Catch-22
Avey, John
Nichols on the Silver Screen Catcb-22 A few years ago I heard Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, speak before a college audience. He was a member of a panel discussing the modern novel. The other...
...Nichols-Heller is not a satirist, only a wise guy...
...In order to talk about Catch-22, I found I had to take it seriously...
...He plays the arch-typical semi-fascist general, with about as much conviction as a fire hydrant...
...Others felt Nichols had blown the whole thing, and still others implied that the film was sort of a black-humor version of Bridge on the River Kwai, anti-war in a nice, safe orthodox way, but chock full of Mike Nichols' special kind of magic...
...Again, he is making easy points with his audience, but only at tile price of intellectual dishonesty.If on the other hand, he does believe that survival is the only thing that counts, he must have some reason for wanting to survive...
...But Liberals are notoriously "pragmatic," i.e., they are said to judge each case on its own merits...
...Satire pokes fun at human vices and follies-but in order to know what a folly or vice is, the would-be satirist must have a firm idea of what is good and desirable...
...Mike Nichols' Catch-22 is a thin child's garden of Liberal clichfes...
...The book had puzzled me...
...2. All war is a futile exercise engaged in by desperate men driven by mindless leaders for unknowable purposes...
...In short, I laughed at Catch-22 but I knew that laughter was not all that Heller had expected from his readers...
...the scene works that way, and the lines Garfunkel has are all simplistic, patriotic truisms, meant to be snickered at...
...Surely Heller did not write such a long and involved book to merely make us laugh at the alleged pretensions of the American military...
...no one but a Liberal could have made this kind of film from that kind of book...
...Neither of these answers was satisfactory, so I did what any red-blooded American boy would do in such circumstances - I stopped thinking about it...
...This kind of strawman has been with us since God knows when, and if there is any point in dragging him in at this late date at least he should be given something to do...
...Now all of the above is in no way an argument for not being beastly to the military...
...In short, the film Catch-22 is (to use a word borrowed shamelessly from William F. Buckley) a paradigm of American Liberalism in all its intellectual shallowness, philosophical confusion and surface glitter...
...John Avey...
...There is a scene in Catch-22 which for tastelessness should win Nichols some kind of award...
...The other professor mumbled the same things only in more complicated terms, pausing from time to time to remember what he had just said and then plunge on...
...For those who love really sophisticated Liberal commentary on the meaning of it all, don't miss Martin Balsam sitting on the bowl defecating...
...Their ridicule of the armed forces is a reflex action-mention a general and the Liberal smiles, but he smiles for much the same reason his knee jerks when the doctor hits it-reflex...
...One of the professors talked for what seemed to be eight hours, in that unique and maddening English-professor language, which is almost but not quite English...
...Or was he...
...There are performances that are good and one-Alan Arkin's as Yossarian- that is very good...
...There are a number of things offensive in this scene...
...The old Italian is proud that he switches sides when the opportunity presents itself...
...No one but a Liberal could have written Catch-22...
...Much of Catch-22 depends on this kind of reflex action from its audience...
...Yet every time I tried to figure out just what Catch-22 was all about, nothing seemed to fit...
...But what else can he do with such a cardboard character...
...I stopped, that is, until Mike Nichols made a movie based on Catch-22...
...It is the quin-tessentially Liberal film of our time and it fails because it is unable to transcend the basic emptiness of Liberalism...
...The film is bad partly because it succeeds too well (if unintentionally) in exposing the book's lack of intellectual depth, but in essence the film fails on its intrinsic lack of worth as a film (i.e., it fails because Mike Nichols as director simply could not cope with the philosophical problems involved...
...He knows that if he makes the correct sounds, his audience has been trained to laugh-but never once does he even hint from what moral vantage he is poking fun at the military...
...The Liberals have no answer because they have no philosophical basis from which to judge the question...
...He then sat down to thundering silence...
...The Israeli Army is o.k...
...There are moments, even entire scenes, which leave you aching for more, for they are nothing less than perfect...
...Nichols is buying laughs, on the cheap, as it were...
...At a time in American and world history when ethnic stereotypes are more and more being enjoyed by fewer and fewer, Nichols has the consummate gall to place this vicious ethnic caricature in the middle of his film...
...Now, this in itself is not an original or even a very persuasive thesis...
...This kind of intellectual dishonesty permeates the film at every level...
...If the American armed forces as they exist are not desirable, what kind of American armed forces are...
...But what is most offensive is the argument of the scene...
...But the thing, as a whole, is a colossal disaster, a pretentious and embarassing disaster, a disaster of the eye and of the intellect, a disaster of heroic proportions, for when Catch-22 goes down, it not only goes down by itself-it brings with it every fashionable Liberal attitude ever held...
...If he does believe it makes no difference which side you choose as long as you survive, then he logically must believe that civil rights workers who risk their lives are fools, and that those who fought the Nazis in Europe were fools...
...He spoke (or, to be exact, mumbled) of symbols and dichotomies and genres and metaphysical quiddities...
