The Recap: Catch 22

These are the do-overs. The ones we want to press repeat on, again and again.

Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 was one of those books that opened the world a little bit wider.
It was an ah-ha moment of sorts, a realisation that there are different ways to think.

The 1961 novel tells the story of Yossarian, leading man and artful dodger, who was a bombardier who didn’t want to bomb, in a war he didn’t want to fight.

I remember the first time I read it. I’d dug it out from the back of my Pop’s bookshelf and – bam – it had me. Suddenly, through its pages, this world that never made any sense, made sense.
The revelation? It wasn’t supposed to.
It was fast, funny, fatalistic and, far out, was it different from anything I’d read before. Almost entirely incomprehensible in an ‘is everyone crazy except me?’ kind of way.

The premise of Catch 22 is simple:
As the base physician Doc Daneeka puts it: any crew member can be grounded for being insane, but only if they ask to be — an act of self-preservation that would render them clearly sane in the eyes of the military.
It was a guide on how to get through a world you didn’t understand. One you couldn’t escape.

Catch 22, 2019, Stan Australia

And now, George Clooney – and others – have brought Catch 22 to a miniseries by HULU and currently screening on STAN. Shot over nearly five months last year in Italy, the series marks Clooney’s return to TV. (He found fame on hit show ER, between 1994 and 2000.) But, they’ve done it differently.
And not just differently in the physics of squeezing a 450-page book into six one-hour episodes (of which the script – written by Luke Davies (Lion) and David Michôd (Animal Kingdom) – does a fairly decent job). Differently in that there was something in the book they really didn’t like … So they changed it.

“We made it our mission statement to make the portrayal of women more interesting,” Davies told Variety. “And not because we think the world has changed, not because we think that outside forces tell us that we need to do that, but because the portrayal of women in the novel is so goddamn awful that it just gave us the heebie-jeebies.”

And so, Heller’s women were rewritten. They had names, rather than being someone’s wife, someone’s whore.

So I settled in to watch.
The book I’d loved so much – that I thought had shown me so much – cracked the world a little wider still thanks to Clooney and his team. (Women, on set, held rank in key creative positions including Ellen Kuras – Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind – who directed two of the series’ six episodes.)
It’s like each time you revisit a story you find something new in it.

So, it’s always worth a check in. Because some things improve with time.