The last film, The Grapes of Wrath, came from a novel that’s fame overshadows the movie, despite the movie still making the AFI list. This one, instead, led to a TV series that also overshadows the movie, despite it still making the AFI list.
The TV show is one of the most famous sitcoms of all time, still in the American culture zeitgeist, perhaps just as much as the book, The Grapes of Wrath.
It was never a huge show for me, growing during the tail end of it, although I was told as a kid that I would freeze whenever the haunting theme song played.
It’s a sad song about a sad reality of life: war. But despite that, one could easily put both the movie and the show under the category of “screwball comedy.” Will it prove to be more painless than suicide?
Here we are with 1970’s M*A*S*H, written and directed by Robert Altman.
As alluded to, this film is completely a screwball comedy, and it might even earn the title of “romp” (still figuring out exactly what that means). It led to other movies in that same vein, like Animal House and Porky’s.
The twist is, though, that this movie is not about a frat house (although, admittedly, the distinction between one and the MASH unit are barely indistinguishable). It is instead about the Korean War and all the darkness that in encapsulates.
And it might even edge into satire. Thus, like all the other AFI movies, this one has a very strong message: “war is absurd.”
M*A*S*H was made an popularized in the midst of The Vietnam War, a war that many will agree was pointless. But instead of a typical anti-war film, M*A*S*H leans completely into comedy. The idea of officers and status in the war are made a joke, and the characters have no interest in taking down enemies. The enemies, if any, are the higher-ranking officials in the US army, who are also made to be goofballs.
Hawkeye and Duke have no interest in the war, and Frank and Hot Lips are made to be buffoons in their own rights.
It takes the entire notion of “war is glory” and our forces are the epitome of noble, it exposes how ridiculous that idea can be.
It treats war–humans risking their lives and killing each other for the benefits of others–as the absurdity that it is.
A good question to ask might be why this book turned to film works so well, while a few other classics, like I’ve written a lot about comedy in articles. This basic premise, “war is absurd” does effectively fulfill one of the two ways that we get comedy.
And to spell it out, those two ways are we either make something serious absurd or we make something absurd serious, and this movie does that over and over again.
Along with making war absurd, it also does so with other serious subjects. It exposes the absurdity of suicide, with the services for Painless. It exposes the absurdity of authority, as authority figures are almost always trading their authority for sex.
It also is able to have the opposite effect for comedy, for example, not being able to “get it up,” and finding out if a superior officer’s carpets match her drapes are treated with the upmost importance.
While this movie would probably not be made today, along with many other screwball comedies, it executes its comedy textbook fantastically, which is one of the huge reasons it resonated with so many people, and it’s still something we can learn from when we write comedy.
The podcast that originally gave me the idea for these articles, Unspooled, pointed out that the “Suicide is Painless” song itself is meant to be a joke.
That is something I had never taken into consideration before, but it does make total sense. It begins the movie, and sets it with the most serious, most sad tone ever, going over the top, only to reveal that even that is tongue in cheek (not to mention that a character named Painless tries to commit suicide).
To bookend the movie, it goes full meta, revealing itself to be a movie even within the movie universe.
Maybe anti-war films help to prevent war and maybe they don’t. But helping people see the absurdity of war could perhaps be even more important.
When we can see the absurdity of something, we’re able to see it from an outside perspective, and when we can see something from an outside perspective, it can have less power over us.
So it does seem like a good thing that in whatever form–movie, book, or TV Show–M*A*S*H has a place within our zeitgeist.
And I am accused of being an optimist, but I do really hope one day we’ll look back at war as only an absurdity of the human past. Laughter very much might be the way to get there.
Thanks for reading!
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