The Tartan

On the last day of February, in the year 1983, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the last episode of the nearly decade-long TV show “M*A*S*H” became the most watched broadcast in American history. It would remain as such until 2010.

I don’t entirely know what it was about “M*A*S*H” that captured the attention, love, and adoration of the nation, but I can hazard a few guesses. The Hays Code died in 1968, and with it, America acknowledged that public broadcast could be complicated. “M*A*S*H” itself was a deeply humanistic, self-critical look at a war that had happened two decades before, in the midst of the United States recovering from the war we fought directly after it. It was, quintessentially, the American’s view of war, on the TV. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t glamorous. It was complex, and painful, and it was raw.

It was also very, very green.

Now, that’s not a particularly interesting observation, I mean, the United States Army was rocking green outfits and that good ol’ glorious star in this era, and while they’re not the snazzy pink-and-greens that I’ve heard people gripe about, those uniforms were, by and large, very interested in a singular hue.

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? We went to war in Korea and Vietnam. Both of those places were filled with forests and jungles, and they were so very green.

But so were the rest of our war movies. So were the stories we told with our war movies. 

See, color TV really only became a nationwide hit shortly after the end of World War Two, and there’s one thing Hollywood is really good at doing — making movies. They started makin’ ‘em, and the big topic that pretty much everyone had heard of (and honestly, you couldn’t even use the “I live under a rock” excuse for this one) was World War II. Of course, it took a bit for those movies to come out, partially because color TV had not yet been invented, but also because the stories told directly post-war were far more documentary-like in nature. I mean, you could go down the street and run into a half-dozen vets, most of them were about 24 years old and learning about this newfangled thing called college, and that meant it wasn’t really necessary to glamorize them.

There was, however, something to be said about the color schemes of these movies. See, the early World War II movies ran on a muted, traditional color scheme. There wasn’t much in terms of a specific hue or coloring method, because there wasn’t that much done to think about color theory in a world where you hadn’t had to deal with it until recently. World War II movies used muted forms of what everyone else was doing because that was just the way things were done. You also didn’t have to identify to anyone which war you were talking about — there was one pretty big one, and it was the one that was on the silver screen.

That’s not to say there weren’t certain stylistic choices that felt oddly consistent throughout this era of filmmaking. The uniforms, the outlooks, the way that people dressed in these movies were consistent, but that was because they were all consistent and that was, again, just how movies were made.

Then Korea happened. We don’t talk about Korea. We haven’t spoken about Korea for a while because it’s just not something we care about. We talk about Vietnam and we talk about Iraq and we talk about Afghanistan and we do not at any point talk about Korea.

So the forgotten war came and went and the movies we made during it were left in the wayside, but then, something else happened. 

Vietnam. And that green comes directly into full force. Because obviously, we now have a new Big War that we can connect everyone to — UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU to know at least one person who’s been drafted. But, we still have those pesky World War II veterans all around, and they also have a big war and we can’t have two distinct big wars, right?

And that’s when the movies themselves became green. There were the obvious parts. I cannot overstate that the uniforms were sort of camouflage, but the big thing, and the thing that really can’t be overlooked regardless of era, was suddenly that if you wanted everyone to just know your movie was set in Vietnam, you make it green, you make it leafy, and bam, we know what war it is.

The icon of this genre is Rambo. We love Rambo. It’s so goofy. It’s so over the top. It’s so green — okay, you get it, I don’t need to keep repeating the color.

But then, as time passed, how did we want to talk about that Other War (World War II)? Well, Europe is boring and dark, and there was a lot of water, and honestly I can’t emulate the thought process of strange little men making movies in the 1970s and 1980s but you look at them and they are blue. Or grey. Grey-blue. Navy?

Point is, that was the de facto way we said “This is World War II.” It became ubiquitous, the way World War II movies portray that conflict has a look. It’s concrete and mud and greys, and that style gave us a clear visual indicator that this was a specific place. It saved us all the exposition — the color palette became the showing-not-telling that writers keep telling us about.

Of course, the actions of Sept. 11, 2001 are a key player in so much of pop culture and how it evolved as well as a terrifying national tragedy. The war in Afghanistan was very, very different from how Americans expected it to go.

We’ll get to Iraq.

It was desert, yes but it was so much desert. It was always desert. You look at pictures and it was brown and beige and yellow and sandy, and that was how Afghanistan was sold to the American public. So it stuck in people’s mind — there’s still that classic “Oh shoot, we’re in the Middle East” music riff that people make fun of, but there are still other tells associated with places and the Middle East, especially in an era where we were actively changing how recruiting rules worked to send more people there.

And what does Hollywood do when there’s a war? They make movies. 

So in the post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan movie boom, the time when we still thought they would greet us as liberators, focused on yellows and browns, and suddenly that became how we thought about wars. It also became how we thought about conflict. Notice how the sudden shift from the 1960s-1970s paradigm into the 1990s paradigm expanded outside of movies set in these areas. Movies about war in the 1990s had the same blues and same colors — look at the lighting in “Top Gun.” Movies in the 2000s had violence in cities, and had it out in the desert.

We had found another setting.

This is one of the more interesting trends in cinema. While broadly, it’s more “we stereotype locations to talk about how they look so we don’t have to tell the audience,” there’s also the aspect that we shorthand the kind and style of violence to be expected with these same tricks. See greens and you know it’s guerilla tactics. See blues and grays and its combat on a field with trenches and mud. See yellow and brown? Well, you know the stereotypes by now.

The way we make movies communicates what we want to tell the audience. That’s obvious, but the colors we pick can key the audience into the kind of story we expect them to pay attention to, and nowhere is that more obvious than war movies and the action genre.