M*A*S*H (revisited)

"Heal Thyself"

Summer is here. Theater camp has concluded, my show has opened, and it is time for a little vacation with the family. A two-day drive, with four teenagers in the car, and guess what? We still all love each other.

Hotel life can -- if you can tear yourself away from your computer or phone -- provide the opportunity to take in some old fashioned television. We watched two episodes of M*A*S*H, back-to-back, just like I could on any single weekday during my childhood from seven to eight on Channel 43.

The vast majority of episodes from eleven seasons feature a cast of characters who were created for the television series, and not taken from any of Hooker's novels -- Potter, Winchester, Hunnicutt -- and the characters of Hawkeye and Houlihan grew to bear little resemblance to those from the books or from Altman’s 1970 film version, upon which the TV series is based.

Last night we saw the one where Edward Herrmann plays a relief surgeon who cracks under the pressure of “meatball surgery” (S08E17 "Heal Thyself") followed by the one where Col. Potter receives word that he’s the last survivor of his World War One buddies (S08E18 "Old Soldiers").

I have avoided re-watching the show for my entire adult life. When I was a kid I must have seen every episode several times over. I have probably watched M*A*S*H more than any other television program ever made. But whenever I happened upon a broadcast, revisiting just a few moments, I was appalled at the stupid jokes, the laugh track, and the general “niceness” that all the aforementioned characters fell into once they had jettisoned the difficult Trapper John and the impossible to make sympathetic Frank Burns.

Watching an episode play out in real time, from beginning to end, I was reminded of what made the show truly good. Yes, it was sanctimonious, I knew that as an adolescent. But take for example the way they took their time to play out the young surgeon’s disconnection from reality under pressure was truly affecting. I was surprised to learn they even borrowed from Shakespeare. I didn't read Macbeth until eighth grade. Herrmann’s doctor bemoans his inability to get imaginary (but also very real) blood off his hands.

The blood won't come off.
No matter what I do, it just stays there.
Just take it easy.
See what I mean? Look at that.
Never gonna go away.
No matter how hard I scrub or -- how much I wash it's gonna stay there.
Where do they come from? What do they -- What do they expect me to do? I can't.
I can't.

Well-written and well-played. When we moved into the next episode, and Col. Potter announced a sudden visit to Tokyo General, I knew exactly which episode this was. From somewhere in my head I heard the words tontine and pledge and the phrase, “give that man a cheroot.”

I may have been the only eleven year-old who knew what a cheroot was.

"Old Soldiers"

There were so any elements of the episode that I had no life experience to comprehend. The team of characters do not at first understand the colonel’s behavior, and one suggests he may have received a dire diagnosis himself in Tokyo. They never use the word cancer, not once, but when the gang is summoned to Potter’s tent, they have already braced themselves for the worst. “You have our total support,” says one, before learning the truth about the colonel’s recently deceased comrade.

You have our support? That struck my eleven year-old ear as odd, what kind of support do you provide someone who is ill? “I support you,” like he was being persecuted. Didn’t make sense. Now it makes sense.

Also, Colonel Potter’s entire war record was something I was unable to fathom. What I didn’t know about World War One was a lot. The final act of the episode features Henry Morgan speaking, taking his time, without interruption, describing the provenance of the bottle he has just received, the night in question, the fate of his comrades, an extended toast to lost youth … it is remarkably affecting.

The motion picture M*A*S*H is something I have also not watched in a long time. I saw it very young, and it had a poor effect on the way I saw the world. Indeed, it gave me an education in the madness of combat, and the joys of bucking the system. But it is cynical in the extreme, far too passive in its criticism of institutional racism, and downright condemnable in its treatment of women, especially women in positions of authority.

It is easy to tear down corrupt institutions, easier still to merely ridicule them from a distance. It is far more challenging to build up institutions based on basic human decency and understanding.

See also: Cleveland Centennial, M*A*S*H (TV show), January 20, 2012

Doonesbury

I drew cartoons before I knew Doonesbury. But only after knowing Doonesbury, did I start drawing comics.

Feb. 10, 1976
M*A*S*H indoctrinated this boy into a philosophy of relativism and secular humanism. Doonesbury taught me character, plot, humor, subtlety, sarcasm, and yes, it was where I got my news. Creator Garry B. Trudeau (b. 1948) may have ruined comic strips forever because of his flat, static drawing style, showing two people talking to each other but never moving (Calvin & Hobbies had great fun with this once) or worse yet, feeling so insecure about his ability to draw actual people realistically that he chose to depict the same drawing of the White House over and over rather than have to draw Nixon.

