Casablanca: Isolationism’s Cure

A couple of years ago I blogged about my Mom’s continued productivity into her eighties when I reviewed a play of hers about Frank Lloyd Wright.  This year, for the eighth year in a row, she and her troupe have written and she has directed them in producing an original play.  I found this one particularly timely and instructive – it was about the film Casablanca – its creation, its meaning, and its place in our collective experience of film going.  After the play, the reluctant wife and I watched the film – for me it was my third time.  The first time I saw it was in high school – I found the film difficult to piece together.  Without historical context, I found the city and the agendas of the inhabitants and the bar to be foreign.  I was even somewhat confused by the love story – who was this Rick guy – this hard-hearted guy and what was the tenderness that he had experienced in Paris in that filmy flashback?

The second time that I saw the film was ten years ago when it was shown at our local institute and the love story was interpreted from an analytic perspective as the classic oedipal triangle with Rick being in love with the maternal figure of Ilsa who was married, unbeknownst to him, to Victor Laszlo, the hero of the underground movement.  She, for her part, allowed herself to fall in love with Rick only because she thought Laszlo dead, and so Rick’s heroic disavowal of their love at the end was the healthy resolution of the oedipal romance, with Rick choosing to quit mooning for someone who wasn’t his own, to make sure that his parents had the marriage they deserved and he set off with new friends for new adventures, free to love in whatever way he chose.

Mom’s troupe presented a very different historical – political perspective based on recent books about the making of the film.  They did this in the context of the troupe starting out as a kind of book club interested in the film, and the members of the club morphed into characters in the play and then the film, but also into the characters who wrote and produced and watched the film, and the censoring board (hilariously played as a “church-lady” type) – as well as being the actors in the film off stage – being the people that they really were.  It was an enchanting play – including a moving sing along to “The Marseillaise” at the moment in the film when it was sung in defiance of the Germans in Rick’s bar.  After seeing the play, I could appreciate just how tightly written this film is and that, despite Bogart’s experience of it as just another of the many studio movies he was under contract to churn out, it was, in fact, anything but.

The play, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s”, was purchased by Jack Warner – one of the two Eastern European Jewish brothers who had come to the U.S., changed their names to Warner, and built a movie studio – as a vehicle to help the U.S. move out of its isolationist position with regard to World War II.  Everybody Comes to Rick’s, in turn, was based on the experiences of an American watching the torturous route that refugees were taking to try to escape the ever expanding grip of the Nazis and reporting on this trail to a friend who was a playwright.  The play was written but never produced before being bought by Jack Warner for $20,000.  There aren’t many editions of the play currently available, but a librarian friend of my Mom’s was able to find a copy and the troupe was able to produce some of the scenes.

Ilsa, who is so effective as the morally torn woman at the center of the film was, in the play, a floozy with another name who had toyed with Rick’s heart in Paris – exactly the kind of person that Rick unjustly accuses Ilsa of being when he is drunk and angry with her in the film.  But this would not do for Jack Warner and the producers and writers he hired to turn this into a movie that would help move the US off the dime.  You see, the government had put an embargo on films about the war.  We wanted to stay out of what was seen as a European problem.  Let them sort things out for themselves, we said.  We will stay over here - even after Paris fell – and having knowledge of what was happening to the Jews – we did not want to commit ourselves to a problem that was not of our own making.

I get that.  In the wake of September 11^th, when we were gearing up for a war with Iraq, I had a conversation with a fellow faculty member’s 18 year old son who was arguing that we should go and fight for a variety of reasons – including that the Iraqis were living under the rule of a dictator who was taking their right to a free life away.  I agreed with him that this was not right, but I also said that I was reluctant to risk his life, which could certainly happen if the draft was reinstated, so that the people of Iraq could live freely.  This brought both of us up short and made an argument that had seemed hypothetical and philosophically obvious suddenly immediate and uncomfortable for both us.

 So Jack Warner’s crew needed a hero, someone who never stuck his neck out for anyone, but also someone who embodied who it is that we, as Americans, would identify with, someone who had deep convictions about right and wrong.  So Rick had a very important relationship with Sam – his piano player – an egalitarian relationship with someone who called him boss, but with whom he shared the profits of the casino and with whom he worked as a sort of “colleague".  It was important that our exceptionalism, our vision of ourselves as doing well by our former slaves – a fiction that Ne-Tahisi Coates and many, many others have exposed as a lie – be depicted.  Rick's character, as portrayed in his relationship with Sam was (ironically) written to appeal to our better selves, to the self who always rooted for the underdog.  And Rick needed to be principled - having helped the underdog in wars, but also helping a very visible underdog - an African American.

In this film, only three of the named actors were born in the United States.  Most of them were recent immigrants and some of those playing Nazis were Jews who had just fled Europe.  The actor playing Victor Laszlo was a European star who was now in exile and angry about being outside of the central romantic lead that he was used to playing.  Ingrid Bergman, one of the few actors of her day who kept her given name, was working hard to understand her character and how to play her – which was difficult because the conclusion of the film had not yet been written – no one knew how the conflict was going to be resolved – and because Bogart was incredibly remote and unresponsive – disappearing into his trailer when not on set.

