On Casablanca

"Casablanca" may be the greatest film ever made. I have not seen many foreign films and I have only seen a little over a quarter of the AFI's 100 greatest films of all time. In fact, I tend to have poor taste in films and often indulge in movies that I find wholly uninteresting, and so I may be precisely the wrong person to write anything at all about film. I am, when it comes to movies, generally superficial, subjective, partisan and impatient. My scale of judgment consistently defies itself and one actor in one movie I'll like while in another I'll hate, one director's movie I'll admire, another I'll loathe. I also tend to judge every movie by it's cover or by whatever small, greatly insignificant but intriguing fact I find out about it. I shy away from "cult" classics because I can't stand the word "cult" and thus very reluctantly watched "Mad Max" (at the insistence of someone who thought that I would undoubtedly enjoy a movie merely for the fact that it included my name in the title-curious fact, there is another movie called simply "Max" which is about young Adolf Hitler trying to sell his paintings). I often try ardently to ascribe greatness to movies simply because they make me feel good, picking out the best parts and over thinking them until I've forgotten the rest of the very poor parts. Or I'll love a movie because I saw it with someone I love or enjoy and hate another movie because I was impatient or in a bad mood or I got tired reading subtitles or looking at someone in it.

Nonetheless, when I was a kid (all of this complicated system was being constructed) I gobbled movies up, I spent endless summer days escaping the dreadfully oppressive California heat curled up on the couch with the air-conditioner on, eating popcorn or ice cream watching and re watching "Tombstone" and all of the Indiana Jones movies. My mother, whose taste is significantly more refined than mine, would insist on our spending one day to watch all three "Star Wars" movies in a row; we'd unplug the phones and turn all the lights off and close all the curtains to make the living room as dark as possible and make what seemed like endless bowls of popcorn, devoting the better part of six hours to what I thought of as unbridled fun. I daydreamed about the rumored first three "Star Wars" movies when I was eight and salivated profusely in anticipation of not only six, but twelve straight hours of "Star Wars". I would actually have to get up early-not to do homework but-to watch movies. But when they came out and I watched them (despite scathing reviews) I was terribly unimpressed and hard as I tried I could find no way to make them any better than they were. The dream of half a day of movie was regained when, freshmen year, the extended versions of the "Lord of the Rings" came out the second they arrived at the school library I checked them all out and finally experienced twelve straight hours of movie-granted it was slightly different than I had imagined; there was beer instead of ice cream and a few breaks to perform minor obligations, like class and hundreds of pages of reading. I'm still recovering from how awful the new "Star Wars" films were (and are) and in silent protest Will and I must have seen "Empire Strikes Back" somewhere in the ballpark of twenty times in two years. No joke; we watched it as regularly as once a month, and if I exaggerate it is not because I got tired of it.

In short, I think I might be the most singularly unqualified movie reviewer. There is no education I can rely on; there are no principles or precedents I understand or can employ; there is in fact little other than intuition (which is perhaps entirely off-base) and taste (which smacks of anything but refined) and rambling words (which certainly do not do justice to my sentiments) that I can offer in a discourse on film. I begin this essay in such an awkward way in order to definitively establish my lack of wisdom on the subject of film. I would also like to add that, being 21 years old and having never been married, the brief digression on marriage is entirely a matter of speculation and a subject of which I claim no sapience. Any truth discovered therein is coincidental, however it is a subject I treat with the greatest sincerity and about which I have ruminated for many years. With all of this in mind, I would like to embark on a essay in an attempt to understand what might make "Casablanca" the greatest film ever made, or at least worthy of serious discourse.

"Casablanca", which is second behind Citizen Kane and immediately before The Godfather, is arguably the greatest "Hollywood" film of all time, a film that can be enjoyed academically as well as it can be entertaining. Citizen Kane is a great film, but it seems to me to be a film for films, too aware of itself to exist beyond its own story and its own legend. The Godfather (by this I mean 1 and 2, while the AFI indicates just 1; Godfather 2, the only sequel to appear on the list is at number 32) is also great but too epic to be a pure "Hollywood" film. The horse head scene in the beginning of the first film, I believe, decisively establishes this fact. "Casablanca", on the other hand, immediately establishes itself as a film with big stars, big ideas, big events, to be enjoyed within the spectrum great dramatic literature, while attempting to perfect the genre of dramatic film. Few films have such a fluid storyline which is demonstrated by one's ability to read the script like a book (it is in fact based on a play called "Everybody Goes to Rick's"). The storyline itself is augmented by the fact that so much of the dialogue in the movie (which mirrors the diverse setting of French Morocco in the throes of World War II) pertains to the many other characters that appear besides Rick and Ilsa. All of the political commentary, all of the social commentary provides the perfect backdrop for the action of their romance.

