Directing Despair

At 75, Robert Altman remains one of our most enigmatic and inventive filmmakers. His penetrating, and sometimes quirky, vision pierces the thin skin of American culture, peeling away and examining the layers of false stereotypes, misunderstanding, and deceit that alienate individuals from their society. Altman's vision is nowhere more evident than in his films of the 1970s, currently being featured at a retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Altman's films, from M*A*S*H (1970) to A Wedding (1979), examined in various ways the failure of institutional structures--the Church, the military, political organizations, even country music--to provide any kind of moral and religious instruction, guidance, or authority. Altman's challenge to authority shows up in ineffectual chaplains and preachers (M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller) and in inept political figures (Nashville). Beginning with M*A*S*H, individuals find themselves cast into a world bereft of morality, in which they must create for themselves some kind of moral sensibility.

In the moral universe of Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Elliott Gould) from M*A*S*H*, the highest ethical standard is to performing surgery well to save lives. Military regulations are no guidelines for Hawkeye and Trapper, or for anyone else in the camp, since those rules can't be apply in their isolated medical camp, where the agonies of war are plain to see and arrive like a tide twice a day. Even authority figures, like camp commander Colonel Henry Blake (Roger Bowen) and the quasi-religious Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) abandon traditional moral instruction, instead creating their own standards when all normal standards are meaningless.

"I'm here if you need me, if you have any problems," Dago Red, the priest in M*A*S*H*, tells anyone who'll listen--which is nearly no one. Yet confronted with Painless Pole's fear of impotence and his suicidal thoughts, Dago Red turns to Hawkeye, asking him to talk to Painless. The company celebrates a "Last Supper" with Painless, giving him sleeping pills he thinks will put him out of his misery. After Painless "dies," Lieutenant Dish (Jo Ann Pflug) enters his "deathbed" and resurrects him through sexual intercourse. Although here sex replaces religion as a means of healing, the scene reinforces Altman's idea that traditional authoritarian structures fail to provide the moral vision necessary to cope with a meaningless world.

Altman wasn't alone in challenging the failure of traditional religious and moral authorities. In 1967, American film began to change radically as it confronted the inability of political and religious institutions to provide ways of coping with a society divided by the Vietnam War and Civil Rights. With the demise of the studio system in Hollywood and rising influence of French New Wave filmmakers like Godard and Truffaut, a new generation of American filmmakers launched their own efforts to question prevailing moral standards.

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