Page 331 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 29: Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (History and War-Background)

and two later Bogart films, To Have and Have Not (1944) and Sirocco (1951). Parodies have included Notes
the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (1946), Neil Simon’s The Cheap Detective (1978), and Out
Cold (2001), while it provided the title for the 1995 hit The Usual Suspects. Woody Allen’s Play It
Again, Sam (1972) appropriated Bogart’s Casablanca persona as the fantasy mentor for Allen’s
nebbishy character, featuring actor Jerry Lacy in the role of Bogart.
Casablanca itself was a plot device in the science-fiction television movie Overdrawn at the Memory
Bank (1983), based on John Varley’s story, and made a similar, though much less pivotal, appearance
in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian Brazil (1985). Warner Bros. produced its own parody of the film in the
homage Carrotblanca, a 1995 Bugs Bunny cartoon. In Casablanca, a novella by Argentine writer
Edgar Brau, the protagonist somehow wanders into Rick’s Café Americain and listens to a strange
tale related by Sam.

29.6 Summary

• Casablanca has been subjected to many different readings. Semioticians account for the film’s
popularity by claiming that its inclusion of a whole series of stereotypes paradoxically
strengthens the film.Umberto Eco explained: Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many
films, an anthology. [...] When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric
depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the
clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
• Eco also singled out sacrifice as one of the film’s key themes: “the myth of sacrifice runs
through the whole film.” It was this theme which resonated with a wartime audience that
was reassured by the idea that painful sacrifice and going off to war could be romantic
gestures done for the greater good. Koch also considered the film a political allegory. Rick is
compared to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gambled “on the odds of going to war
until circumstance and his own submerged nobility force him to close his casino (partisan
politics) and commit himself—first by financing the Side of Right and then by fighting for
it.” The connection is reinforced by the film’s title, which means “white house”.
• Harvey Greenberg presents a Freudian reading in his The Movies on Your Mind, in which the
transgressions which prevent Rick from returning to the U.S. constitute an Oedipus complex,
which is resolved only when Rick begins to identify with the father figure of Laszlo and the
cause which he represents. Sidney Rosenzweig argues that such readings are reductive, and
that the most important aspect of the film is its ambiguity, above all in the central character of
Rick; he cites the different names which each character gives Rick (Richard, Ricky, Mr. Rick,
Herr Blaine and so on) as evidence of the different meanings which he has for each person.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct option:
(i) The best setting rural of eco is ............... .
(a) Nome della rosa (b) Cosablanca
(c) The Aesthetics of Themas (d) None of these
(ii) Eco was born on January 5th, ............... .
(a) 1930 (b) 1931
(c) 1932 (d) 1941
(iii) The novel the Island of the day before, is the ............... novel of eco.
(a) 1st (b) 2nd
(c) 3rd (d) None of these
(iv) The purting of its Golden Age Hollywoodness—refers to ............... .
(a) American (b) Casablanca
(c) Passage to Marscille (d) None of these

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