MASH Is NOT an Anti-War Movie
MASH is often characterized as an anti-war movie, but that is not entirely accurate. Hawkeye and Trapper John and to a lesser extent Duke and to a lesser extent most of the others working at the unit are most assuredly engaged in a war they view as just. The problem is that their enemy is not the same one the soldiers are fighting. Their enemy is not the evil communist hordes from the North of the Korean peninsula, but the military leaders who have decided that the evil communist hordes from the North are actually worth killing and dying for. Hawkeye are constantly at war and rarely take the position of stepping back as peaceful pacifist activists. They heartily engage the misguided American military-industrial machine with all the fervor of soldiers on the battlefield.
Life Is Precious
The one thing that is considered precious and sanctified in this military unit is life. That is all that matters to the rebels who slowly take charge of the 4077th out of the hands of the hypocritical Hot Lips and Frank Burns. Burns, especially, is the engine driving this theme: he holds pretensions toward the sanctity of life through the lens of the sanctity of religion. Then he turns around and commits adultery, thus proving not only that he has feet of clay, but can’t even adhere to the ten single most important rules found in the Bible. Religion is as useful for preserving life amid the madness of war as marching and saluting for those who recognize the true value of life.
The Incapacity of Religion to Offer Hope and Solace
Indeed, religion takes just as hard a satirical uppercut as the war. In addition to making Frank Burn a symbol of Christian hypocrisy, the hospital’s resident chaplain is barely recognizable as a man of God, especially in comparison to the long history of chaplains popping up in war movies throughout the history of Hollywood. And, of course, perhaps the single most controversial scene in the movie cannot be interpreted as an anti-war statement at all, though it certainly can be interpreted as blasphemous. The recreation of Da Vinci’s arrangement of Jesus and his apostles at the Last Supper would be likely enough to have raised the hackles of the church by itself. When you add in the fact that sitting in place of Jesus is a man about to commit to suicide because his prodigious penis has apparently stopped working as intended, it becomes clear that religion is every bit as much in the bullseye of the makers as war and the military.
Race Relations
An often overlooked aspect of the thematic material covered by MASH is it examination of race. Keep in mind that although the film is set in the early 1950’s, it was made in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. At the time, very few Americans questioned that the white James Earl Ray had indeed been responsible for killing King. Although not actually a southerner at all, Ray fit the part of the redneck from Dixie avenging the Confederacy by murdering the most famous black man in the country with the possible exception of Muhammad Ali or Jim Brown. And thus the introduction of a seemingly out of place football game with a black “ringer” nicknamed Spearchucker coming into conflict with a character who actually is a redneck who embodies all the worst attributes of the South—Duke—begins to make a lot more sense. Also worth keeping in mind is that at the time of the film’s release in 1970, Bear Bryant’s vaunted Univ. of Alabama football teams had yet to field one single black player in any position.
