Why does Casablanca have such immense appeal? Its stunning cast with clever and memorable repartee certainly contributes. Patriotic feelings that were stirred at its timely release during the war (just after the invasion of North Africa and during the Casablanca Conference) enhanced its popularity. But its iconic status has persisted far beyond World War II.
Casablanca displays the look of a thoroughly prepared, well-crafted, entertaining movie even though it was shot in a most disorganized way. The decision whether Rick (Humphrey Bogart) or Laszlo (Paul Henreid) would leave with Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in the climactic scene was undecided until the end of the shooting. Two scripts were written. When Ingrid Bergman told director, Michael Curtiz, she had to know how to prepare for the ending, she was told to play it as though she did not know—and, in fact, he was still deciding. He said, “We don't know. Just play it day to day and we'll see what happens.” In the failed original dramatic version that never reached Broadway, “Everyone Comes to Rick's,” Ilsa seduces Rick and leaves Laszlo behind in jeopardy of being killed. The cinematic decision to change the dramatic version is crucial to the way we respond to Casablanca and emphasizes the underlying theme.
What do we know about the character of Rick? He has a mysterious past and is an exile who cannot return home. Capt. Renault (Claude Raines) suggests that he absconded with church funds, murdered a man, and married a senator's wife. Seemingly in jest, Rick confesses to all. Though of questionable veracity, the dialogue serves as associations. In the Paris flashback, we do know that he has had an affair with Ilsa, a woman married to a renowned man, although he didn't know that she was married; she believed her freedom fighter husband had been killed by the Nazis.
In Casablanca Rick portrays a somewhat depressed, apolitical, cynical, and isolated man who plays chess by himself—a game in which one attempts to capture the king. Wounded and embittered by Ilsa's desertion in Paris when she learns that Laszlo is alive, Rick feels as though “his guts have been kicked out.” He struggles to compensate for his humiliation by asserting authority and control over formerly very important people and by maintaining quiet but ironfisted control of the café.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
He does not allow himself to be in a dependent or openly contentious position where he would be vulnerable to a woman or to anyone else. He “sticks his neck out for nobody.” His character armor weakens at the shattering arrival of Ilsa and Laszlo and the challenge of dealing with the letters of transit allowing exit from Casablanca (presented to him for safe-keeping by Ugarte [Peter Lorre], the murderer of the couriers).
Unconscious conflicts may be revealed by focusing on distortions or unrealistic aspects of the film, like slips or dreams.
The magical letters of transit supposedly signed by General de Gaulle which could not be rescinded or even questioned historically did not exist. Rick says, “As long as I have these letters, I won't be lonely,” and “No one ever loved me that much.” In granting exit from Casablanca to safety, they enable Rick to decide whether he or Laszlo will depart with Ilsa.
Furthermore, like the letter in Poe's “The Purloined Letter,” which revealed an affair, the letters of transit are also hidden in an obvious place. Rick puts them under the piano lid. Sam (Dooley Wilson) plays “As Time Goes By,” Rick and Ilsa's song in Paris, signifying the resurgence of their love in the timelessness of Rick's yearnings. [One could speculate that the letters penetrate the piano as a body of a woman; Ilsa asks Sam to play the piano. Rick deposits them in a hidden dark place that makes sounds, a regression to anality—passivity, ambivalence, homosexuality, and an analization of the phallic—and a protection against the castration threat in an oedipal triumph.]
A time distortion is evident in the Paris flashback. Rick appears to be considerably younger by five to ten years. But the occupation of Paris occurred in June of 1940 and the action of Casablanca takes place in the early days of December 1941. Thus, many years are collapsed into a year and a half. This is a clue to the idea that symbolically the events in Paris occurred in the far past as when a boy falls in love with an already married woman, his mother. Visually, the shot of the Arc de Triomphe suggests an oedipal fulfillment.
