Catch-22, take two

Last time I taught Joseph Heller's Catch-22, it was a total disaster; this time, it's a delight. What made the difference?

Context is key: I taught Catch-22 three years ago in a sophomore-level Literature into Film class full of non-English majors interested in fulfilling two General Education Requirements (Literature and Writing Proficiency). Many students were attracted to the class because they saw the word "Film" in the title and assumed that it would be less demanding than a literature class focusing entirely on books.

They balked at Heller. Didn't like him one bit. Didn't understand why he couldn't just tell the story straight out instead of jumbling the chronology and switching between so many characters the students found incomprehensible and introducing obscure theological debates and going on and on and on for so many hundreds of pages.

And then they didn't like the movie any better: too scattered, too unpatriotic, too confusing. They really didn't like the brief moments of semi-nudity, complaining on course evaluations that I forced them to view pornography in class.

Those were probably the worst course evaluations I've ever received, and not just because of the nudity thing. It was the first time I had ever taught a three-hour evening course. I am a morning person. My brain shuts off the lights and pulls down the blinds at about 7 p.m. The class lasted until 10. For that particular group of students, I needed to be at my best, and I simply wasn't.

This semester it's all good: I'm teaching Heller in an upper-level American Novel class full of English majors who enjoy dissecting Heller's rhetoric, his characters' peculiar moral arithmentic, and his theological debates. I'm teaching in the morning when my brain is fully functioning, and I'm showing brief clips from the film but avoiding nudity.

Well, mostly. Yesterday I wanted to show the scene in which Yossarian receives a medal in the buff, and I warned students that they would be exposed to Alan Arkin's bare butt, but I also offered the advice my adorable son gave me years ago when my husband and I were setting out to see Titanic for the first time: "I heard there's a naked girl in it," he said, "But you can put your coat over your head when it gets to that part."

I didn't notice whether any coats went over any heads in class yesterday, but I did hear the sort of painful laughter that arises at so many points in both the book and the film. Heller takes all the ideas mid-century Americans held dear and twists them until they squeal in joy or pain or sometimes both, and that's a complex set of emotions for the average student to encounter.

Good thing I have above-average students this semester, because they make Catch-22 an awful lot of fun.