a new hero." Schaffner's project meant to question war by portraying a maniacal commander as an "impulsive ... hungry militarist." Instead, viewers identified the eccentric and merciless General Patton as a dedicated leader, the warrior as the essential man.56 In M*A*S*H, using Korea as a stand-in for Vietnam provided a space in which not only to question combat but also to reject Pattonesque essences. Men's protest was not centered on questions of equal rights but on the freedom to determine their roles and identity. The resounding box office success of both films and the long-running career of the television series clearly revealed two sides of the same coin. Both venues sat on the battleground of manhood. Protest was both specific to Vietnam and to the other war within American culture.
If Altman closed the power-door to women in M*A*S*H, he attempted to open it in his next film, released in 1971: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, starring a resourceful, independent woman entering a man's landscape with authority and determination. Julie Christie as Mrs. Miller took on Warren Beatty and the elegant, panoramic Western. A successful businesswoman in a turn-of-the-century northwestern mining town, Mrs. Miller asks a gender-conscious society to permit new representations of women in the West. Her stunning performance takes up where Major Houlihan feared to tread and suggests there might be more to the image than just telling it like it is.
I tell ya, Ida, you start payin' special attention to one man and you just end up with a lot of misery.
- Constance Miller, McCabe and Mrs. Miller
In November 1970, Look magazine underscored the importance of American film. "The movies, America's favorite and most enduring entertainment," the editors wrote, "take over this entire issue." Feature writers collaborated with members of the industry to assess the poststudio environment. "Movies today are more alive, more filled with surprises, more talked about than ever," they said. United Artists president David V. Picker declared "this is a great day for creators, for those with new ideas, for people whose first love is making good movies." Martin Baum of ABC Pictures proclaimed the new decade "a golden age, the best of times for creative people because, with far lower budgets, we can gamble with new ideas and new talent."'
What the seventies offered American cinema was certainly a determination to experiment with new material ranging from American lifestyle changes to newly spirited movements. American cinema recorded and redesigned its society; whatever appeared real was meaningful and whatever seemed "emotionally unstrung" was real.2 Considering the passionate plea from the "under thirties" audiences to make film art, any audacious trumping of convention would appeal, but iconoclasm in Hollywood fit one director's style perfectly. Robert Altman, who had twenty-some years of experience in both television and film, found his antiestablishment viewers and began what would be his most memorable movies. The changes in the industry offered him a chance to develop his taste for the European-style art film and spark his interest in revising sacred American myths. From 1970 to 1975, he cut nearly ten films. The trade touted him as "the new enfant terrible of the cinema," the "boy wonder" of moving pictures.' In the eyes of the industry, he and a handful of others ensured film's future and guaranteed its place as "the greatest entertainment medium ever."4 Altman, with his antigenre projects, held very little back.
Disrupting Hollywood formula meant adding a new dimension to stories that revolved around men. Tackling a most masculine and ingrained narrative to find a strategy for speaking about social change in America was gutsy in M*A*S*H, the war genre, but necessary in the Western since women's liberation emerged as a national priority. To address the quest for women's equality honestly, Altman turned to the Western.
The Western could work as a treatise on social issues of gender if the hero were an incompetent but likeable businessman /gambler instead of a cowboy protector. Add a strong, independent businesswoman who knew the way to financial success better than anyone in town and the conversation about women's liberation could begin. In his 1971 experiment, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Constance Miller (Julie Christie) meets John Quincy McCabe (Warren Beatty) and begins to deromanticize the magical West. As a strong feminist movement converged with antiwar protest, changes in gender roles became obvious, but the meaning Altman made of these shifts did not. Altman's work sheds light on the uncertainty men and women faced as they came to terms with the myriad controversies of their time. The result was a veritable treatise on men's and women's relations. McCabe and Mrs. Miller represents the pressures, accomplishments, and limitations in the gender debates at the beginning of the new decade.
