the one no one will get*
18 Nov 2009 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigou* except Windsor, who started at the top and kept going until she got it.
I posted a list of fandoms, though not all were necessarily actively fannish -- I mean, some of those pre-date any kind of an awareness of fandom, so I loosely defined it for myself as "a story, book, or movie in which I spent time wondering what happened to the character(s) after the story ended". The one no one's going to get, I'm almost certain, is the character from M*A*S*H.
I grew up with M*A*S*H, in great part because my grandfather was a Korean vet, and the show was one of my grandparents' favorite shows. I have no idea what else they watched -- we weren't really a big TV-watching family, on paternal or maternal sides -- but we'd watch M*A*S*H every time we visited. Even into adulthood, if I'd catch a rerun, I'd stop and watch it. Yes, because I loved the show and the characters, but also because it was a connection to my own childhood.
My family is strongly military, so a lot of M*A*S*H made sense to me on some basic level, with jargon I grew up with. Things like knowing that AWOL isn't automatically the same as desertion, and being roughly familiar with jargon like deployment and moving out, and knowing seemingly from birth that M*A*S*H stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Other things, not so much, like the ongoing tension about being in Korea unwillingly; my family was almost exclusively willfully enlisted, not drafted, so I didn't completely get the characters' frustrations. I could get, though, that one might enroll for something and then figure out after-the-fact that this is not a good place to be, to change one's mind, and to want to go home.
Which is why Corporal Maxwell Klinger was my favoritest character on M*A*S*H -- not because he wanted to go home, but because of how he tried to do it.
A lot did go right over my head, as a kid, like the tension yet camaraderie, the way adult relationships can contain animosity but at the same time have strong bonds and lines that don't get crossed... but that's the nature of being a kid, I think. You just don't get it until you've been there. What I could relate to about M*A*S*H was the environment -- not Korea, but the concept of a warzone. Not because I had literal bombs falling on my head, or people dying on my doorstep, but the schizophrenia of life in a warzone, of living when there's a lot around you that would really rather you not.
That, I totally got, and it meant M*A*S*H was one of the only shows I could ever, did ever, watch that somehow clicked as an analogue for my own home/life. I mean, you'd have scenes where previously fractious characters, like Hawkeye and Winchester and Hunnicutt, would be playing a game of touch football. There are ammunitions storage in the background, and the helicopter pad's not far away, all these signs of wartime, but in that moment, it wasn't entirely bad. They were able to make something half-way tolerable of it, like Winchester listening to music in the tent, or the moonshine from Hawkeye's and Trapper John's still. When I say 'schizophrenia', I mean that very intentionally: that war is crazy, and crazy-making, and that the characters exemplified the idea of grabbing what good you can when nothing is certain.
That's where Corporal Klinger's cross-dressing comes into it. Now, true, I didn't entirely understand the idea of having been drafted nor why Hawkeye spent so much time grousing about being there against his will, but Klinger never seemed to express the same anger about it, so much as a steadfast determination to go home. Of all the options, most of them obviously required that one either break promises (desertion) or hurt someone (create a hostage-like situation to commandeer a ride home) or hurt one's self (severe injury as path to discharge), Klinger's route really didn't hurt anyone at all. In a show where people are getting shot, blown up, killed, sewn back together and sent back out, and a lot of the characters are sleeping with each other, breaking each others' hearts, drinking heavily, and frequently being nasty to each other as part of acting out their own frustrations, Klinger's coping mechanism was truly harmless.
I mean, the entire series is pretty upfront about the fact that war is crazy, and being at war is crazy-making, and trying to avoid catching this crazy is, in itself, going to make you just as crazy. Klinger's response resonated because it mirrored the story my father's reasons for joining the Air Force: that if you enlist willingly in a time of war, you'll have more avenues open as to what you can do (eg, getting advanced degrees instead of the front lines). In some ways, Klinger may have been unwilling in joining the Army, but he willfully joins the crazy -- thereby opening more avenues for dealing with that crazy, compared to all the other characters who were unwilling and therefore ill-equipped to handle the crazy.
