Catch-22 is the first book I reread the hardcopy in its entirety after listening to the novel on Amazon's Audible.  This book, it turns out, was the final straw for me to realize audio books just aren't the same for me.  I admit I've never been a great listener.  I'm too lost in my head and if I don't have something directly in front of me to look at with my eyes or touch with my hands, then I'm off to the clouds to imagine my own stories where portals connect top secret agents to alternate past realities and governments collude with private industry to enslave us all.  This is to say I'm glad I reread it.  It's a great book and I got a lot more out of it the second time through.   This has prompted me to reread Moby Dick and Great Expectations after feeling a bit let down from the audio listen-through.  More on those later...  

It's amazing, to me, that Stanely Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove came out in 1964.  I used to think that wasn't that long ago - at least when I first watched it in college in the early 2000s.  It's not early 2000s anymore.  Nearly a quarter century has passed since the dawn of a new millennium.  A lot has happened since then.  Art has morphed, attention-spans have waned, and different kinds of social media platforms have lured in the dopamine-starved eyes of the next generations (like Millennials and Gen Z).  With the rapid flood of information quantity, and with the collective unwritten social censors deciding what is taboo or faux pas, how do some of these old movies and books hold up today?  I'm a child of the 80s and 90s, so my sensibilities are still partly grounded in the past, but my perceptions and tastes aren't exempt from the dynamic influences of contemporary times.  

Dr. Strangelove has been one of my favorite films of all-time since I watched it 20 years ago.  After recently rewatching it, it's more relevant and biting than it's ever been.  I hope the younger generations get it too.  It has an audience score of 94% positive review on the movie review website, Rotten Tomatoes.  This includes over 100,000 reviews by non-critics.  Critics score it even higher at 98%.  I like to believe that many of the audience reviews are from people under age 40.  They tend to be online more, the website isn't that old, and many of the reviews are within the last year or two.  

Good art holds up over time - it's not trendy - and good black comedy is a very difficult genre.  Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, a cynical black comedy novel, which was published three years before Dr. Strangelove holds up today just as the latter does by Stanley Kubrick.  Both stories, and certainly Heller's novel influenced Kubrick's film - and many other works following - maintain a similar, but powerful message about the corruption and bureaucratic degeneracy of runaway government hubris.  They both don’t take a favorable stance on the federal government.  Whereas Kubrick's film is centered around the Cold War and nuclear bombs, Catch-22 concerns WWII and US Air Forces flying military missions off the island of Pianosa, Italy.  The main character, Yossarian, is caught up in a spiderweb of military superiors that keep him and his compatriots flying more and more bombing missions - far beyond their official requirement.    

The tone of Catch-22 is cynical, satiric, and comical throughout - some scenes are laugh out laugh hilarious, but it's within its final act that the horror and starkness of the war and bombing campaigns are displayed and juxtaposed against much of the earlier chapters.  Yossarian wanders the streets of Rome after the death of this friend Nately and encounters dead bodies, starvation, and major destruction.  Distraught with the death of many of his friends and the realization that he may never leave the military machine of destruction he's part of, he flees to start a new secret life in Sweden.

It's the duality of the novel, I think, that appropriately captures the duality of war.  It's at times absurd and comical, endless campaign orders trickled down to soldiers and pilots from superiors tangled in government geopoliticking.  It's also brutal and traumatic and devastating.  The question Catch-22 never really asks, or tries to answer, is whether the whole war effort was necessary.  Most historians and citizens of the west would probably agree that WWII was the last imperative war - the Allies fighting a genocidal enemy hellbent on world domination and massacre of large groups of people.  And perhaps that's where its power lies - many of the wars and conflicts following WWII it became reasonable to question the authenticity of them.   The gains and sacrifices of Vietnam or Korea or Iraq, when weighed, didn't seem to make sense for many people - including some politicians, journalists and historians with a collective reach.  But WWII, by almost all accounts, was a required effort.  Thus, in a way, it's the most shocking to see Heller poke at it with humor, satire, and horror like he does in his famous novel Catch-22.  If there is a hero in the story, it's supposed to be Yossarian simply because he survives and escapes, (dishonorably) to another country where he's free from the fighting and death, and free from the consequences of abandonment.

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For older generations, and when this book first came out, I imagine it created a lot of disgust and controversy.  Times are different now and the younger generations are too distracted with dopamine triggering social networks and the Tik-Tokkings to “reduce” themselves to understanding the past and the significance of anti-war stories like Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove.  These kinds of stories can open the conversations and debates about what and why we do any of it.  Is modern war necessary, or is it runaway bureaucrats playing boards games with lives and tax money?  These kinds of questions are critical for own understanding and by extention our lives and futures.  The younger generations need to be asking and trying to answer these questions, but they don't seem to care.  At least that’s how it seems to me – but then again some the latest Rotten Tomatoes reviews are very recent, so maybe I’m just being too cynical, too.    

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Summary:  Groundbreaking controversial novel stuffed with satire and comedy, and devasting questions governed by its own quirky internal logic...like the actual government.  

 

Rating:  8.0

 

-E.B.  2024-04-21

 

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