Calvin & Hobbes
But he also broke ground in what was generally thought of as the controversy-free zone of the comics page; treating drugs as a subject for humor, introducing the first openly gay character in comics, and in 1975, was the first comic strip to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

In Fall, 1976 Joanie Caucus is the campaign manager for her friend Ginny's run for Congress. They are defeated by the Republican candidate, Lacey Davenport, but the upshot is Joan's acquaintance with Washington Post reporter Rick Redfern, who is in California covering the race. After the election, they both let their guards down enough to begin flirting in earnest, and Trudeau created a legendary series of strips which involved Ginny trying to reach Joanie at her apartment.

On Monday we see the phone next to Joanie's unmussed bed ringing, and pan out of the bedroom window, as in a film. The next day we fly from her house, across town, finally zooming into the bedroom window of Rick's apartment:

Nov. 13, 1976
This technique of creating suspense, and taking time to play out a dramatic plot point was unique in the world of daily comic strips. It is not unique anymore, because Tom Batiuk, creator of Funky Winkerbean uses this form over and over again to ploddingly spell out horrible accidents and life-altering mistakes which have no suspense because you knew they were going to happen months earlier when the doomed character in question said, "Another drink wouldn't hurt," or "what's this lump?"

May 6, 2011
Batiuk actually used the same technique here -- exactly the same, in fact -- 35 years later, when Les has sex for the first time since his wife died. Same slow pan, on a house, to reveal an intimate post-coital moment ... only in this case it looks miserable and unhappy.

May 3, 1988

I did use this same technique myself in my daily strip in college, taking a week to illustrate my protagonist's struggle with insomnia.

May 5, 1988

M*A*S*H (TV show)

On any given Friday evening in early 1976, you could tune into CBS at 8:30 PM to view a brand new episode of M*A*S*H (and then switch over to NBC for The Rockford Files.)

This fourth season of the program marked two notable transitions from the Robert Altman film upon which it was based (the movie having been inspired, sort of, by the book by Richard Hooker) with the departure of two major characters, "Trapper" John McIntyre and Colonel Henry Blake. Characters original to the series now included B.J. Hunnicut and Colonel Sherman Potter (seen right.)

The character of Trapper John was always the sidekick to what had swiftly become the leading role in the series, that of Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce, and upon repeated viewings (countless repeated viewings) Trapper was always my favorite character. I am not sure why any longer, there was not much "there" there, but my emulation of him as a pre-adolescent was probably in keeping with my self-image as sidekick to my more popular best-friends.

The characters of Hunnicut and Potter had much in common, in that they were dedicated family men, much more earnest and much less zany than the philandering, alcoholic characters they were replacing. This was in keeping with the tone of the show, which was moving from laugh-fest into a weekly sermon on everything Liberal. A steady diet of Alan Alda, two episodes every Monday through Friday from 7 - 8 PM on Channel 43, made me the knee-jerk, bleeding-hearted Communist I am today.

This fourth season was particularly difficult for Larry Linville, who played the clownish Major Frank Burns. Portrayed in the film by Robert Duvall, Burns was the subject of scorn and derision for his piety and patriotism, though he did seem menacing in his way and in that context his comeuppance (taken from the camp in a straightjacket after attacking Hawkeye) satisfies. However, by the mid-70s, ridiculing Burns' Christianity and love of country seemed churlish and unsympathetic, and so Linville's Burns degenerated into a wimpy boor of no particular stripe. Just irritating and whiny.

Antony & Cleopatra (1964)
Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival
Larry Linville (Octavius), Anne Murray (Octavia), David Tress (Marc Antony)
Lawrence Lavon Linville (September 29, 1939 – April 10, 2000) is one of few Americans selected to train at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, England. Unlike Wayne "Trapper" Rogers and McLean "Henry Blake" Stevenson, who left M*A*S*H with plans of capitalizing on their success as lead performers in other shows (and failing, spectacularly) Linville left when his original, five-season contract expired, because his character simply had nowhere to go. Even Burns' former lover, Margaret "Hotlips" Houlihan, was becoming a more sympathetic multi-dimensional character. Unfortunately for this classically trained actor, his life after-M*A*S*H was consisted largely of unremarkable television appearances where he played much the same guy he did in this program.

During the mid-1960s Larry Linville was a company member at Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Lakewood, where he worked alongside his second wife, Kate Greer (Linville was married five times.) Linville not only performed at GLSF, he also directed.

"This is where the full employment is, in the regional theater. And it's good theater. You need both—regional and Broadway. But the regional theater develops the potential playwrights, actors and directors." - Larry Linville in 1965

Sources:
Wikipedia
Cleveland Memory Project - Tony Mastroianni Review Collection