[On July 27th, 1953 an armistice signed by President Eisenhower ended the Korean War. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that endpoint and other Korean conflict contexts!]
On AmericanStudies
takeaways from each of the three iterations of M*A*S*H.
1)
The Novel: I can’t
be alone (at least among us born post-1970) in not having been aware that the
entire MASH franchise originated with
a book, Richard
Hooker’s (a pseudonym for military surgeon H. Richard Hornberger) MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors
(1968). That was just the beginning of the literary franchise, as Hooker
followed it up with two sequels over the next decade, M*A*S*H Goes to Maine (1972) and M*A*S*H Mania (1977). When we remember that Monday’s subject,
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, was published
just seven years before Hooker’s book, the two novels become part of a longer
conversation (along with Wednesday’s subject Dr. Strangelove) about 1960s wartime comedies and satires. Interestingly
none of those works focuses on the decade’s ongoing war in Vietnam, but of
course all of them were at least implicitly in conversation with that
contemporary event.
2)
The Film: Just two years after the publication
of Hooker’s novel, journalist and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. adapted
it into a screenplay that was then directed by the young filmmaker Robert
Altman as M*A*S*H (1970). Both Lardner Jr. (in tandem
with his dad Ring Lardner Sr.) and Altman have plenty to tell us about American
culture and pop culture across the 20th century, as does the fact
that the film is apparently the first studio
movie to feature audibly the word “fuck.” But what’s particularly
interesting to me is the way in which the film’s main changes from Hooker’s
novel involve the two characters of color: in the book the main Black character
is known as “Spearchucker” Jones and is the target of significant stereotyping,
whereas he gets a more three-dimensional portrayal in the
film; and in the book the young Korean soldier Ho-Jon is killed off, whereas in
the film (and later the TV show) he survives. Close in time, but quite distinct
in tone, are these two texts.
3)
The TV Show: Just two
years after that film (and thus only four years after the novel—this franchise
exploded very fast), on September 17, 1972, that hyperlinked opening scene of
the pilot episode aired on CBS, launching what would become one of the most
successful TV shows in history by the time its hugely prominent finale
aired in February 1983. Of course a show that ran for 256 episodes
across 11 seasons diverged in all sorts of big and small ways from the book and
film alike; but the core characters remained the same, a striking testimony to
their appeal across all these genres and media. But one thing that’s specific
to the show’s more than a decade-long timeline is how much the world changed
across those years—from the Vietnam War ending to the changes in the Cold War
between 1972 to 1983, and with many concurrent changes to the medium of
television itself, a show like M*A*S*H
can help us track and analyze contexts well beyond its characters and plots.
Last post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do
you think? Any other Korean War contexts you’d highlight?
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