Irony as Anesthetic in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H” (1970) – Part 2

Wes & Erin continue their discussion the 1970 classic “M.A.S.H,” and whether irony ought always to be our anesthetic, when confronted with traumas that are otherwise unspeakable. Upcoming Episodes: Rilke, Rebecca (1940), Dickinson. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: [email protected] subtext podcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of mash. We just got done talking about the faux suicide scene, and I think you wanted to talk about Hot Lips now. 0:43 Erin: Yeah. Unless we have anything more to say about. I guess, you know, we were more interested in the suicide part and not in the sexual part of Painless is so called redemption or resurrection, as it were. 0:58 Wes: Right. Okay, there's. That's the point, all right, that he's resurrected through things. 1:03 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 1:04 Wes: Well, he's resurrected through just waking up, 1:06 Erin: but it's okay because she. She looks at the camera later and breaks the fourth wall. So we know. We know it's all okay because she enjoyed it. 1:15 Wes: Well, she is certainly redeemed. 1:17 Erin: Yeah. Right. 1:19 Wes: Yeah. 1:19 Erin: The power of Christ compels her. 1:22 Wes: Redeemed through sin. 1:23 Erin: Yeah. 1:24 Wes: But she looks very. Looks very happy, which is the suggestion is that it's because he has a large penis, which at an earlier point in the film, they've all been lining up to look at his large penis through a crack in the wall. Lots of hijinks. Lots of fun hijinks in this film. 1:40 Erin: Yeah. We don't get them taking down the shower wall to see him naked, do we? That's the. That's the disappointing part of all of this. Disappointing for me, I guess. No. What's good for the goose, I guess, isn't good for the gander here. But the loudspeaker and how that comes in as the thing that humiliates Burns and Hot Lips, I'm really interested in that. Like I said in the last part, in Altman films, of course, sound is so important, and I can think of Nashville as being. I can't think of any of his other films that might use a loudspeaker like that. Maybe I'm forgetting one, but I'm sure there's something super obvious that I'm not thinking of. But those two films using the loudspeaker as the Big Brother esque, but also kind of toothless demonstration of authority. And mash. It's used to advertise the sort of super dopey, rah rah patriotic films that they're apparently showing at the camp all the time to make announcements about behavior that are then almost instantly, they're either disobeyed immediately and constantly, or they're actually retracted in the course of the announcement so that whether or not they can or can't do something. Seems to be like a flip of the coin. 2:57 Wes: Good point. Interesting. 2:58 Erin: I think they're broadcasting. I think it's Radio Tokyo is the. I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah. And they almost seem to be parodies of American jukebox songs. 3:09 Wes: Well, I think they're real. Yeah. Just Japanese versions of American songs. 3:15 Erin: And that was one of the few things that actually gave me a period feel to the film because of those songs that. And maybe, I don't know, maybe there would be less drinking and more drug use if it were a Vietnam film. Instead, they're having martinis all the time, which to me is a little. I mean, that's what I prefer. But it's a little more old fashioned than just marijuana. 3:34 Wes: Well, and again, indicative of their class. 3:37 Erin: That's true. 3:37 Wes: That class dynamic. And they're being commissioned officers. 3:41 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So the speaker as a sort of ineffectual but persistent reminder of authority. Then you have these two symbols of authority and Burns and Houlihan. Sexual encounter being broadcast over the loudspeaker is an interesting choice because, as I think I've already suggested, there is something that's already undermining about the loudspeaker to begin with. It undermines itself all the time. It's, you know, it's this kind of jokey thing that nobody really seems to listen to, take seriously, care about at all. So it's as feeble and flimsy a symbol of authority as perhaps Burns and Houlihan are themselves. It has. It seems to have no place in the MASH unit or no significance other than as an audible counterpoint to what we're seeing visually on the screen at times. 4:28 Wes: Yeah. So it is the weak voice of authority. You could think of it as, you know, like there's something interesting about a speaker that's telling you to do things because it's. It's because it's disembodied and it's almost like conscience or something like that. But in this case, no one takes it seriously. I'm reminded of Community, actually, which I think is a TV show that you like as well. I think they use the school intercom for the same sort of purpose. So they're joining scenes and it's kind of ridiculous announcements and things like that. The loudspeaker becomes a mean of exposing hypocrisy. One of the things about Burns and Hot Lips is that they are supposedly paragons of moral rectitude, but they're doing what everyone else is doing, which is cheating on their spouses at Home. And they're doing it with each other. It's a really great scene when they're. So after Trapper John. Is it Trapper John? I always get this wrong. 5:24 Erin: That's Elliott Gould, right? 