Special medical operation – Weekend
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Robert Altman became a classic with Field Hospital: in the midst of the Vietnam campaign, the anti-military film, directed by a World War II veteran, received the Palme d’Or and several Oscar nominations. Instead of hostilities, Altman showed their result – the location of the military field hospital was best placed to instill disgust for the absurdity and cruelty of war.
In 1971, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Arthur Hiller’s Love Story, Franklin Sheffner’s Patton, George Seaton’s Airport, and MASH (Military Field Hospital) fought for the Oscars for Best Picture. Robert Altman. In his latest book, Film Speculation, Quentin Tarantino writes that he rooted for Altman’s absurdist anti-war comedy, which he managed to watch at the box office three times. It is worth noting that Tarantino at that moment was barely eight, and at the screening of the film, full of nudity and full of the dirtiest curses, he was held by his mother’s boyfriend, a big cinephile and liberal. Tarantino admits that, of course, he did not understand the anarchist message of MES at such a young age, but he laughed along with the audience at the prank of field surgeons against the female staff, especially at the scene in the shower when Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Halligan is in what mother gave birth in full view of the entire military unit. “Patton” – a traditional pathetic drama about the prowess of American soldiers on the fronts of World War II, “Oscar” in the end, won only an award for adapted screenplay – Ring Lardner Jr., who transferred to the screen Richard Hooker’s autobiographical novel “MASH : the story of three army doctors. However, there was no reason for Altman to be upset because of the loss, because MES had already won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and collected an impressive box office at the box office. For a recent debutant – truly Altman came to the cinema at the age of forty – it was an unthinkable success. Two years after the premiere, MES will inspire TV people to create a series of the same name, which was produced due to its huge popularity right up to 1983.
The idea to film Hooker’s extremely critical novel about the life of military doctors in the frontline zone in Korea came to Ring Lardner, who had already established himself as an excellent screenwriter on The Cincinnati Kid (1965) by Sam Peckinpah and Norman Jewison. Lardner offered to buy the rights to Ingo Preminger (the younger brother of the famous director Otto Preminger), who worked mainly as a literary agent – in particular, he represented the interests of Dalton Trumbo, who suffered from McCarthyism, and therefore felt nothing but indignation towards the state and military machine. Together with 20th Century Fox bosses, Ingo Preminger compiled a list of prospective directors: David Lean, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Mankiewicz, all big stars of classic and New Hollywood. However, none of the applicants could take part in the project due to a busy schedule or did not want to take part in the project due to the complexity of the material. Last on the list was Altman, who had a couple of films that moderately interested critics (the fantasy drama Countdown with Robert Duvall and James Caan in 1967 and the paranoid thriller A Cold Day in the Park, shown out of competition at Cannes in 1969) . Altman’s chances, frankly, were not great, but unlike other candidates, he imagined the world of army drill and military everyday life firsthand, because he studied at the Wentworth Military Academy in Missouri and fought in World War II, flying a B-24 bomber over the Dutch East -India. As soon as he read the book, Altman expressed a fiery readiness to rush into an anti-militarist attack and debunk all the myths about the US Armed Forces – not only old, but also modern: it was 1969 in the yard, the Vietnam War did not leave the newspaper pages, the Korean campaign that preceded it could become ideal historical material for a film that exposes today.
Of course, Altman was not entrusted with the budget he was counting on. Therefore, Korea and Japan, where the protagonists are urgently called, tearing them away from the golf tournament, to save the son of a congressman who was seriously injured, were filmed in a pavilion in Santa Monica, where, behind the wall at the same moment, as if on purpose, Franklin Sheffner was conducting Patton. The plein-air scenes – actually golf and other fooling around – were played by the actors in the neighborhood of the villa of the film industry magnate Darryl F. Zanuck, who constantly complained about the noise and obscene behavior of the group members.
While working on the director’s version of the script, Altman decided that there should not be any military actions in the frame, only their result: bodies disfigured by the blast wave, which rule more than they repair, surgeons cutting off limbs with a saw so that gangrene does not kill the patient. In any case, soon after waking up, depression will kill the patient. “When he wakes up, tell him there’s nothing between his legs now,” Captain Pierce Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) tells the nurse heartlessly.
The producers demanded that Altman get rid of overly naturalistic episodes during editing, showing in bloody details what is happening on the operating table after the fighter on it has fulfilled his duty and with honor, like unusable material, can be written off as scrap. Altman, however, insisted on his own – the barracks humor and healthy cynicism of the MES needed dramatic counterpoint. Sex, which is morbidly dreamed of, obsessively talked about, and, if very lucky, stupidly engaged in by heroes, is a remedy for the fear that gnaws at souls stuck in frontline hell. Recalling in interviews about his personal military experience, Altman always said that on the front line he thought only of girls, and only in a scurrilous manner. A soldier needs sex to feel alive before death has its last word, using guns instead of a microphone. Before you lie down in a zinc coffin, you need to lie down – neither the gender nor the rank of the one who agrees to drag himself into a bunk is important.
