Mini-Thems

I had fond memories of Laurel & Hardy’s BRATS, but I also remembered Leslie Halliwell saying it was disappointing, arguing that because L&H are so much like big kids, seeing them as little kids removes the amusement of inappropriateness. But Leslie Halliwell was dependably wrong on every point of opinion, criticism and analysis that ever came his way, just as he was dependably right on facts. BRATS, after all, gives us the familiar life-sized Stan and Ollie, in addition to the kiddie versions, so you’re not being deprived of anything. In fact, the irony of big men with childish minds is pointed up even more, since we can see how the boys have not progressed from their infantile selves.

Actually, we don’t quite get the familiar Ollie, because he’s had to shave his moustache to play his diminutive self, Ollie Jr. So adult Ollie is wearing a fake ‘tache that looks like it was drawn on with magic marker. Its sharp definition makes it look more than usually Hitlerian, or like the improbably square blot on the window in Father Ted.

Apart from a surprising animated mouse, there are only a couple of special effects shots, but these combine with the shot-reverse-shot schema in which both sets of the boys cut together using the Famous Kuleshov Effect to convince us they’re in the same space, looking at each other, when in fact the child versions are performing on impressively scaled-up sets. The effect is to make the kiddie duo uncannily small, TOO small. Because they have adult proportions, they don’t seem quite like real children, more like the victims of Dr Cyclops.

Because of the immature (or MORE immature) variant boys on display, this one’s even more violent than usual, with little Stan consistently getting the best of it. Most wince-inducing moment is Ollie getting the metal rod of a door-knob in the eye. Even more distressing to see this happen to a “child”. Ollie checks, gingerly, to see if his eye is still there.

Little Stan also delivers a wholly deliberate eye-poke, and right at the start of the film Big Ollie accidentally pokes his OWN eye. Is this an Oedipal theme or something?

Ollie’s self-inflicted injury reminds me of a Blake Edwards quote. Attempting to explain his sometimes grisly sense of humour (who else would attempt to raise laughs from a man stabbing himself in the side with a letter-opener?), Edwards described the funniest thing he ever saw: he was sitting in a restaurant when Curt Jurgens walked in, saw him, and waved — “Hiya, Blake!” and with the same movement, stuck his thumb squarely in his eye.

It’s funny because it’s Curt Jurgens.

Mom?

So, I read Joseph Heller’s autobiography, Now and Then. I’m a big Catch-22 fan but never got into his other novels. When someone told Heller he’d never written anything as good as his first novel, he’s said to have replied, “Yes, but neither has anyone else.” But I do really like No Laughing Matter, Heller’s other memoir, co-written with Speed Vogel, which deals with his year struggling with Guillane-Barré syndrome, a nasty but thankfully temporary neurological complaint, with the two writers taking alternate chapters, which leads to a great bit where Vogel announces his friend’s tragic death and Heller bounces back in the next chapter with “I certainly did not die, and I don’t know why Speed insists on telling everyone I did.” (Later, Heller did die, which either spoils the joke or adds a fresh punchline depending on your level of morbid humour.)

Anyway, the autobio is good, but I was mainly interested in reading about the events which influenced Catch-22. An unexpected one occurs before Heller even gets overseas. He was working in flight training when his mother fell and injured herself. He got leave to go visit her ~

Entering the hospital in Brooklyn some five days later by myself some five days later I had no idea what I would find. For reasons I don’t understand and never expect to, I had constructed the bizarre scenario that I might not recognize my mother and feared that my failure to do so might sink her into deep despair. A couple of dozen beds in the women’s ward of Coney Island Hospital stood before me. Facing the entrance when I stepped in was a bed holding a white-haired woman of about my mother’s age whose attention I captured instantly. She rose on an elbow to observe me more intently. I stared right back with the tentative beginnings of a smile. Her gaze remained fixed on me and I started across to her. I hugged her gently while kissing her once or twice and sat down. I was appalled that she didn’t seem to recognize me or respond appropriately to my name. This was worse than I had imagined. It required a few more awkward minutes of uncomfortable talk for both of us to realize we had never set eyes on each other before. I glanced about wretchedly. At the far end of the ward I then clearly spied my mother, practically levitating out of her bed, plaster cast and all, and waving wildly in furious and frustrated exasperation to attract my attention. She looked exactly as I remembered, and she told me yet again that I had a twisted mind.

Lots of interest there. I’m struck by the fact that when I’m waiting for someone, and they’re late (I’m usually early, and I’ve always had the misfortune to socialise with people who are usually late), I cast around and seem to see them in every stranger. But then, when the real person turns up, I KNOW it’s them. Recognition is a frail, fallible thing, until suddenly it’s not. Heller had seen his mother every day of his life, then suddenly he’d been removed from her, and found he didn’t have a reliable image he could call to mind.

He goes on to say ~

After reading this, anyone who has recently read Catch-22 for the third or fourth time might be struck by the parallel between the account of my mother I’ve just given and an episode in the novel in which Yossarian is visited in a hospital bed by a family of tearful strangers, but I don’t remember that I consciously had the former in mind when I was devising the latter.

And the scene made it into Mike Nichols and Buck Henry’s movie adaptation, so there you go, a movie connection. I wish they’d found time for the soldier who sees everything twice, and Yossarian’s psychiatrist, but then the movie would be three hours long.

I think the scene in the novel isn’t about the vagaries of recognition in the same way. The family, who have lost a real son, embark on a sort of role-play where Yossarian stands in for their son/brother who died before they could see him. The mother seems to believe that Yossarian is her dying son, and dad keeps correcting her, until she says, “What does it matter, he’s dying, isn’t he?” (Yossarian is not, in fact, dying, or no more than the rest of us.) So it’s about knowing self-deception and rites of passage. Saying goodbye. Maybe it doesn’t matter who you say it to.

The King