#war metaphor

[flintism]

you know how i’ve said 55 times that bj is always projecting himself into the future while hawkeye feels like he can’t see the end of the war/is stuck in the present? well period of adjustment is actually a rare example of those things being reversed. one of the reasons bj has his big gay breakdown is because it forces him to face the fact that he is here “i’m here in this stinking place” & that no matter how much he tries to project himself into the future time is passing and he is currently missing things and there is no way he’ll ever get this time back. and when you know that the war is a metaphor and that by projecting himself into the future bj’s also trying to avoid thinking about his feelings for hawkeye/being gay then him also having a trapper breakdown/smashing the still makes sense. and then hawkeye as an act of love forces himself to envision a future for once (which he only ever does in relation to bj) and tells him “one day you’ll go home, we’ll all go home” which means that the one time bj is in the present and is more or less facing it... hawkeye isn’t and they miss each other.

[dialogue-queered]

Getting rid of a disease, overcoming it and returning to live “among the healthy” is not a question of military value, strength, constancy, heroism of the individual; it is a question of being well cared for, of health resources and also, unfortunately, of luck. Applying the metaphor of war and defeat to an illness means loading the sick person with guilt and, [Susan] Sontag says, hindering him[/her/they] on...[their] recovery path.

@alanspazzaliartist in https://alanspazzaliartist.tumblr.com/post/613303745213874176/coronavirus-talking-about-war-invasion-and

[flintism]

what truly makes the farewell dinner scene & bj’s joke so maddening is that bj’s emotional arc is one of the clearest things in the entire show to me. literally everything you need to know about it is stated in s4: hawkeye & peg are the two things keeping him sane, he doesn’t see himself as a part of the war/as a soldier but as a mis-assigned civilian. & throughout the show you see very clearly how he has breakdowns whenever he feels that his future life in mill valley, which he depends on to stay sane, might be compromised & then theres the entirety of s11 during which bj has to come to terms with the fact that the war has indeed changed him and that he can’t be who he was when he left home (when i cut that rope they made me a soldier/i wanted so hard to believe that this soldier wouldn’t lose his leg that i didn’t prepare him for it). so we eventually get to that farewell dinner scene where everybody is explicitly talking about how the war has changed them emotionally (margaret is going to live the life she wants to live and not the one her father wants for her, klinger is gonna stay in korea for love, colonel potter is gonna prioritize mildred now that he isn’t divided between her and the army) or physically (father mulcahy) and bj who, following this pattern, you would expect to say something about how war has changed him but it’s not what matters, what matters is that he gets to go back to the life he has been missing all this time, jokes about not wanting to go back. like i would really really like to know what i’m supposed to do with this 

[flintism]

“the minute i cut that rope they made me a soldier” is particularly awful in the context of bj constantly trying to think of the war as a nightmare/something that he will be able to wake up from/put behind him as soon as he gets home (which is why he is so hung up on his perfect future) because it means that they’ve taken this protection away from him and he can’t hide behind the idea that he will be able to come out of the war and still be himself anymore. the war quite literally changed his identity.

[flintism]

riiiiight so wheelers and dealers is another example of the usual bj/hawkeye dynamic being reversed with hawkeye trying to think about the future for once (for bj) and bj being forced to face the present. when they first discuss peg’s letter and her having to take a job bj is like “this wasn’t the PLAN i was supposed to be earning money so peg could stay at home and be the perfect housewife” to which hawkeye answers “it’s not gonna be forever” and bj is like “i’m talking about NOW”. literally every time bj has to face the present/stops projecting himself into the future he has a breakdown because facing the present = facing the war = facing his feelings for hawkeye/his sexuality

[flintism]

it’s amazing how consistent bj’s emotional arc has been throughout the whole show, from setting up his dilemma with him saying “i’m torn between the idea of the love i have for those people and wanting that to continue and wanting to erase my memories of this place” at the end of s4 to the various realizations that the war has indeed changed him & that he won’t be able to erase any of it in s11.... 

[flintism]

re: bj calling himself a prisoner of war and telling aggie “you can come and go as you please! i can’t” if you consider that everything he says about the war can also be read as something said about his sexuality this can easily be interpreted as bj feeling stuck in his heterosexual marriage/perfect husband identity (which doesn’t contradict the idea that he needs it and relies on it.... you can feel trapped by something you desperately need) & it also explains why when he has his big gay/i’m not a good enough het husband breakdowns he always ends up snapping at hawkeye & telling him stuff like “nobody is stuck here like me, certainly not you”/”tell me how much you miss your wife and kid” etc. he’s frustrated not only because he’s like “boohoo nobody feels TORN the way i do” but also because he feels that hawkeye isn’t chained to a perfect straight persona the way bj is/isn’t dealing with the same identity struggle. 

[flintism]

is2g bj saying “i’ve got to live for tomorrow because for me there is no now” (a line that mike farrell WROTE) is one of the things that truly drives me crazy because i feel that it explains absolutely everything about him it’s both like. the way he deals with the war and the way he deals with his feelings for hawkeye by trying to convince himself that if he ignores them hard enough they won’t be able to touch him/change him and it seems to work for so many seasons and then mash s11 is like. “see how bj thought that if he ignored things hard enough they wouldn’t fuck him up? see how he believed that he could just concentrate on the future/his straight marriage in order to avoid thinking about the war/his gay feelings? well boohoo bj is a soldier now & the idea of never seeing hawkeye again makes him want to run off instead of going home”