Page 361 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

paradigm. Ray, however, is less interested in castration and the gaze than he is in adapting Notes
psychoanalytic thought to a theory of how "the concealment of the necessity for choice" determines
the sequence of shots in classical cinema. By pinning the viewer's consciousness to Rick' s, most of
what happens takes its logic from his point of view. The fusion of Rick and audience begins when
we first catch a glimpse of nothing more than Rick's hand as it signs a check. Ray observes that the
shot is striking because the hand comes directly out of our space, as if a (right-handed) viewer
were to reach up to the screen and sign the check himself. Shortly after this shot, the entire body
of Rick emerges from the viewer's space as he walks into the frame to confront the arrogant
German who tries to force his way into Rick's inner sanctum.
Earlier, the personal magnetism of Rick seems to exert an inexorable pull on the camera. After
being told that "everyone comes to Rick' s" and having seen the sign with his name above the cafe
door, the viewer enters the cafe and is drawn steadily toward Rick as the camera drifts always to
the left in a series of tracking shots. The camera pauses first to close in slightly on Sam, allowing
him to be centered against a background that loses a bit of the definition that deepfocus
cinematography usually grants to establishing shots in this and most other classical Hollywood
films. The tracking shots eventually arrive at Rick's table where he is engaged in a solitary game
of chess. The audience is then granted its first good look at Bogart's face, a visage that Casablanca
cultists have called "existential." Ray points out that this concealing of the necessity for choice also
governs the thematic paradigm in Casablanca. The film invites the audience to identify with Rick
rather than Laszlo even though official American wartime sentiments are consistently voiced by
Laszlo. Rick regularly insists upon unmediated self-interest ("I stick my neck out for nobody," "I'm
the only cause I'm interested in"), a position that Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) explicitly identifies
with a discredited American tradition: "My dear Rick, when will you realize that in this world
today isolationism is no longer a practical policy?" [emphasis added]. Casablanca is typical of
classical Hollywood in its willingness to confront, at least initially, its audience's most important
concerns, in this case, "the deep-seated, instinctive anxiety that America' s unencumbered autonomy
could not survive the global commitments required by another world war." Although the film
never puts Rick in a position to retract his innately American reluctance to give up his independence,
he ultimately does exactly what Laszlo--and the United States government--would have him do.
Of course, Rick's decision to fight the Nazis is related to his feelings for Ilsa rather than a change
of heart about being an isolationist. By means of this well- established Hollywood pattern of
reconciliation, Casablanca could support the war effort without disturbing the foundations of
American myth.
Ray acknowledges a debt to an essay by Charles Eckert on the 1937 gangster melodrama Marked
Woman. Eckert argues that the corrupt, conspicuously affluent movie gangsters of 1930s Hollywood
provided Depression-era audiences with ideologically sanctioned objects for the hatred they felt
toward the rich. Although Eckert uses Marxist and Levi-Straussian methodologies to uncover the
class conflict and myth-making that is submerged in Marked Woman, he is also interested in how
Freudian concepts of the dream work can explain the process by which politically proscribed class
hatred is displaced into familiar conventions of melodrama. We should also mention Brian
Henderson's work on John Ford's The Searchers (1956) that reveals how the film's dialectic on the
assimilation of Indians is also a displacement for American concerns about black integration in the
months just after the "separate but equal doctrine" was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1954.
Although Eckert and Henderson have both cautioned against reductive readings that ignore the
overdetermined polysemy of Hollywood films, they have both acknowledged the importance of
psychoanalysis in their larger semiotic project.
Casablanca's audience must never be asked to choose between Rick and Laszlo because everything
in the film has prepared them to choose Rick, who represents the rejection of America's involvement
in world politics. Instead, the film relieves the audience of the necessity of choice by displacing the
film's political conflict into melodrama, where familiar emotions overwhelm ideas. To the extent
that films resemble dreams, the film's latent political content--whether or not America should
enter the war--appears in the manifest content as whether or not Rick should help Laszlo. Although

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