While many men newly rejected conventional assumptions about manhood in the early 1970s, women turned to larger contests over authority and legitimacy. The women's movement emerged as a demand for equal rights with provisional alliances in the early stages, growing out of radical politics on and off campuses during the 1960s. Educated women rebelled against New Left organizations that restricted their participation in radical organizations. Women in Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for example, suffered sexual stereotyping and discrimination and argued against the limited world of men's ideas about participatory democracy. While Americans protested the military and called for a more honest government, women in particular pointed to their own subjugation in radical advocates' organizations.' This gender gap represented the degree to which traditional hierarchies operated even in the most liberal spaces and, by comparison, provided the perfect symbol of larger, more difficult tasks ahead than war protest.
By the time McCabe was in production, radical advocacy for women's equal opportunity had made significant progress in mainstream arenas. As one study reported, where women's liberation during the 1960s "ha[d] virtually no impact on youth values and attitudes," just a few years later, a "wide and deep penetration of Women's Liberation precepts [was] underway." Popular magazines such as The Ladies' Home Journal yielded to pressure and inserted feminist writings. In 1972 New York Magazine published forty pages of feminist articles, leading to Ms. Magazine, the first widely circulated popular feminist periodical. That year, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX of the Education Act, opening new avenues for the equal rights discussion.7 When McCabe hit theaters across the country following its release in 1971, the feminist movement to date developed its widest exposure and most dynamic influence.
Once unsettled by politics of the generation gap and campus radicalism, American society now found deeper tremors when women's liberation mutated into a debate about reproduction and the control of women's bodies. With a new political Right responding to Left politics, the issue of abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment dominated the women's movement. At the same time, the sexual revolution became a nationwide struggle. The birth control pill by the seventies was accessible and widely considered the contraception of choice, enabling defiance of dogmatic religious institutions. For young people the pill became "a tool of revolution." As historian Beth Bailey argues, youth "attempted to use sex as a weapon against `straight' society." Youth, as the logic went, "celebrated sex as a `natural' act that symbolized an alternative to materialism, capitalism, or the military-industrial complex." Young adults pressured college administrations to establish co-ed dorms where men and women could enjoy "relationships (including sexual) based on a common humanity."8 On the popular front, Americans read The Sensuous Woman, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, The Joy of Sex, and countless sex-advice articles in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, and Redbook.
Both feminism and the sexual revolution overlapped with the counterculture that had already professed free love in the late sixties and therefore deluged popular culture anew with sexual attitude and its connection to women's liberation. In Bailey's words, the sexual revolution defined an "emerging national culture."9 Traditional morality was challenged in permanent ways.
The most private room, the bedroom, now symbolized the public state of men's and women's relations. Making the personal political brought the bed into the center of the pursuit for liberation. Women's issues became a multivoiced site for social change. Ideas about liberation flowed into and out of an everyday consumer culture that sold the image of uninhibited females and sexual suggestion as normal. Turning sex, the women's movement, and bedroom roles into a viable commodity gave one publication its cultural voice. The fashionable Cosmopolitan advocated that the sexes forever bid "farewell to prudishness and unreasonable taboos." Its popular editor, Helen Gurley Brown, determined sexual enlightenment, not sexual modesty, to be the sign of liberation for the 1970s. As one expert declared in a 1970 issue, "In a world where contraception, abortion, and divorce are legally accepted means of preventing or correcting errors, yesterday's sexual inhibitions seem inappropriate. "10 Brown, whom some called a female Hugh Hefner, turned her publication into a showcase on sexuality. She invited readers to "step into my parlor" and ask questions about "promiscuity," find answers about the "(hard won) sexual emancipation," and make comments about personal experiences. Readers found answers from sex therapists, from advice columnists, and in everyday stories." The publication, largely geared to single, working women, turned gender strife into an education workshop on fashion, general sex appeal, and bedroom strategies.