So Mom’s troupe explained that the pivotal scene, when the Germans start to sing a patriotic song in Rick’s bar using Sam’s piano, was constructed in an interesting way.  Rick, the person who was so firmly in charge of his nightclub that no one was admitted to the illegal casino without a nod from him, the man who never drank with a customer, and the man who didn’t bat an eye when a man who relied on him was shot when Rick refused to intervene to save his life, gave the nod to the band to play the Marseillaise when Victor Laszlo stood up to lead them.  In the filming, Bogart was told, "This will be a light day, just come on set and give a nod.", which he did before retiring to his trailer.  The actors who sang the Marseillaise and the band who played, many of them recent immigrants, cried real tears of grief and joy at this show of mettle in the bully’s face.  And Jack Warner had the moment he needed – the taciturn isolationist who remained staunchly neutral giving tacit approval to the resistance.

Of course, the real drama occurs in the last few minutes, when neither we, nor apparently the cast, know how the movie will resolve.  Rick is selling his business to Ferrari, the owner of the Blue Parrot across the street who has coveted it, in anticipation of running off with Ilsa, who has entrusted their future to Rick, as Rick double crosses Laszlo and delivers him to the Nazis.  When it becomes apparent that this is not, in fact, Rick’s plan, we are left with the fear that the Nazi commandant, who has been contacted by the brilliantly played French Captain Louis Renault, will prevent Laszlo and Ilsa’s flight to Lisbon.  All is nicely resolved and Rick and Louis, who have just worked to double cross each other, recognize that each of them, with their long history of being spineless exploiters of the plight of the Jews fleeing Europe through Casablanca, is, in fact, a deeply principled person and they resolve together to begin a new kind of friendship based on that shared resolve.  In that beautiful moment, we witness Rick’s transformation through Renault’s eyes, and we identify with Rick’s being the good, decent and just man we always knew him, and we, ourselves, to have been.

One of the things that my Mom’s production clarified was the integral role that the censorship board played in making this a truly great movie.  They would not allow the most egregiously immoral aspects of the Casablancan milieu to be directly depicted.  Thus, they censored out the original versions of the script where Renault’s trading sex for visas were spelled out, so the script had to be clean enough that the censor’s wouldn’t object, and Claude Rains’ performance had to be smarmy enough that we couldn’t not know.  Similarly, Rick giving a key to Ilsa to come to his room, and Ilsa showing up the next morning in the dress she had worn the night before, had to be cut – Ilsa is a married woman, after all – so Ilsa has to take a back stair – and they have to be interrupted mid reconciliation by Laszlo’s appearance in the bar – and all of this heightens the tension as we experience their unrequited love burning and smoldering and not being consummated. 

I think, for what it is worth, that all of the censor’s work and that of Jack Warner to have Rick be the person the US as a country could identify with, also led to my objection to the straight Oedipal interpretation ten years ago.    I think it is Ilsa, not Rick, who is in the infantile position.  She was a child who had an Oedipal crush on the older, wiser, more worldly Laszlo – and the oedipal “victory” (which is really a defeat because it imprisons the child in the infantile position admiring the distant and superior parent) of being loved by a father figure.  His apparent death in the concentration camps relieved her to fall in love with someone more like her – a peer – and created the possibility of her having the kind of romantic life that a mature woman should have – with a person with whom she can discover the world – together – as peers.  But this man – Rick – betrays her need for just such a relationship.  He could have put Laszlo on that plane and run off with Ilsa to fight the bad guys together in their own way, but he doesn’t do that.  He decides for her – paternalistically (just as he apparently decided for Sam, despite his protestation that he doesn’t buy or sell people, that being “owned” by Ferrari was in his best interest) that remaining the adored young child, is the best role her.

So, to summarize, Jack Warner won the war.  He got the US to get out of its isolationist Rick mode and helped us recognize our better selves.  But he did this, in part, by censoring something about ourselves that is very important but that we didn’t want to know or couldn’t yet know: that we infantilize minorities and women – we use them to our own ends while claiming that we are doing what is best for them.  Coming to grips with these hidden aspects of ourselves is put off while we fight a greater evil.  Yes, we needed to defeat Nazism.  And, in the process of doing that, Rosie the Riveter and the armed services as a promoter of racial equality began to chip away at the enemy of paternalism, but Jack Warner’s support of the American Dream, of our exceptionalism, also allowed us to continue to slumber.  Perhaps now we are awakening from that sleep – but it is a rude awakening.  We had to elect a President who promised to Make America Great Again – which, for some of us, was code for Make America Paternalistic Again – make us the kind of country that Rick personified.  The kind of country that is certain of itself and assigns roles to people that work – as we imagine it, for the people we are assigning the roles to – but in fact, and outside of our awareness, those roles are assigned primarily based on what is good for ourselves.  Perhaps we need to see our narcissism personified on a huge stage in order to actually see it for what it is and to recoil against it – to redefine ourselves in new, more humane ways.

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