Page 356 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Rocky Horror, Pink Flamingos, and Eraserhead had much less auspicious beginnings. How can a
popular wartime melodrama, promoted initially as home-front propaganda, continue to find such
devoted audiences?
For Umberto Eco, the key to Casablanca is its "glorious incoherence, " producing enough
contradictory material to support new meanings for each new audience. Not only does Casablanca
contain several archetypal situations, writes Eco:
"When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us
laugh, but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among
themselves and celebrating a reunion."
If Eco had watched more products of the American studio system, he might have observed that,
from the beginning, Hollywood films have constituted a never-ending reunion of archetypes. We
suspect that the film's appeal has more to do with its ability to tap into the unconscious concerns
that regularly drive audiences to the movies. Psychoanalytic theory provides the royal road to
understanding the American cinema, especially the films of the "classical" period that began with
the acceptance of sound films around 1930 and culminated at about the time that Casablanca was
made in 1942. But since psychoanalysis has in the last two decades ceased to be a monolithic
method for film scholars, we have adopted a pluralist approach, deploying a range of
psychoanalytically based methodologies around Casablanca. We share the view that "a
psychoanalytic reflection on any phenomenon is incisive to the extent that it employs more than
one dimension." The "star" performances of Bogart and Bergman, the music of Max Steiner, the
romantic tensions of the narrative, even the film's handling of American politics can be approached
through psychoanalytic thought. We are as interested in illustrating the heterogeneity of
psychoanalytic film theory as we are in offering a thorough reading of Casablanca.

32.2 Oedipus in North Africa

A wealth of Oedipal material awaits anyone wishing to interpret the film along classical Freudian
lines. Like Sophocles' Oedipus, Rick Blaine is an outcast from his home country. At least in the
fantasies of Capt. Renault, Rick may have fled because he killed a man. In fact, as Greenberg has
observed, Renault's speculations have a great deal of Oedipal resonance. Because Rick will not
divulge the real reasons that brought him to Casablanca, Renault wonders if Rick absconded with
the sacred money of the church or if he ran off with a senator' s wife. Renault says that the
romantic in him would like to believe that Rick took a man's life. Rick's response that he left
America because of a combination of all three can be read as more than a glib piece of verbal
sparring. Greenberg suggests that the sacrosanct stolen treasure [is] the wife of a preeminent older
man; her husband is the one murdered -- and by the love thief. Thus, the essence of the "combination"
of offenses is the child's original desire to kill his father and possess his mother. In Casablanca's
one flashback, Rick's Parisian interlude with Ilsa can be understood as the realization of this desire
to possess: the blissful union with an all-good, nurturing woman completely unattached (at least
in Rick's mind) to a threatening paternal figure.
We doubt that any other actress could have fulfilled this role quite as completely as Bergman,
whose screen image projects the most desirable qualities of mother and lover. Whenever Curtiz's
camera closes tightly on her face, she appears to be as innocent and nurturing as she is sensual and
compliant. Rick was not the only one who responded to Bergman's face in this manner: The
American media worked itself into a frenzy in 1949 when Bergman bore a child out of wedlock to
Roberto Rossellini, after years of being portrayed in the press as the ideal wife and mother,
Bergman so thoroughly flouted American mythology that she was denounced on the floor of the
U.S. Senate, and a legislator in the Maryland state senate introduced a bill to condemn Stromboli,
Bergman's first film with Rossellini.
Rick's flashback at first depicts a dream-like paradise of prewar, pre-Oedipal Paris, where he
toasts Ilsa amid romantic settings. The lovers create a dyed that comes to its inevitable end with
the arrival of Nazi armies, a nightmare image of the jealous, castrating father. Ilsa, as nurturing
mother, has even warned Rick that the Nazis will take special pains to look for him. Later on, in

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