Essay Number Ten:  On the Argument of Casablanca and the Meaning of the Third Rick by Kenneth De Luca

            The appeal of Casablanca is unmistakable.  Popular amongst men and women of all ages, Casablanca is frequently listed as the second greatest film of all time.  What makes this film so universally popular that it can still garners passionate fans amongst generations that can not even remember World War II,  the studio system, or even Bogart and Bergman?  It is this question that Political Philosophy Comes To Rick’s: Casablanca and American Civic Culture tries to answer with a series of relevant scholarly essays.  The tenth essay (written by Kenneth De Luca) is of particular interest to the analysis of the legendary film.  This essay reflects on the relationship between Rick’s character and the ideals of America.  According to this essay, Rick’s character maintains modern American appeal because he represents the personification of Jeffersonian individualism.  Rick is a man who needs to be free to the point where he can actually be moral and even beautiful.  By making the ultimate sacrifice of love, Rick achieves personal autonomy and also freedom from the overwhelming guilt of having done the morally wrong thing.  De Luca states that Americans find this sacrifice seductive because it represents a combination of seemingly irreconcilable freedoms – freedom to satisfy self interest and freedom to be directed by some higher purpose.  This essay is important to the study of Casablanca because it shows the noncommercial / non-studio system aspects of Casablanca overwhelming popularity. 

Michel Foucault’s analysis of the evolution of the western penal system resonates with the 1932 national Burns-inspired urge to abolish the chain gang. Foucault recounts the replacement of the chain gang in France in 1837 “by inconspicuous black-painted cell-carts.” Thus, “punishment gradually ceased to be a spectacle” (Foucault 8-9). However, the lack of visibility of brutality does not displace the sinister effects of a now ambiguously-motivated penal system. Foucault argues that discipline’s growing absence of tangible sources renders the system all the more insidious. For, “punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process… [and] as a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice” (9). The chain gang in Georgia was indeed subsequently supplanted by a less visible means of penal correction.

Foucault’s concern regarding the penal system’s move toward discretion reflects national fears of Southern racial integration that the chain gangs both facilitated and made visible to the public. The chain gangs evolved out of an antebellum convict labor system designed to prolong the racial, economic, and cultural dynamics established through slavery. Thus, Warner Brothers responded to national anxieties provoked by whites’ conspicuous subjection to a mode of punishment perceived to be designed for blacks. 

However, the film for the most part ignores arguments that address these racial tensions. Might Hollywood have relished portraying the chain gang as a hyper-visible site of injustice in order to facilitate its manipulation of pre-existing national fears surrounding chain gangs? In other words, the chain gangs – which arguably embodied a tense conflict between Southern modernity and lingering effects of its post-slavery economy – rendered racial tension and physical violence spectacles, thereby generating national anxiety which posed threats to established cultural and economic hierarchies (Hollywood, at the top of these hierarchies).

I do not suggest that a national return to a chain gang penal system would be appropriate. Rather, in 1932, the existence of the chain gang was not purely regressive, but complex and deeply imbricated in modernity. Thus, the film’s structural misreading of the chain gang – a system which in many ways literalizes the studios' symbolic perpetuation of violence and inequality – can be read as motivated by Hollywood’s fears regarding the chain gang’s cultural and economic self-exposure. 

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that civilization represses barbarity by attempting to embody its negation. However, savage brutality does not disappear. They explain this as a process of “progress…reverting to regression. That [industries] are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain, within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, does matter. That is the basic premise of our fragments” (Horkheimer and Adorno xviii). This attempt to elucidate the dynamics of contradictory forces in modern industrial societies, – that is, culture represses ritual which resurfaces in barbarity – seems particularly relevant to LeRoy’s dichotomized expression of modern industry and penal savagery in Chain Gang.

Thus, the film can be read as at once enacting and promoting alternative readings of modernity’s relationship to tradition. Lichtenstein’s depiction of chain gangs as trapped between old and new systems (although, he argues, closer to the latter, while occupying a space in the public imagination – thanks largely to Burns’s and LeRoy’s efforts – which links them primarily with the former) reflects Horkheimer and Adorno’s modernity paradigm. Might, then, the film’s repression of cultural-historical complexity signify its participation in generating the very conditions which facilitated and prolonged the existence of unjust systems like the chain gang?

Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of “the culture industry” also confirms arguments that any text produced by Hollywood participates in stifling potential political resistance to capitalism. They assert that “under the dictate of effectiveness, technique is becoming psychotechnique, a procedure for manipulating human beings … everything is directed at overpowering a customer conceived as distracted or resistant” (133). In effect, Chain Gang’s purportedly subversive message can be interpreted as co-opting mounting politically-resistant energies in 1932 American culture.

I will also attempt to analyze Horkheimer and Adorno’s scathing criticisms of Hollywood and American capitalism dialogically with arguments promoted by the very systems the Dialectic of Enlightenment decries. If anything, Chain Gang’s example has instructed me to appreciate the nuanced difficulties posed by classifying any one economy, culture, or form of government as either purely repressive or uniquely revolutionary.

Walker and Chaplin walk through the theory and history of Visual Studies. They begin with an exploration of the notion of culture, particularly as a foil to nature. The notion of culture, they argue, is inextricably linked to what the economy allows and, perhaps more importantly, deems necessary, allowing the members of a society to establish a hierarchical pattern. Now, however, "culture" is increasingly used to describe any aspect of daily life. Next, the concept of the "visual" is explored, both in how it is sensorally experienced, and what the repercussions of this perception are.

Chapter four's discussion of theory and its various manifestations is particularly interesting, as it explores not only self-conscious theory (e.g., philosophers and people who fancy themselves theorists) but also theory-as-byproduct; that is, theory that developed more organically. "In sum, there are not only theories of art, but also theories for art; theory-informed art, and even theories as art" (62). This is an especially helpful screen for considering why book covers are designed as they are.

The chapter entitled "Production, Distribution and Consumption" has a helpful explanation and description of consumer models, and examines the theories behind the design and distribution of products. In the following chapter, they examine the roles of institutions in creating various products designed to perpetuate their ideals. They explain: "in the case of large, complexly structured arts and media institutions employing or commissioning teams of specialists to produce films, televesion programmes, etc., the influence of the institutions on the content, form and ideological agenda of the final product is likely to be harder to judge because of the many functionarires and levels of mediation involved" (94).

The notion of looking and voyeurism is also explored. This is a critical concept when considering the "why" of book covers; people's selections of books mirrors their interests, and the visual to which they are drawn is an immediate indicator. Therefore, one can extrapolate from the text, that selecting a book by its cover is a sort of narcisistic voyeurism.

""In imaging female subjectivity and addressing the spectator as female, feminist filmmakers have created films which transform and innovate cinematic codes and conventions." Smelik switches the focus of feminist discourse from spectator to filmmaker. Unwilling to revive the auteur theory, which she considers to be elitist and phallocentric, she nevertheless investigates the works of such filmmakers as Sander, Campion, Treut, and Adlon and discovers ways in which they subvert traditional cinematic subjectivity, affect, and modes of representation. Smelik's arguments are, of course, deeply rooted in the feminist theory of Lacan, Mulvey, Silverman, Kaplan, Irigaray, et al., but she also includes such figures as Eisenstein and Barthes. She does not privilege any particular theory but uses whatever works for the particular filmmaker she is dealing with. Her choice of films is as refreshing as her method: one is too used to reading about the same feminist films in book after book. Smelik's knowledge of the field is encyclopedic, and her analyses are consistently persuasive. This welcome addition to the ongoing feminist discourse is recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty." (Choice, February 1999)