But it's not just the crazy itself. It's also the fact that Klinger didn't do a half-ass crazy but didn't do a destructive crazy, either. He didn't chew the scenery, which mattered to me, and he didn't blow off his job, either. He'd made a promise and sworn his duty, and had official responsibilities -- I knew that much was required and honorable, seeing my father, grandfather, and uncles -- so if he'd spent his time frothing at the mouth or shirking work in histrionics, I wouldn't have respected him at all. That would be a different kind of crazy, the same self-destructive crazy I saw in the other characters. But Klinger does his job and he's fairly good at it, enough that his CO notes that the only thing of issue about Klinger is his preferred mode of dress.
In other words, you can pick a path of crazy as a reaction to the crazy you're dealing with, and it doesn't have to destroy you. In fact, you can contribute and be valued even in a world of crazy, even when you're embracing the crazy.
And it's even more than that, this full-ass crazy, I guess you could call it. Because Klinger didn't just wear a dress and let that be it. No, any time you see Klinger, he's got a hat, he's wearing gloves, and he has a matching purse. (I recall one time Hawkeye compliments him on whatever he's wearing, and Klinger says, "I thought it was quite fetching myself.") Klinger didn't do half-way on it. He took it to its logical conclusion, in terms of what women considered appropriate fashion-wear for that time: glove, hat, purse, even wearing a slip under his skirts. I mean, that's cross-dressing, and doing it with style. He didn't try to pass himself off as a woman, or speak in a falsetto; it was cross-dressing in the strictest sense of the term, to dress as the opposite sex. I mean as a distinction between "dress as the opposite sex to pass one's self off as a member of that sex" versus the common route you see when it's a het-man doing it, which is "dress as the opposite sex in order to ridicule the opposite sex". Klinger did neither. He just freaking wore the clothes -- with, as I recall, a total lack of the cultural overlay/defenses that usually come with cross-dressing for straight men -- and as a result he always seemed to me to be the sanest crazy in a crazy world of crazies.
Even as a child, though, there were undercurrents I did catch, like the slight tension between Klinger and the nurses, who might wear a little makeup but were almost always in Army green. They're also almost always dirty, sweaty, tired, flushed, worn-out, and generally overworked, while Klinger (being on office-duty) can afford to be a sharper dresser. But somehow, Klinger's affectation of the crazy made the nurses even more powerfully feminine in my childhood brain, because it underlined that if you take a woman and put her in a warzone, and you take away her makeup and her pretty dresses and all the other accoutrement that scream 'feminine', she remains a woman.
She's not a honorary man, nor is she an unattractive or unsexy thing of no notice -- I mean, Hot Lips Houlihan spends the majority of the series in Army green, yet she's undeniably one of the sexiest women on the show, and at the same time is also undeniably one of the most capable, strong, resilient, and complex women as well. She doesn't fall apart in womanish cries at the sight of blood, she doesn't pine over the lack of pretty things or the fact that she has to deal with blood and guts. Or the fact that Nurse Kealani Kellye is sweet and adorable and incredibly feminine compared to Houlihan, yet she's just as tough as Houlihan, in her own way, and still without the extra trappings that signify "woman", visually.
It's having Klinger over there, as a contrast, that let me see that everything he adopts as part of his sane-making crazy, these are all unnecessary things in terms of some fundamental understanding of sex/gender because his crazy doesn't make him less of a man, and the nurses' lack-of-feminine-accessories doesn't make them less as women.
In hindsight, I can see the potential problematic elements of Klinger, at least superficially. I recall distinctly the episode in which he insists he's not gay, and not a transvestite, he's simply crazy, but that in itself is just as subversive, because what he's really saying is that if he were gay, or if he were a transvestite, that he wouldn't be crazy. That the two (or three) are separate issues; to be one of the first two is not crazy in and of itself. That, in a sense, what's crazy is pretending to be something he's not, but that this doesn't make him what he's not, it only makes him a kind of crazy for trying.
What saves that, I think -- and I was on some level aware of this even as a child -- is that Klinger's brand of crazy may be played for laughs by the television show itself, it's not treated as a matter of humor by Klinger himself. Nor, for that matter, is it really treated as an object of ridicule by any of the other characters. We, the audience, aren't expected to laugh -- or at least, it never felt so to me as a child -- along with Klinger as he ridicules or pantomimes being-a-woman, because he doesn't really give that impression; we're expected to laugh at this essentially silly and relatively harmless method he's chosen to try and get out of what is patently obvious as a crazy-making place. But it's also something the show and the characters treat with a certain amount of respect, because in the end he's just one more in a long line of characters who are going crazy from the crazy, and each of them have equally potentially ridiculous (and more destructive) ways of dealing with it.
