Throughout Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield criticizes others for laughing at the wrong parts of movies. But what are the right parts of movies to laugh at?
To answer this question, I'd like to look at the scene immediately after Maurice, the elevator pimp, has punched Holden and exited with Sunny from Holden's hotel room with the stolen money. On page 116 (Chapter 14), Holden shares how he imagines that Maurice shoots him. He goes on to share how, in this fantasy, Holden, bleeding and dying, confronts Maurice with a machine gun, and is nurtured by Jane Gallagher back to health like in some kind of spy movie.
Holden expresses discomfort with his imitation of the movies, but can be seen nevertheless to identify with movie characters and their reaction to imaginary situations in this scene. Instead of laughing at the pain and vengeful emotion of the actors like I imagine the people Holden scorns to do, Holden projects his own feelings onto them.
Holden has an "abnormal" empathy; for example. he finds himself incapable of taking non consensual sex from his dates, unlike his fellows, and where most people would objectify, he tries to connect emotionally (we see this when Holden talks about his double-date with Stradlater and in the scene with Sunny in the hotel room). Holden tries to understand people and see the good in them, and he sees them as people.
Perhaps the big problem Holden has with the movies is the way they force a particular perspective on their characters, effectively taking away a whole dimension. In action movies, soldiers and spies are pawns of good and evil but lack mundane problems and hygienic flaws; in comedies, we laugh at the mindless misfortune of others without much empathy; in romances, we idealize love and attraction while ignoring the problems and uglinesses. Holden's description of a movie he watched on page 154 (Chapter 18) of Catcher echoes these complaints. I imagine Holden would movies corresponding to these stereotypes distasteful because of the disregard for reality--this constitutes an imposed phoniness inherent to most cheap fiction.The screenwriters are at fault here because they take such a limited approach to make people laugh, cry, or have fun, at the price of a 360 degree character. As I see it, this is Holden's biggest objection with D.B.'s current work.
My mom and I watch the Hallmark Channel even though we recognize the rampant stereotyping and missing dialogue and bad acting that comes from a movie that did not use its budget effectively (and/or that has bad writers, which happens a lot on Hallmark as well). I feel like Holden could do a much better job than Hallmark or Hollywood (or his brother) at screenwriting because he wouldn’t sell out the multidimensionality of a character for laughs. His compassion, imagination, and dislike of movies that aren’t true to the characters in them could power some really good movies. Of course, as the book ends his distaste for movies remains, but I think he’s capable of moving past it for movies as a whole.
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