Catch-22

Catch-22

          I watched the Mike Nichols movie based on Joseph Heller’s dark WWII comedy about a bombardier off the coast of Italy doing everything he can think of to get sent home.  Catch-22, the novel, was first published in 1961 and made into a movie in 1970. The story of its title deserves to be told as a prequel to its absurd comedic tone.  The concept of the rule “catch” of a paradoxical situation which cannot be escaped due to other rules that preclude it, is fabricated, so it could have been called Catch-Anything. The marketing geniuses of the day went through Catch-18, Catch-17, Catch-11, and Catch-14 before landing on Catch-22.  The fist sounded too much like Mila-18, the second like Stalag-17, the third like Ocean’s Eleven and the last was just not considered funny (I am not sure what a funny number is, but there may be some truth to this).  But 22 was considered hilarious in the way it duplicated itself like some of the characters tended to and gave a sense of the deja-vu that weaves through the story.

          It had been many years since I read the book and saw the movie and I was struck by several things.  First there is the all-star cast of Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, Martin Sheen, Buck Henry (also the script writer), Anthony Perkins, Bob Newhart, Jon Voight, Bob Balaban, Normal Fell, Charles Grodin and, wait for it…Orson Wells.  Then, there is the unmistakable resemblance to M*A*S*H, both in look and feel of the setting and the nature of the comedy.  The Italian airstrip and the Korean helicopter-linked mobile surgical unit could have been filmed on the same Southern California back lot. Jamie Farr as Corporal Klinger has the same swarthiness as a young Alan Arkin as Captain Yosarian, who also has a bit of the Elliott Gould look.  Both would run around naked if it would help them get a Section-8 out of the Army (or Army Air Corps). Both had a full-frontal nude female scene (one on a swim raft and the other in a makeshift shower). The flyers are as irreverent towards the military and the cause of their war as are the surgeons.  Radar O’Reilly is the effective scrounger that Jon Voight’s Milo Minderbinder is, only far less commercial.  Both movies came out the same year even though the M*A*S*H novel was written long enough after Heller’s that there is little doubt who influenced who.

          There is a common anti-war, nay, idiocy-of-war theme that both movies embody.  That is probably why they were so well-received in a time like 1970.  To be honest, Catch-22 got its Academy Award and Golden Globe ass kicked by M*A*S*H, so I guess either the 1968 dialogue versus 1953 dialogue resonated better with the Vietnam-hating audiences or Sally Kellerman appealed more than Paula Prentiss. The biggest difference in the movies may be that Robert Altman chose to add music (Suicide is Painless by Johnny Mandel) where Nichols decided to let the movie rest on the comedy.  Who among us can’t hum the M*A*S*H music and whether from the movie or series, it is irrelevant since they both go to the greater media success of that franchise?

          What is the message of Catch-22?  I see it in everything around me almost every day.  It’s crazy. The absurdity of life abounds.  Just in this morning’s news I read about negative interest rates on European government bonds and about the sale of high-end survivalist condos made from old Cold-War nuclear missile bunkers in the Midwest.  As for negative rates in the time of an inverting yield curve, that all shows great negativity about the future. It is a bet that inflation will be so low as to imply significant contraction in the world economy.  And like the Woody Allen diner who says the food is lousy, but the portions are big, the negative rates only get more negative as investors look more forward.  The good news is that hedge fund managers have found ways to make money on this whacky environment.  The first trick is to factor in the relative forward curves of the currency markets and then figure out the normalized implied yields on those bonds.  This is like that cartoon where the announcer says that the markets traded off on news that the earth was doomed to be hit by a meteor but traded up later on news of a Fed rate cut. Crazy is an understatement (especially with Jay Powell at the helm). By the way, a big factor in all this is that fear drives a flight to quality, which drives money into longer-dated US government bonds. Crazy.

          As for survivalist mentality, I am astounded.  During the Cold War, as a child, I thought backyard shelters were a cool folly, but even I scoffed at their usefulness. The obvious dismissive comment is who wants to live in a world gone mad with everything and everyone around you obliterated.  I relate more to the people who face the tidal wave head-on and accept their fate than the people who scurry underground to live life as moles until radioactive levels abate.  I guess I am not a genetically-programmed last-survivor (that probably got subsumed by my early-adopter tendencies).  But having a hole to go hide in is not the same as buying a multi-million-dollar underground mansion, complete with swimming pools and movie theaters.  I see the rooms all have windows with video views of the outside world.  I guess they must have lots of memory storage, because who would want the depressive view of a blighted world to wake up to?  It all overloads my sense of anything worth further consideration.  The only guy I understand is the guy who sees the fear and looney-tunes thinking and sells into it with a shrug of the snake oil salesman. By the way, do the buyers not think the zombies of the aftermath won’t find a way into their sanctuaries? Crazy.

          The real message of Catch-22 should be that war is futile and the only battle worth fighting is the battle for human kindness.  We may be anthropologically beyond physical war (other than local skirmishes) and now have the economic war machine to occupy out testosterone-driven needs for a good fight.  But that doesn’t change the crazy factor too much.  Someone we know who’s name rhymes with harrumph, thinks that it is shrewd to inflict tariffs on someone such that our own population must pay higher prices and go further into debt, debt which is ultimately held by the very people we are trying to hurt with our tariffs.  That’s almost as crazy as bombing cities that we pay handsomely to go visit in later life or trouncing ideological and grotesquely evil enemies only to let them own the hearts and minds of the state of Kentucky, as Rusal is in the process of doing with its aluminum smelter as we speak. Crazy.