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Unit 31: Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (Deconstructing and Disciplinarising Hollywood)

Tomashevsky and to look in Casablanca for free or tied and for dynamic or static motifs. We should Notes
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distinguish between more or less universal narrative functions a la Propp, visual stereotypes like
the cynic Adventurer, and more complex archetypical situations like the Unhappy Love. I hope
someone will do this job, but here I will assume, more prudently (and borrowing the concept from
research into Artificial intelligence) the more flexible notion of ‘frame’.
In The Role of the Reader I distinguished between common and intertextual frames. I meant by
‘common frame’ data-structures for representing stereotyped situations such as dining at a
restaurant or going to the railway station; in other words, a sequence of actions more or less coded
by our normal experience. Any by ‘intertextual frames’ I meant stereotyped situations derived
from preceding textual tradition and recorded by our enclopedia, such as, for example, the standard
duel between the sheriff and the bad guy or the narrative situation in which the hero fights the
villain and wins, or more macroscopic textual situation, such as the story of the vierge souillée
[dishonoured virgin] or the classic recognition scene (Bakhtin considered it a motif, in the sense of

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a chronotope) . We could distinguish between stereotyped intertextual frames (for instance, the
Drunkard Redeemed by Love) and sterotyped iconographical units (for instance, the Evil Nazi).
But since even these iconographical units, when they appear in a movie, if they do not directly
elicit in action, at least suggest its possible development, we can use the notion of inter-textual
frame to cover both.
Moreover, we are interested in finding those frames that not only are recognizable by the audience
as belonging to a sort of ancestral intertextual tradition but that also display a particular fascination.
‘A suspect who eludes a passport control and is shot by the police’ is undoubtedly an intertextual
frame but it does not have a ‘magic’ flavor. Let me define as ‘magic’ flavor. Let me address
intuitively the idea of ’magic’ frame. Let me define as ‘magic’ those frames that, when they appear
in a movie and can be separated from the whole, transform this movie into a cult object. In
Casablanca we find more intertextual frames than ‘magic’ intertextual frames. I will call the latter
‘intertextual archetypes’.
The term ‘archetype’ does not claim to have any particular psychoanalytic or mythic connotation, 7
but serves only to indicate a pre-established and frequently reappearing narrative situation, cited
or in some way recycled by innumerable other texts and provoking in the addressee a sort of
intense emotion accompanied by the vague feeling of a déjà vu, that everybody yearns to see
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again. I would not say that an intertextual archetype is necessarily ‘universal’. It can belong to a
rather recent textual tradition, as with certain topoi of slapstick comedy. It is sufficient to consider
it as a topos or standard situation that manages to be particularly appealing to a given cultural
area or a historical period.
The Making of Casablanca
‘Can I tell you a story’? Ilse asks. Then she adds: ‘I don’t know the finish yet.’ Rick says: ‘Well, go
on, tell it. Maybe one will come to you as you go along.’ Rick’s line is a sort of epitome of
Casablanca itself. According to Ingrid Bergman seems so fascinatingly mysterious because she did
not know at which man she was to look with greater tenderness.
The explains why, in the story, she does not, in fact, choose her fate: she is chosen. When you
don’t know how to deal with a story, you put stereotyped situations in it because you know that
they, at least, have already worked elsewhere. Let us take a marginal but revealing example. Each
time Laszlo orders something to drink (and it happen four times) he changes his choice: (1)
Cointreau, (2) cocktail, (3) cognac, and (4) whisky (he once drinks champagne but he does not ask
for it). Why such confusing and confused drinking habits for a man endowed with an ascetic

5. Vladimir Propp. Morphology of the Folktale (1928)
6. Chronotope is a term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin (see pp 235-63, above) to analyse the ways in which time
and space are represented and related in narrative.
7. As it does in the work of Carl Jung and critics influenced by him, such as Maud Bodkin and Northrop Frye.
(see sections 14,15 and 31 of 20th century Literary Criticism.)
8. Something already seen.

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