5:26 Wes: Yeah. 5:27 Erin: Yeah. 5:28 Wes: I always get the second one wrong. Anyway, after he. He kind of pisses off Hot Lips at. They have a party, and then Burns and Hot Lips run off to write a letter. And I think we only hear the conclusion of the letter. This letter has been written in the interest of army morale. As officers, we feel it is our duty to bring this unwholesome situation to your attention. We are writing this letter jointly to assure you that no one's personal feeling has in any way influenced this report. Which, of course, is BS Anyway, and then. And I think he asks her if she's hungry, and she says, ravenous, how about you? And then his response is one of my favorite scenes in the movie because he says it in such a wooden way for you, Margaret. And then they start making out, and then she quickly pushes him off like nothing's happened and gets to go. And you see him sitting there with his face smeared with lipstick and looking quite hot and bothered, but she's done so. Yeah. It's after that that we learn about Painless Problem. And that's basically the midpoint of the movie. It's in the next act, right, that they. First they cure Painless of his problem, and then they defeat Burns and Hot Lips. And they. The first way they do that is with the. With the loudspeaker. So they're. So the thing that they're doing, right? Their sexual interaction radar puts a microphone under it, slips the microphone into the room, and ultimately they can hear themselves and what they're doing. So then it really does become like the voice of conscience. And they can't escape their own hypocrisy, right? So you say one thing, but you do another. You're the voice of moral rectitude, and you're going to stamp out unwholesomeness at the camp. But then you're doing this thing. And so the. The way they're taken down is perfectly matches, of course, what it is that others dislike about them, which is the pretense to some sort of moral authority or some sort of rectitude. It's not the bad behavior itself, of course, which is what all of them endorse. And I think when they endorse it, when they endorse the hedonism and the womanizing and the cheating on spouses and things like that their endorsement meant to have. I think, as you pointed out near the beginning, there's a moralism to that. They don't escape moralism. Right. Their morals. That we're just going to be honest about our condition here. We're not going to fake it. We're hedonists. But we have a reason for doing that because it's the only way we can survive psychologically or whatever argument you want to give for that. The ultimate sin is not the sin, but the COVID up here or the hypocrisy. 8:06 Erin: Right. Yeah. To work off of that for a second and think about that feedback loop that happens. So I think we've already talked about the loudspeaker as being this expression of this bland authority. There's a blandness that we've already talked about, but also because of these Radio Tokyo versions of American songs are being played. There's this idea of an occupying force, that the loudspeaker is sort of expressing that mentality of occupation. And because no one listens to it. You could use a term for the loudspeaker. I mean, we're listening to it, but insofar as the characters inside the film seem to never pay it any mind. And it's sometimes played in the background and has a similar effect as the overlapping dialogue, which some of it is just kind of white noise. White noise might be the word that we could use for it. However, there's an interesting contrast then that happens when you recognize yourself. It's like they're suddenly recognizing the sound of some of their own voice inside the white. White noise. Right. Like it's as though they make the transition from not listening to it or believing that they're listening to something else, something different from them, to then realizing that it's having that recognition and realizing it is, in fact, their own voices, which I think is a great expression of the fact that they're, of course, representative of this authority, as we've already said. But one of the things that's so interesting about this moment is when the chaplain comes in and thinks that he's listening to an episode of the Bickersons. I'm trying to kind of like connect all of this up with this idea of white noise. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a couple that was always having these fights, right. On the radio. And. 9:46 Wes: And it's the kind of, daddy, why are you fighting? 9:49 Erin: Right, exactly. And it's the kind of thing that would probably just be on the radio. Nobody would pay much attention to it or whatever. But they, you know, he Thinks they've all gathered around to listen to this, which is a little funny, you know. Oh, we. We just love the Bickersons. We're gonna all gather around and listen to this tonight. So that mistake, that misunderstanding, I'm trying to think through what that's indicative of. I mean, of course, the fact that the. The sort of. What sounds like some pretty aggressive sex that they're have. 10:17 Wes: My lips are hot. 10:19 Erin: Yes. Some pretty aggressive sex that they're having. Sounds kind of like an argument. 10:24 Wes: Well, they're having trouble with logistics, let's put it that way. 10:28 Erin: Right, right. 10:29 Wes: Aren't they having trouble getting undressed and, you know. 10:32 Erin: Yeah. And so they're kind of. It's a little bit slapsticky. Right. Which would sound like maybe some sort of pots and pans banging kind of humor in a marital argument on the Bickersons. So it sounds like sort of regular aggression. I'm not doing a great job of connecting all this up. I thought I would come up with a way to connect it all the way around, but I'm, like, trying to put the pieces together of this idea of, like, it's not just about recognizing their own voices as the voice of authority, but it's sort of almost like recognizing themself at the heart of some kind of, like, ugly American culture that also has a lot of hypocrisy in it. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, yeah. If the whole culture is a military industrial complex and they valorize this. 11:19 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. And it kind of lends itself to your observation about the Japanese versions of those American songs. Because what's just happened with the defeat of Japan is that two very different cultures have come into contact, and Japanese culture has been significantly affected by American culture. And Japanese culture was something much more conservative and serious before that war. And it is now, you know, within a matter of years, completely absorbed the flippancy of burgeoning American youth culture. I mean, I think you could call what's happening at this point, you know, the beginnings of youth culture, it doesn't fully dominate until the 60s. Right. But certainly starting in the 50s, speaking of boomers. Right. The first youth culture warriors. But so there's