Hot Lips' Last Kiss
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television HOT LIPS' LAST KISS BY MARVIN KITMAN Just as Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had its final chapter, M*A*S*H came to an end one night last...
...In fact, he didn't look much different when he returned to the unit after being cured, except that he was not wisecracking so much...
...That is something, at least...
...So it made you feel a little bad...
...Some worried about people in high places being sorry the Korean War was ending, and unconsciously making a move that could begin the shooting again...
...A frustrated TV viewer on the government payroll could take an insult from his North Korean counterpart the wrong way...
...After all, ABC spent 18 hours earlier in the month on The Winds of War, and that only had to do with the start of World War II...
...In this case I tuned in far beyond the call of criticism...
...It was fascinating to see how Hawk-eye and crew dealt with ambiguity, how they grappled with the subtleties of right and wrong...
...This was an unusual experience for TV audiences...
...They won some and lost some...
...Maybe Douglas MacArthur had a point in his farewell address about old soldiers fading away...
...Usually TV critics don't have the time to actually watch television-we're too busy scribbling about it...
...In Asia, Europe, everywhere they watch the show, people would believe what they see on the tube...
...As Larry Gelbart, in one of those startling insights you sometimes glean from the tube, explained to TV news show reporters the night before, CBS had earned a mere $340 million from the series...
...Frankly, all the tipsters bothered me...
...The writers milked the occasion so shamelessly you could hear the cows mooing all the way to India...
...The stories cut close to the bone, often uncomfortably close...
...Although few people know it," I explained, "the war in Korea isn't officially finished...
...It didn't prevent Vietnam, no matter how furiously we played dominoes...
...Loretta Swit may have me disbarred from the TV Viewers of America for not appreciating the high professionalism she has brought to nursing since she dumped Frank Burns, but I still think of Major Margaret Houlihan as Hot Lips and a delicious dish...
...We don't show the wounded screaming in pain," Alan Alda observed on the public TV documentary, The Making of M*A*S*H...
...The show created a kind of us and them ambience...
...The first authentic living room war was also the most protracted in the annals of TV-11 years, almost three times the duration of the actual fighting in Korea...
...People would have been able to say war wasn't insane, only Hawkeyewas...
...You have to be willing to be funny and let the pain come through," Alda continued on the documentary...
...The last 15-20 minutes had me in tears...
...Peace would break out...
...Or they could have saved up for another farewell next year...
...The U.S...
...We were all noncombatants here, TV viewers First Class: They also serve who sit and watch...
...Okay, Hawkeye didn't sound too insane when he was in the loony bin with General MacArthur and Harry Truman (two other GIs...
...Not that anyone complained about the melancholy that accompanied the joy...
...The Roman Empire's fall seemed rushed by comparison...
...Network greed was behind the bloated length...
...Most times after the laughs you'd wind up feeling a little down...
...A permanently deranged Hawkeye would have been worse than the death of Colonel Blake...
...I could wait for M-Night along with everyone else...
...You had to be 14 to get the jokes...
...Still, those who never missed an episode should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor with oak clusters (or chairs) for dedicated duty...
...Because TV is such a passive pastime, I suppose we were really passivists...
...All wars everywhere might come to an end...
...Audiences have so little to look forward to in the way of surprises that it is cruel to ruin the fun...
...It could have been the beginning of a new tradition, a tradition like the Bob Hope farewells on NBC or Jack Benny's Third Annual Farewell specials...
...My son at law school in Boston called me with details he had overheard from somebody on the subway near Fenway Park...
...I saw it on television,' everyone would say...
...The best touch was Hawkeye's going crazy...
...They should be pursuing leads about corruption in important places and leave TV alone...
...M*A*S*H was a wonderful program, an amazing piece of artistry...
...put it, 'The reality of TV is greater than real life...
...It almost didn't matter...
...What did it settle...
...That's sitcom...
...They were all heroes in their idiosyncratic way, often stupidly heroic, yet they all had their flaws...
...I never realized they had such great shrinks in the Army, right up there with the dentists...
...Parts were moving...
...Or if he had gone home to Crabtree Cove, Maine, as a basket case...
...would win, of course...
...You'd come for laughs, get them, and get something to think about as well...
...On Television HOT LIPS' LAST KISS BY MARVIN KITMAN Just as Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had its final chapter, M*A*S*H came to an end one night last month...
...The length is awkward too, so it won't fit into all the local stations' schedules...
...With the show ending, I suppose they could tell more of the truth about the carnage...
...I bet an Annen-berg Media Foundation study would uncover a significant correlation...
...Worst of all, the final episode sure took itself seriously...
...M*A*S*H was Diana Trilling's favorite TV offering, and mine, too...
