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Wednesday, March 10, 2004

# Posted 12:27 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

M*A*S*H NOTES: After talking so much about the film that started it all, I decided that I had no choice but to start watching the series that made M*A*S*H a household name.

After watching the first half-dozen episodes on DVD, it's not hard to figure out why everyone says that the series is simplistic, self-righteous and far more political than the film. These characteristics emerge in the series pilot, which develops and amends one of the important subplots in the film, the fate of Ho-Jon, the young Korean who works for Hawkeye.

In the film, we first meet Ho-Jon along with Maj. Burns, the pretentious martinet surgeon who later becomes Hawkeye's main adversary. When Hawkeye first meets Burns, he is teaching Ho-Jon to read by using a Bible as an instruction manual. Hawkeye's [As M points out, it was actually Hawkeye's associate Duke Forrester who gave Ho-Jon the girlie mag --ed.] response is to give Ho-Jon a girlie mag. During the film, Hawkeye becomes very close to Ho-Jon and does his best to protect him from the war. When the Korean military subjects Ho-Jon to a pre-draft physical, Hawkeye gives him medication that artificially raises his blood pressure. The Korean physician in charge sees through this ruse, however, and Ho-Jon enters the army.

In the pilot, Burns shows no demonstrable interest in Ho-Jon's welfare. Instead, Hawkeye persuades his alma mater to accept Ho-Jon as a foreign student but discovers that Ho-Jon will need $2000 to cover the cost of travel, etc. Thus, Hawkeye organizes a raffle to raise funds for Ho-Jon while Burns tries to throw a wrench in the works because Hawkeye's plans violate military regulations.

Another change in Burns character in the first episodes is that he becomes a mindless poster boy for American propaganda. Whereas in the film Burns was simply strict, his strictness now becomes an extension of his naive belief that Korea is a good war. This point comes across best in Episode Six, in which Burns desperately tries to get the lead role in a propaganda film being made by an Army public relations unit.

In contrast, Hawkeye's breaks into the storage room where the undeveloped film is being kept and destroys it in order to protect the homefront audience from this sort of propaganda. Then, Hawkeye persuades Col. Drake to let him direct the film, which turns out to be a Marx Brothers farce set in the 4077th. The Marx Brothers' mock-up is actually one of the most brilliant things I've seen on television. Alda's impression of Groucho is fantastic and the machine-gun sarcasm of the dialogue doesn't give you even a second to recover.

When the mock-up ends, Hawkeye appears on screen by himself, out of costume and delivers a solemn lecture on the human costs of war. This is M*A*S*H at its most self-righteous. In lesser ways, this leitmotif appears again and again throughout the first six episodes. It is also a rhetorical device for battering Burns and other defenders of the war, since they are often shown to be far less concerned about the human cost of war than are Hawkeye, Trapper John, etc.

Yet at the same time that the series meditates on the costs of war, it also sanitizes it. The bowdlerization first becomes apparent as the M*A*S*H theme music plays at the beginning of the episode. The haunting lyrics of the original song have been taken out. But perhaps one simply cannot have a primetime television show declare that
Through early moring fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are with held for me
I realise and I can see

That suicide is painless,
That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please

The game of life is hard to play
Gonna to lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
So this is all I have to say
The fact that Marilyn Manson chose to do a cover of the song only emphasizes the fact that it was something mainstream America just wasn't ready for. (NB for our British audience: The Manic Street Preachers have covered the song as well.) While one can argue that the removal of the lyrics was an inevitable concession to the network censors, it does reflect the absence of the darker psychological aspects of the film as well. In the original, the men of the 4077th sing the song during a mock funeral for one of their comrades who has chosen to commit suicide because he is unable to confront his latent homosexuality.

Given that psychiatrists still defined homosexuality as a perversion and a pathology at the time the film was made, its portrayal of the issue is both far ahead of its time as well as sensitive and sophisticated by today's standards. However, I'm going to have to reserve judgment on this issue until I get to watch the later episodes of the series, in which a more prominent role is played by the cross-dressing Corporal Klinger. Still, Klinger does appear in some of the early episodes and is nothing more than a clown.
[I screwed this one up bigtime. The potential suicide is a response to impotence, not latent homosexuality. Serves me right for letting my politics get in the way of dispassionate analysis. And thanks to CM for pointing this out. --ed.]

One final aspect of the series I'd like to comment on is the contrast between its paternalistic liberalism and the politically correct liberalism of today. In Episode Five, Hawkeye runs across a sergeant who has purchased a Korean woman named Young Hi from her family for a price of $500. While Young Hi is at best an indentured servant and at worst a slave, she bears it all with constant chirpiness and no complaining. After delivering a lecture about the hypocrisy of buying slaves during a supposed war of liberation, Hawkeye hatches a plan to win Young Hi in a fixed poker game with the visiting sergeant.

When Hawkeye wins, he grants Young Hi her freedom. The catch is that she doesn't want it. In fact, Young Hi is so dedicated to being a servant that when Hawkeye sends her to Seoul she sneaks back to the 4077th and starts cleaning again. At that point, I was beginning to expect that the scriptwriters were going to pull a fast one on the audience. Surely Young Hi wasn't really all that servile and self-denigrating. Her ridiculous pidgin English dialogue made her seem like a complete fool. It had to be an act put on for the Americans' benefit. As good liberals, the scriptwriters were surely luring the audience into believing that Koreans aren't as self-aware or assertive as Americans, only to have Young Hi drop the mask once the audience had bought into her act.

Bottom line: she doesn't. Instead, Hawkeye teaches her how to be an individual. He teaches her to interact with other members of the M*A*S*H unit as an equal. Hawkeye also contacts Young Hi's family so that she can return to them. But when Young Hi's brother shows up to claim her, he makes it clear that he intends to sell her once again, but this time for double or triple the price. At first, she goes along with it, telling Hawkeye that family is the most important thing for Koreans. But within thirty seconds of leaving the base, Young Hi strides right back and announces that she told her brother off because she learned from Hawkeye how to be an individual.

On one level, there's a good message in this story about the universal value of freedom. On the other hand, it is absurdly condescending to suggest that Hawkeye's 72-hour lesson in civics could persuade a Korean woman to turn her back on her family. It makes Young Hi seem even more naive then she did when she accepted her role as the sergeant's slave. Are we supposed to believe that Koreans have no personalities of their own, but instead willingly conform to the dictates of their American masters? Isn't that exactly the kind of Great Society paternalism that supposedly got the United States involved in the same war that M*A*S*H was devoted to protesting?

But remember, that was 1972. Ethnicity and gender weren't mainstream liberal concerns. Thus, Hawkeye's relentless womanizing -- and the passive acceptance of it by his giggily-jiggily nurses -- might strike today's audiences as no less disturbing than the racial caricature known as Young Hi. All in all, M*A*S*H is truly a relic of its time.
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