Joseph Heller's and Mike Nichols' CATCH-22

"Yes, you are. Even that's a contradiction."

The above scene fragment is a direct quote from Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Although the scene is absent from Mike Nichols' adaptation of the book on film, yet it is a perfect illustration of how the writer is capable of twisting logical thinking out of its normal routine in every situation to make the outcome either absurd or contradictory – a notion that is greatly elaborated in the film as well.

The case of contradiction mentioned earlier, however, is a performative catch, meaning that it only becomes a contradiction once it is said aloud. It is not a typical case of what Heller calls Catch-22. The famous catch - originally titled Catch-18, then changed to Catch-22 by Heller's editors in order to avoid confusion with Leon Uris' Mila 18 – is a contradiction in that statement "A" can only be realized if both condition "B" and its opposite are fulfilled at one and the same time. More specifically, the greatest catch that appears in both the book and the film is the impossibility of getting grounded and being sent home from war thus eluding combat duty and therefore getti

The scene, where the reference to Catch-22 evokes such a reaction from Yossarian does not involve the introduction of a new example of the catch, yet it is the absolute peak of the film from the direction's aspect. Yossarian arrives at the whores' apartment, ruined and devastated, and finds the old woman alone in the room, rocking in her chair. As she informs him moaningly that the girls had been taken away by soldiers, the viewer sees the silhuette of her whole figure with no light on her face at all. Even when Yossarian speaks, the focus remains on her rocking body and her cigarette-holding hand. The order of the discussed topics in the book was necessarily changed by the director in order to work up the tension to the climax of the film, which takes place at the end of this scene just before Yossarian leaves the apartment.

Finally, there is one more scene to be examined that stands unique in the course of both the book and the film. It is the scene, where Yossarian walks along the streets of the ruined city of Rome. The change in style from Heller's ironic humor to a melancholy and devastated tone is perfectly adapted to the film as Yossarian is seen walking into the incomprehensible experiences of a winter night during the war: the mother nursing her infant outdoor, the boys in thin shirts and tattered trousers with bare feet, the cripple in the doorway, the man beating his horse with a whip, the man being brutally beaten up by some others. The rumble of thoughts in his mind, which we can read about so clearly in the book, is expressed on the screen through his body movements of a seemingly indifferent tension. "Nothing warped seemed bizarre any more in his strange, distorted surrounding."

Some topics in this essay:
Mike Nichols, Yossarian Luciana, Colonel Korn, Doc Daneeka, Didn't Didn't, Major Major, Police Yossarian, Uris' Mila, Mike Nichols', Catch-22 Catch-22, doc daneeka, major major, scene yossarian, scene film, book film, statement realized, grounded crazy, spiral structure, short scene, crazy grounded,