# Posted 9:23 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

SISKEL & EBERT & OXBLOG: I don't know why, but when OxBlog goes Hollywood, we get some extraordinarily thoughtful responses from our readers. Even though it's been seven days since I posted my initial thoughts about M*A*S*H, the mail is still coming. Writing in from Chicago, Prof. JL notes that there is surprising resemblance between the Hawkeye-Burns relationship in M*A*S*H and the Bunny-Fudd relationship in some classic Looney Toons:

The phenomenon you note -- viciousness being a response to provocation -- is played out nicely in 1940s and 1950s cartoons. Chuck Jones usually required that Bugs Bunny be (playfully) mean in response to a provocation. Jones's typical introduction of the shift from mild
victim to strong attacker was Bugs saying, "Of course, you know, this means war!" An exception is Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck, where Bugs as animator torments
Daffy Duck without provocation. Other Bugs directors, such as Bob Clampett in the early 1940s, allowed Bugs to attack without provocation. Although both worked, the Clampett approach was more artistically daring.

The Warners cartoonists of the 1940s were all aware of this issue and Tex Avery, after he left Warners for MGM, did a great commentary on this process in an MGM cartoon, Bad Luck Blackie (1949). It is too long to describe in detail, but Joe Adamson in Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (pp. 89-93) has a long description. It starts with a mean dog, swallowing and disgorging a little kitten, cruelly laughing. Once our sympathies are aroused against the dog, the kitten allies with a black cat. Together,
they torment the dog through the rest of the cartoon, which ends with the kitten cruelly laughing as the dog did at the beginning. The bulk of the cartoon is pretty funny, but the opening and closing are quite disturbing because you are indeed sucked in to root for the brutal treatment the dog gets--and seemingly deserves. At the last moment, Avery lifts the veil to let you know how he has manipulated your sympathies.

I think JL is right, although my memories of Bugs & Duffy are a little bit hazy. It's also interesting how in almost every episode of M*A*S*H, Burns has to antagonize the audience before Hawkeye is allowed to have a go at him. This sitcom/cartoon logic: the characters have no apparent history and must reenact their morality each time the camera starts to roll. Next up, SC tries to provide a little more context for my perceptions of M*A*S*H:

Just to clear up some misconceptions...

Heller wrote in the intro for a limited edition run on Catch 22 that he was using the war/military as a satirical tool to make fun of how crazy civilian corporate life was in the 1950's. It's not a criticism of "military life" so much as it is of "civilian life". He seemed to go out of his way to clarify this point precisely because there'd been so much confusion about his intent. It'd probably be more accurate to say he was making fun of the militarization of US corporate culture that to say he was mocking the corporate nature of US military culture.

Regarding MASH. It'd probably be worth your time to rent the full feature DVD version and listen to what Altman himself says about the project, intent, and public reaction. He had innumerable problems clearing both the studio and the ratings board due to his insistence of keeping some of the more graphic operating room scenes, which for the time were extremely controversial. Altman suggests that he was able to get away with as much as he did mainly because there were a couple gigantic war films in production at the same time (Patton was one), and he was able to get most of what he wanted because of the small scale and obscurity of his production. So although you're certainly entitled to your personal, subjective interpretation of the film, it's worth noting that MASH (like Catch 22) was meant by its creator as a
broad social commentary and not a specific critique of military culture alone.

You know, I may just go back and rent the DVD again so that I can listen to the commentary track. Getting a director's insight into his own work is one of the great benefits of upgrading from VHS to DVD. However, when you rent DVDs, you don't often want to watch the movie twice in the space of four or five days. But when I own the DVDs, I tend to go through as much of the extra material as possible. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion