Word: casablanca
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Traditionally, it is couples, not generations, that have their songs. Rick and Ilsa would put themselves in a trance by getting Sam to sing As Time Goes By in Casablanca. Sometimes we have more than one special song, or a different song for a different mate or a different archaeological layer of our lives...
...poshlost, as the Russians say, an overheated lunge toward the profound, to think of Casablanca in terms of deeper allegory. Still, it is hard to resist delving for Jungian archetypes, primal transactions of the kind that lurk in, say, the Oedipus story (Here's looking...
...Much of Casablanca's constituency is collegiate anyway. Generations of Harvard students have wandered out of the Brattle Theater in a state of sappy exaltation. The movie's audience is too large to be described as a cult, but the religious vibration in that word may be oddly right...
Semioticians, who study the significance of signs and symbols, have discussed Casablanca as a myth of sacrifice. One can have fun with that. Consider it this way: America is the Promised Land, the place of safety and redemption. Rick Blaine has been cast out of America, for some original sin that is as obscure as the one that cost Adam and Eve their Eden. Rick flees to Europe, which is the fallen world where Evil (the Nazis, Satan) is loose. He meets and beds the widow of Idealism. Idealism (meaning Victor) is dead, or thought dead, but it rises from...
...About Casablanca there clings a quality of lovely, urgent innocence. Those who cherish the movie may be nostalgic for moral clarity, for a war in which good and evil were obvious and choices tenable. They may be nostalgic for a long-lost connection between the private conscience and the public world. Casablanca was released three years before the real moment of the fall of the modern world: 1945. That year, the side of good dropped nuclear bombs on cities full of civilians, and the world discovered Auschwitz. We have not yet developed the myths with which to explain such matters...