J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has been read by high school and college students ever since it was first published in 1951 because of their strong identification with its central character and narrator, Holden Caulfield who, like them, is in transition between childhood and adulthood. Throughout the novel, Holden does things without understanding why and without the necessary tools to explain them to himself.
He seeks out the company of people he despises, he gets into fights with people he cannot hope to beat, he calls girls late at night, drops in on former teachers, dances with strange women, and visits nightclubs that he knows will bore him, and the only justification he can find for his behavior is that he must be crazy.
Holden is torn between what he wants to do and what he thinks he is supposed to do. Much of what he knows about other people’s expectations of him comes from watching movies and so he models his life on them because he has few other guides. Since Holden does not understand his own motives, the reader has to infer those motives from the clues Holden throws out. What this paper will show is that one of the keys to understanding Holden’s behavior is his attitude toward the movies.
At the beginning of the novel Holden says, “if there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me” (Salinger 1). What he does not acknowledge is that the movies are an essential escape from his problems. Holden has a great deal on his mind, including the death of his younger brother, Allie, and his recent dismissal from Pencey Prep. He has a few more days at the school before he must go home to face his parents, who are already unhappy with him for having been thrown out of three schools before this one.
He sits around the dormitory aimlessly, so desperate for company that he goes into the bathroom to watch Stradlater shave, and while he shaves Holden does a tap dance routine. Holden explains his behavior by saying “all I need’s an audience. I’m an exhibitionist” (Salinger 16) but that is a cover-up.
The part he is performing is that of the governor’s son who has become a dancer against his father’s wishes, and who becomes a star in the Ziegfeld Follies overnight, thus establishing himself as a great tap dancer and proving his father wrong. It is a “corny” plot from a musical picture, a genre he hates “like poison” (Salinger 20), but as Ann Pinsker says, “for Holden, motion pictures may be ‘lousy,’ but they are better than sitting in the dormitory feeling depressed” (132). This is Holden’s problem; movies may be lousy but they are better than his life which is why in moments of crisis he escapes into them.
Other references to films are more direct reflections of Holden’s internal struggle. The most obvious one is Hamlet since both protagonists are battling with uncertainties. Holden’s criticism of Laurence Olivier’s performance is prompted by his sense that the actor falsifies the emotions of a character with whom Holden identifies.
In the case of Olivier’s interpretation of Hamlet, Holden comments that “he was too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy,” and by depicting Hamlet in that way he deprives Holden of the consolation of watching someone as screwed-up as he himself is. For the same reason, he enjoys the way in which Polonius’s children were “horsing around” (Salinger 63) while he was giving them fatherly advice, expecting that he might be due for a lecture himself when he gets home from his angry, disappointed father. When that happens, Holden hopes that he and his sister Phoebe will combine forces against their father, but deep down he knows that there is no way out except through the movies.
Another reason Holden claims to hate going to the movies is the audience’s reaction to them. He gives several examples of how his response differs from that of his companion or the people sitting near him. As Alan Nadel says, “even if one attends alone, the viewing [of movies] is a communal matter. The experience itself depends on the reactions of other people in the audience; it is a matter of ‘other direction’” (97).
In other words, the reactions of others force Holden to confront his own differences with them and frustrates his desire to model himself on people whom he respects and whom he would like to emulate. One of the reasons he gives for loving his little sister, Phoebe, is that “if you take her to a lousy movie, for instance, she knows it’s a lousy movie” (Salinger 37). Holden constantly puts people to the test and one of those tests involves their taste in movies. If they are seduced by Hollywood sentimentality or kitsch he writes them off on the grounds that people who love those films are themselves heartless. Yet his own view of movies is ambivalent at best.
As A. Robert Lee says, “movies were dangerous because they could be believed, and movies were dangerous because they could not” (129). By taking movies as his guide to what he is supposed to do, yet despising those who believe in them, Holden confuses himself to the point of wanting to retreat from the world, into a monastery or as a deaf-mute, or a gas station attendant. Until he finds a more reliable guide to life, however, he is condemned to go on seeing movies.
Holden’s ambivalent relationship with the movies reflects his struggle to construct an identity out of the bits and pieces of truth he sees in them. This is one of many reasons why Catcher continues to be read by young people everywhere. Like Holden, they must make the difficult passage from childhood to adulthood, and like Holden, they have difficulty finding suitable role models. Instead, they look “among artifacts of our culture—books, movies, TV programs … to fashion a character” (Whitfield 122).
For them, the novel is optimistic because even as Holden trashes about looking for some way to construct an authentic self in a world that seems by nature inauthentic, it is constructed for him by his engagement with the external world, whether that is the real world or the world of movies.
Works Cited
Lee, A. Robert. “Flunking Everything Else Except English Anyway: Holden Caulfield, Author.” Ed. Harold Bloom. Holden Caulfield. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
Nadel, Alan. “Rhetoric, Sanity, and the Cold War: The Significance of Holden Caulfield’s Testimony.” Ed. Harold Bloom. Holden Caulfield. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Web.
Whitfield, Stephen J. “Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the Rye. Ed. Harold Bloom. J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.