Page 357 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

Casablanca, Rick enters a more advanced stage of Oedipal development when he comes face to Notes
face with Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Although some viewers may consider Henreid's Laszlo
something of a cold fish, there is no question that the intellectual/freedom-fighter manages to be
more heroic, virtuous, understanding, and forgiving than the most idealized hero of romantic
fiction. Laszlo's entrance presents Rick with a typical conflict of the Oedipal-phase male child.
Does he challenge and attempt to replace his rival, or does he renounce the forbidden object of his
love and identify with his father?
Unlike Oedipus, whose entire, undisplaced story has never really been taken up by Hollywood,
Rick negotiates the Oedipal phase with success. He renounces his incestuous object of desire and
identifies with father/Laszlo, Ilsa's original mate whose place Rick could usurp only temporarily.
When he guns down the evil Nazi Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), Rick kiss the principal enemy of
his father surrogate, thereby becoming a man himself. Alternately, we might also regard the
killing of Strasser as the displacement of Rick's Oedipal rage onto a less stigmatizing individual,
but one who is nevertheless associated with the pre-Oedipal disruption brought about when the
Nazis entered Paris. Like Ernest Jones's Hamlet, Rick is an indecisive, passive individual until he
renounces mother, identifies with father, and kiss the villain. In terms of the film's political/
Oedipal nexus, Rick's decision to fight the Nazis corresponds with his realization that the paradise
he has lost was an illusion sustained only by a refusal to acknowledge the existence of father.
Casablanca resembles most Hollywood films of the classical period in its highly involving
combination of myth and politics with melodrama.
Another aspect of Rick's dilemma is that the man he wishes to replace is a figure of unimpeachable
integrity and virtue, thus complicating his efforts to integrate his positive regard for Laszlo with
his murderous wishes toward him. Similarly, it is difficult for Rick to view this forgiving and
saintly leader of the resistance as a castrating, punitive father who will retaliate against Rick for
his lustful yearning toward llsa. Because of Rick's difficulty in integrating these representations of
himself and Laszlo, he appears to regress from the task of integration that accompanies the Oedipal
phase. The result is a splitting of the father figure into the benevolent Laszlo on the one hand and
the sadistic Major Strasser on the other. Even the ultimate identification with Laszlo at the end of
the film comes at the expense of his murdering the disavowed and split-off "bad" aspects of the
internalized father. One could argue, then, that resolution of the Oedipal conflict is only partial
since a true integration of "good" and "bad" aspects of the father has not been achieved.
32.3 "Here's Looking. . ."

These classically psychoanalytic readings of Casablanca are not typical of the theoretically oriented
writing that currently fills most academic film journals. By isolating the characters as case histories,
this application of Freudian theory casts the viewer in the role of ideal analyst, completely free
from any countertransferential reaction to the images on the screen. As Shoshana Felman has
observed, the actual experience of text puts the reader/viewer in the dual position of analyst and
analysand, attempting to take charge of the story at the same time that the story takes charge of its
consumer. The Lacanian- inflected psychoanalysis that has dominated film theory in the academy
for several years now is usually presented as the alternative to a classically Freudian film criticism.
Too often in the lacanalysis of films, however, will-of-the-wisp theoretical positions are read back
into films with such iron rigidity that some of the most salient aspects of a film are entirely
overlooked. As Kaplan argues, we must hold applied psychoanalysis to the same conceptual
standards as clinical psychoanalysis. Most notably, Lacanians tend to ignore the specificity of
actors: Bogart and Bergman, for example, are almost texts unto themselves, and any thorough
reading of Casablanca must account for how their star qualities, their histories, and the meanings
encoded in their cinematic images transform the films in which they appear. We undertake a
Lacanian reading of Casablanca to illustrate one of several possibilities in the application of
psychoanalysis to the Hollywood cinema.
A major similarity between lacanalysis and classical psychoanalysis is an attention to Oedipal
triangles. Raymond Bellour, especially eminent among Lacanian theorists, has suggested that the

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