"Casablanca" sits in a funny category though, because of its romance. It is not a comedy because, by Shakespearean or Jane Austen standards, there is no marriage at the end. By Aristotelian standards, the characters are too important, to noble to be comedic characters. Yet, it seems neither to be a tragedy. There is no death at the end, except for the death of a Nazi Major who, given the partisanship of the film, deserves to die and is in fact killed by the film's hero. The Achilles heel of "Casablanca"'s hero does not kill him in the end, as would be expected by an ancient definition of heroism, and rather redeems him of any selfishness for which he might ultimately be judged. His tragic flaw, that he cannot be with the woman he loves, becomes the very inspiration of his nobility, the redemption of his character and of the character of his lover. Thus, we find in the climax that there is something both comedic and tragic. Rick enables the woman he loves, the one things that can make him happy and would seem to make her happy, to leave with her husband, to continue the journey they had been on when they first came to "Casablanca". The film's climax is filled with lines that, like the great lines of Shakespeare, have become common expressions. They present Rick's argument for staying in "Casablanca" and sending Ilsa away with Victor. I'll write out a small section if full:

Ilsa
You're saying this only to make me go.
Rick
I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll never regret it.
Ilsa
No.
Rick
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
Ilsa
But what about us?
Rick
We'll always have Paris. We didn't have, we'd lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa
And I said I would never leave you.
Rick
And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going you can't follow. What I've got to do you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now...
Here's looking at you kid.

This dialogue weaves the irrational and extravagant feelings of love with the deep sense of duty and honor to which Rick ascribes himself and ascribes to others, even the woman who broke his heart. His actions are to the end of romance rather than self interest; the romance between Rick and Ilsa thrives on its impossibility, on their disparate lives, only congruous for brief moments under great strife. According to Denis de Rougemont in his 'Love in the Western World' romance, beginning with the tale of Tristan and Isolde, is defined by the polemical relationship of duty and passion; we have obligations, institutions, traditions that conflict with our greatest passions and that, while the obligations and traditions we have generally guide our life and give us meaning, love may be, as Swinburne puts it, the "one thread in life worth spinning, one sin worth sinning". Our metaphysics must allow us to be free enough to make and understand our decisions for our romance to be substantial, otherwise its tragic nature becomes null and the whole structure of the romantic story crumbles.
The institution of marriage exists as both a response to this phenomenon and also as a remedy for it. Marriage presupposes that we are romantic, that we believe that there is one person to whom we ought to devote ourselves. Marriage is in fact inspired by our romantic impulses and when wholly divorced from them (by way of overly emphasizing the economic benefits, the "reasonableness" of it and the social and emotional consistency it can provide) it becomes seriously marginalized. Marriage also attempts to resolve the inherent problem in our romantic impulse which is that eros, in its substance, is irrational, unreasonable and potentially destructive. Many ancients rendered eros as a madness or a sickness. Plato actually rendered eros necessary to philosophy, despite its potential craziness, and thereby integral to our study of politics. In Thucydides' The Peleponnesian War, Pericles identifies eros as necessary for good citizenship. But we see, most eloquently in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, that romance as a modern phenomenon is necessarily tragic. Even the youthful Romeo and Juliet insist on marriage as their necessary first step. The romance of Jane Austen novels, more morally Aristotelian and thus considerably less sexy than The Symposium or Shakespeare, exists only before there is marriage. in both Pride and Prejudice and Emma the entire romantic character of the books resides in the uncertainty of consummating desire. Once marriage becomes a reality, the books end. Even Jane Austen seems to see little "romantic" in married life. In fact, great swaths of modern literature have spent thousands of pages and hundreds of characters trying to understand the tension between the irrationality of eros and our desire to harness it indefinitely to one and only one particular person. It has hitherto found no resolution.

I digress for the sake of establishing marriage, not sex, as the most important consequence of eros. This I take to be the reason that great writers, like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, end romances with marriages and the greatest romantic comedies, The Philadelphia Story is perhaps the best example, end in marriage. Their insistence on marriage instead of vague or exciting commitment springs from a profound understanding of and belief in eros. It is not enough for them to leave us readers and watchers with the fact that two people love each other, they must act on their love, for the sake eros, for us to believe that eros can do more than cause conflict and pain and heartbreak.
The morality of "Casablanca" respects this view of eros, specifically as it pertains to marriage and thereby enables the two married people to stay together because it is a commitment for life and was only broken when one was (thought to be) dead. Rick both respects the romance on which marriage is founded, and the romance that stands at odds with marriage. He unravels their connection in the film's last scene. What he feels for Ilsa is exactly what would inspire him to marry her and exactly what renders him incapable of breaking her commitment to Victor. Romance is too great to be employed to anything other than love. Rick has too deep a wealth of feeling and too profound respect for human dignity as well as human frailty to allow his passions to drive his actions beyond the boundaries of what is good, what is fine, what is noble. Were Rick to feel otherwise, were he to misunderstand eros and fail to recognize its universality, were he to hold eros is less esteem, he would have left with Ilsa, or had her stay with him in "Casablanca". Rick's connections, his history and his savvy assure us that his second excuse (that were they to stay together they would die) is a poor one and thus we know that his insistence on Ilsa's staying with Victor is due to more serious concerns than inconvenience and deeper principles than happiness for its own sake.

Thus, "Casablanca" stands in a unique category, in the company of other great inquiries into the nature of love. It reminds us that we have no perfect solutions to our varying desires, that we have no chance of understanding happiness unless we afford ourselves the most earnest reflection and that happiness ought not to exist for it's own sake, but it serves to remind us of the good in ourselves and the good in others. If any of the characters are to be happy, they must be so in terms of the good, the good for themselves and the good for others. Eros will always be problem, but then again, it may also be the best solution.