The last bit is something I really only realized as an adult, when M*A*S*H finally aired its last episode: that the two characters I liked best and close-to-best were two characters completely unlike the usual mainstay of American television. By that I mean that Jamie Parr is Lebanese-American, and Kellye Nakahara is Japanese-American. Maybe it's that in some ways they weren't the usual mold, like Loretta Swit and Alan Alda. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that made for some subtle changes in the ways their characters were written, to be from significantly smaller minorities compared to Alda's Italian-American background. But it does seem telling to me, when I look at characters I resonate with, later on in fandoms, that I don't usually go for the middle-class white male (or female) lead as a favorite, but for someone who isn't like me -- or maybe for that reason those characters speak even more strongly to me, because they're so different in some ways and yet in other ways I feel like there's a kindredness in there.
Or maybe, in Corporal Klinger's case, it's just something I needed as a child, to see someone who dealt with a crazy-making warzone by choosing to be crazy, and thus taking on a kind of empowerment in his chosen crazy. I never found an analogue for that in my own life, but Klinger at least gave me hope that it could be done, and done with a bit of style at the same time, along with knowing the importance of having a purse that matched with your hat.
On my father's side, my grandfather was never military, being too young for WWI, and old to be drafted by WWII, but my great-aunt was military, in WWII and the Korean conflict. She was a nurse, but not just a nurse: she was a NAVY nurse, and I assure you, they are a level of scary unlike any civilian nurse you've ever met. My great-aunt was all of about 5'3" or so, and came across like she was as wide as she was tall, not literally so but psychologically, hell yes.
She was in the Pacific theater for most of WWII, and remained there as things wrapped up with Japan. At some point, a bunch of injured soldiers had been brought on board, where she was the nurse-in-charge and effectively running the sick bay in absence of doctors (as most of them were in the OR or otherwise busy). So she's got this sick bay full of wounded and post-op soldiers, and one of them decides he's going to get himself up and walk himself out the door.
She stops him, and tells him that he's not going anywhere until she says it's okay to go somewhere, and she hasn't said that, so he can plop his ass right back down (except she said it with a few more obscenties, being, y'know, NAVY), and he can stay there until she tells him it's okay to move.
Well, the soldier doesn't like this all that much, and first he protests that he's fine, then he moves into the "do you know who I am" thing, which seems to be a truly pointless move with any nurse in any time in any place on this planet. I mean, nurses must have an extra class that deals with making them immune to the "do you know who I am" stunt, and my great-aunt was no exception. Not just that, she must've passed that class with flying colors, because she told the soldier AND I QUOTE: "I don't give a fucking rat's ass who you are, you're my goddamned patient, and you're staying in that goddamned bed until I fucking say otherwise."
Then the soldier decided moved to the next stage, which is to assume that because he's a fully-grown man with a good six inches or more of height and who knows how many pounds of muscle more than my great-aunt, that he can just muscle his way past her. He starts to get up, she warns him one more time, he says something about how he doesn't have to stay because some lowly nurse told him to stay, so she makes him stay: she decked him.
That's right. She clocked him one, knocked his ass right out, and then shot him up with sedatives and kept him that way for the next twenty-four hours. When he came to, she told him if he didn't behave, she'd keep doing it until he realized who was in charge, and that it wasn't him.
She told we listening kids that after that, the soldier was a model patient. Mostly. Though he did prevail on a doctor and get out after a week instead of the longer time he really could've used, but she'd made her point so she wasn't pressed about it. We said, in awe, holy crap, you just punched the guy! Who was he? Was he someone important?
She just shrugged and said, and I quote, "Hell if I fucking know. Some general."
That's a nurse for ya.
I posted a list of fandoms, though not all were necessarily actively fannish -- I mean, some of those pre-date any kind of an awareness of fandom, so I loosely defined it for myself as "a story, book, or movie in which I spent time wondering what happened to the character(s) after the story ended". The one no one's going to get, I'm almost certain, is the character from M*A*S*H.
