Catch-22

Joseph Heller’s book, “Catch -22” has joined other book titles, like “A Bridge Too Far,” “The Perfect Storm,” and even “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” as an essential cultural reference point and a useful metaphor that can explain more contemporary situations. I had never seen the movie before; I had read the book…a long time ago. I checked my listing of books read and realized, fittingly enough, that I had read Heller’s classic, when I was in the Army, in Vietnam. Furthermore, the very next book read was another classic, but a more conventional military history, “Hell in a Very Small Place – The Siege of Dien Binh Phu.” What a juxtaposition. Which book more truly conveyed the “truth” of the military experience?After half a century, I retained mainly two scenarios from Heller’s novel. There is the issue that the title references: In order to get out of the military for being crazy, you have to request a discharge, but the very act of requesting it proves you are not crazy. Voila. You can never get out. The other was form over substance. The general demanded that that aerial photographs showed a “tight bombing pattern.” It did not matter if you really hit the target.The movie was released in 1970, the year after I read the novel. Mike Nichols was the director. Yes, a cliché, “a star-studded cast,” but so it was. Alan Arkin played the protagonist, Captain John Yossarian. There is also Art Garfunkel, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Jon Voight in a memorable performance as Lt. Milo Minderbender, who is the quintessential wheeler-dealer, Martin Balsam is impressive as Col. Cathcart, and even Orson Wells plays a key role as General Driddle.The movie brought back to mind numerous other aspects of the novel that I had forgotten, aspects of war that are completely omitted or only lightly covered in more traditional histories, such as Fall’s account of the French disaster. For example, there is all that “fetish” about medals, Napoleon’s “hochets,” which is traditionally translated as “bobbles,” something you would give a baby to distract them. And thus the movie line from Col. Cathcart: “Don’t you want more oak leaf clusters on your air medal…” Ah, motivation. In another scene they award medals for bombing the ocean, the “logic of war” meant that no one could back down when it was obviously a farce. There is the doctor who “earns his flight pay” by being on the manifest of the flight. When the plane crashes, a guy is mourning him, because the documents indicate he was on the plane, even though the doctor is standing right next to him. The written document trumps reality. In another scene, one of the pilots is determine to kill Col. Cathcart, “before he kills us all.” The pilot proclaims: “the first sane thing I have ever done.” He does not use the “coin of the realm” in Vietnam: “fragging.” “Cheap available” women, with hunger being an all-important impetus was depicted well by Nichols, and a daily reality in Vietnam.Milo (Jon Voight) deserves his own paragraph. He is the quintessential wheeler-dealer, trading the silk in Yossarian’s parachute for Egyptian cotton, while providing Yossarian one share in “MM Enterprises” as a substitute to jump with. Real war? From the classic Vietnam War documentary, “Hearts and Minds” there is the scene of a Vietnamese wheeler-dealer at his desk in Saigon proclaiming: “I am a Johnny-come-lately to war profiteering… peace is coming, whether we like it or not.” In another documentary, one interviewee proclaimed that even a helicopter could be bought off the black market in Saigon. But isn’t the scene where Milo arranges for the American Airforce to bomb its own base, in a contractual obligation with the Germans, who will buy the Egyptian cotton, just too “over-the-top”? One might think so, yet it has recently been confirmed, via recently un-earthed documents, the historical allegations that Richard Nixon had taken steps to “throw a monkey wrench” in the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese, in order to prolong the war until after the election, because if the peace talks were successful, his political opponent, Humbert Humphrey might win the election.Life imitating art, and I would have the opportunity to read the art while experiencing the real-life prolongation of that war. Heller got it right, and even the slap-stick aspects of Nichols’ movie were more right than wrong. 5-stars.

This movie is weird and wild. One minute you are laughing, the next minute you are somber contemplating life and death. It’s amazing!

So many stars bring book to life

The book is great but check this movie. It's excellent.

This film is now more than thirty years old, but its pertinence for our warrior present remains. I don't suppose a motion picture can truly alter a cultural perception any more than a popular novel can -- unless it is confirming a societal change rather than attempting to create it. So Joseph Heller's great 1961 novel stays in print and is read by new generations of high school and college students, and yet the reflexive embrace of war as an apt enterprise is still only questioned by a marginalized minority.Watching Mike Nichols' fine 1970 film adaptation, one can almost assume that director Nichols and writer Buck Henry (who also plays the part of the snide Colonel Korn) have resigned themselves to the inevitability of the real "Catch-22," i. e., that for the same reasons that everyone in the movie behaves insanely, the audience will realize (yet agree to) the very same insanity as soon as they leave their viewing experience behind."Catch-22" the film is permeated by the world-weariness and desperate defiance of Captain Yossarian, the bombardier who doesn't want to bomb, played with a manic deliberation by Alan Arkin. The "catch" is that no matter that he realizes how capitalism and war are so madly linked (in Jon Voight's fascist businessman, Milo Minderbinder, whose "M & M Enterprises" is a literal representation of that infamous military-industrial complex), the only answer he can find is to flee. Orr, the other sane insane person (played with a kind of intense restraint -- or restrained intensity -- by Bob Balaban) succeeds in escaping to neutral Sweden, which is (or used to be) the emblematic democratic socialist state; so Yossarian finally follows because he can change nothing about the U. S. warfare state; indeed, he can only be co-opted by it: recall the repulsive Colonels Cathcart's and Korn's nefarious deal to "like us!"Today, even Sweden has been forced into "privatization" and a systematic erosion of its socialist vision. But Sweden's image during the Vietnam War (in the midst of which Nichols' film was resonately produced) was as another Canada, another blessedly humane escape from America's "endless wars." Now it seems that there is no place to escape to; the American behemoth strides the globe, much like M & M Enterprises.Remember the exchange between Marcel Dalio's "old man" and Nately, portrayed by an achingly boyish Art[hur] Garfunkel: the old man confidently asserts that "believing in everything (therefore, nothing)" will allow at least survival, but when Yossarian returns to the brothel (to inform Nately's [lady] that Nately has been killed in Milo's "just business" bombing of their own air base), he is told that even the old man is "dead." So believing in nothing but survival is no guarantee of survival at that.This is a very depressing film; it's meant to be. It has some very amusing scenes, however -- especially the ones featuring a querulous Orson Welles as General Dreedle, Austin Pendleton as his nerdy son-in-law/military aide, and the buxom Susanne Benton as Dreedle's WAC. And then there is the Olympian beauty of Olympia Carlisi as the object of Yossarian's gentle lust, the prostitute Luciana. (Nichols satirizes Stanley Kubrick's somewhat pretentious, otherworldly "2001: A Space Odyssey" by using the now-all-too-familiar opening notes of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" to announce her initial appearance.) A few gentle scenes between Arkin and Carlisi are this movie's most warming moments, for -- as the dying Snowden keeps repeating -- "I'm cold." Cold, indeed.

Catch-22 was one of the greatest books of the 20th century, nonlinear, a revolving cast of characters, with Yossarian at the center. How could a movie be made that could possibly incorporate all of this? Buck Henry's screenplay managed to do it, making the impossible possible. Alan Arkin was outstanding!Very few movies match the books, but this one does.

Good but not great.