something lost, which is not to minimize what the Japanese, the many, many millions of civilians the Japanese killed during World War II, and the, of course, the horrible aspect of that kind of nationalism that dominated Japan at that time, but also it. It was in some ways a more arguably, I think, more religious and serious and more communal. And could not be more different in many ways from American culture. And so you lose something. You lose something when youth culture starts to dominate. And you lose something when cynicism, an ironic take on everything, you know, an ironic approach to the world, begins to dominate. There are many things that are appealing about it, and again, there are many things that are appealing about the wit of the protagonists in this movie. But I don't ultimately think that it's what's endorsed. And we get just these hints at the drawbacks of that, and it's that lack of serious. So, for instance, when they're in Japan, Hawkeye and Trapper John, right, have this fake conversation in Japanese. Do you remember that? They're kind of mocking the Japanese language. And then the guy driving the jeep is like, goddamn army. Goddamn army. 13:18 Erin: Yeah. 13:18 Wes: So they bring that flippancy to Japan. And it's more obvious, in a way, the implications of that, of what's lost with that, than it is at the camp. There's a greater contrast. I think the upshot of that is that the innocence of the chaplain. It's quaint in a way. It's cute that he thinks it's the Bickersons, but there's something about his more wholesome attitude that arguably the film laments us losing. In any case, there are strong arguments in favor of irony in one's approach to life, but it can easily slide into nihilism, and we can actually get rid of moral authority altogether. Again, as you pointed out, they themselves can be accused of being hypocrites or at the very least, moralists. Right? They themselves are coming at things from a certain kind of value system, and they hide the authority, or they locate it in themselves personally, or they locate it in competence as opposed to some higher moral order. But we really can't evade it. We can't evade seriousness, and we can't evade a moral order. And we can't evade. If we want to be healthy. We can't evade the feeling of sadness, no matter how productive or helpful it is to use humor sometimes. So going back to your point about the intercom, correct me if I'm wrong. So that Burns and Hot Lips got to experience the darkness or the. Yeah, go ahead. 14:43 Erin: Yeah. They're waking up inside the white noise of the kind of Middle American culture that they themselves might valorize and realize that they have brought the sin into the Bickersons, you know, they're the ones, you know, or what would be popular at the time, you know, I Love Lucy. It's like the Truman Show. Only they're realizing, like, they're the ones that are the actors, the bad actors, as a matter of fact, you know, they're the rotten heart of bland American culture and American cultural hypocrisy. 15:14 Wes: Yeah. So I like that. That connection between their particular hypocrisy and maybe army hypocrisy and cultural hypocrisy. 15:22 Erin: Yeah. I don't think I'm going too far. I hope I'm not in connecting a show like the Bickersons or sort of, you know, what I'm calling bland American culture. It's not all bland, but, you know, the kind of entertainment that a lot of people would consume stayed really stagnant and was reflective of. You know, look at Ozzie and Harriet. You know, Ozzie and Harriet is a great, you know, the great punching bag for. For everything we can. We can say about 1950s culture and what was valorized at the time. And I think that Ozzie and Harriet culture is connected to a culture that has great respect for people like Eisenhower and General MacArthur. You know, the people whose words are on the screen at the beginning of the film. And the counterpart culture of the Vietnam era and of the boomers is very much like lumping those like Dwight and Mamie. Might as well be Ozzie and Harriet. Right. 16:12 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think we might say there's a beginning in the 50s. There are beginnings of counterculture and youth culture. 16:19 Erin: Yeah. 16:19 Wes: But it's. It comes across as quite innocent, you know, as I'm thinking of Happy Days. Right. And like the Fonz and what's considered cool. Right. What's considered, you know. Right. 16:28 Erin: Well, in the 70s, you immediately have a nostalgia for the. For the uncomplicated 50s, by contrast, because they got rid of it so quickly. Yeah, yeah. 16:38 Wes: But it is, you know, it's very much in the MASH unit, as if 60s or 70s counterculture were happening in a 1951 MASH unit. It's as if, you know, like, you sent a bunch of hippie surgeons to. Right. To that MASH unit, and this is what would happen then. They're going to be completely irreverent. In any case, I think this. So this is based on a novel. I don't. I think it's based on a novel written by someone who worked at one of these MASH units. And he says these people are amalgams of actual characters. I looked at the novel a little bit. I don't think it's a very well written novel, but a lot of the dialogue is actually lifted from the novel. So I wonder. I wonder to what extent this was the actual climate in the army. And maybe it's something eternal. Right. There's some kind of similarities to catch 22. Right. And just the absurdity of. Do you know what I mean? 17:30 Erin: Yeah. I think I was thinking a lot about birth control, actually. And I was thinking about the fact that the widespread use of birth control, whether or not that would be a problem for the realism in the Korean War versus the Vietnam War here. I think that's the only. I was just reflecting on that earlier, and I think that must be the difference here. That and maybe a more innocent culture in, say, like, the World War II era that the Korea might have been an expression of. But I think part of the more innocent culture is also because it's prior to the widespread availability of birth control and to things like what this movie comes out of or the mentality of this movie, which I see as really being just kind of an early forebearer of a movie like Porky's or something, or Animal House, is, I think, also like the Playboy magazine culture, which I associate with the 50s and after. And I think what fuels the Playboy culture is also widespread availability of birth control. You can just have sex and just. And that's it. And there are no consequences. So. Well, other than STDs. But obviously these people don't seem to be bothered by that. Just party foul. We should talk about the football game. 18:41 Wes: Okay, let's do that. 18:42 Erin: Not that I can talk about it with any intelligence, because if it were 18:46 Wes: a baseball game, that would be something. 