I grew up with M*A*S*H, in great part because my grandfather was a Korean vet, and the show was one of my grandparents' favorite shows. I have no idea what else they watched -- we weren't really a big TV-watching family, on paternal or maternal sides -- but we'd watch M*A*S*H every time we visited. Even into adulthood, if I'd catch a rerun, I'd stop and watch it. Yes, because I loved the show and the characters, but also because it was a connection to my own childhood.
My family is strongly military, so a lot of M*A*S*H made sense to me on some basic level, with jargon I grew up with. Things like knowing that AWOL isn't automatically the same as desertion, and being roughly familiar with jargon like deployment and moving out, and knowing seemingly from birth that M*A*S*H stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Other things, not so much, like the ongoing tension about being in Korea unwillingly; my family was almost exclusively willfully enlisted, not drafted, so I didn't completely get the characters' frustrations. I could get, though, that one might enroll for something and then figure out after-the-fact that this is not a good place to be, to change one's mind, and to want to go home.
Which is why Corporal Maxwell Klinger was my favoritest character on M*A*S*H -- not because he wanted to go home, but because of how he tried to do it.
A lot did go right over my head, as a kid, like the tension yet camaraderie, the way adult relationships can contain animosity but at the same time have strong bonds and lines that don't get crossed... but that's the nature of being a kid, I think. You just don't get it until you've been there. What I could relate to about M*A*S*H was the environment -- not Korea, but the concept of a warzone. Not because I had literal bombs falling on my head, or people dying on my doorstep, but the schizophrenia of life in a warzone, of living when there's a lot around you that would really rather you not.
That, I totally got, and it meant M*A*S*H was one of the only shows I could ever, did ever, watch that somehow clicked as an analogue for my own home/life. I mean, you'd have scenes where previously fractious characters, like Hawkeye and Winchester and Hunnicutt, would be playing a game of touch football. There are ammunitions storage in the background, and the helicopter pad's not far away, all these signs of wartime, but in that moment, it wasn't entirely bad. They were able to make something half-way tolerable of it, like Winchester listening to music in the tent, or the moonshine from Hawkeye's and Trapper John's still. When I say 'schizophrenia', I mean that very intentionally: that war is crazy, and crazy-making, and that the characters exemplified the idea of grabbing what good you can when nothing is certain.
That's where Corporal Klinger's cross-dressing comes into it. Now, true, I didn't entirely understand the idea of having been drafted nor why Hawkeye spent so much time grousing about being there against his will, but Klinger never seemed to express the same anger about it, so much as a steadfast determination to go home. Of all the options, most of them obviously required that one either break promises (desertion) or hurt someone (create a hostage-like situation to commandeer a ride home) or hurt one's self (severe injury as path to discharge), Klinger's route really didn't hurt anyone at all. In a show where people are getting shot, blown up, killed, sewn back together and sent back out, and a lot of the characters are sleeping with each other, breaking each others' hearts, drinking heavily, and frequently being nasty to each other as part of acting out their own frustrations, Klinger's coping mechanism was truly harmless.
I mean, the entire series is pretty upfront about the fact that war is crazy, and being at war is crazy-making, and trying to avoid catching this crazy is, in itself, going to make you just as crazy. Klinger's response resonated because it mirrored the story my father's reasons for joining the Air Force: that if you enlist willingly in a time of war, you'll have more avenues open as to what you can do (eg, getting advanced degrees instead of the front lines). In some ways, Klinger may have been unwilling in joining the Army, but he willfully joins the crazy -- thereby opening more avenues for dealing with that crazy, compared to all the other characters who were unwilling and therefore ill-equipped to handle the crazy.
But it's not just the crazy itself. It's also the fact that Klinger didn't do a half-ass crazy but didn't do a destructive crazy, either. He didn't chew the scenery, which mattered to me, and he didn't blow off his job, either. He'd made a promise and sworn his duty, and had official responsibilities -- I knew that much was required and honorable, seeing my father, grandfather, and uncles -- so if he'd spent his time frothing at the mouth or shirking work in histrionics, I wouldn't have respected him at all. That would be a different kind of crazy, the same self-destructive crazy I saw in the other characters. But Klinger does his job and he's fairly good at it, enough that his CO notes that the only thing of issue about Klinger is his preferred mode of dress.
