>The difference between these two films is the
>presence in _Nashville_ of a perspective that questions men's and the total
>lack thereof in _M*A*S*H*_.
And it's not the antiwar movie it's cracked up to be. Slavoj Zizek says of M*A*S*H:
<quote> Let us further illustrate this gap between an explicit texture and its phantasmic support with an example from cinema. Contrary to its misleading appearance, Robert Altman's MASH is a perfectly conformist film - for all their mockery of authority, practical jokes and sexual escapades, the members of the MASH crew perform their job exemplarily, and thus present absolutely no threat to the smooth nunning of the military machine. In other words, the cliche which regards MASH as an anti-militarist film, depicting the horrors of the meaningless military slaughter which can be endured only through a healthy measure of cynicism, practical jokes, laughing at pompous official rituals, and so on, misses the point - this very distance is ideology. This dimension of MASH becomes even more tangible the moment one compares it to two other well-known films about military life, An Officer and a Gentleman and Full Metal Jacket. MASH and An Officer exhibit the two versions of the perfectly functioning military subject: identification with the military machine is supported either by ironic distrust, indulgence in practical jokes and sexual escapades (MASH), or by the awareness that behind the cmel drill-sergeant there is a 'warm human person', a helping father-substitute who only feigns cruelty (in An Officer and a Gentleman), in strict analogy with the - profoundly anti-feminist - myth of a hooker who, deep in her heart, longs to be a good mother. Full Metal Jacket, on the other hand, successfully resists this ideological temptation to 'humanize' the drill sergeant or other members of the crew, and thus lays on the table the cards of the military ideological machine: the distance from it, far from signalling the limitation of the ideological machine, functions as its positive condition of possibility. What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing 'Happy birthday dear Jesus . . .') - in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. This part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military ideological machine, 'runs amok' and shoots first the drill sergeant, then himself; the radical, unmediated identification with the phantasmic superego machine necessarily leads to a murderous passage a l'acte. The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew Modine) who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic 'human distance' towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription 'Born to kill' is accompanied by the peace sign, etc. - in short, it looks as if he has stepped right out of MASH!), shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject.
The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'. Close analysis of even the most 'totalitarian' ideological edifice inevitably reveals that, not everything in it is 'ideology' (in the popular sense of the 'politically instrumentalized legitimization of power relations'): in every ideological edifice, there is a kind of 'trans-ideological' kernel, since, if an ideology is to become operative and effectively 'seize' individuals, it has to batten on and manipulate some kind of 'trans-ideological' vision which cannot be reduced to a simple instrument of legitimizing pretensions to power (notions and sentiments of solidarity, justice, belonging to a community, etc.). Is not a kind of 'authentic' vision discernible even in Nazism (the notion of the deep solidarity which keeps the 'community of people' together), not to mention Stalinism? The point is thus not that there is no ideology without a trans-ideological 'authentic' kernel but rather, that it is only the reference to such a trans-ideological kernel which makes an ideology 'workable'. </quote>