Page 347 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

5. ‘Deutschland tiber Alles.’ THe German anthem introduces the theme of Barbarians. Notes
6. The Casbah. Pépé le Moko. Confusion, robberies, violence, and repression.
7. Pétain (Vichy) vs. the cross of Lorraine. See at the end the same opposition closing the story:
Eau de Vichy vs. Choice of the Resistance. War Propaganda movie.
8. The Magic Key: the visa. It is around the winning of the Magic Key that passions are unleashed.
Captain Renault mentioned: he is the Guardian of the Door, or the boatman of the Acheron to
be conquered by a Magic Gift (money or sex).
9. The Magic Horse: the airplane. The airplane flies over Rick’s Café American, thus recalling
the Promised Land of which the Café is the reduced model.
10. Major Strasser shows up. Theme of the Barbarians, and their emasculated slaves. ‘Jesuis
I’empire à la fin de la décadence/Qui regarde passed les grands barbares blancs/En composant
des acrostiques indolents...’ 11
11. ‘Everybody comes to Rick’s.’ By quoting the original play, Renault introduces the audience
12
to the Café. The interior: Foreign Legion (each character has a different nationality and a
different story to tell, and also his own skeleton in the closet), Grand Hotel (people come and
people go, and nothing ever happens), Mississippi River Boat, New Orleans Brothel (black
piano player), the Gambling inferno in Macao or Singapore (with Chinese women), the
Smugglers’ Paradise, the Last outpost on the Edge of the Desert. Rick’s place is a magic circle
where everything can happen-love, death, pursuit, espionage, games of chance, seductions,
music, patriotism. Limited resources and the unity of place, due to the theatrical origin of the
story, suggested an admirable condensation of events in a single setting. One can identify the
usual paraphernalia of at least ten exotic genres.
13
12. Rick slowly shows up, first by synecdoche (his hand), then by metonymy (the check) . The
various aspects of the contradictory (plurifilmic) personality of Rick are introduced: the Fatal
Adventurer, the Self-Made Businessman (money is money), the Tough Guy from a gangster
movie, our Man in Casablanca (international intrigue), the Cynic. Only later he will be
characterized also as the Hemingwayan Hero (he helped the Ethiopians an the Spaniards
against fascism). He does not drink. This undoubtedly represents a nice problem, for later
Rick must play the role of the Redeemed Drunkard and he has to be made a drunkard (as a
Disillusioned Lover) so that he can be redeemed. But Bogey’s face sustains rather will this
unbearable number of contradictory psychological features.
13. The Magic Key, in person: the transit letters. Rick receives them from Peter Lorre and from
this moment everybody wants them: how to avoid thinking of Sam Spade and of The Maltese
Falcon? 14
14. Music Hall. Mr. Ferrari. Change of genre: comedy with brilliant dialogue. Rick is now the
Disenchanted Lover, or the Cynical Seducer.
15. Rick vs. Renault. The Charming Scoundrels.
16. The theme of the Magic Horse and the Promised Land returns.
17. Roulette as the Game of Life and Death (Russian Roulette that devours fortunes and can
destroy the happiness of the Bulgarian Couple, The Epiphany of Innocence). The Dirty Trick:
cheating at cards. At this point the Trick is an Evil one but later it will be a Good one,
providing a way to the Magic Key for the Bulgarian bride.
18. Arrest and tentative escape of Ugarte. Action movie.

11. ‘I an the empire at the end of its decline/Watching the great white barbarians pass/While composing idle
acrostics’ 11. 1-3 of Paul Verlaine’s ‘Languer’. one of his poems ‘ A la manière de plusieurs’ in the collection,
Jadis et Naguere (1884).
12. Casablanca was based on an unproduced stage play entitled.Everybody Comes of Rick’s.
13. See not 1, p. 165, above.
14. Another Hollywood classic, made in 1934, also starring. Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre.

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