18:48 Erin: There we go. There we go. Don't get me started. 18:52 Wes: Would you cheerlead for a baseball game or would you be playing? 18:55 Erin: I would be the umpire. 18:57 Wes: You'd be the coach. Oh, the umpire. 19:00 Erin: Okay, the umpire. Talking about moral authority. 19:02 Wes: You wouldn't be able to coach. 19:03 Erin: Sure, I could coach. Yeah. Be the manager. 19:05 Wes: Manager or manager. 19:06 Erin: I'd be a very, very good manager. I'd be a much better manager than Erin Boone. I'm telling you that right now. Oh, she said it. I'm following all the trading going on right now in the mlb. So my brain is all baseball right now. This week especially. They just signed some people. So anyway, I know I found myself being like, oh, man, I wish it was baseball. But that, too would be a slightly older culture at this point. I was watching what's My Line the other night. I love what's My Line? Game show from the. You know, I was watching this mid-50s episode, and they were talking about they had the commissioner of baseball on as one of their mystery guests. And the master of ceremonies, the moderator, John C. Daly, was talking to the commissioner of baseball after his identity was revealed and saying, like, oh, is it true that baseball was falling out of fashion, that the youth just don't care about it anymore? And it was like 1956 or 7 that he's saying this to this guy. This is always this idea that baseball is dying somehow. But anyway, I definitely think that if people were worried about it dying in 56 or 7, that it was representative of an older culture, even in the 50s, and that therefore football, with the violence and all of that, is a better encapsulation. And it's the perfect sport to be playing, I think, just as golf is a great sport to be playing on the helipad, which is something we. We also didn't talk about, but something of a class difference there. 20:25 Wes: Yeah. So golf reflects again, their elite, you know, martinis and golf, their elite kind of status. And it's not just that they're counterculture and protesting war or something like that. It's. They're too good for it. They're too good for all of it. But, yeah, football is something quite different here because it's more warlike and more earnest and more. Yeah, Less elite. 20:47 Erin: Yeah. Just one quick thing about the golf thing. I also was thinking about the blase ness of that, that they can, you know, they get annoyed when a helicopter comes in because they have to clear out. And it just reminded me of something which I should have mentioned in part one, about this difference between officers and enlisted men. I forgot there was a point at which they're working on a guy and they say they're going to close up his chest. And someone asks if it's an officer or an enlisted man. And when it's hard to tell what the voice is, who's speaking, but when someone replies that it's an enlisted man, they say, make the stitches big. So the idea that, like, he's gonna have a nice big scar, and that's a value to an enlisted man, perhaps with working class values, who wants to show off a scar versus an officer who doesn't wanna have a big scar, who doesn't wanna look super banged up after the war. So maybe what golf signifies, as I think we already suggested in part one, is sort of putting the surgeons in that kind of upper class with the officers. And I think it's part of their blaseness or the fact that they're not outwardly showing that they're affected by the war is paralleled by this idea that, you know, the officer doesn't want the scar, but the enlisted man does. He wants proof that he's been affected by the war. That's actually a status symbol for the enlisted man that runs against this whole idea of football. But then again, football is also something that's played and enjoyed by people who are upper class as well. 22:10 Wes: It's interesting because for that soldier, Radar also goes and steals some of Blake's blood to give to that enlisted soldier. And I think from what I. If I'm getting this right, and I might not be, I think so the scenes that are cut make clear that that's Ho-Jon they're working on. 22:27 Erin: Oh, is it? 22:28 Wes: So then we have to read the blood in two different ways, you know. 22:31 Erin: Oh, for the blood scene, not that 22:33 Wes: Radar is getting blood from Blake to give to Ho-Jon. On another reading, I see he's getting it to give to some random enlisted man, which shows you the lengths that they would go to. 22:43 Erin: Right. 22:43 Wes: To save someone. So I'm not sure which is true if I'm getting that wrong. In any case, there are other scenes that make clear that at the very end of the movie, the one being taken away is Ho-Jon. Oh, no, I suspected that. Anyway, I think the viewer can, you know, if you see what's happening in the background, you suspect that is Ho-Jon taken away, who's passed away away. 23:02 Erin: Right, right. 23:03 Wes: So then we get the instruction, which kind of runs counter to that, which is to make the stitches larger for 23:08 Erin: the enlisted man versus the officer. 23:10 Wes: Yeah, yeah. And you're relating that to the scar as a status symbol. 23:16 Erin: Yeah. There's an expression of class difference there. That part of the performance that the surgeons put on is almost like they're going to do all this stuff and act as though they're not affected by what they're doing. And psychologically they're trying to not show the scars. And that seems to be. Yeah. The golf playing on the helipad where the enlisted men are landing versus making the stitches big so that the enlisted man who they save has something to show off back home and show that he's been a hero. Seems to be an interesting contrast there. 