In other words, you can pick a path of crazy as a reaction to the crazy you're dealing with, and it doesn't have to destroy you. In fact, you can contribute and be valued even in a world of crazy, even when you're embracing the crazy.
And it's even more than that, this full-ass crazy, I guess you could call it. Because Klinger didn't just wear a dress and let that be it. No, any time you see Klinger, he's got a hat, he's wearing gloves, and he has a matching purse. (I recall one time Hawkeye compliments him on whatever he's wearing, and Klinger says, "I thought it was quite fetching myself.") Klinger didn't do half-way on it. He took it to its logical conclusion, in terms of what women considered appropriate fashion-wear for that time: glove, hat, purse, even wearing a slip under his skirts. I mean, that's cross-dressing, and doing it with style. He didn't try to pass himself off as a woman, or speak in a falsetto; it was cross-dressing in the strictest sense of the term, to dress as the opposite sex. I mean as a distinction between "dress as the opposite sex to pass one's self off as a member of that sex" versus the common route you see when it's a het-man doing it, which is "dress as the opposite sex in order to ridicule the opposite sex". Klinger did neither. He just freaking wore the clothes -- with, as I recall, a total lack of the cultural overlay/defenses that usually come with cross-dressing for straight men -- and as a result he always seemed to me to be the sanest crazy in a crazy world of crazies.
Even as a child, though, there were undercurrents I did catch, like the slight tension between Klinger and the nurses, who might wear a little makeup but were almost always in Army green. They're also almost always dirty, sweaty, tired, flushed, worn-out, and generally overworked, while Klinger (being on office-duty) can afford to be a sharper dresser. But somehow, Klinger's affectation of the crazy made the nurses even more powerfully feminine in my childhood brain, because it underlined that if you take a woman and put her in a warzone, and you take away her makeup and her pretty dresses and all the other accoutrement that scream 'feminine', she remains a woman.
She's not a honorary man, nor is she an unattractive or unsexy thing of no notice -- I mean, Hot Lips Houlihan spends the majority of the series in Army green, yet she's undeniably one of the sexiest women on the show, and at the same time is also undeniably one of the most capable, strong, resilient, and complex women as well. She doesn't fall apart in womanish cries at the sight of blood, she doesn't pine over the lack of pretty things or the fact that she has to deal with blood and guts. Or the fact that Nurse Kealani Kellye is sweet and adorable and incredibly feminine compared to Houlihan, yet she's just as tough as Houlihan, in her own way, and still without the extra trappings that signify "woman", visually.
It's having Klinger over there, as a contrast, that let me see that everything he adopts as part of his sane-making crazy, these are all unnecessary things in terms of some fundamental understanding of sex/gender because his crazy doesn't make him less of a man, and the nurses' lack-of-feminine-accessories doesn't make them less as women.
In hindsight, I can see the potential problematic elements of Klinger, at least superficially. I recall distinctly the episode in which he insists he's not gay, and not a transvestite, he's simply crazy, but that in itself is just as subversive, because what he's really saying is that if he were gay, or if he were a transvestite, that he wouldn't be crazy. That the two (or three) are separate issues; to be one of the first two is not crazy in and of itself. That, in a sense, what's crazy is pretending to be something he's not, but that this doesn't make him what he's not, it only makes him a kind of crazy for trying.
What saves that, I think -- and I was on some level aware of this even as a child -- is that Klinger's brand of crazy may be played for laughs by the television show itself, it's not treated as a matter of humor by Klinger himself. Nor, for that matter, is it really treated as an object of ridicule by any of the other characters. We, the audience, aren't expected to laugh -- or at least, it never felt so to me as a child -- along with Klinger as he ridicules or pantomimes being-a-woman, because he doesn't really give that impression; we're expected to laugh at this essentially silly and relatively harmless method he's chosen to try and get out of what is patently obvious as a crazy-making place. But it's also something the show and the characters treat with a certain amount of respect, because in the end he's just one more in a long line of characters who are going crazy from the crazy, and each of them have equally potentially ridiculous (and more destructive) ways of dealing with it.
