In his senior thesis, one of my college classmates disputed a small point made by St. Augustine by analyzing and applying Augustine’s major principles to the question. (Don’t ask me for details - it was fourteen years ago and he is smarter than I could ever imagine being.) For most of the year, he really enjoyed working on the thesis (and, in addition to being smart, he is such a genuinely lovely person that I didn’t hate him for that). But there were a couple of weeks when it wasn’t being as enjoyable, and he explained - I am paraphrasing badly - that, having lauded Augustine for pages and pages, and illustrated in detail what a great theologian he was, he had now got to the portion where he had to explain...or more like suggest, really, just put it out there...that in this one tiny instance, well, he would just have done it a bit...differently, is all.
Why do I bring this up? If I may descend precipitously from the City of God to the city of man, it’s because I feel rather the same way about this post.
Is there a screenwriter alive today who hasn’t learned from William Goldman? Who doesn’t have a well-thumbed copy of Adventures in the Screen Trade? Okay, probably there is, but grant me my hyperbole. It was Goldman who first showed me how screenwriting is done, and he remains one of my favorite and most reliable guides.
But every once in a while, he’s wrong.
In Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman defines a “comic-book movie.” He gives four markers, but I want to focus on the fourth, which he describes as “probably most important” and from which the other three largely stem: “The comic-book movie doesn’t have a great deal to do with life as it exists, as we know it to be. Rather, it deals with life as we would prefer it to be. Safer that way.”
That’s not the part where he’s wrong. I agree with that, and I think one could have a good time unpacking the implications and debating whether all movies based on comic books are comic-book movies.
Where Goldman is wrong is where he starts to illustrate his point with parallels. And he says this (keep in mind that the book was published in 1983):
The only prime-time entertainment series that is not a comic-book program is M*A*S*H. Not because of its outstanding quality, but because every scene in M*A*S*H, no matter how wildly farcical, is grounded in the madness of death. That is what gives it its tone, that is the heart of the piece. You can make M*A*S*H into My Mother the Car easily enough. Just keep those same wonderful actors and stick them in a giant army training camp here in the States. And the wounded are simply guys hurt in fights or drunken-driving accidents...And what you’ve got then is a bunch of goofy surgeons grousing because they’re stuck on the service and not out in the civilian world, making a fortune. It might be just as funny, and just as successful, and absolutely would be exactly like every other series on the air.
The first few times I read that, I nodded along. But two things happened. First, I watched a lot of M*A*S*H, and while I could appreciate its brilliance, I felt less drawn to it the more I watched it. I decided I was just being perverse - everyone said it was brilliant, so I was determined not to be impressed. But then the second thing happened. That alternate show that Goldman jokingly pitched above as a contrast? Well, take out the army base aspect, and Bill Lawrence put it on the air in 2001. It’s called Scrubs.
In case you haven’t encountered Scrubs, and don’t feel inclined to click over to Netflix immediately (which is...your decision...), it is the story of John Dorian (“J.D.”), who advances from brand-new intern to co-chief-resident of a large teaching hospital, Sacred Heart. It is a laugh-out-loud funny sitcom, bordering on the absurd and often stepping over that line.
When one is dealing with long-running TV shows, any thesis will be an over-generalization. There will always be episodes, subplots, even characters that break the mold. But with that caveat, here’s my thesis. Scrubs is not a comic-book program. And M*A*S*H is.
M*A*S*H is not really about “the madness of death.” It is about the madness of war. Everything that happens (over-generalization, remember) is because of the war. I think that’s the reason for my gradual disenchantment. I got tired of watching Hawkeye rant and complain about the war. I’m not in favor of war, and Hawkeye’s response is natural and believable and probably what I would have done in his place. What it is not is admirable. The only two characters I really love are Col. Potter, the soldier who hates war but understands that there are things worth fighting for and that duty is not a four-letter word, and Major Charles Emerson Winchester, who, however badly he goes about it, is still trying to be a civilized man in an uncivilized world.
There’s a Major Winchester episode in which he reports excitedly to one of his patients that, despite the extent of his injuries, the only permanent effect will be a slight loss of dexterity in one hand. It took all of Winchester’s considerable surgical skill to achieve that result, so he is justifiably pleased, and therefore stunned when the patient is angry. The trouble is, the patient is a concert pianist. For him, there’s no such thing as “slight.” At the end of the episode, Winchester orders some one-handed piano music, and he explains to the patient that he is still a pianist. He has a lovely speech about how he (Winchester) can read and reproduce the notes, but he can’t make music.
Summary of the episode: War can ruin your life, but you can still find hope through a snobby but thoughtful surgeon who is learning empathy.
Twenty-odd years later, on Scrubs, J.D.’s best friend, surgical intern Chris Turk, also encounters a pianist - a kid on a scholarship. But in surgery, Turk makes a mistake, and the kid won’t be able to play again. There is nothing to be done, except for Turk to own his mistake and try to live with it.
Summary of the episode: Even the best of us make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes can ruin someone’s life.
Now I ask you: Which of those is life “as we know it to be” and which is life “as we would prefer it to be”? Which is “safer”?
The fault, in the M*A*S*H episode, is with the war. That’s really the point of M*A*S*H: war is bad. True. Absolutely true. But it gives M*A*S*H just a little, crucial bit of distance. We care about the characters, we are horrified by what they go through, but at the end of the day, we’re not in Korea getting shot at. That won’t happen to us. Plus, we get that warm glow of superiority for nodding along and agreeing that that’s true, absolutely true, War is Bad.
There is no war in Scrubs. There is just death. The true “madness of death”: death that can appear anywhere, to anyone, with no warning, no reason, and no remedy. And as J.D.’s mentor, Dr. Cox, tells him in the first episode, any “victory” they win is just buying time.
The point of Scrubs is that, sooner or later, everybody dies. Including each of us.
Oh, and...
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