From the point of view of feminism, MES is a monstrously patriarchal movie bursting with misogyny through gluing; from the point of view of humanism, it is an epiphany, because God is love. But in general, “MESH” is the triumph of the absurd both over the Holy Scriptures and over secular legislation. Be fruitful and multiply so that you can be killed without guilt, and kill without consequence. Altman’s intentional sexism equals anti-conformity – “MESH” rips the veil not from the female body, but from human hypocrisy. Major “Hot Lips” Hooligan (Sally Kellerman) first scribbles along with Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) a denunciation of the unbridled behavior of senior surgeons Pierce and McIntyre (Elliott Gould), and then throws himself into the arms of Burns, forgetting all decorum, because and she is overtaken by fear and despair. In war there is nowhere to run, except to each other, to someone who is still breathing. “You have a wife and children at home,” the pretty nurse mutters passionately to Pierce, kissing him all the time. “If she were here, I would love her, not you,” the captain replies to her: in war and without heart dilemmas, there are too many contradictions. Arriving at the unit, McIntyre arranges photographs of his legal wife, offspring and a beauty from a pornographic magazine on the bedside table, also not wanting to delve into the nuances of contradictions.
MES opens with quotes from General MacArthur and President Eisenhower, parting words to both audience and protagonists with official speeches: “our guys give the best they have”, “our guys will stand”, and so on through the list of false patriotic truisms. What does “ours” mean? Who gave the right to officials in civilian clothes and martinets, who appear more often at banquets than on the front lines, to appropriate the lives of people, controlling their destinies, allegedly in the name of the motherland? What is this homeland doing in Korea or Vietnam? Whose freedom is she defending? It seems like the freedom to die, because there is nothing else on the menu: death for both the first and the second, and whoever didn’t have enough is free to cut off his head or put his own for dessert. In addition to chefs who write down their recipes on geographical maps or stamped paper, here, as it should be in a first-class institution, there are also managers who are responsible for spiritual food. The chaplains distract the soldier from death with their sermons. “Hey, devout, hold on, clamp,” McIntyre calls out to one of these preachers, “you look, you won’t have to bury the patient.” Every morning at the MES begins with the announcement of a cultural program: today you will be shown the excellent film “When Willy Comes Home”, this film will cheer you up and make you look to the future with optimism! “Ah, that’s what we’re all doing here – asserting optimism!” – mockingly imitate film critics resounding from the loudspeakers, suffering from a hangover surgeons.
The audacity with which lead singers McIntyre and Pierce engage in both drunken brawls and ideological disputes also stems in large part from desperation. What difference does it make where to kill time – in custody or on guard – and there and there it is complete darkness. But this never-ending rebellion – in small things and in essence – is also a distinctive feature of the genre, erected by Altman into a principle: a hundred-headed militaristic monster can be defeated with his own weapons. Dementia and courage are a win-win tactic in the fight against the absurdity approaching on all fronts. And in this sense, Macintyre and Pierce inherit the glorious tradition of Schweik, another “feeble-minded” but fearless character who performed his famous Budejovitsky anabasis, maintaining good spirits and clarity of mind amid general idiocy and madness. Hooker, according to his confessions, as well as Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22 (by the way, filmed by Mike Nichols and released in the same 1970), was influenced by Hasek’s novel.
Absurdity rebounds from McIntyre and Pierce because they deny the military reality imposed on them the right to exist. Fools are born, scoundrels become. It is better to live side by side with the former in peace than to sow death and die at the behest of the latter, for patience will be rewarded, and punishment follows crime, far from all guilt can be atoned for.
In the finale, after a football match organized at the whim of an eccentric general, the heroes return to the tent, where Pierce is ordered to go home. On the same jeep, on which he got into this lunatic asylum, Hawkeye will disappear around the corner without really saying goodbye to his comrades. “Goodbye” in a military context sounds too ambiguous and invariably sad. They would rather never meet again, because only one more deadly meat grinder can become an excuse. On the other hand, saying goodbye forever is like burying beforehand.
Instead of credits, the Military Field Hospital will announce the names of the performers and authors of the existential pantomime that has just been performed before us: what happened is unlikely to be dreamed of, and yet it was a damn good performance. “You watched MASH,” the announcer in the radio station groaned. MES will be strictly banned from display in the US Army for many years to come.
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