Page 335 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 30: Umberto Eco's 'Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (Textual Analysis)

discourse, a palimpsest for the future students of twentieth-century religiosity, a paramount Notes
laboratory for semiotic research in textual strategies. Moreover, it has become a cult movie. What
are the requirements for transforming a book or a movie into a cult object? The work must be
loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world, so that its
fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were part of the beliefs of a sect, a private world
of their own, a world about which one can play puzzle games and trivia contests, and whose
adepts recognize each other through a common competence. Of course all these elements (characters
and episodes) must have some archetypal appeal, as we shall see. One can ask and answer questions
about the various stations of the subway in New York or Paris only if these spots have become or
have been taken as mythical areas, and such names as "Canarsy Line" or "Vincennes- Neuilly" do
not only stand for physical places, but become the catalyzers of collective memories.
It is curious how a book can give rise to a cult even though it is a great work of art. Both The
ThreeM usketeersan d The Divine Comedyr ank among the cult books - and there are more trivia
games among the fans of Dante than among the fans of Dumas. On the contrary, I suspect, a cult
movie must dis-play some organic imperfections: it seems that the boastful Rio Bravo is a cult
movie whereas the great Stagecoachis not. I think that in order to transform a work into a cult
object one must be able to unhinge it, to break it up or take it apart so that one then may remember
only parts of it, regardless of their original relationship to the whole. With a book, one can
unhinge it manually, so to speak, dismembering it into a series of excerpts. A movie, on the
contrary, must be already wobbly and disjointed in itself. For a perfect movie, which cannot be
reread every time we want or from the place we choose, as it happens with a book, remains in our
memory as a whole, in the form of a central idea or emotion; only a disjointed movie survives as
a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visionary icebergs. To become cult, a movie should
not display a central idea but many. It should not exhibit a coherent philosophy of composition. It
must live on in and because of its glorious incoherence. However, it must have some qualities.
Let me say that it may be disjointed from the point of view of its production (in the sense that
nobody knew exactly what had to be done - as is evidently the case with The Rocky Horror Picture
Show), but yet it must display certain textual features since, beyond the conscious con-trol of the
producer, it has become a sort of textual syllabus, a living example of living textuality. In the face
of this, the addressee must suspect that it is not true that works are created by their authors.
Works are created by works, texts are created by texts, and all together they speak to and with one
another independently of the intentions of their authors.
A cult movie is the proof that, as literature comes from literature, cinema also comes from cinema.
Which are the elements of a movie that can be dislocated from the whole and adored for themselves?
In order to go on with this analysis of Casablanca, I should use some important semiotic categories,
such as the ones (provided by the Russian Formalists) of theme and motif. I confess that I find very
difficult to ascertain what the various Russian Formalists meant by motif. If-according to Veselovskij-
a motif is the simplest narrative unit, then one wonders why "fire from heaven" should belong to
the same category as "the persecuted maid" (since the former can be represented by an image,
while the latter requires a certain narrative development). It would be interesting to follow
Tomacevskij and to look, in Casablanca,fo r free and tied motifs or for dynamic and static motifs.
We should distinguish between more or less universal narra-tive functions a la Propp, visual
stereotypes like the Cynic Adventurer, and more complex archetypal situations like the Unhappy
Love. I hope that someone will do such a job, but let me today assume, more prudently (and
borrowing the concept from the research in artificial intelligence), the more flexible notion of
"frame." In my The Role of the Reader Idistinguished between common and intertextual frames.
By common frame I meant data-structures for representing stereo-typed situations like dining at
a restaurant or going to the railway station; that is, a sequence of actions which are more or less
coded by our normal competence. And by intertextual frames I meant stereotyped situations
coming from the previous textual tradition and recorded by our encyclopedia, such as, for example,
the duel between the sheriff and the bad guy or the narrative situation in which the Hero fights
against the Villain and wins; as well as more macroscopic textual situations, such as the story of
the vierges ouilleeo r the clas-sical scene of the recognition (Bakhtin considered this a motif, in the

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