Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Casablanca and The English Patient have similar settings, northern Africa during World War II, and explore similar themes–how passionate love threatens friendships, national loyalties, and all human obligations. By exploring The English Patient's treatment of these themes in the 1990s, we can better appreciate the achievement of Casablanca, a film made over fifty years before. Depicting the beauty and seductiveness of passion free from all political loyalties, but also the dangers of such an infinite love, The English Patient leaves us with the tragic conflict between the limits that seem necessary for human life and humanity's unbounded desire for transcendence. Casablanca, I shall argue, no less complex because of its patriotic fervor, answers The English Patient by demonstrating that love such as Rick and Ilsa's can preserve itself by deriving strength from a noble political cause. Whereas Casablanca is generally understood as valorizing personal sacrifice for the sake of political cause, and thus privileging politics over love, I argue that the film demonstrates that the protagonists' political choices are inseparable from their love for each other. Beauty, when experienced as nobility of soul and expressed in noble deeds, mediates between individual happiness and moral and political obligations. Life, to be sure, is difficult and precarious in Casablanca, but it is nevertheless more wonderful than tragic, for it offers the middle ground that The English Patient lacks.