Catch-22

...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...

...Now all of the above is in no way an argument for not being beastly to the military...

...But what is most offensive is the argument of the scene...

...There are a number of things offensive in this scene...

...But Liberals are notoriously "pragmatic," i.e., they are said to judge each case on its own merits...

...Nichols is buying laughs, on the cheap, as it were...

...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...

...It seemed that he was saying that war is irrational and bad for you under any circumstances...

...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...

...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...

...It is-again like Liberalism-a kind of magnificent failure...

...The old Italian is proud that he switches sides when the opportunity presents itself...

...There is a scene where the men about to go on a mission are going crazy over a well-proportioned female aide to Welles...

...Nichols-Heller is not a satirist, only a wise guy...

...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...

...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...

...I had read Catcb-22 a few years before I heard Heller speak...

...The duty of any sane man is to avoid war at any cost...

...Mike Nichols' Catch-22 is a thin child's garden of Liberal clichfes...

...There is a performance by Orson Welles which is incredibly bad...

...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...

...No one but a Liberal could have written Catch-22...

...Now, this in itself is not an original or even a very persuasive thesis...

...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...

...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...

...John Avey...

...the American Army in Vietnam is not...

...We are obviously to believe that what the Italian is saying is what Nichols believes...

...I could understand every word, not every sixth or seventh word as had been the case with the English teachers...

...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...

...It does to the future of philosophically serious Liberal films what the last flight of the Hindenburg did for the future of zeppelins...

...the scene works that way, and the lines Garfunkel has are all simplistic, patriotic truisms, meant to be snickered at...

...In order to talk about Catch-22, I found I had to take it seriously...

...Vincent Canby of the New York Times said it was the best picture he had seen so far in 1970...

...Funally Heller spoke...

...The important word is satirist, i.e., someone who ridicules vices and follies...

...No, he was not saying the obvious - but what was he saying...

...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...

...Or was he...

...The book had puzzled me...

...The Liberals have no answer because they have no philosophical basis from which to judge the question...

...But what else can he do with such a cardboard character...

...The only philosophically respectable position that can make such an absolute claim about the absurdity of the military is pacifism...

...Recently I caught up with this film...

...If the American armed forces as they exist are not desirable, what kind of American armed forces are...

...There are performances that are good and one-Alan Arkin's as Yossarian- that is very good...

...There are moments, even entire scenes, which leave you aching for more, for they are nothing less than perfect...

...I stopped, that is, until Mike Nichols made a movie based on Catch-22...

...when the Americans come in he loves America...

...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...

...Now if this is what Nichols does believe, that is one thing, but he must go all the way...

...This, however, is precisely one of the things wars are all about, and why men have been fighting them for five thousand years...

...Yes, that's right kids, right there in living color good old Martin Balsam on the bowl...

...He spoke (or, to be exact, mumbled) of symbols and dichotomies and genres and metaphysical quiddities...

...I have mentioned this only to point out that what is written below was composed more in sorrow than in anger...

...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...

...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...

...He spoke in English...

...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...

...He then sat down to thundering silence...

...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...

...Military life is abundant with absurdities (see Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy) and is a fair target for the satirist...

...Yet every time I tried to figure out just what Catch-22 was all about, nothing seemed to fit...

...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...

...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...

...The Israeli Army is o.k...

...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...

...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...

...There is a scene in Catch-22 which for tastelessness should win Nichols some kind of award...

...In short, I laughed at Catch-22 but I knew that laughter was not all that Heller had expected from his readers...

...Here are two of my favorites: 1. All officers in our armed forces are semi-fascist, stupid, greedy, bloody-minded and anti-democratic...

...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...

...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...

...When the Fascists are in power he is Fascist...

...no one but a Liberal could have made this kind of film from that kind of book...

...For those who love really sophisticated Liberal commentary on the meaning of it all, don't miss Martin Balsam sitting on the bowl defecating...

...But then what does he mean...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...But no, it is enough for Nichols to have paid ritual obeisance to the Liberal taboo...

...It is the quin-tessentially Liberal film of our time and it fails because it is unable to transcend the basic emptiness of Liberalism...

...Obviously he does not mean this...

...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...

...People have been saying and writing things like that for eons and people also have been fighting wars for eons...

...This kind of intellectual dishonesty permeates the film at every level...

...The other members of the panel were two professors of English...

...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...

...One wonders why he did not have a greedy Jew or a shuffling black man along to join in the ethnic fun...

...surely he was not arguing that American involvement in World War II was criminally insane...

...Much of Catch-22 depends on this kind of reflex action from its audience...

...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...

...Surely Heller did not write such a long and involved book to merely make us laugh at the alleged pretensions of the American military...

...I did read the reviews and they were, as they say, interesting...

...He plays the arch-typical semi-fascist general, with about as much conviction as a fire hydrant...

...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...

...We have a compendium of what is wrong with the liberal view of the world...

...2. All war is a futile exercise engaged in by desperate men driven by mindless leaders for unknowable purposes...

...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...