# Posted 1:59 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

OXBLOG FILM CLASSICS -- M*A*S*H: Born in 1977, I have some vague memories of M*A*S*H as a television show that everyone seemed to love but which I didn't understand. Especially that guy who was always wearing women's clothes. This past weekend, I finally had the chance to see the movie that started it all.

I didn't watch the film with any particular expectations in mind, since the few episodes of M*A*S*H that I saw on television left no impression on me. However, I did expect the film to be somehow anti-army or anti-war. It's important to keep in mind that one can be critical of the army without being critical of the war, or vice versa. A book like Catch-22 can expose the insanity of military life without suggesting that the US shouldn't have been fighting in Europe. If anything, the unquestionable necessity of the Second World War adds an important dimension to the tragedy of Catch-22, since the confusion and injustice that Heller portrays are part and parcel of a just cause.

That said, M*A*S*H came across as apolitical. It doesn't dwell on the human cost of war. The main characters are surgeons in a military hospital, but they never philosophize about the terrible human cost of war. The patients themselves have nothing to say, literally. There are no scenes of convalescing soldiers, only bodies under white sheets on the operating table. Hawkeye and Trapper John have no qualms about going to play golf in Japan. For them, being a military surgeon is just a job they never asked for.

The target of the film's satire is the hypocrisy and bureaucracy of military life. The villians of the camp are the bible-reading major and the uptight head nurse. The great joy of the film is to show how those who have a healthy disrespect for the mindless regimentation of military life can use the army's own rules against it. In a sense, the fact that the film takes place in a military hospital in Korea is almost irrelevant. It is simply a film about defying authority, wherever it may be found.

Perhaps this is not how the film came across in 1970. In the midst of the Vietnam war, it may not have been necessary to show the bodies or talk about the war in order to make a political comment. Simply ridiculing the army may have been enough. In that context, the incompetence portrayed in the film may have suggested that the irrationality of military life was responsible for our failure in Vietnam.

But in 2004, that message doesn't come across. Today, the American military is a high-tech juggernaut. At least to those of us on the outside. I have a friend in the service whose view of military life roughly corresponds to the one in M*A*S*H. All I ever hear from the captain is how the radios never work and the clowns in charge have no idea what they're doing. And yet somehow, it all comes out fine in the end.

I think the lesson here is that M*A*S*H and Catch-22 and other works in that genre remind of the inevitable absurdity of military life. Even in the most efficient army on earth, there is no escape from bureaucracy and confusion. And humor. God only knows what it was like to serve on the Iraqi side. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion