Casablanca

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, I walked into all of them. I remember every detail: the Germans wore gray … I remember every day, but mostly I remember the last one, the wild finish, the guy on a station platform in the rain with a comical look in his face because his insides have been kicked out. My thoughts would bring a penny, and I guess that’s all they’re worth. I’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life. But I’ll always have Paris.

It’s hard to think of a film with more clichés, reel to reel, than Casablanca. You could close your eyes and hit the fast-forward button and, unless you’ve made it all the way to the end, the very end, no more than a moment will pass after you play it again, as it were, before you come across another line (familiar from earlier viewings of Casablanca, from similar lines in other films, from what you might devise if you were making it up yourself) which, if digested on its own, would make you want to throw up. Every character, too, is lifted from wardrobe along with the tuxedos, trench coats, uniforms, and hats, rescued from shadow theater only by the strength (or star quality) of the performances.

I love it, and have always been suspicious of those who don’t.




Umberto Eco liked Casablanca but had to wonder why, since “aesthetically speaking (or by any strict critical standards) [it] is a very mediocre film. It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects.” The “cast of formidable hams” is not enough to explain why it works: “the characters are stock figures, either all good or all bad;” and the film is a “tangle of Eternal Archetypes” and themes (Unhappy Love, Flight, the Triumph of Purity, Redemption, and enough Sacrifice to beat the band; “an orgy of sacrificial appetites”). “[U]sually to make a story a single archetypal situation is enough. More than enough … But Casablanca is not satisfied with that: it uses them all.”

The reason for this is, in part, how the film was made - on the run, the tuppenceworth of everyone involved considered, dismissed, and reconsidered, with weekly rewrites of rewrites: “all those moments of inspired direction that wring bursts of applause for their unexpected boldness actually represent decisions taken out of desperation.” But what accounts “for the success of this chain of accidents?” For Eco, “this dance of eternal myths” is surrounded by “historical myths, or rather the myths of the movies, duly served up again” (Bogart as the Ambiguous Adventurer, the Lovelorn Ascetic, the Redeemed Drunkard; Bergman as the Enigmatic Woman, Femme Fatale) and this results in “the resonance of intertextuality [which] plays upon the spectator … Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control.”

Sometimes going to an A.A. meeting is like going to see Casablanca again. The script has stitch marks, discussions are improvised daily around bare-bone storyboards, and monologues rest at readymade phrases and are occasionally knitted whole from them. Archetypes abound, and grand themes of suffering, acceptance, spiritual awakening, and redemption play out, layer upon layer, with occasional flashbacks to prequels and hopes for sequels. (Quotidian stressors and humble pleasures are laid forth as well, of course, and don’t always have to be rounded off with a nod to a Step, or a paean to the pleasures of A.A. membership, but usually are.) As with Casablanca, if you recorded an AA meeting, you could close your eyes and hit the fast forward button … Easy does it; live and let live; first things first; one is too many, a thousand is not enough; sick and tired of being sick and tired; face everything and recover; this too shall pass; put the plug in the jug; poor me, poor me, pour me a drink; does anyone have a burning desire, or a cliché we missed?

The Serenity Prayer is La Marsellaise.

“Two clichés make us laugh,” Eco writes, not of an AA meeting, but Casablanca again. “A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion … Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.” A.A. (as another cliché has it) is a simple program for complicated people, and it’s easy to leave after two clichés, but it gets harder to leave after a hundred. The fellowship is invaluable, but even the language becomes stubbornly resonant after a while. It all holds together: somehow the elements combine, the drama unfolds and you’re caught up in it - in part because you’re in it - and that resonance of intertextuality has you spellbound, and right to the end you don’t know if Ilsa is going to leave with Victor or with Rick.