23:50 Wes: Well, you're reminding me of the. Yeah. The ethos of which is that nothing really matters, which is, in a way, what suit the suicide is painless is really just what that phrase is. The football game, in a way, gives them something they can at least pretend to believe in or take seriously. I guess they Take poker a bit seriously, but the football game, they really. They do their best to win. 24:13 Erin: Well, it's kind of like, you know, the football game is like an aristocratic hunt almost. 24:18 Wes: Right. 24:19 Erin: Like, they get to express enthusiasm for something that. Yes, doesn't really matter, but it's a way to sort of exercise that. That emotion, get it out about something that it's okay to get riled up about in ways that are socially acceptable. 24:34 Wes: Of course, they do take their surgery. You know, their work is doctors seriously. And there's an element of teamwork to that, although not as much. I think there's something important about the fact that football is closer to war. 24:47 Erin: There's gamesmanship in the way that they operate on people, too. No, I mean, they are taking it seriously, but their demeanor and maybe the circumstances of this kind of really difficult and hard to manage surgical theater, like, there's a. You know, they leave the guy that's died and they immediately move on to the next one. There's a game quality. 25:08 Wes: They're engaging in small talk, and there's a very casual quality to it. They might be joking around. There's no strong emotional response to what's happened. They're very. There's a lot that goes on in the operating room that's meant to illustrate that they are very harsh, hardened to. 25:24 Erin: Right. 25:25 Wes: What's happening in front of them. They're very used to it. They're very hardened. And they can continue chatting or being flippant or whatever it is that they're doing even while that's going on. But the task itself. Right. They're experts at that task. And that is also emphasized, you know. Yeah, it's an. It's an interesting combination. So. So, yeah. So what's different about the football game? Why is it here? Why do we need a football game in this movie? Did they run out of things to do? 25:51 Erin: Right. Well, part of it is just the hilarity of seeing and the absurdity of the uniforms and the full. Like, is that a regulation football field in the middle of Korea? Like, where the hell are they? You know? So part of that is just like this just crazy humor that comes out of nowhere, which made me laugh out loud when I saw the field and everybody's getups. 26:14 Wes: The film sort of degenerates into complete slapstick, which is interesting, given that it's all been witty, you know, it's all been wit and verbal, and now it's going to be mainly slapstick, and they're going to cheat their asses off. They're Going to. 26:28 Erin: Right. 26:29 Wes: Well, they're going to get a ringer, which the other team does as well. They're going to inject some guy with something, and then they have a trick played. But above all, we should relate this to the arc. The main arc of the movie is defeating Burns and Hot Lips. And Hot Lips is not yet defeated. This is the dragon that's being slain. Still, she's not defeated until she's with Duke. Right. In this third act, right. There's the football game. There's also. She gets with Duke, and then she becomes the cheerleader. And the game happens because Hot Lips complained to that general, and then he took it seriously enough to actually come visit, to come visit the camp. And you think, okay, finally something's gonna happen. She might have been vindicated, Right. If the story had been different, if it had gone a different way, she might be the protagonist, and she might be the one who defeats the bad guys, the bad boys. Of course, it's not going to turn out that way. The general gets distracted by the good old the boys club. He gets sucked into the idea of a football game. And that, once again, distracts us from any moral order or moral authority into a substitute for that, which is, of course, part of the way people use sports. No offense to baseball, but anyway, Hot Lips is defeated in a double sense. The football game is a replacement for addressing her concerns, and she is transformed into a cheerleader. So that is in the way the plot function of the football game, but also this descent into slapstick. And also something that resembles, more obviously resembles war. I think those. Those two things are important as well. 28:11 Erin: Yeah. And Hot Lips can finally achieve her raison d' etre as a hot blonde. The idea of the ringer is something that I was kind of thinking about, because I was thinking about it in relationship to being drafted. And a little bit of what you were talking about in terms of the moral authority that the surgeons have within the camp as being a result of their competence and perhaps their class, too. But the idea that they're the result of a kind of meritocracy versus whatever the army chain of command represents, which is, more often than not, probably not a meritocracy. So the idea that bringing in a ringer is something like being drafted, but drafting sort of smarter, not harder. So, you know, they. They draft this guy into the football game, but on the basis of merit. 28:59 Wes: Well, as his merit as a surgeon. I mean, they had. The way they have to get him right into the unit is to say he's. He's a great surgeon, so. 29:08 Erin: That's right. 29:09 Wes: But he's also used to be a professional football player. 29:12 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know what to say about that other than, you know, there's this kind of doubling there with the way he gets on the team and the way one gets into the war. I don't know. But all of this is also muddied, of course, by the fact that there's some racism in. In his nickname. And, I mean, there's some racial jokes being played about his nickname Spearchucker, and I'm not sure what that signifies. Like, we know that Tom Skerritt's character is a racist. 29:41 Wes: Right. And then there's a really funny scene where he's asked how he got that nickname, and he's like, oh, I used to throw javelin. 