Yesterday was the Victory Day in Russia when Nazi’s Germany surrendered. We decided to look at the war from another point of view and watch American movie Catch 22.
The movie is based on Joseph Heller novel and contains lots of absurd things. It’s quite hard to see it because the narration is not in chronological order and the plot is not clear at all for the first part of the film. The main character, John Yossarian doesn’t want to serve any longer and trying to escape from the army. He tried to persuade the army doctor that he is mental, got his medal naked and did other strange things. The movie ends when he run away from the hospital with an inflatable boat and started rowing into the ocean.
The main idea is that war is good for cynical and mental people but for normal people all this madness is unbearable.
It is very popular in Russia now, among all this political tension with West, to boast the strength of our army and repeat a stupid phase that “we can repeat”. The people who are saying this either don’t remember or don’t know about tens of millions of lives lost on the WW2 battlefields. And May 9 (or May 8 in western Europe) is a good occasion to refresh our memories that peace is one of the highest values of modern society. And our ancestors paid a high price for it.