Nichols: Catch-22 (1970)

For all that it revels in visual conundra, Catch-22 is a remarkably difficult novel to adapt to the screen - it’s so driven by paradoxes, circularities and conversational dead-ends that it’s hard to see how it could ever be appropriated as dialogue. Thankfully Nichols’ adaptation doesn’t even aim for dialogue, opting instead for a series of cacaphonies intermittently drowned out by aircraft noise. Virtually the whole film feels shouted, ejaculated more than delivered; poised at a weird hysterical pitch between terror and ecstasy, it’s locked in a perpetual nosedive that makes Dr. Strangelove feel positively placid by comparison. Like the novel, all that frenzy revolves around Yossarian (Alan Arkin, in the role he was born to play), a fighter pilot stationed on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean, during the later part of WWII. Like the novel, too, Yossarian’s more or less displaced by a vast bureaucratic machinery, deflected into a host of cacaphonous voices who seem to have somehow turned reduced language to its exchange-value – in this world, it doesn’t much matter what you say, just that you say something, exchange language in some way. As with some of the Zucker comedies, then, there’s not much distinction between names and things, making for a vast bureaucratic nightmare wherein naming something totally changes its meaning, or even its existence. Perhaps that’s why the film tends to foreground Milo (Jon Voigt), the barracks businessman, who barters supplies, parachutes and, finally, the base itself to maintain a steady exchange of goods with the German economy. And it’s that sense of an exchange that defies belief or even perception – an exchange of perception -  that foreshadows Michael Bay’s take on the American military-industrial complex some twenty years later, as Nichols sketches out a new and totally disorienting kind of no-man’s-land, collapsing the extreme foreground and background into a new kind of space, buoyed by a galactic updraft that makes the whole film feel shot in the air. Veering quite vertiginously between satire and superspectacle – there are some breathtaking aerial sequences – it’s quite true, then, to the galactically dystopian scale of Heller’s vision. True, too, to its melancholy, as Yossarian spends the last part of the film wandering through  a dark, dank dreamzone, not so much a surreal descendent of neorealism as an American experiencing the tableaux that would eventually inspire neorealism. Quiet as a mess hall that’s just been annihilated, sombre as the first two acts are cacaphonous, it’s bears witness to the profound, terrifying silence that lurks just beneath the surface of Heller’s manic verbosity, completing the novel as much as complementing it.