29:48 Erin: Right. Exactly. 29:49 Wes: As if they're complete. As if no one is making the connection to race, which is really funny. 29:55 Erin: Yeah, that's a really funny line. Yeah. But just the element of race being brought in is kind of a funny line complication. But I'm not entirely sure how to, like, metabolize that. 30:05 Wes: Well, we find out. I mean, it is kind of a highlighted scene where we find out that Duke is a racist. 30:11 Erin: Yes. 30:11 Wes: Because he doesn't want to live with him. They want to. Is Duke resisting the idea of getting this guy into camp. 30:17 Erin: Yes. Sharing a camp with a black guy. 30:19 Wes: Because he. Yeah, that's where they're plotting. Getting the ringer. But then Duke isn't like, where is he gonna live? 30:25 Erin: And he says it's been difficult enough for him to live with a bunch of Yankees. Never mind. And then it just trails off. 30:31 Wes: Yeah. Never mind. And then they hit it. They give him a. They. They give him a friendly hit in the shoulder or something like that. 30:38 Erin: Right. Oh, come on. 30:40 Wes: So it's disappointing. It's disappointing that the only guy from Georgia in the movie turns out to be the racist, but I guess that's accurate. 30:47 Erin: I was gonna say good old Southern 30:51 Wes: boy, but, you know, it's one of these, like, come downs. Right. So that gives us a little more that. It rounds out the film with some disappointments after everything else has been completely manic. There's the come down of Hawkeye being sad at the end about Ho-Jon's body being taken away. There's finding out Duke is a racist. Is there anything else. Is there anything else that's genuinely sad 31:16 Erin: that happens that one moment? When is it Duke that has the vision of his return home? 31:24 Wes: Yeah. 31:25 Erin: When he and Hawkeye are told that they can go home. That, I take is very sad. 31:30 Wes: Well, say more about that. I mean, there's Duke. Duke is, as I mentioned before, Duke and Hot Lips are very upset that they're gonna be taken away from each other. 31:38 Erin: Yeah. 31:38 Wes: You can tell Hawkeye is not happy as well. They're gonna lose that community. And then. Yeah. Duke has that. What is sad about that fantasy that he has of being, well. Well welcomed home as a hero. Right. Which is not gonna happen, is that way. 31:53 Erin: Yeah. And the juxtaposition of what that shot represents, something of the culture that we've already been talking about, as expressed in the Burns and Houlihan and the fact that maybe he's Then the one on the loudspeaker or something like that. Right. So he, knowing that he's a hypocrite, has to return home to what looks like a really loving, wonderful family. It reminded me of images of Vietnam soldiers, like, returning home and how most of those marriages, at least the highly publicized ones from famous photos, were ended in divorce within a couple of years. And something about the inability to reintegrate. Like, you have this emotional reunion, and then you can't reintegrate into the fabric of American life anymore because you're too. You are getting rejected by the host that you're trying to graft yourself back into. 32:44 Wes: Well, people get very attached. Attached to. When they're in an environment like that, which is highly traumatic. They compensate with these extremely close connections to the people that they're with. The bonds that they forge with those people are much stronger than they can forge with people in civilian life, because there's not the same life and death circumstance hanging over people, which points to the fact that the philandering that people are doing in the film is a little bit more than. It's not just hedonism. 33:15 Erin: Yes. 33:16 Wes: It's a closeness that's just developed under those circumstances. 33:20 Erin: And a shared project. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's a sort of. It's a work, husband and wife kind of situation. Right. Yeah. 33:29 Wes: And so they lose that, and they. As much as it sucks, they lose that. And then. Yeah. So you have lots of veterans of war who come back and they miss. They miss being at war. 33:39 Erin: Right. 33:39 Wes: They miss their comrades in arms. 33:41 Erin: Yeah. 33:42 Wes: There's a meaning. There's a more. It's more meaningfulness than I think we often get out of ordinary life. 33:49 Erin: Sure. Yeah. The heightened sense of purpose, the intensity of it is probably a rush, what they're doing in the surgical theater. You know, my. This is gonna sound downright disrespectful, but, you know, I think of when I was in high school, I worked at Dunkin Donuts, and you always wanted to get the morning shift because the afternoon shifts were killer, because you, like, barely anybody would come in. And so if you were there for, like, seven hours, you would feel every minute of those seven hours that you were there, and you'd have to do boring things. 34:22 Wes: Did they bring in the donuts on helicopters? 34:25 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 34:26 Wes: You had to rush them into the. 34:27 Erin: Exactly. No, but, like, you got to be friendly with. Well, and you wouldn't. You wouldn't get as close to people on the afternoon shift, but on the morning shift, it would go by in two seconds because you're just working nonstop. Like you. I loved working the morning shift because you'd be on for six, seven hours, but it would be six, seven hours of, like, constantly moving, constantly working. You wouldn't have to do the boring stuff, like cleaning stuff out that you do in the afternoon, and it would go by in a flash. And that's when you get, like, the kind of the machine operating of everybody, you know, everybody who was super competent was all on the morning shift together. So we would all. And it would sometimes be dependent on people's availability or what hours they signed up for. But, like, we all would make jokes with each other. We would talk while we were doing stuff, and it would. It was. It just. It was more enjoyable. It went way faster. People were meaner to us in the morning because it's the morning. They haven't had their coffee. You're dealing with, like, the angry, entitled people that want their coffee, and so it's easier to bond under those circumstances. It's just more trying. In this extremely disrespectful example I'm giving, I'm just trying to say that, you know, the army life is like the morning shift, and your regular life is like your afternoon shift and. Or something like that or your normal work or whatever. And. Yeah, it's just. It's just much easier to miss, you know, the excitement, and life goes faster. Things. Things happen more quickly, and so that, like, other shifts, other parts of the day don't look as. There's not that adrenaline rush that you're getting all the time. So you get kind of addicted to that. And if it's not going as fast, that's hard to adjust to. And then you just go to college, and you forget all about dealing with that until the summer when you need more money. So you go back, pick up some shifts at Dunkin, the brown visor. 