In 1971 when I was sixteen, my parents divorced. My brother and I lived with my mother, but on weekends we saw my father for a few awkward hours. He was an oil company executive, a real workaholic, and we hardly saw him while growing up. So the natural thing to do when you don't have much to say to one another is go watch a movie, right?
On this particular weekend I was allowed to pick out the movie. For some reason (why? I ask myself now) I chose Catch-22. (There's now a 2019 remake, which I know nothing about.) That movie, along with M*A*S*H, was all the rage that year. Catch-22 had a huge cast of A-list stars such as Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Orson Wells, Anthony Perkins, Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and many others.
The three of us went to the movie theater. As I recall, we were the only ones there. The entertainment began with a faintly pornographic cartoon that should have clued us in to the quirky tone of the movie to follow.
Catch-22 is about a World War II airman named Yossarian who's desperate for doctors to pronounce him insane so he won't have to fly any more bombing missions. The storyline is supposed to be a crackpot take on the absurdity of war, taking place in a Satyricon-like hellscape. No one in the film is heroic. In rewatching the film fifty years later, it was clear to me it hasn't improved with age. It's just as ham-handed and obscure as it was in the 70s. Of the two antiwar movies that came out that year, M*A*S*H is by far the better film IMO.
My father was very conservative. What I didn't know at the time when we saw the film (because when I was a child he didn't talk to us very much) was that he considered his time as a naval officer during WW II to be the defining event of his life. He was a lifelong Republican and, at that time, all in on the Vietnam War. To me, the person he most resembled was former President Richard Nixon--not in looks, but in manner. Whenever I see photos of Nixon walking along the beach at San Clemente in office slacks and dress shoes, it reminds me exactly of my father.
We left the movie, and my father had not one word to say about the film.
In a strange turn of events, as my father aged he became increasingly liberal. To this day I have no idea what prompted that 180 degree-turn in him. By the last twenty-five years of his life (he lived to be exactly 90, dying on his birthday), he was listening to MSNBC, displaying signs for Democratic candidates on his property, and even getting into fierce arguments with people at the gas station and grocery store over politics. He and I volunteered together for Dottie Lamm's 1998 US Senate campaign, and in 2004 he stood on a Denver street corner with me in near-zero temperatures to wave a sign for presidential candidate John Kerry. Despite all this, he still held his WWII service to be sacred. Like me, I think he'd dislike Catch-22 just as much now as he did then.
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