Cinema: Some are More Yossarian than Others

McWATI'S VOICE (filtered, yelling):

Help him! Help him!

YOSSARIAN (into mike, yelling):

Help who?

McWATI'S VOICE (filtered, yelling):

Help the bombardier!

YOSSARIAN (into mike, yelling):

I'm the bombardier. I'm all right.

McWATT'S VOICE (filtered, yelling):

Then help him. Help him!

THE chronicle of war is the Bible of irony. The original victim of that mistaken-identity crisis was a B-25 bombardier named Joseph Heller during a World War II raid over Avignon. He was a dozen feet from the pilot; yet they were separated by layers of chaos and terror. It was not Heller who was hurt—it was his gunner who was bleeding copiously into his flight suit. It was Heller's 37th mission. From that instant of agony he grew petrified of flight. When his war ended, he took a ship home; it was some 15 years later before the flyer entered another plane.

The experience was too extravagant to be fiction and too real to be borne. Heller furnished the corpse with a vaudeville wardrobe, mixed in '50s America, and called his novel Catch-22. Black, mad and surreal, it told of a bombardier named Yossarian impaled on the insanity of war and struggling to escape. Undergraduates still see Yossarian as a lionly coward, the first of the hell-no-we-won't-go rebels who had to go anyway. To them, the book's final sentence limns the human condition as well as the hero's: "The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."

Catch-22 smacked of Restoration comedy. The characters trapped with Yossarian in the 256th Squadron had arch names: Major Major, General Dreedle, Colonel Korn, Milo Minderbinder. The contents seemed to be a series of hyperbolic World War II anecdotes, but its author confesses: "I wrote it during the Korean War and aimed it for the one after that." The book was criticized as flatulent, self-indulgent and anachronistic—"Engine Charlie" Wilson's General Motors, thinly disguised, was one of its archvillains. Moreover it followed Hilaire Belloc's irritating dictum: "First I tell them what I am going to tell them; then I tell them; and then I tell them what I told them."

Nearly 5,000,000 readers nevertheless found it one of the most original comic novels of their time. They found it so funny, in fact, that surely half of them ignored Heller's own warnings: that Catch-22 is no more about the Army Air Corps than Kafka's The Trial was about Prague; that "the cold war is what I was truly talking about, not the World War"; and that the second biggest character in the novel is death.

From Neurosis to Hysteria

The biggest, of course, is Yossarian. Like most larger-than-death heroes, he is everyman. Still, some men are more Yossarian than others. Mike Nichols knows. And Alan Arkin knows. And Mike Nichols knows that Alan Arkin knows. "It was the only part I've ever worked on which didn't demand a conception," says Arkin, "because there isn't much difference between me and Yossarian." Viewing Arkin in the film of Catch-22 is like watching Lew Alcindor sink baskets or Bobby Fischer play chess. The man seems made for the role. Fear rides on his back like a schizoid chimp. His voice climbs from neurosis to