You're so on the money about Hawkeye. He cracks those jokes all the time and sure they're just silly jokes but they've got a certain desperate everyone's-looking-at-the-rockstar-but-nobody-sees-him vibe to them that always struck me as really sad. It's a bit like he keeps trying to get the point across but no one hears.
I used to have an icon of him that said 'I can't hear you over the sound of gin and tragedy' so pretend I used that icon for this.
The sound of gin and tragedy! Yes, yes, that's exactly it! Oh, Hawkeye - I really like that characterisation, that he's talking and talking but no one's listening, because in the end no one ever does.
I guess growing up in the household I did I couldn't really avoid meditations on the professional life over the dinner table, but people are supposed to be unsure about things.
Yes, this. My bosses who have been doing this for 30 years are unsure about things. Strangely, I find that reassuring.
M*A*S*H is some of the best comfort brain food out there, I think. Many a time I have turned back to righteously angry Hawkeye and slyly pranking BJ and the sheer, total comfort that is Sydney Freedman when I need to soothe myself. (Oh, yes, exactly too about Hawkeye's flexibility. Huzzah.)
Oh, so do I. I mean... it's part of the job to be unsure about things. It's hard, that's why we train so long to do it, and get paid as though we were people held to very high professional standards. I just, I'm working on it. :)
M*A*S*H is good for the heart, I think. It's so full of warmth and affection even it's showing you things that are awful.
I've only in the past few months stopped feeling like the intern--most of the time; I still have the occasional panicked moment of "You want me to decide what now? On my own? Like I'm a competent professional?" So, yeah, keep working on it?
Mmm, yeah, I need to watch some M*A*S*H again soon.
Oh, Hawkeye. M*A*S*H is a show that will never leave me, not the least because of how fantastic the content is and how there's so much unspoken text or subtly spoken text to dig into, like what you've outlined so wonderfully here, but also because I'll never be able to read those texts without thinking about all of you all on the yahoo list and how you read it or don't read it too.
This this this all of this. I wish so much I'd gone with you and Leigh to see Alan Alda that time, if I'd been certain I wouldn't have exploded into paper hearts.
I think you could only watch this show in a heterosexist society - a society where your unspoken assumptions code how you hear dialogue - and then come away from it believing Hawkeye isn't queer.
Isn't that the point, though? That those who remain in an unquestioned heterosexist society think he's straight, and don't complain, while those who are reading from a queer positionality see him as queer, thus giving the show the best of both worlds by keeping both audiences?
Oh, sure, but it's not really important to me about the intent behind it, not now watching the show at this remove from its historical period and so many decades after it was made. I mean, it's easy to argue in response to me that Hawkeye wasn't written to be queer in 1972, and I accept that - but now, I want to make the point that you have to make an effort, put on your heterosexist goggles, to read him as straight.
Intent is hardly relevant now, indeed. Re. heterosexist googles, yes, I do have to make that effort; but I have slash googles, and I have a conceptual space, a possibility, for someone being bisexual. I suspect that if you lack that - and much of the population doesn't have it even now - Hawkeye's queerness is easily overridden by the straightness he also displays, so that the complexity ("queer, bisexual, maybe fluid, not as simple as "gay"") is ignored because it seems impossible.
(I still had this one uploaded, and I have some more lurking in dusty corners of my hard drive.)
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I used to have an icon of him that said 'I can't hear you over the sound of gin and tragedy' so pretend I used that icon for this.
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Yes, this. My bosses who have been doing this for 30 years are unsure about things. Strangely, I find that reassuring.
M*A*S*H is some of the best comfort brain food out there, I think. Many a time I have turned back to righteously angry Hawkeye and slyly pranking BJ and the sheer, total comfort that is Sydney Freedman when I need to soothe myself. (Oh, yes, exactly too about Hawkeye's flexibility. Huzzah.)
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M*A*S*H is good for the heart, I think. It's so full of warmth and affection even it's showing you things that are awful.
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Mmm, yeah, I need to watch some M*A*S*H again soon.
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Shouldn't be too hard, given that I married a man who owns the DVDs. Now I just have to find the time . . .
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Isn't that the point, though? That those who remain in an unquestioned heterosexist society think he's straight, and don't complain, while those who are reading from a queer positionality see him as queer, thus giving the show the best of both worlds by keeping both audiences?
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(I had a M*A*S*H icon! Damn you, LJ.)
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(I still had this one uploaded, and I have some more lurking in dusty corners of my hard drive.)
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