[May 1st marks the 80th anniversary of Citizen Kane’s release. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some contexts for Kane and other classic films, and I’d love your thoughts on them all and other films you’d AmericanStudy!]
On two ways the
iconic film resonates in the age of Trump.
While of course
any 80-year old movie is going to feel dated in various ways, I would argue
that Casablanca also feels about as
contemporary as any 1940s film could. There are numerous reasons why (including
the whip-smart
dialogue and very telling
human moments), but I would say that the film’s iconic romance is a
particularly relatable element. Casablanca
is at one and the same time a deeply
sentimental love story and a realistic examination of the limits of such
romantic love in a world where those kinds of personal relationships don’t necessarily
amount to, well, much more than a hill of beans. And, as that
hyperlinked final exchange illustrates (SPOILERS here and throughout, duh), the
movie combines those two seemingly contradictory tropes into a final vision of
romantic love as something that we can carry with us and be inspired and
motivated by even if the world and its realities take us in other directions. That’s
a lesson well worth playing again and again, I’d say.
It’s also a
timeless one, of course. But there are likewise elements of Casablanca that have more specific
lessons to offers us in this Age of Trump. For one thing, the arc of Humphrey
Bogart’s Rick directly and powerfully refutes the “America
First” rhetoric of Trump and company (rhetoric that of course had made its debut
during the 1930s). Rick may be far away from the United States, but the
insular concern for only his own café and needs with which he opens the film
nonetheless clearly reflects American isolationism and self-interest (in but
not limited to World War II). Part of what pushes him toward engagement with
the world instead is still a personal interest, if one centered on another
person’s needs: his love for and desire to help Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa. But
through her, Rick also connects to the resistance efforts of her husband, Paul
Heinreid’s Victor Laszlo; and while in their love triangle Rick and Victor are
rivals, in the course of Rick and the film’s arc the men become allies as well.
Rick’s concluding decision to join the resistance even convinces Claude Rains’s
corrupt police officer Renault to do the same, a potent representation of the
broader potential effects when Americans step outside their insulated bubbles
and join the cause of freedom and social justice worldwide.
Of course, in
the age of Trump many of the most prominent international news stories have involved
not the U.S. entering the world, but the world coming to the U.S., most
especially in the form of refugee communities. Nearly all of the characters in Casablanca are refugees and exiles from
the war in Europe; and, for that matter, so were many of the film’s actors,
especially those who played supporting roles. As film
historian Aljean Harmetz puts it, these refugee actors brought to their
roles “an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from
Central Casting.” What truly motivates Rick’s evolution in the film, starting
as early as his
famous nod in the iconic “duel of the anthems” sequence, is his recognition
that these refugee and exile communities deserve respect and support, and
indeed his sense that he is in solidarity with them. It would seem to be a
truism that America is in solidarity with refugee communities—with the tired,
the poor, the huddled
masses yearning to breathe free, to coin a phrase—but in fact that has
always been a contested concept, and never more so than in late 2018. So we
could all still stand to learn the romantic, realistic, and timeless lessons of
Rick and company’s journey in Casablanca.
Next
FilmStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on this or other classic films?
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