Alan Alda, the 70s Liberated Male, and The Four Seasons
There is a moment in the pilot episode of MASH where Hawkeye walks along the dirt paths of his MASH unit, he passes by a beautiful nurse then, without even a hint of consent, takes her in his arms and kisses her on the lips. He then leaves her (satisfied? horrified?) and goes about his business. Alan Alda — the beloved actor who played Hawkeye for 11 seasons on TV’s MASH and is a beloved liberal icon to this day — cites this moment, approvingly, as the magic time in which he found the Hawkeye character.
Gentlemen: here before you is the progressive man of the seventies. He is cute, he is charming, and because he is funny and cloaks everything in righteous humor he can accost woman freely and we, as the adoring audience are meant to think “what a scamp, but you know she wanted to anyway”.
Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent in Alda’s well-received box office hit The Four Seasons which boasts a 77% percent “fresh” rating and, if internet comments are to be believed (and of course they should be) still maintains a reputation for “truth and honesty in adult relationships”.
The Four Seasons fucking sucks and, as far as toxic masculinity corrosiveness is concerned, makes Rambo look like Louis CK before we found out about Louis CK.
The Four Seasons takes place over the course of the four seasons and is set to the tune of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons so that the spring symphony is played over shots of spring (hummingbirds, flowers) the summer symphony is played over shots of summer (wildflowers, the sun), the fall symphony is played over shots of fall (leaves changing color, bulky sweaters) and the winter symphony is played on the nose.
The plot consists of four vignettes centered around three couples who hate one another but spend every conceivable vacation sequestered with one another — a cabin in the spring, a sailboat in the summer, a B&B in the fall, a cabin in the winter. A plot threatens to happen when one of the couples divorces thus necessitating a husband lamenting the fact that his wife is legit having a nervous breakdown and blaming her for this defect in her shitty personality. Granted the film does everything to make her look like a complete loon so that the audiences sympathize with the adulterous fornicator.
No one, least of all screenwriter (and liberal icon) Alan Alda does this character any favors. She is introduced carrying around pictures of fruit. Now, it should be noted that this is her job, she’s not just some lady who carried around fruit and halts whenever she speaks. She’s a lady who is a legit food photographer and halts whenever she speaks.
At certain points during this film we cut between the men and the women in separate rooms. In these scenes the men be menning and the ladies be ladying. You see, men like to goof around and laugh, they razz each other, cook complicated dishes (sample line “Isaac Newton: inventor of moo shu pork”).
There is a lot of laughing by the men in this movie. Women talk about feelings and have serious discussions because, well ladies need to be ladying. The women in this film are not written as funny nor witty. It should be noted that at least two of the women are Carol Burnett and Rita Moreno. The other is Sandy Dennis who does no favors to her horribly misunderstood character.
Now, I can imagine a world in which Sandy Dennis would have fought for her character. I imagine she would have said something like this “my character exists only to justify the marginalization of women and relegate women who suffer from mental illnesses such as depression or obsessive compulsive disorder away, to perpetuate the notion that women can be equal to men so long as they adapt to a toxic culture meant to reward aggression and rapaciousness. This character simply disappears and we never even once examine the decision the male character made to leave her, in fact this decision is celebrated as he is gifted with a largely obedient and much younger girlfriend.”
Perhaps we can all imagine Sandy Dennis giving such an impassioned speech but perhaps someone showed her a clip from the movie MASH directed by liberal favorite Robert Altman. In case you don’t remember, Margaret Houlihan who is an army nurse is recorded having a private consensual affair with another army officer. Because her consensual tryst is played over the loud speakers at her work place she is given the moniker “Hot Lips”. This joke is so good it will be used in the subsequent television series. While trying to maintain a certain professional and military decorum free of sexual harassment Houlihan is targeted. While taking a shower her privacy is invaded when her co-workers rig up a mechanism to reveal her naked body to all the entirety of the military installation. Another job induced humiliation.
When she complains to her superior officer he backs up her violators giving her no other option but to swallow her pride and join the men. She literally becomes a cheerleader thus completing her arc and joining the men and becoming “cool” enough to just know her place. Sandy Dennis, as the clearly distraught-just-needs-a-friend Anne simply leaves the picture during the fall sequence about ¾ a way through the film. Annie has clearly not taken the divorce very well, we know this because she has clearly let herself go, man. Her skin is blotchy, she is pale and it even looks like she has been non-stop crying at least for the entire season of summer while her friends have been listening to her husband bone a much younger and more blonde woman. She admits to her friends that she feels ignored and that they are choosing her ex-husband — who cheated on her regularly during their marriage and left her when she exhibited signs of strain that he fucking caused — and the friends ignore this statement and counter it with the excuse that they could not invite her to a party because they had invited her ex (he of the gaslighting and adultery) and they (the friends) were afraid that they “would be a nervous” wreck if they invited her. This would be fair if this decision was given any amount of scrutiny, but evidently this is an appropriate excuse because Annie will leave the film here.
