"Here's Looking at You, Kid"- Casablanca

I think it is high time I talk about the namesake for this blog, Casablanca.  I recently watched Casablanca for the forth time to remind myself of why it is such a wonderful movie (it isn’t even in the same league as Clueless). The first time, I was seven years old and fell asleep after I realized it was in black and white. The second time was in a film studies class my senior year of high school; it was last period of the day, the lights were off and it was the day after a particularly brutal all-nighter. Again, I didn’t make it past the opening credits. The third time, I watched it for an art class I was taking and looked at it from a purely artistic vantage point (I guess the third time really is a charm).  Watching this from for art revealed something I hadn’t really noticed before; you could take a still from any point in the movie and it could stand alone as artistically strong photograph (a quality that has been lost in modern movies). And the forth time, well, with a movie as good as Casablanca there is no such thing as too many times.

Casablanca is a beautiful, timeless, but also tragic love story about escaping WWII. During the war, Rick Blaine (played by the dashing Humphrey Bogart) is an American club owner in Casablanca, Morocco who comes upon two stolen letters of transit (assurance for two people to escape occupied Europe by going through Casablanca, then Lisbon then ultimately the United States). Shortly after, the leader of the Czech underground resistance, Victor Laszlo, shows up in Casablanca trying to get to America with his wife-to-be, Isla. When the pair of them happen to walk into Rick’s club, the look between Isla and Rick speaks volumes of their history. In a very poetically filmed flashback, you find out that Ilsa broke Rick’s heart on a Parisian train platform at the beginning of the war. Ilsa and Laszlo both desperately try to get the letters of transit from Rick, and Ilsa and Rick end up falling in love again because in his words “We’ll always have Paris”. That is as far as I can go because it would be impossible to do the ending justice with just words. For those of you who haven’t seen it, watch it. If you don’t like classic movies, watch it anyway. It will build character. 

Now how can an old WWII movie connect to the world of Barlow, blogging and Turkle, you ask? Casablanca perfectly represents the public vs. private spheres. The police represent the “sphere of public authority” for obvious reasons. Laszlo and the underground resistance represent the “private sphere” and Rick’s club, where the spheres converge, represents the public sphere.