The last bit is something I really only realized as an adult, when M*A*S*H finally aired its last episode: that the two characters I liked best and close-to-best were two characters completely unlike the usual mainstay of American television. By that I mean that Jamie Parr is Lebanese-American, and Kellye Nakahara is Japanese-American. Maybe it's that in some ways they weren't the usual mold, like Loretta Swit and Alan Alda. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that made for some subtle changes in the ways their characters were written, to be from significantly smaller minorities compared to Alda's Italian-American background. But it does seem telling to me, when I look at characters I resonate with, later on in fandoms, that I don't usually go for the middle-class white male (or female) lead as a favorite, but for someone who isn't like me -- or maybe for that reason those characters speak even more strongly to me, because they're so different in some ways and yet in other ways I feel like there's a kindredness in there.
Or maybe, in Corporal Klinger's case, it's just something I needed as a child, to see someone who dealt with a crazy-making warzone by choosing to be crazy, and thus taking on a kind of empowerment in his chosen crazy. I never found an analogue for that in my own life, but Klinger at least gave me hope that it could be done, and done with a bit of style at the same time, along with knowing the importance of having a purse that matched with your hat.
On my father's side, my grandfather was never military, being too young for WWI, and old to be drafted by WWII, but my great-aunt was military, in WWII and the Korean conflict. She was a nurse, but not just a nurse: she was a NAVY nurse, and I assure you, they are a level of scary unlike any civilian nurse you've ever met. My great-aunt was all of about 5'3" or so, and came across like she was as wide as she was tall, not literally so but psychologically, hell yes.
She was in the Pacific theater for most of WWII, and remained there as things wrapped up with Japan. At some point, a bunch of injured soldiers had been brought on board, where she was the nurse-in-charge and effectively running the sick bay in absence of doctors (as most of them were in the OR or otherwise busy). So she's got this sick bay full of wounded and post-op soldiers, and one of them decides he's going to get himself up and walk himself out the door.
She stops him, and tells him that he's not going anywhere until she says it's okay to go somewhere, and she hasn't said that, so he can plop his ass right back down (except she said it with a few more obscenties, being, y'know, NAVY), and he can stay there until she tells him it's okay to move.
Well, the soldier doesn't like this all that much, and first he protests that he's fine, then he moves into the "do you know who I am" thing, which seems to be a truly pointless move with any nurse in any time in any place on this planet. I mean, nurses must have an extra class that deals with making them immune to the "do you know who I am" stunt, and my great-aunt was no exception. Not just that, she must've passed that class with flying colors, because she told the soldier AND I QUOTE: "I don't give a fucking rat's ass who you are, you're my goddamned patient, and you're staying in that goddamned bed until I fucking say otherwise."
Then the soldier decided moved to the next stage, which is to assume that because he's a fully-grown man with a good six inches or more of height and who knows how many pounds of muscle more than my great-aunt, that he can just muscle his way past her. He starts to get up, she warns him one more time, he says something about how he doesn't have to stay because some lowly nurse told him to stay, so she makes him stay: she decked him.
That's right. She clocked him one, knocked his ass right out, and then shot him up with sedatives and kept him that way for the next twenty-four hours. When he came to, she told him if he didn't behave, she'd keep doing it until he realized who was in charge, and that it wasn't him.
She told we listening kids that after that, the soldier was a model patient. Mostly. Though he did prevail on a doctor and get out after a week instead of the longer time he really could've used, but she'd made her point so she wasn't pressed about it. We said, in awe, holy crap, you just punched the guy! Who was he? Was he someone important?
She just shrugged and said, and I quote, "Hell if I fucking know. Some general."
That's a nurse for ya.
no subject
Date: 19 Nov 2009 08:31 am (UTC)(I loved M*A*S*H as a kid. I wrote a fan letter to the show in 10th grade and they sent me a script to share with my English class. I always loved how Klinger - in his matching hat, gloves and purse - never shaved his legs and walked like a linebacker in heels, with his toes all splayed out and his knees apart, and I was kind of crushed when he decided to stop wearing the dresses. The sight of him as the Statue of Liberty still kills me on many levels.)