Anarchy vs Military Order in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H

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It's a dialectic between 2 groups—the smart and cunning tricksters and the 'Regular Army clowns' (Hawkeye's name for them). Luckily for Hawkeye, Trapper and Duke, Colonel Blake (the camp's commanding officer) doesn't give two hoots about discipline and in fact doesn't want any. He wants to be able to fish and laze around and have sex with his secretary. This is what allows them to play havoc with anyone who does want to maintain parade-ground order. This is Altman's anarchic jab at the Vietnam war. And though set ostensibly in Korea, the location was never named and the hairstyles and facial hair of the pranksters more closely resembled those of 60's era hippies.

There's no story structure at all, it's entirely episodic. There's no real main character, it's an ensemble piece. No character grows or has an arc of any kind. In this insane world of war and absurd discipline, in a camp lost in the boonies where they never have enough supplies or people and they stitch up the wounded so they can go back into combat, there can be no meaningful growth. In fact, in some ways it reminds me quite a bit of Fires on the Plain, which began with absurd and meaningless military order in the midst of utter devastation (see my breakdown of that film in terms of Theatre of the Absurd here.)

The name Hawkeye implies he's a sharpshooter—an archer (exactly what cunning trickster Odysseus was—he slew all the suitors with a bow). The name Trapper implies he'll trap the unwary, and he does. What was the other guy's name, their partner in pranks who stays in the tent with them? Duke Forrest. Duke could be a nickname too. Hotlips didn't like that Hawkeye went by a nickname rather than a military rank attached to his real name—that's too informal. So what did they do? They gave her a nickname, one she in fact chose for herself and that forever branded her as a hypocrite—she was definitely breaking discipline and protocol when she moaned about how hot her lips were for Frank. So was Frank in fact, at the same time. And it took a few moments for them to realize their voices were being broadcast to the entire camp at high volume.

The regular army clowns are presented as hypocritical fools. In fact they're like adult teacher's pets, who would dutifully learn everything exactly the way the teacher presented it—rote memorization—and would eagerly raise their hand with the precisely-worded answer. But they never learned anything about life. They never got out and experienced anything rough or tested themselves against difficulties. They think all you need to do is learn the right answers to the test questions, show up bright and early every day with a positive attitude, and be a good obedient kid. And when you run into trouble go to an authority figure (AKA tattling). They'll take care of everything for you. Suuuuure they will. They'll usually screw it up even worse for everybody involved.

The cunning tricksters of M*A*S*H live in a tent called The Swamp where they have a still, and when Trapper arrives he brings a jar of olives, which are extremely hard to come by in wartime Korea, so finally their martinis can be just right. He was already 'one of them' from the beginning. They hate the bright-eyed and rule-bound teacher's pets, In fact you can see their army life as a continuation of their school life—if they had all lived in the same town they would have been nemeses all through school. The dialectic here is the real life—a street education—vs the 'proper school education' of the teacher's pets. Luckily all the regular army clowns are buffoons, on the level of Keystone Cops put there specifically to be targets for the arrows and traps of our tricksters.

I think Regular Army discipline was intended to be a secretive poke at the rules that prevented American soldiers from fighting effectively in Vietnam, and the buffoons like Frank Burns, Margaret Houlihan, and the rest of the authoritarians represented the politicians who created those rules while sitting behind desks half a world away from the war. At least they're people who follow rules without question.

To Hawkeye and Trapper the field of combat is a golf range. A place to play and scoff at discipline. Not just for fun, but as a statement. They're seen as bullies by the teacher's pets, because they represent unruly, dirty-fighting life itself, breaking through all the barriers of discipline and rules and protocol. They're the rebels making sneak attacks against the empire of military order—pranksters putting tacks on the seats of the generals and the majors and showing them up for the fools they really are. It's not hard to do because the teacher's pet types don't think for themselves, they're afraid of the messiness of real life. And those in favor of extreme order can't stand humor. They break out into apoplectic fits of rage every time someone metaphorically puts a pea under their mattress or a pebble in their shoe (that they must then march on or break protocol to remove).

This assault on order and protocol is a tradition running all through silent comedy and comedy in general, which tends to be anarchic. You see it in Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, and Bugs Bunny. In fact, you see it in Theatre of the Absurd as well, which grew from that same tradition. It's built into the structure of the comedy team, the straight man standing as the bastion of order, to be continually humiliated by the magical child he's always chastising, whose magic and charm he fails to appreciate. It's a codependent relationship—a humorous take on the dialectic of order and disorder. Damn, funny how that keeps turning up at the root of just about everything I examine. I feel like I've discovered a secret key to the world.

Edit—Altman was a loose cannon director making an anarchic film under the noses of authoritarian studio heads who hated what he was doing. Art imitates life. And apparently the movie ended up saving the studio, even though the studio did everything it could to stop it or change it. Altman was one of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls directors, following in the footsteps of the post-war European trends of Neo-Realism and Nouvelle Vague, a movement away from narrative technique and toward the Poetic.