If Cosmo and such recorded the different ways women and men addressed issues of sex, sensuality, and gender roles, film offered a unique opportunity to decide the shape and tone of women's liberation. In a post-Code environment, film turned the sexual revolution into the dominant story of change in the relations between men and women. Yet, in some ways, the challenge for film would be more difficult than the call for equal rights and sexual freedom. Film's visual discourse depended on images of men and women deeply embedded in American thinking. Men on screen were repeatedly defined by their tasks, work, abilities, and action. American movies typically defined women in terms of their relationship to those men in public roles. It made sense in film to declare women's independence by awarding action roles to females.
If women could unleash their resourcefulness, then maybe they could shed the shackles of Hollywood, too. Altman adjusted the lens for the Western to allow his film a chance to test a most challenging assertion. Adjusting a genre that was almost synonymous with America meant letting go of heroes revered for decades and detaching the West itself from a most masculine image. In other words, how might equality look on a woman in a Western without merely flipping the coin and putting a woman in a conventionally male role? While the genre was updated over time, the central concern was men's role in the West. Women figured in the Western as both the threat and the stability in the frontier process. Consequently, the Western offered few central roles for women. No woman has won an Oscar for a role in a Western. Julie Christie was at least nominated for her role in a genre that had extraordinary ability to be uniquely American, universal, and specifically male.
Similar to the women's movement at the time, the film's critical perspective recognized that the notion of `power' for a man is different from `power' for a woman: it is acquired and manifested in different ways."12 In the first sequences, to reverse this kind of typical dependency, McCabe and Mrs. Miller reinvents masculinity's tie to the frontier and sets the stage for an Altmanesque emancipation of Mrs. Miller. McCabe opens to the Warner Brothers logo and the sound of a high gale wind blowing across the Northwestern landscape of green foliage, pine trees, and rain. The film's signature ballad filters through the sound of blustery weather as the folk guitar of Leonard Cohen, a Canadian balladeer, introduces the film's perspective. The miners "were dealers," Cohen sings, kind of homeless creatures who sought "shelter" in the West for their deals.
As Cohen finishes the song about the wandering "Josephs," the camera brings Warren Beatty's character, John McCabe, into view. He wears a full-length muskrat fur coat, white dress shirt, and vintage suit and tie. A short distance from town, he prepares his entrance by sprucing up his clothes and putting on a black derby. As the ballad continues, McCabe rides on his horse in "Wall Street" attire, down muddy streets, across a suspended wooden bridge, and into the town of Presbyterian Church - the Northwestern destination named for "the tallest structure in town," as the production notes say.13 He makes his entrance as the patriarchal dealer/Joseph who will become the small-town big shot in a thriving gambling enterprise.
The opening frames set the ironic tone of the film. Altman interrogates the frontier myth and, rather than building on a Fordianesque mystique of the West as a place of American progress, Altman highlights the flux in the turn-of-the-century West. The community of Presbyterian Church is not the steadfast, consummate settlement but part of "a thoroughly ambiguous process." The script explains, "The town ... was born in the early 1890s. It was never conceived, it just happened." As executive producer David Foster explained, the film would more closely mirror "the way [towns] grew" from "a tent under a tree for protection" to a mining camp to settlement.14
Once imagined as a place in which to perform the ethical act - the regeneration of America - the West in McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a chaotic frontier, a space where deception and cunning pay. Instead of the resourceful man of solitude in the context of a progressive American past that allowed men to settle wide, open spaces, making the way safe for democracy, the center of this Western's screen is an incompetent opportunist whose sole aim is making money. Reshaping the classic role of men in Westerns meant instigating their role as protectors of the town. In typical John Ford Westerns, for example, if men do their duty, the town survives the terror and the violence of the frontier. By performing acts of heroism and bravery, the central character confirms the noble role of the rugged individualist in the process of westward expansion. Altman casts this formula aside and suggests towns often could not sustain themselves and were not symbols of order. As the script explained, five years after McCabe arrived, the town died." It never developed a main street, and buildings are half constructed. By the end of the film, the one constant in typical Westerns, the church, burns down. Instead of the rule of law, church, and family, money is the tie that binds. Zinc, whiskey, and prostitution hold each character to this place and, according to Altman authenticity, that's the way it probably was.
