Page 344 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 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 aspects of the fan’s private sectarian
world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of
the sect recognize through each other a shared expertise. Naturally all these elements (Characters
and episodes) must have some archetypical appeal, as we shall see. One can ask and answer
questions about the various subway stations of New York or Paris only if these spots have become
or have been assumed as mythical areas and such names as Canarsie line or Vincennes-Neuilly
stand not only for physical places but become the catalyzers of collective memories.
Curiously enough, a book can also inspire a cult even though it is a great work of art: both The
Three Musketeers and The Divine Comedy rank among the cult books; and there are more trivia
games among the fans of Dante than among the fans of Dumas. I suspect that a cult movie, on the
contrary, must display some organic imperfections. It seems that the boastful Rio Bravo is a cult
movie and the great stagecoach is not.
I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate,
unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with
the whole. In the case of a book one can unhinge it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series
of excerpts. A movie, on the contrary, must be already ramshackle, rickety, unhinged it itself. A
perfect movie, sine it cannot be reread every time we want, from the point we choose, as happens
with a book, remains in our memory as a whole, in the form of a central idea or emotion; only an
unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should
display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition.
It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.
However, it must have some quality. Let me say that it can be ramshackle from the production
point of view (in that nobody knew exactly what was going to be done next)—as happened
evidently with the Rocky Horror Picture Show—but it must display certain textual features, in the
sense that, outside the conscious control of its creators, it becomes a sort of textual syllabus, a
living example of living textuality. Its addressee must suspect it is not true that works are created
by their authors. Works are created by works, texts are created by texts, all together they speak to
each other independently of the intention of their authors. A cult movie is the proof that, as
literature comes from literature, cinema comes from cinema.
Which elements, in a movie, can be separated from the whole and adored for themselves? In
3
order to go on with this analysis of Casablanca I should use some important semiotic cateogories,
4
such as the ones (provided by the Russian Formalists) of theme and motif. I confess I find it very
difficult to ascertain what the various Russian Formalists meant by motif. If-as Veselovsky says- a
motif is the simplest narrative unit, then one wonders why ‘first 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

the United States, usually by bribing the Prefect of Police, Renault. A Czech Resistance leader, Victor Laszlo,
turns up with his wife, Ilse (Ingrid Bergman), who had a love affair with Rick in Paris just before the German
Occupation, when she believed her husband to be dead. On discovering that he was alive, she parted from
Rick without explanation Bitterly hurt by this experience, Rick is at first hostile to Ilse in Casablanca, but on
learning the truth, and that she still loves him, chivalrously helps her and Laszlo to escape the clutches of the
Gestapo chief Strasser, at considerable risk to himself. In the final sequence, Rick and the implausibly
reformed Renault go off to join the Free French.
3 With the widespread availability of DVDs, Eco’s point is capable of greater emphasis: our identification with
the episode or intertextual motif is expedited by the technical facility of the instant re-run, sometimes cutting
across any imposed editorial order or theme.
4 A reference to what were in effect two Russian groupings that flourished in the pre-and immediately post-
revolutionary years, the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which included Roman Jakobson (see introductory note
to essay, p.140 above), and the Opoyaz group based in St Petersburg, including Viktor Shklovsky. Motifs
were particularly memorable and ‘defamiliarized’ symbols to be considered aside from their position within
narrative frameworks or ‘themes’.

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