36:16 Wes: Again, I mean I'm just. You have me, you have me thinking a lot of people do seek this out in their work life. Right. And whether they're surgeons or working at Dunkin Donuts, they can get that feeling of being under. They can high stress jobs. Right, Right. It's not as perfect as being at war or being in a MASH unit, but it's better than having nothing to do. No, but it. Right. You can, and you can forge camaraderie with co workers in those situations. And you can get some of that, and you can get some of it from this football, you know, from a sport. It's part of how we use sports in daily life. And so again, it's interesting that it shows up here. Team sports are one way of replicating the bonds that can only otherwise be forged in war. 37:04 Erin: That's right, yeah. 37:05 Wes: Especially when it's such a physical sport. 37:07 Erin: Well, and it's an arbitrary way to form bonds with people based on arbitrary things like proximity. So you know, you all root for the same team because you're from the same area. Even if you can't stand each other's guts, you have that in common. And that arbitrariness of where you live can actually be a non threatening way of bonding with people that you might ordinarily have nothing in common with. And so that seems to work for Hot Lips. You know, just because she's with the MASH unit, they all can bond over this and kind of get over whatever it is that divides them in a non threatening, non confrontational way where someone outside of you becomes the person that you're against. 37:50 Wes: I was thinking too, she's, she, what she shows in the end is that she's willing like them, to show that she can take take seriously what's not serious. They demand that what's not serious in a way be taken seriously. Do you know what I mean? 38:04 Erin: Yeah. She shows some understanding then arguably some kind of moral flexibility at the end. 38:11 Wes: So she gets into it and she's willing. You know, the more benign reading of it all is she's willing to step outside of the role of her own authority because she is head nurse and just be one of the girls, one of the guys, however you want to think about it. But she can put herself in a position where she doesn't take herself seriously and is willing to say dumb things about a game she knows nothing about and then be made fun of all that stuff. So there's an element of humility in It. So there's an alternative moral order, and that's what she's submitting herself to in that circumstance, which is much more. Again, more. It's more anarchist, maybe, is the way to put it. 38:46 Erin: Well, in that spirit, I'll end by saying that I did enjoy watching this movie, and it surprised me me a little bit. 38:56 Wes: Is that real? Are you. Is that true? 38:58 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad I. I'm glad I watched the whole thing. I mean, enjoyment is maybe too strong of a word. 39:04 Wes: That's a raging endorsement. Sorry, you blur the blurb. The movie. I'm glad I didn't stop halfway through. 39:15 Erin: No, I'm. I'm. I'm glad I saw the whole thing. And also, so here's some. Here's some real, like. Like deep cut Erin trivia. I should see this whole movie because I'm, in fact, named after a character from the mash, the TV show. So an unseen character. Yes. 39:33 Wes: No. 39:33 Erin: Honeycutt's daughter that he gets the letters from. You know, Hunnicutt gets letters from his wife, and the wife talks about his daughter missing him. 39:41 Wes: I don't remember the show well enough, but. Which of your parents is a fan? 39:45 Erin: Oh, well. Of mash, the TV show. 39:48 Wes: Well, who. Who named you? Who gave you that name? 39:51 Erin: My mom liked that name. 39:53 Wes: Okay. 39:54 Erin: That was a contender because of the fact that she liked Honeycutt's Letters From Home. And Honeycutt's daughter's name was Erin. So the daughter who was too young to write the wife would include, like, messages from his daughter. And my mom thought that that was really sweet. And his daughter's name was Erin. Yeah. So I was named after. At least that's the story she told me. I don't know. 40:15 Wes: Interesting. 40:16 Erin: Yes. 40:17 Wes: This kind of makes me want to go back and watch some of the TV show, MASH. 40:21 Erin: Yeah. 40:22 Wes: I do love the way Altman films things with the overlapping dialogue and the shots where there's some intervening thing like helicopter blades or the distance shots, or there's multiple things going on at once. But I guess you would call it a kind of naturalism. I just. I find it very powerful. 40:39 Erin: It's great. I mean, very Hawksian. But of course, I think that the overlapping dialogue in the 70s has a different kind of valence to it, where Altman style itself, I think, is expressive of the fragmentation of society and the idea that multiple voices and narratives competing with each other with not one individual voice being the primary one. It's kind of that anarchy or that stance that you're talking about. Is sort of expressed in his style, which I find really interesting. I think it's difficult to do, to have that carried through, even in the form and the way in which you're filming. 41:12 Wes: Yeah. Have I converted you yet into loving 70s film more than. What is your decade? 