LGM Film Club, Part 417: MASH

I watched MASH the other night and it’s interesting to compare it to The Graduate. The films both are huge male gaze activities, one more slapstick, the other supposedly more profound or something. Robert Altman certainly directed his share of manly man films, but then he was hardly committed to that and directed great films centered around women too. Still, there’s no way to interpret this film as anything beyond utterly and ridiculously sexist. If anything, this is where resides its charm. It isn’t pretending to be what it is not and at times it is genuinely hilarious. On the other hand, I would not blame anyone for not wanting to watch this. It’s more than a little casual about racism as well, though playing a very countercultural white notion of it, which is to condemn outright racist characters and also find it funny to have a Black athlete known as “Spearchucker” and claim that it is because he was a javelin thrower (and also have him played by Fred Williamson!) So….yeah, I dunno…..

I do have to say that part of the reason this still partly works despite its obvious problems is that Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould and Robert Duvall are all so awesome in the film. Tom Skerritt is more marginal to me and he does mostly disappear from the narrative once Trapper John is introduced; not so surprising that the TV show eliminated that character. That’s the other thing about the film and its sexism and possible racism–its representation was so mainstream in 1970 that it was immediately turned into a TV show that was a hit for the next decade, slowly critiquing those things, but not really until the second half of the series when Alan Alda effectively took much of it over.