The debate over the inherent cruelty in MASH

Rating: 8/10 (13 February 2014)

You know what MASH is. It's a culture icon. One of the most important films of the 1970's, but if you haven't seen it recently you might forget just how cruel the film is. There are a lot of different points of view about the cruelty baked into the film, here's mine...
Yes, the film has sexist, racist, cruel and homophobic characters. But I strongly believe that the film is NOT laughing along with them. Again and again, we see the repercussions of callous behavior in the faces of the taunted. Altman holds on Frank Burns' face (through fire, no less) as he's being driven away by the military police after being pushed to violence. The infamous shower scene with Hot Lips isn't played for laughs to me at all, it's a horrible scene, just because people are laughing in the scene, that doesn't make it less horrible. It's a long-held shot of her humiliation, and ultimately, when she goes to her CO only to find him drinking wine in bed with another nurse, her futility. When Hawkeye and Trapper John are making fun of Japanese people, the driver of their jeep is openly irritated by their buffoonery. He verbally blames the culture of the Army for their behavior, repeating the phrase "Goddamned Army" again and again.
I do believe that Altman is saying something here about what war does to people. How spending hours every day trying to save mangled human beings creates a surrealist hell and hardens those who live in it. Also, let's not forget that this film is set in the fifties. The attitudes towards women, minorities, people of other cultures and homosexuality are not out of step with the era that the characters are supposed to be existing in. In that regard, it's not just a comment on the state of war, but on 1950's moral values as well.
Having said all of that, it is undeniable that women get a pretty bad rap in this film. Hot Lips is a completely inconsistent character. She seems to change to become whatever the script needs her to be to get a laugh. One could argue that she changes in an effort to "join them" since she can't "beat them", but even this reasoning shows little regard for her character. The only other female of note in the film, Dish, has sex with Painless the dentist because her lover asks her to (in an effort to save his life, which is ridiculous). It's one thing for the main characters to be sexist. I'm not opposed to that. I don't need my protagonists to be "good" people. But it's another thing when the universe of the film itself is sexist. And sadly, I do feel that is the case in this film.
Fortunately, we have a whole body of work from Altman where he counters this attitude about women, but it does keep this film from being one of his absolute greatest achievements for me.
Apart from that, the film is a technical masterpiece. The level of narrative communicated through what seems to be total chaos on camera is amazing. Scenes don't transition from sequence to sequence, they spill all over one another. Altman took the messiness of life and captured it in a bottle. It's also an incredibly edited.