Suicide Ain't Painless

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2009)

The "multi-character anti-narrative mosaic" was invented with "MASH". I've coined that ridiculous phrase myself, but how else do you describe what Altman's created here?
Let's examine the ingredients. Firstly, Altman constructs a self-contained environment. In "Gosford Park" it was a country estate, in "The Company" it was a ballet school, in "Prairie Home Companion" it was a theatre and in "Short Cuts" it was nothing less than the city of Los Angeles. In "MASH" Altman constructs a mobile army field hospital, with functioning roads, helicopter landing pads, tents, barracks, mess halls and a make shift golf course.
His environment created, Altman then inserts his cast. But rather than give us a comfortable 3-act story, Altman has his characters interact, seemingly spontaneously, within his giant set. And so within this huge environment little mini narratives play out, the audience having to work hard to pick out the subtle character arcs and personality traits, Altman's camera floating back and forth, catching bits of dialogue and fragments of story. In a sense, it's up to the audience to synthesize the story and turn it into a cohesive "whole".
This seemingly haphazard way of storytelling is further highlighted by Altman's love for overlapping dialogue, shapeless scripts and his willingness to let his casts improvise. And beyond this you then have the typical self-referential Altman layer, in which the act of preparing, improvising and putting on a performance is mirrored to the act of preparing, improvising and creating Altman's film. (Almost all of Altman's films revolve around large groups of people getting together and putting on a show. In "MASH" this "performance within a performance" takes the form of an operating theatre, football game, peep show and radio sex act).
But what separates "MASH" from Altman's other films is how joyously rebellious it all is. Altman has always been a filmmaker with a strong anti-establishment streak (one of his first films, a parody called "Pot au Feu", was a cooking show which presented the recipe for a cannabis joint), but never has he been this wacky and irreverent. Wounded soldiers are airlifted to the tune of "Suicide is painless", and the cast seems to go to great lengths to be as sexist, misogynistic, anti-religious (in one neat scene at a table, they strike the pose of Da Vinci's Last Supper), anti-establishment and gory as possible.
But it's the juxtaposition between the film's playful sense of anarchy and its gory hospital scenes that is Altman's very point. These are characters so engulfed by the madness of war that their only means of coping is to lose their minds in as controlled a way of possible. You might say that their antics are precisely how they cope with their environment.
But just how anti-establishment is "MASH" and is it right to call it an "anti war" film? In an essay comparing "Full Metal Jacket" to "MASH", philosopher Slavoj Zizek deemed "MASH" Altman's most conformist film. For all their practical jokes, jabs at authority and sexual escapades, the MASH crew perform their duty with maverick-like efficiency. They are no threat to the smooth running of the military machine.
In other words, this very "detachment", the ability of MASH's cast to adopt a persona of cynicism, practical jokes and mockery - to view themselves as existing outside the system - is itself modern ideology. As to give oneself completely over to ideology, to revoke one's Self in favour of a one dimensional military persona (Hot Lips, Pvt Pyle) is itself a suicidal act, working ideology requires the subject to retain a kernel of individuality, whereby he views himself as being external or opposed to the system he inhabits.
While Altman prides himself on being the great deconstructor of genre, Zizek cites "Full Metal Jacket" as a deconstruction of Altman. Altman's sex acts and attacks on women and religion become the institutionalised acts of Kubrick's Sgt Hartman, religion upheld, femininity denigrated and sex transposed to violence. While Altman has one troop seek and then reject suicide as a cure for his sexual impotency, Kubrick flips this by having a young cadet embrace suicide as the logical outcome of his own sexual over-identification with the military. Altman's cast may get a slap on the wrist for toying with a Christian trooper, but when Pvt Joker denies the Virgin Mary, Kubrick is careful to counter violent punishment with a swift promotion.
Significantly, the second part of Kubrick's film ends with a scene in which Joker, a character seemingly plucked straight out of "MASH", shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. Far from an outsider, Kubrick reveals Joker as the fully constituted military subject. In other words, an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it. By "joking", by seeing themselves as "opposed" to military ideology, the MASH boys are creating a human space that thwarts their own suicidal self destruction. And what is suicide but total identification; the giving of the Self totally to ideology.
Kubrick was a big Altman fan, and cast Mathew Modine in "Full Metal Jacket" based on his performance in Altman's military drama "Streamers". But what's interesting is that Kubrick's last war film (its an anti "anti war film" film) is, on one level, a response to the ineffectual rebellion of something like "MASH" or "Catch 22". For all their antics, Altman's cast are simply school boys making noise in between lessons.
Interestingly, while Altman's film ends with an overlong football match, Kubrick filmed but then removed a sequence from "Full Metal Jacket" in which his marines play football with a sniper's decapitated head.
8/10 – Though it's more a carnival show than a comment on war, "MASH" is still lots of fun. The film's irreverence has lost some of its bite (1st major film to use the F word), but should nevertheless appeal to those with a macabre sense of humour.