In addition to what is known of Rick's struggles and character in the Casablanca narrative, let us focus on the parallels to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. It begins with an announcement: that there is a plague and famine upon the land, that children will be born sterile unless the culprit, the murderer of Laius, is discovered. Casablanca opens with an announcement of murder of the couriers, roundup of suspects, and the arrival of the Nazi, Major Strasser, and company. In both there is a portent of great unrest until the murderer is found. A pickpocket warns the couple about the vultures, the danger. Major Strasser proclaims that the freedom fighter hero Laszlo is not to leave Casablanca alive. The threat to Laszlo's life parallels the threat to Oedipus's father, Laius, and Oedipus's foster father, Polybus; each was warned that he would be killed by his son. Not only the movie's narrative but also the crimes attributed to Rick in the United States, that he killed a man and ran off with a senator's wife, evoke the Oedipus play.
Casablanca opens with a description of the city being part of a dangerous, tortuous, roundabout, refugee route. Oedipus, of course, was a refugee who also could not return home because of the curse placed on Laius. As an infant his ankles were pierced and riveted—Oedipus means swollen foot—and a shepherd was ordered to abandon him on Mount Cithaeron. But the shepherd gave him to another shepherd who took him to Corinth where he was adopted by Polybus and Merope, king and queen of Corinth. Threatened by the prophecy that he will kill his supposed father, Polybus, and marry his mother, Oepidus leaves Corinth. But he proceeds to kill Laius, whose identity is unknown, during a right-of-way dispute at a three-way crossroads. Later he exiles himself from Thebes. Oepidus thus also journeys a tortuous and roundabout refugee trail.
In both narratives people are waiting to be saved. Early in the film, the narrator says, “The others wait in Casablanca, and wait and wait
and wait.” Later, a man bemoans, “Waiting, waiting, waiting, I'll never get out of here.” Rick helps save the waiting people of Casablanca by allowing the sale of exit visas to Portugal in his café. Oedipus eventually saves the waiting people of Thebes by removing the curse of the Oracle through his discovery that the murderer of Laius is himself. He enucleates his eyes—a castration equivalent—and exiles himself.
Oedipus's background is initially unknown but is slowly revealed, as is Rick's. Unknown identity is linked to peril and destructiveness in Rick's vulnerability, Oedipus's and Jocasta's disasters, and the suspect who is killed after he is discovered with improper identification papers. The letters procured by a double murder can be used by anyone. As Rick playfully tells Renault that he was misinformed about coming to Casablanca for the waters, Oedipus was misinformed about his true parentage and adoption.
By harboring the letters of transit, Rick becomes an accomplice to the murder of the couriers. Possessing the letters of transit, Rick now is conflicted about using them for access to a symbolic mother. Rick's access to the magical letters of transit resonates with Oedipus given access to marry Jocasta, his mother, through solving the Sphinx's riddle. If he chooses to leave Laszlo to “rot in Casablanca,” usurping the power of the father and going off with Ilsa, he will be subjecting himself to retaliation from the internalized father in his conscience. Ugarte was killed for his murders. Both Rick's killing of the bad father, Major Strasser, and reliving the fantasized oedipal triumph in Paris by leaving with Ilsa would be dangerous.
Casablanca's popularity derives from our experiencing the triumph of personal and political righteousness, a fulfillment of our ego ideal. Clearly Laszlo represents the idealized father hero. Rick says to Laszlo, “I try, you succeed. You have character, I only have visas.” In a split good (Laszlo) triumphs over bad (Major Strasser), Rick becomes virtuous by not departing with Ilsa but by identifying with his father surrogate, Laszlo. Rick also can continue his heroic work by joining Renault as a freedom fighter. This identification with the father and relinquishment of the sexual yearnings for the mother for the sake of later finding an appropriate mate is a model for the resolution of the Oedipal complex.
In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Jocasta tries to reassure Oedipus by saying, “Have no more fear of sleeping with your mother: how many men, in dreams, have lain with their mothers? No reasonable man is troubled by such things,” or in a more poetical translation, “Many men ere now have so fared in dreams also; but he to whom these things are as naught bears his life most easily.” Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams quotes Plato's dictum that “the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does.”
Casablanca has universal and lasting appeal because we can identify with Rick's oedipal relinquishment and feeling of virtue in satisfying his ego ideal—thus differing dramatically from the tragic consequences of living out of impulses in Oedipus Rex.
[Harvey Greenberg and Glen and Krin Gabbard have written about Rick's oedipal conflict.]