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Unit 32: Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (Intertextual Analysis)

was enshrined in revival houses across America as a sacred relic, not to mention an audience- Notes
participation precursor of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Like Casablanca, The Rocky Horror
Picture Show is a compendium of mass media cliché and romantic wisdom -- in this case pertaining
to post-Elvis Anglo-American youth culture.) If Casablanca itself was the Casablanca of 1961 (call
this now designated cult film "Casablanca"), the next decade was, of course, a problematic one for
Americans abroad: You might argue Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie as the CASABLANCA of
1971, if not for Woody Allen's half-nerdy, half-swinging refetishization of "CASABLANCA," Play
it Again, Sam.
Perhaps each generation gets the CASABLANCA remake it deserves. Steven Spielberg's Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981) -- which, in a self-conscious attempt to be "movies," knowingly reshuffled
elements of CASABLANCA and "CASABLANCA" -- heralded America's reborn confidence and
self-absorption. Sidney Pollack's quickly-forgotten Havana (1990) -- which proposed Robert Redford
as the cynical expatriate and Lena Olin as the Swedish dame of mystery, transporting
CASABLANCA to the Pearl of the Antilles on the eve of the Castro revolution -- is redolent of our
current confusion and decline.

32.1 Intertextual Analysis

When people in their fifties sit down before their television sets for a rerun of Casablanca, it is an
ordinary matter of nostalgia. However, when the film is shown in American universities, the boys
and girls greet each scene and canonical line of dialogue ("Round up the usual suspects," "Was
that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?" -- or even every time that Bogey says "kid") with
ovations usually reserved for football games. And I have seen the youthful audience in an Italian
art cinema react in the same way. What then is the fascination of Casablanca?
The question is a legitimate one, for aesthetically speaking (or by any strict critical standards)
Casablanca is a very mediocre film. It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility,
and with little continuity in its dramatic effects. And we know the reason for this: The film was
made up as the shooting went along, and it was not until the last moment that the director and
script writer knew whether Ilse would leave with Victor or with Rick. So all those moments of
inspired direction that wring bursts of applause for their unexpected boldness actually represent
decisions taken out of desperation. What then accounts for the success of this chain of accidents,
a film that even today, seen for a second, third, or fourth time, draws forth the applause reserved
for the operatic aria we love to hear repeated, or the enthusiasm we accord to an exciting discovery?
There is a cast of formidable hams. But that is not enough.
Here are the romantic lovers -- he bitter, she tender -- but both have been seen to better advantage.
And Casablanca is not Stagecoach, another film periodically revived. Stagecoach is a masterpiece
in every respect. Every element is in its proper place, the characters are consistent from one
moment to the next, and the plot (this too is important) comes from Maupassant--at least the first
part of it. And so? So one is tempted to read Casablanca the way T. S. Eliot reread Hamlet. He
attributed its fascination not to its being a successful work (actually he considered it one of
Shakespeare's less fortunate plays) but to something quite the opposite: Hamlet was the result of
an unsuccessful fusion of several earlier Hamlets, one in which the theme was revenge (with
madness as only a stratagem), and another whose theme was the crisis brought on by the mother's
sin, with the consequent discrepancy between Hamlet's nervous excitation and the vagueness and
implausibility of Gertrude's crime. So critics and public alike find Hamlet beautiful because it is
interesting, and believe it to be interesting because it is beautiful.
On a smaller scale, the same thing happened to Casablanca. Forced to improvise a plot, the
authors mixed in a little of everything, and everything they chose came from a repertoire of the
tried and true. When the choice of the tried and true is limited, the result is a trite or mass-
produced film, or simply kitsch. But when the tried and true repertoire is used wholesale, the
result is an architecture like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. There is a sense of dizziness, a
stroke of brilliance.

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