...No one reading the book, or seeing the film, can guess just what Nichols-Heller believes is good and desirable and for a very good reason: Liberalism simply cannot provide a philosophical basis for such judgments...
...when the Americans come in he loves America...
...One wonders why he did not have a greedy Jew or a shuffling black man along to join in the ethnic fun...
...The other members of the panel were two professors of English...
...But on the way home I began to think about the film and the more I thought, the more I was convinced that in the film Catch-22 we have more than just a movie...
...Vincent Canby of the New York Times said it was the best picture he had seen so far in 1970...
...When the Fascists are in power he is Fascist...
...He spoke in English...
...Now if this is what Nichols does believe, that is one thing, but he must go all the way...
...Funally Heller spoke...
...I had read Catcb-22 a few years before I heard Heller speak...
...I have mentioned this only to point out that what is written below was composed more in sorrow than in anger...
...Here are two of my favorites: 1. All officers in our armed forces are semi-fascist, stupid, greedy, bloody-minded and anti-democratic...
...It's really bold and daring and it really says something really profound about daring Mike Nichols, and about the daring Liberal ethics out of which he created this pointless, mindless, tasteless, hypocritical, phony movie...
...Obviously he does not mean this...
...Now if there is one point about satire which has been made from Chaucer to Evelyn Waugh, it is this: in order to be able to poke fun at someone or something you have to be standing somewhere...
...surely he was not arguing that American involvement in World War II was criminally insane...
...People have been saying and writing things like that for eons and people also have been fighting wars for eons...
...The scene is an Italian brothel: Natley (played by Garfunkel of Simon and) is talking to an old Italian who claims to be one hundred seven years old...
...There were parts that were Very funny, but when I tried to pin down exactly what it was that Heller was saying things got a bit sticky...
...But every possible philosophical position (even one that held that he had no philosophical position) I used as a basis for understanding the true meaning of Catch-22 led to one of two conclusions: either Heller had written a long series of punch-lines, non-sequiturs and logical absurdities just for the fun of it, or he was not quite sure what he wanted to say, and had taken over three hundred pages to do it...
...We have seen this obligatory scene in every film about World War II since This is the Army and it still is not funny, but Nichols does not know that and lingers on the moaning and groaning of the men as if it were a witty scene out of high Restoration comedy...
...It is-again like Liberalism-a kind of magnificent failure...
...He spoke quite simply, with a great deal of self-deprecatory humor, and at the end of his little talk I almost wept for joy because in the midst of a panel discussion (the academic equivalent of the bastinado) someone had cared enough to speak in a human voice...
...We are obviously to believe that what the Italian is saying is what Nichols believes...
...The only philosophically respectable position that can make such an absolute claim about the absurdity of the military is pacifism...
...No, he was not saying the obvious - but what was he saying...
...We have a compendium of what is wrong with the liberal view of the world...
...It seemed that he was saying that war is irrational and bad for you under any circumstances...
...I could understand every word, not every sixth or seventh word as had been the case with the English teachers...
...Heller was attempting to say something important, not only about a group of Air Corps men in World War II, but about the way of the world...
...But the only reason to survive is to be able to live your life the way you want to, and not the way other people want you to lead it...
...There is a scene where the men about to go on a mission are going crazy over a well-proportioned female aide to Welles...
...Military life is abundant with absurdities (see Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy) and is a fair target for the satirist...
...The numerous pokes Nichols-Heller take at the armed forces just do not come off because when you ask the relevant question-if the military, as you portray it, is this bad, what do you propose in its place?-you get no answer...
...The important word is satirist, i.e., someone who ridicules vices and follies...
...All the non-sequiturs juxtaposed with the horrors of war, all the play on words, all the emphasis on individual survival and personal responsibility for disassociating oneself from obviously irrational undertakings, all the energy poured into the task of making anyone in authority look either criminal, stupid or insane...what was the ultimate purpose of it all...
...The duty of any sane man is to avoid war at any cost...
...But then what does he mean...
...I walked out somewhere near the end of it, mumbling to myself through gritted teeth, angry that I had spent two dollars for the privilege of seeing Mike Nichols be indecisive for over two hours...
...There is a performance by Orson Welles which is incredibly bad...
...But no, it is enough for Nichols to have paid ritual obeisance to the Liberal taboo...
...I did read the reviews and they were, as they say, interesting...
...Yes, that's right kids, right there in living color good old Martin Balsam on the bowl...
...This, however, is precisely one of the things wars are all about, and why men have been fighting them for five thousand years...
...When it first came out I wasn't in the movie-going mood or was broke or something or other, and I did not see the film...
...He implies that this is an Italian attitude, and that the Americans (like Natley) are fools for fighting when a man can live well by simply switching sides and bending with the wind, etc...
...Recently I caught up with this film...
...It does to the future of philosophically serious Liberal films what the last flight of the Hindenburg did for the future of zeppelins...
...the American Army in Vietnam is not...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
