On the surface, Casablanca should be hilarious.
There was never a nightclub on all the Earth—or in the universe, for that matter—as stylish and cool as Rick's Café Américain. The exquisitely dressed men and women move through the frame as if they were spending the evening in some beautifully appointed New York watering hole.
Then there is the almost United Nations diversity of the place: people of different races, religions and nationalities, all rubbing shoulders under one roof.
No way.
And then comes the great Sydney Greenstreet, looking for all the world like some magnificent Middle Eastern pasha holding court.
Come on.
By every reasonable measure, the whole enterprise should collapse under the weight of its own fabulousness. This magical place could exist nowhere else outside of, say, Anaheim.
But it does not collapse.
Why?
Because underneath all that glamour, Casablanca is smuggling something true.
Rick's is a refuge. A last bulwark against the wicked Nazis who, truth be told, are themselves enjoying the wares of this magical place. Outside, the world is collapsing. Inside, Sam is playing, champagne is flowing, roulette wheels are spinning and somehow civilization is still hanging on.
The film and its millions upon millions of writers—I exaggerate only slightly, ahem—understand that refuge is a powerful selling point.
A secret place protected against the ill winds outside.
A place where the brilliant and the desperate can congregate, hear music, enjoy a libation (or three), try their luck at the roulette wheel in the back room, fall in love, trade secrets, make deals and plot their escape to more hospitable climes.
And presiding over all of this is that wonderfully corrupt French official, Captain Renault.
Renault comes from a conquered country now tied to a puppet regime. He has power. He wears the uniform. He gives orders. He arrests people.
And yet, at the end of the day, he too is a puppet.
The fabulous Claude Rains plays this beautifully. Renault surfs the demands of his Nazi masters, bending without quite breaking, compromising without entirely surrendering that little piece of himself which, when the moment finally comes, may still be capable of choosing a side.
I recently finished Lynne Olson's electrifying Last Hope Island, and it struck me that during the war Britain became, in a very real sense, Casablanca for much of fallen Europe.
The dream of those living under the heel of the Nazi jackboot:
Get to Britain.
By whatever means necessary.
Governments went there. Soldiers went there. Resistance leaders went there. Refugees went there. From conquered countries came people determined somehow to continue the fight and live.
Such were the dreams of the vanquished.
Secret places.
Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.
Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury.
Rick's Café Américain.
People coming together.
A bulwark.
And somehow Casablanca, a film that by the cold rules of construction ought to seem silly and illogical, instead shines and stands tall like Oz in the distance—before Dorothy actually gets there and discovers the sham writ large.
But Casablanca never lets us get behind the curtain.
The sham must be kept at bay at all costs.
And I think that is one of the great lessons of Casablanca.
When you build a world, no matter how fantastical that world may be, it must always be about something else.
The sets aren't enough.
The atmosphere isn't enough.
The villains aren't enough.
The beautiful people, the music, the shadows, the danger—none of it is enough.
Something human has to hold the whole magnificent contraption together.
And Casablanca works because underneath everything else it is about profound loss.
The war be damned for a moment.
Rick has lost something.
Ilsa has lost something.
Renault, perhaps, has lost something.
Almost everybody wandering through Rick's has lost a country, a home, a lover, a future—or the world they thought they understood.
And hanging over all of them is the tantalizing possibility that something might yet be regained.
Look at the horrible world our heroes face.
Look at the odds.
On the surface, they have no chance.
But worlds have to sustain that something else, no matter how scary the monsters, no matter how dire the predicament, no matter how fantastical the machinery surrounding the people trapped inside it.
Terra Firma moved me as I wrote it because, at the end of the day, it was about two sisters who loved each other and would die for each other.
That was the foundation.
The incredible alien invasion and all its horrors were ultimately sustained by two women.
Two lives.
They finished each other's sentences.
They laughed together.
Joked together.
Made music together.
They imagined futures. Husbands. Careers. Lives yet to be lived.
But underneath all of it was something already complete:
family, love and a lifelong, unbreakable friendship.
That's the something else.
That's what has to remain real when everything surrounding it becomes impossible.
Curtiz had Nazis, refugees, letters of transit, roulette wheels, beautiful gowns, foggy airports, Sydney Greenstreet's magnificent pasha and the most improbable nightclub this side of Anaheim--or Orlando.
I have aliens.
Monsters.
Impossible technologies.
Things lurking in mirrors.
Passageways filled with millions of beings walking for thousands of years.
A telescope turned into a forty-story nightmare.
Bring all of it on.
Make the monsters scary.
Make the aliens nasty and snarling.
Because underneath all that terror are two sisters.
And if we believe in them—
we'll follow them anywhere.
More Terra Firma:
More Terra Firma Watching Masters: Doctor Who's Season 7, Episode 5, "The Angels Take Manhattan"
Further Reading: Lynne Olson's Last Hope Island — the story of the governments-in-exile and resistance networks who found refuge in London during WWII.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, so speak your mind. Leave me a comment or feel free to hit me up at: fromandromedaandback@gmail.com. And thank you!
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