Page 360 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Citing an example from Steiner's score for Curtiz's Mildred Pierce, Gorbman has written, "the
appropriate music will elevate the story of a man to the story of Man." Much the same can be said
for the long closeup of Bergman as she listens to "As Time Goes By." With Ilsa's face providing
additional validation, Sam's interpretation of the lyrics elevates a love song to a song about Love.
Surprisingly, the song was almost excised from the film. "As Time Goes By" was written by
Herman Hupfeld and first performed in 1931 in a Broadway show called Everybody's Welcome.
The song is central in the unproduced play on which the script for Casablanca is based. When
shooting was completed and an edited print of the film was presented to Steiner, he objected to the
use of "As Time Goes By" and asked to substitute a song of his own composition. Steiner said that
he disliked the song, but he also knew that he would surely benefit from the royalty checks if his
own song became popular. At first, producer Hal Wallis consented to cut the scene in which
Bergman requests "As Time Goes By" by name and to shoot additional scenes in which Steiner's
song would be used. But since Ingrid Bergman had by this time received a rather severe haircut
for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Wallis realized that a new scene with Bergman and Wilson
was out of the question. Steiner subsequently learned that he would have to work with the original
scene and hence with "As Time Goes By."
It is as difficult to imagine Casablanca without "As Time Goes By" as it is to imagine the film with
Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan, and Dennis Morgan, the leads who were originally projected for
the film. In its day, the film gained an element of nostalgic power by using a well-known song.
Many in the audience may have associated a romantic experience of their own with the music,
thus adding an additional level of audience subjectivity to Ilsa's, and later Rick' s, reaction to the
song. For a moment, Ilsa and the viewer return to an earlier time, but the audience has the larger-
than-life face of an idealized maternal figure to facilitate regression to a moment even more
pleasant than the one recalled by the heroine. Although more contemporary audiences are likely
to associate the song with the same era as the film, the music is still crucial in associating the
experience of the film with a simpler, more romantic era to which the viewer can bliss fully return.

32.6 America Dreaming

Psychoanalytic thought is relevant to Casablanca's political agenda as well as to the film's expression
of American ideology. We are most concerned here with the extent to which the "dream work" of
the film censors or displaces political material that may be intrinsic to American mythology but
incompatible with the war effort. Michael Wood was one of the first critics to observe that Rick is
portrayed as a patriot ultimately dedicated to fighting the Nazis even though he represents a well-
established breed of American heroes, who are more suspicious of compromising entanglements
with friends than with the predictable hostility of enemies. According to Wood, the well-known
poster of Bogart as Rick, "staring into the middle distance, a giant of heroic self-pity in his eyes .
. . is a picture of what isolation looks like at its best: proud, bitter, mournful, and tremendously
attractive. "When Rick hands over Ilsa to Laszlo, he tells her, "where I' m going, you can't follow,"
and yet if Rick and Laszlo now share the same cause, why is it suddenly so essential that she
follow Laszlo and not Rick?
In A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, Robert B. Ray categorizes Casablanca as "the
most typical" American film. Ray uses Casablanca as a tutor text for what he calls the "formal
paradigm" of Classical Hollywood as well as the "thematic paradigm" that addresses the conflict
between isolationism and communitarian participation. Thematically, the film is typical in its
appropriation of an official hero (Laszlo), who stands for the civilizing values of home and
community, and an outlaw hero (Rick), who stands for ad hoc individualism. Although these
mythological types at first appear to be at odds, they share a common purpose by the end, just as
they do in films as generically dissimilar as Angels with Dirty Faces, Shane, and Star Wars.
Formally, Casablanca abundantly illustrates the importance of a number of "centering" techniques
that create the illusion of realism while at the same time disguising the complex apparatus that lies
behind each shot. Although Ray does little to develop a Lacanian reading of Casablanca, he relies
upon the Lacanian-inflected writings of the Screen critics to develop his thesis of the formal

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