atch-22: what's
FSm Comment
by GARY HILL
You've got to read the book
io understand the flashbacks,
someone said behind me.
What is the book, a manual?
Or an airstrip like I thought?
An airstrip Mike Nichols
nd Buck Henry and the
cameraman Watkins lift the
film Catch-22 like a screaming
desert bomber up into the heat
on wings all its own.
The film is sensation.
And anyway, flash back to
what and forward where?
Yossarian is caught in a
system of sensory bank boards,
the message-meaning being
whamming air and flapping
tarps, the blowing sand and
pulsing color grain of film
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PAGE 4
stock fusing out to nothing but
projector light
This is a film. The medium is
light.
Unfortunately, there still
lingers as a side effect of shat
tering literature into
particularized images and
sounds, the urge to hunt for
meaning in a chrronological
reshuffling of the pieces.
The urge is to decipher
rather than respond.
And that is exactly where
Yossarian is himself t rying
to shuffle his own notions of
what's right what's wrong,
humane and inhumane, to
make sane sense of the Euro
pean Theater and the second
world war.
He swims through dust past
howling bombers, out through
ers
C
JUII
right, hienane,
open wounds of friends in a
condition of total
choieelessness. x
The machinery is in motion,
and as its gearing slips and its
insanities expand, the only
answer offered, reason given is
Catch-22.
Catch-22 allows for the
dismissal of crazy men from
flying bombing missions but
stipulates that the request for
such a dismissal is certain
proof of sanity and therefore
grounds for refusal of the re
quest After all, you'd have to
be crazy to want to fly the
missions.
And just as Yossarian fullfils
the number of missions re
quired, requirements change
and he's up again fighting,
kicking, middle-fingering
whatever madness put him
there. . i
His friends die off. are hack
ed in half, or suicide
themselves."
One old new boy ("He's
dead; that's as old as you can
get.") spills guts all over him
in repeated flashing cuts inside
a gutted airplane, hot white
light strobing , like a pulsing
head or rotor blades enough
to make Yossarian stick, but
not enough to wrench him free
of the machinery.
Yossarian .
THE KlEBRASKAN
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Within the bureaued drawers
of governmental madness,
Yossarian is alternately
classified sane and insane
whatever Is currently
calculated to perpetuate the
system. Sane or insane ac
cording to the Catch, both
labels working like inventory
tags to keep him in the
drawer.
No bureaucratic system ever
provided : the mechanism for
escape from that system.
Yossarian pleads within the
framework with the doctor,
the chaplain, the major, and
the colonel to ground him from
the ceaseless bombing runs.
Their hands are tied, their
motors going, but their minds
shut off Catch-22.
What right did the MPs have
to gut an Italian whorehouse
and re-cycle independent
whores into Milo's black
market enterprises? Catch-
22.
Catch-22 is not only the name
of the error, the snag keeping
everyone enmeshed and
mindless in the system, it: is
also ' the name of the
regenerative force for duplica
tion and expansion within the
order. '
. . "only crazy people siUn trees."
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1970
sane?
Milo transforms himself from
a hershey-hawking GI to the
dictatorial top man of a black
market mafia riding in a
motorcade in hitlerian splen
dor. He is the system's incarna
tion. A contract is a contract
That's what we're fighting
for!
Ultimately, Catcb-22 Is the
name for whatever conditions
exist when thousands of hitman
beings relinquish their freedom
of choice and-' band over' ail
their working parts to an Idea
or a Natioa or a Cause, i V
And the solution is not just
. sitting naked in the system's
trees or flipping the bird to the
colonel '
If you can't be human-breathing-real
within, the only
way is out
"I've been fighting for my
country for three year. I'm
going to start fighting for
myself," and Yossarian breaks
arid runs against the grain
marching bands and airstrips
off across the desert to the sea,
Swedish girl scouts dancing in
his head.
To live on your feet is better
than to die on your knees.
J