George Clooney’s Hulu miniseries hits home
I mentioned last week while reviewing a serial killer movie that the U.S. is a decidedly warlike country. This week, of course, we have a variety of conservatives in the political class inching us closer to a war with Iran. It’s inevitable, really.
Never mind that we’re still actively involved in Afghanistan. Never mind that we’re regularly bombing several other countries. What’s one more war? What’s one more destabilized region? Who cares about the legions of dead or their radicalized survivors? We’re protecting freedom, right?
So long as we lie to ourselves about our justifications, we can continue to make movies about flag waving and sacrifice. Hollywood has a long and storied history of military propaganda. But there’s an equally long history of dissent. For every Patton, there’s a Platoon. For every Dirty Dozen, there’s a Dr. Strangelove.
One of the best American novels of the 20th century is, in fact, an antiwar satire. Sometimes the resistance to an idea produces the best art. “Catch-22”, the satirical novel by Joseph Heller set in a system of circular logic during World War II, has been adapted many times. The most recent adaptation is a six-part miniseries on Hulu, produced and directed by George Clooney. The series is a departure from the structure of the novel, but maintains the same themes and much of the humor found therein.
For those unfamiliar with the novel, the story is mostly concerned with John Yossarian (Christopher Abbott), a B-25 bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Forces. John Yossarian is baffled by the idea that people he hasn’t met are constantly trying to kill him. He has a set number of missions to fly before he can be sent home, but every time he nears his quota, Colonel Cathcart (Kyle Chandler) raises it.
Yossarian tries a variety of ways to get out of flying his missions—general sickness, liver disease, mental illness. Craziness, in particular, is one way to be sent home. There’s a problem though, which the novel explains thus: “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to, but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
The series uses the novel to expound on this idea, along with several other examples of circular logic meant to keep the men fighting the war and dying for the cause.
The series departs from the novel in terms of structure, however. The novel is told non-chronologically, exploring its myriad characters by telling the same events from differing perspectives. This simply wouldn’t work for series or a film. As such, Hulu’s Catch-22 is fairly straightforward.
Novel purists may be bothered by this, particularly because the series doesn’t flesh out any other characters as much as it does Yossarian. It’s a fair criticism, but the series manages to effectively express the themes of the novel carefully and powerfully. The ideas of justice, greed, and the importance of individual identity are still on display.
It doesn’t quite handle the war profiteering aspect as well as it might have—the character of Milo Minderbinder is maybe too likable and too isolated from the consequences of his actions to effectively drive the point home. Overall, however, the series does the novel justice.
The filmmaking, too, is excellent. Two of the episodes are directed by George Clooney (he also plays the notorious Scheisskopf). Clooney, who might not be a prolific director but is a talented one nonetheless, also produced the miniseries. It’s likely a passion project for him, and given the timely nature of the subject, it’s one that could easily resound with an audience.
Really, assuming our nature as a country, there’s never a moment in our history when Catch-22 wouldn’t be timely. We need someone to point out how ridiculous endless war is. Even if it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.