Film Friday
What is it about Casablanca that makes it applicable to practically any occasion? A couple of weeks ago I referred to it when comparing Goldman Sachs to a casino. Then a couple of days later Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen mentioned the scene of rounding up suspects when writing about Arizona’s new immigration law. The film seems to fit practically any situation.
In a famous essay, Italian culture critic Umberto Eco has a theory that could account for this. Eco says that the film is a brilliant melding of scores of clichés. In an almost haphazard manner, Casablanca invokes different plots, different themes, different archetypes, different movies. As Eco puts it,
we can accept it when characters change mood, morality, and psychology from one moment to the next, when conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation if a spy is approaching, when whores weep at the sound of “La Marseillaise.” When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
Eco makes the same point earlier in the article when talking about how the film was made:
Forced to improvise a plot, the authors mixed in a little of everything, and everything they chose came from a repertoire of the tried and true. When the choice of the tried and true is limited, the result is a trite or mass-produced film, or simply kitsch. But when the tried and true repertoire is used wholesale, the result is an architecture like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. There is a sense of dizziness, a stroke of brilliance.
In addition to coughing conspirators and patriotic whores, what are these tried and true elements? Eco points out that the film starts out in exotic Morrocco, then invokes France by playing La Marseillaise, and then moves into an American jazz bar. There is a story of unhappy love, a story of flight, and a number of stories of sacrifice. There is a Holy War and there is the Resistance. There are stories of the reluctant hero, of the femme fatale, of the faithful servant. There is a love triangle where the two men, Rick and Lazlo, admire each other. The is male bonding in the final scene between Rick and Renault. There are
such myths as: they’re playing Our Song; the Last Day in Paris; America, Africa, Lisbon as a Free Port; and the Border Station or Last Outpost on the Edge of the Desert. There is the Foreign Legion (each character has a different nationality and a different story to tell), and finally there is the Grand Hotel (people coming and going). Rick’s Place is a magic circle where everything can (and does) happen: love, death, pursuit, espionage, games of chance, seductions, music, patriotism.
So that’s one reason why Casablanca seems bigger than life and why it may be Hollywood’s ultimate achievement.
Here’s another explanation, as least for the movie’s mythical status amongst Americans. When I discussed Meet Me in St. Louis a few weeks ago, I mentioned Robert Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980, which argues that our most enduring films manage to reconcile the conflict between rugged individualism and cooperative behavior. Rather than either/or, these films promise both/and. In addition to St. Louis, Ray looks at It’s a Wonderful Life, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valley, Rebel Without a Cause, Godfather, Taxi Driver and, above all, Casablanca.
In Casablanca, American individualism shows up as isolationism. “I stick my neck out for nobody,” Rick says. Only it appears that this is only a front. Captain Renault accuses him of being a secret romantic, pointing out, “In 1935, you ran guns to Ethiopia. In 1936, you fought in Spain, on the Loyalist side.” In response to Rick’s explanation that he “got well paid for it on both occasions,” Renault observes, “The winning side would have paid you much better.”
Why is Rick so determined to appear a self-serving, reluctant hero. Ray explains that Casablanca puts its finger on our “deep-seated, instinctive anxiety that America’s unencumbered autonomy could not survive the global commitments required by another world war.”
“In fact,” Ray goes on to say, “this anxiety derived from the national ideology’s most fundamental projection: the image of America as separate, unique, and remote from the Old World’s entangling responsibilities.”
According to Ray, Casablanca, leaves us with the sense that, like Rick, we can be both committed and aloof, both independent loners and community participants. Both libertarians and communitarians, outsiders and insiders.
No wonder we find it a mythical film.
Update: An article in today’s Slate explains why the inside-outsider split is inherently unstable. Here’s an excerpt:
Everyone promises to change Washington. And everyone compromises when they get there. It’s just politics. “Most outsider candidacies are wildly contradictory,” says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. “If you say you’re going to make the Senate work and all you do is support filibusters and prevent action, you’re not being faithful to what you said you were going to do.”
Then there’s what Shor calls the “basic re-election imperative.” “Whatever you want to accomplish,” he says, “you can’t do it in a single term.” Re-election itself requires becoming part of the Washington establishment—candidates have to raise money for fellow party members in hopes that they’ll return the favor, and they have to keep their heads down so as not to tick off the leadership. “Outsider” candidates often say they’ll serve only one term, as Bob Bennett did in 1992. But those who have a good shot at re-election almost always take it, as Bob Bennett did in 1998 and 2004.
For any congressional candidate to believe that he or she can “shake up” Washington upon arrival may be unrealistic. But it’s not necessarily disingenuous. They may actually believe it. Or they may simply not understand how Washington works. (They’re outsiders, after all.) There’s little one person can do to derail the legislative train that’s been chugging along for 250 years. First-term members of Congress are also the least equipped people to do it. They don’t have seniority on their committees, they don’t wield personal influence, and they don’t have chits with the leadership.