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

not bear any positive value (except, obviously, beauty). The whole story is a virile affair, a dance Notes
of seduction between Male Heroes.
From now on the film carries out the definitive construction of its intertwined triangles, to end
with the solution of the Supreme Sacrifice and of the Redeemed Bad Guys. Note that, while the
redemption of Rick has long been prepared, the redemption of Renault is absolutely unjustified
and comes only because this was the final requirement the movie had to meet in order to be a
perfect Epos of Frames.
The Archetypes Hold a Reunion
Casblanca is a cult movie precisely because all the archetypes are there, because each actor repeats
a part played on other occasions, and because human beings live not ‘real’ life but life as
stereotypically portrayed in previous films: Casablanca carries the sense of déjà vu to such a degree
that the addressee is ready to see in it what happened after it as well. It is not until To have and Have
and Have not that Bogey plays the role of Hemingway hero, but here he appears ‘already’ loaded
with Hemingwayesque connotations simply because Rick fought in Spain. Peter Lorre trails
reminiscences of Fritz Lang, Conrad Veidt’s German Officer emanates a faint whiff of The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari. He is not ruthless, technological Nazi; he is a nocturnal and diabolical Caesar.
Casablanca became a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is ‘movies’. And this is the reason
it works, in defiances of any aesthetic theory.
For it stages the powers of Narrativity in its natural state, before art intervenes to tame it. This is
why we accept the way that characters change mood, morality, and psychology from one moment
to the next, that conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation when from one moment to the
next, that conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation when a spy is approaching that bar
girls cry at the sound of the Marseillaise....
When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two cliches make
us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among
themselves, celebrating a reunion.
Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on
mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.
Nobody would have been able to achieve such a cosmic result intentionally. Nature has spoken in
place of men. This, along, is a phenomenon worthy of veneration.
The Charged Cult
The structure of Casablanca helps us understand what happens in later movies born in order to
become cult objects.
What Casablanca does unconsciously, other movies will do with extreme intertextual awareness,
assuming also that the addressee is equally aware of their purposes. These are ‘postmodern’
movies, where the quotation of the topos is recognized as the only way to cope with the burden of
our filmic encyclopedic expertise.
18
Think for instance of Bannanas, with its explicit quotation of the Odessa steps from Eisenstein’s
Potemkin. In Casablanca one enjoys quotation even though one does not recognize it, and those
who recognize it feel as if they all belonged to the same little clique. In Bananas those who do not
catch the topos cannot enjoy the scene and those who do simply feel smart.
Another (and different) case is the quotation of the topical duel between the black Arab giant with
his scimitar and the unprotected hero, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you remember, the topos
suddenly turns into another one, and the unprotected hero becomes in a second. The Fastest Gun
in the west. Here the ingenuous viewer can miss the quotation though his enjoyment will then be
rather slight; and real enjoyment is reserved for the people accustomed to cult movies, who know
the whole repertoire of ‘magic’ archetypes. In a way, Bananas works for cultivated ‘cinephiles’
while Raiders works for Casablanca-addicts.

18 Film made by Woody Allen in 1971

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