40s. 40s, 41:21 Erin: yeah. Right, yeah. 41:23 Wes: That's what I thought you would say. 41:25 Erin: Yeah. If anything, I think I've converted you. 41:28 Wes: I'm just a product of my times and you're just a product of some random time the way before you lived. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it anyway. 41:40 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. I really did laugh a little too hard at some of the stuff that Hot Lips was saying during the football game. So I'm not above it. 41:48 Wes: Yeah, it's great. I think it's a great film. 41:52 Erin: Yeah. 41:52 Wes: Deserves its place among, you know, its typical rankings, top 100 films. 41:58 Erin: Well, the acting alone. I mean, Sutherland and Gould are really fantastic. 42:01 Wes: I love those guys. 42:03 Erin: They're so good. You know, it's rare to see acting that natural on film at any point in time. 42:10 Wes: I think it comes from. I was gonna say improvisation, but now I'm thinking I read contradictory things about that. And the dialogue does match, so I don't know how it was accomplished if there's some improvisational element, because that's usually what's at work when you see, you know what I mean, things that are. That feel that natural. I saw a indie film at the Brattle Theater recently called the Black Sea, and the director and lead actor actually were there to do a talk afterwards, and it turns out the film was completely improvised. They couldn't write any of it because of the writer strike. And it's great. 42:44 Erin: I mean, that's one way to get around you, really. 42:46 Wes: But you circumvent all the problems, especially with a small film and maybe limited talent. You circumvent a lot of problems with trying to get lines to sound natural, which takes a lot of repetition and, like regular filmmaking, a lot of rehearsal, a lot of repetition before you can say something that's been scripted and have it sound natural. And you just get rid of that problem when you. When you improvise. Well, not entirely, but. You know what I mean. 43:09 Erin: Yeah. I mean, insofar as we all are thinking about what we're going to say before we say it in real life, you know, like, that's one of the kind of really dubious things about filmmaking as a medium is that improvisation can sometimes work better than something that's scripted. And where does that leave you in the classification of film? As kind of an art form. You know, it's a strange thing. I know that Altman's dialogue, you know, was not quite as meticulously planned, I think, as the Hawks overlapping dialogue, where he would deliberately give filler stuff to say, but actual content. Whereas I think some people have said that in mash. In the background, you could hear that people are kind of spinning their wheels a little bit, as though Altman might have told them, oh, just say whatever. And they're kind of going, oh, yeah, you know, that kind of thing. So. But he does have. I know he individually mics people. That was a technique that he used. So what you are getting is a heavily edited. You know, you're getting this incredibly naturalistic feel, which, in fact, has been heavily edited and manipulated sonically by him. So I think when you have everybody's individual mic on and you want to give a room sound, but you want to make sure that the audience picks out one person or the other. He was just changing the levels all the time. So the person you're supposed to be listening to gets the highest mic volume. And he was just doing that in the editing room. His hand is. Is very much in there. Yeah. 44:38 Wes: So what is your favorite Altman film? 44:40 Erin: Nashville. 44:41 Wes: Oh, you already said that. Okay. Yeah, so we'll have to do that one day. Yeah. Okay. 44:45 Erin: Yeah. I don't know. You know, I don't love Altman. Like, I don't. I wish I got him better. I really love sequences in Nashville. It has, for me, some really incredibly memorable sequences that have really ingrained themselves in my memory. And so, therefore, I admire the film for creating that kind of set piece in several different instances. But I'm never sure in an Altman film what it all amounts to. I think there's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of. You know, there are many, many characters. Usually it all kind of ends in some sort of denouement. But it always leaves me feeling a little empty, a little cold as a film, sort of buying into the hopelessness a little bit too much, where I think you run the risk of tipping the balance and then saying, okay, then what was the point of making the film in the first place? To a certain extent, you know, so that. That nihilism can sometimes leave me feeling pretty dissatisfied at the end of an Altman film. I mean, maybe nihilism is an unfair. It's not total nihilism on Altman's part, but, yeah, so, like, you know, Nashville has lots of great moments, and then at the end, the super Great moment. And then when it's over, you're like, what was really the point of any of that? You know, I don't know that the film needs one or wants. Wants a point, but maybe I'm. Maybe I'm just a little too simplistic or something. I don't know. Do you have a favorite Altman film? 46:04 Wes: Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen his other films. I wouldn't say. I wouldn't call myself, like, an Altman fan in general. And maybe if I watch those other films, I would find out that I am having a similar reaction. Like, it leaving me cold. It's not the way MASH feels to me, but I think even though I like the way he films things with overlapping dialogue and all the rest of it, that's not enough of itself. And it doesn't mean that doesn't make me an Altman fan. Exactly. But I would put this up there among my favorite films, with Annie hall, for instance. 46:37 Erin: Wow. Wow. 46:38 Wes: Anything else in the 60s and 70s, basically. Just kidding. 46:44 Erin: Well, the. The overlapping style and the. I mean, the way he works with actors and the kinds of performances he gets are unbelievable. Like, Nashville is just full of, like, 20 great performances. And McCabe and Mrs. Miller is another. I'm due for a rewatch of that. But that's. That's another favorite Altman film of mine. 47:03 Wes: Yeah, me too. Okay, thank you. 47:06 Erin: Thank you. 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