She confesses to boarding busses and being so overwhelmed with depression that she barely remembers where she is, after confessing to severe husband induced depression. She then admits to planning a trip to 1980s Czechoslovakia — these are the same people who spawned a depressive such as Franz Kafka before the Nazis and Soviets even arrived. So, she’s suicidal and this is when the screenplay has her admit to buying a snake. We cut to Burnett’s reaction here because this is supposed to be a very funny line. Like ‘ha-ha, this crazy women who’s definitely on the verge has bought a… snake!’ This is the same crazy lady who takes pictures of fruit! Woman, amirite?!The very last shot of her in this film, directed by liberal and feminist icon Alan Alda, is Sandy Dennis asking her friends to tell her ex-husband (serial fornicator, mental health apologist) that she bought a boa constrictor. She then lifts up a wan hand to say good-bye with her back to the camera. She will never get mentioned again.
There are about seven main characters in this film, all of whom get some sort of character arc. Alan Alda (liberal lion, TV’s Hawkeye) is Jack Burroughs. He is a successful attorney, who apologetically lusts after his friends young girlfriend. His major problem is that he never gets angry. You see, he’s a man and men (real men, even real lawyer men who wear sweaters) bottle up their emotions. That is until in the final act when Burroughs-Alda gets really angry and proceeds to tear apart a well-apportioned B&B fireside lobby. It shall be no surprise to you when I tell you that a poorly mounted moose head is involved. Once he has destroyed the room his wife looks to him approvingly because he has displayed anger. Personal property destruction in the cause of catharsis is no vice.
Kate Burroughs (Burnett) feels invisible because she is too perfect. She laments that her husband is attracted to a younger woman. She is completely defined by her relationship to her husband. Her character arc comes about when she gets her husband to express his anger. She, more than likely, still feels invisible at the end of the movie. Danny Zimmer, played by Jack Weston, is a dentist. He yells at his wife (the Puerto Rican actress and national treasure Rita Moreno) for saying that she is Italian. He is the oldest of the group by about ten years and thus voices an intense fear of death. This dark admission is greeted by laughter from his friends which apparently is the only appropriate reaction to the “I show love by making fun of you” crowd that this film sympathizes with.
Ginny Newley, played by Bess Armstrong, is young and very attracted to her much older boyfriend Nick Callan (Len Cariou). Her third act arc consists in her yelling at her boyfriends friends then running off into the snowy woods only to be forgotten about so that Alda-Burroughs can have his catharsis, get re-remembered and then, when found, runs off to warn everyone that the old guy who was afraid of death is dying after falling into a freezing pond. Mind you, she is the youngest and most fit of anyone in the group but it takes the combined efforts of the two middle-aged men and a BMW to save him.
The Four Seasons seems to have been widely forgotten by now. If anyone remembers it now they probably remember it as that movie your parents rented on Beta that you weren’t allowed to see because it was too adult.
This movie is not adult, it is a man-child toxicity wrapped in a seemingly sophisticated bow that, upon further inspection, is only glued on. Alarmingly, even more recently it continues to have a fairly good reputation as a thoughtful film about love and friendship. Janet Maslin of the New York Times cites the film as “… a fond, generous movie about characters who might easily lent themselves to satire” or Steve Crum of Video-reviewmaster who approves of the “comedy-drama… stellar cast, ably directed by [liberal stalwart] Alan Alda”.
These reviews were written in 2004 and 2005 respectively, a while ago but you would hope that we evolved beyond that even that early in the new century. More recent audience reviews see this film as an “interesting social observation driving a wedge… by a charismatic cast and some humor being balanced with reflective drama”. Mind you, I grew up on MASH the TV series, like many people in our generations I watched it on re-runs with my dad. My dad, and other Baby Boomers, looked up to this. They were in their 30s when this film came out and they more than likely saw this as a proscriptive as how sophisticated, liberal, urban adults in their 40s and 50s behaved. Were we supposed to approve of the man who divorced his wife simply because it got too difficult to care for her? Were we supposed to be wowed by the fact that this man is “rewarded” with a much younger girlfriend who will fuck you loudly enough that all your friends can hear you on a tiny boat? Are we not supposed to see this in the same context of other sophisticated romantic comedies about adults?
Manhattan is a film about a forty-two year old man who has a sexual affair with a 17 year old girl. The film approves of this relationship to the point where in the final act she becomes more mature than the middle-aged man. This is the type of film that liberal’s grew up lionizing and approving of. This is the type of film that not only normalizes, but also approves, of men who will take a woman and force himself upon her because that’s what real men do?
