My First Blog Post

In particular about Catch-22.

In case you didn’t know, Catch-22 is a 1961 novel by Joseph Heller about the futility and absurdity of war. It follows many different characters over the course of four-hundred some pages, but focuses on Captain John Yossarian as he tries to survive long enough to be sent home, a seemingly impossible task.

I have no desire to summarize the plot here, I wouldn’t do it justice and would probably just confuse myself, but suffice it to say that it’s good and you should read it. Not only is it a “Great and Important Work of Literature,” it’s hilarious. Heller’s writing is laugh-out-loud funny in a way that I haven’t experienced in any other book, before or since.

For me, that humor is a vital part of the work.

Now let’s talk about adaptation. It’s a tricky thing, and a lot of it comes down to themes and interpretation. Someone might choose to adapt a work to have different themes from its original iteration. Take, for example, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a novel meant to highlight the importance of Notre Dame and kickstart a restoration campaign for the dilapidated cathedral. The novel has been adapted into many different films since its 1831 publication, usually with themes of social justice rather than of the importance of architecture.

Many adaptations, however, are not in the business of changing themes, but are an attempt to convey the messages of the original work. If this is the case, the most important thing about an adaptation, in my opinion, is that it captures the spirit of the work. I don’t care what has to change in order to tell the story, as long as it feels the same to me the adaptation is a successful one. Frankly, I think it’s exciting to see an artist’s interpretation of a story I love and usually adaptations feature a visual richness that I never would have imagined on my own.

Let me clarify something: this is not a review. I only watched two episodes of Hulu’s recent adaptation of Catch-22, so my assertions about the series are unfair and not founded in a complete understanding of the work as a whole. But, for me, Hulu’s Catch-22 failed as an adaptation because it didn’t capture that spirit of the original work, namely its humor.

Most important in this regard is the character of Yossarian who, in Hulu’s series, is suffering from a lack of personality. In the book Yossarian is mad by virtue of being the only sane person in his squadron. His desperate attempts to convince his superiors that he’s mad despite his inherent sanity mean that he is always on the cusp of craziness. One layer of the multi-tiered, titular catch-22.

Yossarian in the show doesn’t walk this line. He is quietly, starkly sane. All the humor is sucked out of him in favor of having a palatable hero. Gone is the harebrained character who crackles with life, scared enough of death to defy the United States military. Instead, Yossarian is stoic, a noble man who speaks truth to power. He’s wildly boring. And it’s a damn shame.