Umberto Eco on Casablanca

If any Hollywood movie exemplifies the 'genius of the system,' it is surely Casablanca - a film whose success was founded on almost as many types of skill as varieties of luck. (It's also ironic that aspiring screenwriters take Casablanca's script as a text; rewritten many times, the film was virtually made up as its makers went along.) Mixing genres with wild abandon, Casablanca has become a cult film precisely because, as Umberto Eco suggests, 'it is not one movie. It is movies.'" More than this, Casablanca is the bedrock of western mythology, a film that unapologetically plays with the very myths and beliefs that fuel our own Western society - the very world we live in. Umberto Eco is quite cheeky, but unreservedly astute about the role Casablanca has played in our own understanding of the world, and the reason why it has reached the heights of legend...

...[Casablanca] opens in a place already magical in itself - Morocco, the Exotic - and begins with a hint of Arab music that fades into “La Marseillaise." Then as we enter Rick's Place we hear Gershwin. Africa, France, America. At once a tangle of Eternal Archetypes comes into play. These are situations that have presided over stories throughout the ages. But usually to make a good story a single archetypal situation is enough. More than enough. Unhappy Love, for example, or Flight. But Casablanca is not satisfied with that: It uses them all. The city is the setting for a Passage, the passage to the Promised Land. But to make the passage one must submit to a test, the Wait (“they wait and wait and wait," says the off-screen voice at the beginning). The passage from the waiting room to the Promised Land requires a Magic Key, the visa. It is around the winning of this Key that passions are unleashed. Money (which appears at various points, usually in the form of the Fatal Game, roulette) would seem to be the means for obtaining the Key. But eventually we discover that the Key can be obtained only through a Gift - the gift of the visa, but also the gift Rick makes of his Desire by sacrificing himself. For this is also the story of a round of Desires, only two of which are satisfied: that of Victor Laszlo, the purest of heroes, and that of the Bulgarian couple. All those whose passions are impure fail.

Thus, we have another archetype: the Triumph of Purity. The impure do not reach the Promised Land; we lose sight of them before that. But they do achieve purity through sacrifice - and this means Redemption. Rick is redeemed and so is the French police captain. We come to realise that underneath it all there are two Promised Lands: One is America (though for many it is a false goal), and the other is the Resistance - the Holy War. That is where Victor has come from, and that is where Rick and the captain are going. On the other hand the myth of sacrifice runs through the whole film: Ilsa's sacrifice in Paris when she abandons the man she loves to return to the wounded hero, the Bulgarian bride's sacrifice when she is ready to yield herself to help her husband, Victor's sacrifice when he is prepared to let Ilsa go with Rick so long as she is saved.

Into this orgy of sacrificial archetypes (accompanied by the Faithful Servant theme in the relationship of Bogey and the black man Dooley Wilson) is inserted the theme of Unhappy Love: unhappy for Rick, who loves Ilsa and cannot have her; unhappy for Ilsa, who loves Rick and cannot leave with him; unhappy for Victor, who understands that he has not really kept Ilsa. The interplay of unhappy loves produces various twists and turns: In the beginning Rick is unhappy because he does not understand why Ilsa leaves him; then Victor is unhappy because he does not understand why Ilsa is attracted to Rick; finally Ilsa is unhappy because she does not understand why Rick makes her leave with her husband. These three unhappy (or Impossible) loves take the form of a Triangle. But in the archetypal love-triangle there is a Betrayed Husband and a Victorious Lover. Here instead both men are betrayed and suffer a loss, but, in this defeat an additional element plays a part, so subtly that one is hardly aware of it. It is that, quite subliminally, a hint of male or Socratic love is established. Rick admires Victor, Victor is ambiguously attracted to Rick, and it almost seems at a certain point as if each of the two were playing out the duel of sacrifice in order to please the other. In any case, as in Rousseau's Confessions, the woman places herself as Intermediary between the two men. She herself is not a bearer of positive values; only the men are.

But precisely because all the archetypes are here, precisely because Casablanca cites countless other films, and each actor repeats a part played on other occasions, the resonance of intertextuality plays upon the spectator. Casablanca brings with it, like a trail of perfume, other situations that the viewer brings to bear on it quite readily"

Sources: Magill's Survey of the Cinema & Casablanca, or
"The Clichés Are Having a Ball" (Umberto Eco ), in Signs of Life in the U.S.A.
full text here, until it disappears (i don't check my links)

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