Catch-22 (dir. Mike Nichols, 1970) - Review

Download the Catch-22 screenplay for personal, private, educational use.

In 1970, Catch-22 tapped into a growing sense of crumbling American hegemony. Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a study of the collapse of empires from the Ming dynasty to the contemporary USA, notes that “the beginning of wisdom in human as well as international affairs was knowing when to stop.” It is this question of when and how to stop, while no one else possesses the wisdom or will to do so, which dogs the protagonist of Catch-22, and his attempts to escape from war.

The film depicts the struggle of a single “crazy” bombardier, Lieutenant Yossarian (Alan Arkin), attempting to flee Italy in World War II. Familiar structures of comedy and war films fracture into an absurd tangle of horror and humor as the extent of the madness of war becomes clear; in the end, when Yossarian finally announces that “beyond this point I will not go,” his friends marvel that he is “crazy”- as he begins to paddle to Sweden.

Catch-22 reflects the alienation of the soldier as a bellwether for broader American identity, fuelled by the absence of the patriotic and emotional structure that Hollywood provided for earlier wars. World War II and its representations in film brought the US together, smoothing over the domestic divisions that surfaced in subsequent conflicts from the 1960s to the present. Mass media of the 1940s painted not only the Allied soldiers but civil society in a friendly light: Catch-22 uses this rose-tinted portrayal to skewer war and its aftermath as a mixture of the awful and absurd which defies any such comfortable framing. The film topples the narratives traditionally applied to make sense of the nation-building practice of conquest and occupation. Its jarring mixture of humour and sobering silence reflects the experience of soldiers as citizens, who increasingly found their countrymen at ‘home’ to be incomprehensibly distant, and their higher authorities - both moral and institutional - to be indifferent or corrupt.

Director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry designed the film “to be funny and then not at all” (Nichols, 1970): while the overall tone fades gradually from farce to horror, it is particularly stark for its juxtaposition of affects: the film buries punchlines in its atrocity. In one scene, Yossarian collects a medal naked. A fellow soldier explains that he has no clothes because “a man got killed in his plane over Avignon and bled all over him.” The discomfort of the chuckling audience serves as a reminder of the distance between observer, experience, and representation of conflict.

The significance of Hollywood in supporting the collective insanity of war which drives every character except Yossarian is incarnated in Orson Welles’ role of General Dreedle. Initially interested in directing an adaptation of the novel, Welles settled for role of the ill-tempered, bullish commander, who seeks to ensure that his troops fight and die unquestioningly when ordered to do so. Welles’s appearance as a figurehead persecuted in the anti-communist witch hunts of 1940s Hollywood highlights competing national myths: hegemonic institutional control vs. free spirited, individual liberty.

Nichols also lays out a sharp critique of capitalism - entirely unthinkable in the post-WWII, HUAC- moderated Hollywood. Chirpy profiteer Milo Minderbender (Jon Voight), embodies the crass, self-satisfied folly of Yossarian’s situation, sells his compatriots out at any opportunity, and haggles with Yossarian over the grave of the latter’s young crewmate, Snowden. Their superiors, Colonel Cathcart (Martin Balsam) and Colonel Corn (Buck Henry), are equally eager to join in the corruption, bombing their own airfield in a bargain with the Germans, and offering Yossarian the chance to buy his return home as a hero: "what's good for business is good for America”. The contrast between capitalist America (the slick, unscrupulous officers) and the ideals for which Yossarian is supposedly fighting (the innocent Snowden, killed in his countrymen’s pursuit of profit) pushes the Lieutenant over the edge.

“There is just one thing after another in the novel which in the past seemed to be outlandish and insane extrapolations on normal human behavior, and now have become par for the course,” commented screenwriter Buck Henry in 1970. “A lot of Catch-22 is hardly as radical as it was. It has been removed from the framework of fantasy and tied to things that really happen - like Vietnam.” Henry’s view of the story as a reflection of an increasingly absurd ‘Catch-22’ of modern reality seems prescient nearly 70 years after its inception.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.