In the Realm of the Sensei

In his essay “Casablanca”: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage, Umberto Eco posits the tempting idea that CASABLANCA, and other cult movies, work by reconfiguring fragments of earlier narratives so that you get a fresh-seeming structure with a lot of familiar elements so people feel refreshed yet comfortable. He doesn’t quite put it in those terms, but I think that’s what he’s saying.

What he doesn’t say, maybe because he’s not a nerdy film buff like me, is WHICH movies or stories CASABLANCA is so indebted to. Which would be the proof of his theory if he could manage it. I think that actually CASABLANCA is quite an original story. There hadn’t been a lot of films set in occupied countries — and none of them resemble CASABLANCA. There had been exotic escapades like ALGIERS, which had Peter Lorre in it and an Arabian setting, but doesn’t really have any story elements in common. Rick Blaine calls his Cafe Americain a “saloon” so we might be looking at a transposed western, but westerns are NEVER about saloon-keepers. The letters of transit are a novel (if nonsensical) MacGuffin. Rick’s bromance with a corrupt police official certainly echoes previous buddy movies but the dynamics are quite different due to Renault’s status as sort-of villain.

Eco would have been on MUCH surer ground if he;d chosen STAR WARS as his example, though I’d argue that STAR WARS isn’t a cult film — but then, is CASABLANCA? STAR WARS really does mash up lots of different story elements and action sequences from lots of different movies and genres. This was borne in on me anew watching THE MAGIC SERPENT / DRAGON SHOWDOWN / KAIRYU DAIKESSEN (1966), an epic fantasy mash-up of kaiju and chanbara believed by some to have inspired George Lucas (along with THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, YOJIMBO, DAMBUSTERS, CASABLANCA, THE SEARCHERS…)

The key similarity is the nature of the villain, a former student of the guru character, who has turned bad ( gone over to the dark side). But this plot strand also occurs in AN ACTOR’S REVENGE! Maybe it’s kind of a meme in Japanese fiction and film, where the idea of the sensei and student is so important. This idea being sort of a general one makes STAR WARS’ borrowing of it seem even more like a symptom of its having what Eco calls “archetypal appeal.” Lucas has borrowed elements so archetypal that it’s not always possible to tell where they’ve come from. Is the cantina sequence inspired by CASABLANCA, or by any of a million westerns, or one of King Hu’s inns? Or all of the above?