...The show was great not because it gave answers, but because it acknowledged the existence of problems...
...A group of North Koreans, the people in the bushes outside the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital who do all the guffawing on the laugh track, kept slipping me little hints...
...Heck, I myself told Alda how I thought the show should end...
...She and Hawkeye should get married in the postwar period, if you ask me...
...I disapprove of my press colleagues who feel they must lie, cheat and rummage through wastebaskets to find out the big secret about a television program...
...We always heard how high its Nielsen ratings were, but no one has ever looked into the suicide rate the nights it was on...
...I always sensed a missing element, like a major part of the ghastliness of war...
...The National Enquirer and the National Star, those scholarly journals, had their inside accounts...
...At 150 minutes it was two hours too long...
...Certain unpleasantness was avoided, sure...
...Everything was so sweet my teeth ached as much as my heart...
...It would be a great victory...
...There are people enjoying and understanding M*A*S*H," Alan Alda once told me in awe, "who were not even born when it started...
...We glanced at other sitcoms and sniffed, "What does that fluff, that contrived bit of nonsense have to do with iw...
...V-K Day...
...Alan smiled, and demurred: "We want the show to follow history...
...With reruns M*A*S*H will be right up there with the War of the Roses or the Hundred Years War in the contention for the longest running (or sitting) conflict...
...Seeing the farewell would be jarring when there are 251 installments floating around to be syndicated a zillion times...
...At times I was convinced I was watching Marcus Welby, M.D...
...Hell, this was war...
...One consolation is that we will probably be old and gray before the final episode is aired again...
...Indeed, this episode in our history remains unresolved in the American conscience...
...Big deal if Klinger returns to Toledo and opens a dress shop, or if Winchester signs on as the team physician for the Boston Red Sox...
...Not even any gray comedy...
...M*A*S*H should make its exit by unilaterally declaring the war over...
...Maybe you can't get too much of a sad thing...
...however, was soporific...
...Those poor guys...
...The windup would have worked better as a miniseries, a five-night, five-movie goodbye...
...M*A*S*H was a great source of national gloom, in fact...
...With the exception of Rizzo, the motor pool sar-geant, everybody got to tell us what they were going to do after the war a high school yearbook kind of script from Alda and the seven writers...
...I loved the sustained kiss between Hot Lips and Hawkeye...
...This time it was gushing...
...That would have invalidated the antiwar sentiments he had been pushing for the past 11 years...
...You risk failure by trying to capture the ambiguity of war...
...The characters were very real, too...
...That's them...
...Week after week you witnessed men suffering and dying in a far off place where the issues being fought over were unclear...
...The final installment turned out to be a very long goodbye...
...Thank goodness Sidney Freeman guided him back to mental health...
...The 4077th grew in importance until it became to TV what the Beatles were to music...
...Life is depressing enough...
...For months the press was buzzing with speculation about the final two and a half hour movie that was going to conclude the Korean War on TV after 11 years...
...Alda was wise not to allow Hawkeye to remain crazy...
...In other historic firsts, we saw puddles of blood in the operating room...
...While picking its way through a minefield of human emotions, the 4077th broke all the rules of television situation comedy-including the one that demands mindlessness...
...As the fateful final night of February 28 inched closer, everyone was filling me in on what happens in the last episode...
...What a bummer it would have been for the American people if everybody's beloved Hawkeye Pierce ended up nuts from the bloodshed and senseless violence...
...What mattered was their dealing with such issues on a sitcom...
...Well-written and well-acted, daring (for network TV), M*A*S*H miraculously survived and flourished, becoming a part of our folklore...
...The ultimate purpose of the "police action" may have been to provide the material for the television tales of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital...
...Something had happened on the bus to make him snap...
...You'd have to be a traitor to say a harsh word about those doctors and nurses...
...What was it all about anyway...
...They expanded the whole thing to five times the usual half hour to add plenty of extra commercials...
...we all have a tendency to drag out farewells as long as possible, standing at the door with our coats on, but this was ridiculous...
...As Marshall McLuhan (or was it Ching Chow in the Daily News...
...But the pain came through after the laughs...
...It was as if there was a reality knob on the set that everyone had agreed not to fiddle with...
...In the past the red was present only in little touches from an artist's palette...
...To this day both sides still meet regularly at the peace table in Panmunjon...
...It'shard enough to write good jokes, hard to get [audiences] to feel something...
...No black comedy...
...With M*A*S*H, all of us-writers, performers, viewers, society-were together, laughing at the absurdity of the battles and the killing...
...You couldn't react any other way to the insanity of the situation, especially during the Korean War...
...It wasn't created for the 12-year-old intellect...
Vol. 66 • March 1983 • No. 5
