Decades before Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House limped through the corridors of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, TV had already served up the antihero doctor schtick in style. Instead of the usual white coat (which House was never particular about anyway), he was clad in army green, constantly cracking jokes with bloodstained hands.
1972’s M*A*S*H was well-rounded in many ways; the commentary was stellar, the jokes really landed, and the actors gave it their all. However, it did not give us a polite, emotionally balanced medical lead. Instead, we got Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda), a surgeon from Maine with a functional drinking problem, who yapped away a little too much, chased anything in a skirt, and expressed so much disdain for the system that it became his trademark. In a nutshell, he was brilliant once his hands were plucking out shrapnel from a soldier’s belly, but borderline exhausting everywhere else. However, by doing so, Hawkeye set the standard for all renegade TV doctors with some semblance of an inflated moral compass.
‘M*A*S*H’ Framed Medical Brilliance As Emotional Damage Long Before ‘House’ Made It a Brand
Pain as a personality trait? Before House mainstreamed it, Hawkeye Pierce was a testament to how medical brilliance can often transform itself under pressure. Here we have a man who wasn’t just a whiz with a scalpel; he was performing “meatball surgery” while shells were exploding yards away. As such, speed often mattered more than elegance, because one extra second was often the difference between life and death.
Without a doubt, that kind of work could turn a sane man into a sarcasm machine… dispensing by the minute. In Season 2, Episode 2, “5 O’Clock Charlie,” the camp ping-pongs between turning incoming shelling into a joke and treating casualties. While the whole thing plays out for laughs, it makes one wonder how possible it is to have a semblance of emotional balance in their line of work.
The show was sure to highlight the fact that sarcasm wasn’t always the armor it was pumped up to be. In Season 3, Episode 17, “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” Hawkeye’s resolve fails when a soldier he knows personally dies on the operating table. Besides serving as a lens into the many horrors of war, this episode also says, “even competence can’t protect anyone from loss.” As the show progresses, the larger-than-life protector of the little guy and ultimate rulebreaker we meet in Season 1 goes back and forth between cracking jokes mid-crisis, then unraveling when the consequences hit.
In a nutshell, M*A*S*H made one vital point early and frequently: being the best with a scalpel, with the threat of death by shelling looming everywhere, does not make calm heroes. For Hawkeye, it was war; for Gregory House, it was unique, life-threatening cases no one else could solve. Either way, those two pressure cookers brilliantly created unstable geniuses.
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House Is What Happens When Hawkeye’s Empathy Gets Burned Out Completely
While there are certain parallels to be drawn between the two men, one thing’s for sure: Hawkeye and House are not the same. The best way to put it is that House is a version of Hawkeye who put off confronting his demons so much that he lost the humor and heart but stuck with the snark. When faced with the excesses of war/police action, Hawkeye copes by caring a bit too loudly. Sure, he drinks and chases nurses, but he also picks fights with authority because he ultimately refuses to clock out emotionally. In Season 11, Episode 16, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” Hawkeye suffers a nervous breakdown. It’s not because of the overall weight of the war, but the weight of one decision that leads to the loss of an innocent.
Taking a sharp left, House stands on the other end of that emotional cliff, and by the time he attempts to feel something, he’s pretty much already burned a ton of bridges. Let’s take a look at Season 1, Episode 21, “Three Stories,” where viewers finally hear the House origin story. In a captivating lecture that encapsulates the titular three stories, the good doctor manages to explain his leg injury with clinical distance, interpret pain as data, and still treat his patients as puzzles. There is no doubt that these two men are brilliant in their respective areas. But as obnoxious as he could be, Hawkeye only became more insufferable when the war struck in the worst ways possible. House, on the other hand, is a later model of sorts, one that decided not to care because it never served him.
You can catch the dysfunctional doctor with a heart of gold by streaming M*A*S*H on Apple TV.
