Page 358 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Oedipus story is the masterplot of all Hollywood narratives. A Lacanian reading of Casablanca
would focus not so much on the dynamics among the characters but on how the viewer is
constructed within a larger discursive field that positions the viewer in a circuit of looks.
Richard Corliss has suggested that "Rick's famous toast--`Here's looking at you, kid'--can be read
as meaning, `Here's trying to look into your soul, kid, to figure out who you really are.'" A
Lacanian would have no difficulty conceptualizing the remark somewhat differently, in terms of
how the viewer is positioned through Rick, its surrogate. So long as the audience is in control of
the gaze, looking at Ilsa but also at everyone else, it need not acknowledge the range of differences
that the classical realist text works so hard to conceal. The possibility that someone or something
may be looking at Rick raises the possibility of difference and the possibilities of castration that
marks the entry of the subject into the symbolic register. As long as the viewer controls the look,
it can safely remain in the imaginary register where there is no difference between itself and
mother.
Significantly, when Rick's looking toast is interrupted in the flashback by Gestapo loudspeakers,
Sam (Dooley Wilson) warns him that the Germans will soon be in Paris, "and they'll come lookin'
for ye." The invading Nazis represent not only the castrating father but the castrating gaze of the
Other as well. The coincidence of the Nazis' arrival with the baffling disappearance of Ilsa leaves
Rick as an object in someone else's plot, his previously omniscent gaze reduced to a limited point
of view. Similarly, the Oedipal trajectory that leads Rick to the reconciliation with Laszlo and the
elimination of Strasser restores him to a sense of origin and identity offered by the father. Rick
surrenders Ilsa to Laszlo only after he has completely regained control over the narrative, writing
a script to which he holds the only copy. As a result, he has regained the right to utter the looking
toast once again. His newly found father, unjealous and supportive to a fault, then tells him, "This
time I know our side will win."

32.4 ". . . at You, Kid"

Beginning in 1975 with the publication of Laura Mulvey's extraordinarily influential essay, "Visual
Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," Lacan' s theses on the look and castration have been central
to feminist film theory. According to Mulvey and the many writers who have followed in her
wake, the patriarchal order of the Hollywood cinema provides two basic solutions to the fear
activated in men by women' s implied threat of castration: Either the woman's lack is part of her
punishment for some wrongdoing, usually sexual transgression, or she is fetishized so that a
portion of her body (breasts, hair, face, legs, bottom, even the entire body) becomes important
enough to compensate for the lack of a penis. Male viewers can then derive voyeuristic pleasure
from a cinema that provides fetishized images of women to exorcise male castration anxiety. The
most commonly cited example here is Busby Berkeley, who directed all those production numbers
of Warner Brothers musicals in which entire armies of women are fetishized, their body parts
reduced to geometric patterns.
The plot of Casablanca consistently emphasizes the sufferings of Ilsa, carefully placing the burden
of transgression on her more than on the two male leads. Both Rick and Laszlo have loved her
unselfishly, but she has been unfaithful to both. Although the film finds narrative means for
repressing her guilt, justifying her conduct in terms of a legitimate romantic dilemma, there is no
question that she has deceived Laszlo through her silences as much as she has deceived Rick by
concealing her marriage to Laszlo. As Greenberg has observed, there is little sense in the Laszlos'
decision to keep their marriage a secret in order to protect Ilsa from the Gestapo. It would be just
as logical for the Germans to interrogate a lover as a wife, perhaps even more logical. Ilsa has no
real justification for not telling Rick of her marriage, just as she has no sound reason for concealing
her affair with Rick from the infinitely forgiving Laszlo.
Significantly, Ilsa's sins are those of omission rather than commission, resulting from the absence
of voice rather than from too much. Kaja Silverman has extended Mulvey's work on the role of
women in the visual register of the cinema to a study of woman's cinematic voice. Classical cinema
does not stop at confining women to an inferior function in which a male-driven diegesis stops so

352 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY