Casablanca in Beijing

(Spoiler warning: if you haven't yet seen the movie, some of the information below may give away some things. The movie is such a part of American culture that I don't know if there's much spoiling to be done, but anyways, there's your warning.)

I watched Casablanca (1942) for the second time ever a couple of nights ago. The first time I watched it was immediately after I checked it out of the Foreign Languages Department video library--it was one of a number of recent and classic English-language movies they've made available for students and teachers at the university. I had some extra time before the finals rush to give it a look, and then I had some time again the other night to look it over a bit more. I had heard that it's supposed to be one of the greatest movies, if not the greatest movie, ever to come out of Hollywood. Even after the first viewing, it was pretty apparent why--stellar performances from Bogart, Bergman, and Henreid, great chemistry between Bergman and Bogart, a great story that mixes something classic with something exotic. It's amazing how well affecting the film remains even after 65 years.

Seeing the movie in China, surrounded by China, had me looking at it a bit differently. The nature of Casablanca as a kind of Limbo was very striking and of course is a critical part of what makes the plot so fundamentally interesting. No one there is quite sure who is in charge--indeed, it is a nightclub owner who ultimately seems to be the most in command of the action throughout the movie. I found one of the most interesting characters to be the conniving police chief, Louis Renault--the guy who is supposed to be in control. One of the most interesting, jarring moments in the movie for me was when, as the final raid of Rick's Cafe Americain is being conducted, the Prefect notes how he is "shocked, SHOCKED that there is gambling going on in this establishment" as he is handed his stack of chips, his winnings for the evening. It is of course a tremendously humorous moment given Claude Rains' character and delivery, but something astonishingly insidious, of course, lays beneath the humor. Kafka was the best at explaining the simultaneous thoughts of humor and terror that these moments evoke. I am in a place now where law, like morality in general, is quite relative--different from moment to moment and from person to person. Based on the whims of officials like Louis Renault, businesses are opened and run out of town, lives are made and lost. The letters of the law are vast, varied and eloquent, but the law is nothing without enforcement, and it is only as stable as the morals of those implementing it.

Casablanca is a place where everyone's coming and going, where no one seems to be sticking around for good and where everyone seems to be waiting for something different. Most come to Casablanca to try to escape. Aside from the massive community of travelers that makes up a significant portion of the neighborhood that I live in, it also seems that many of these people are looking for something different. Many--myself included, in some ways--are looking to escape in one way or another. People come to a place like China with many different kinds of intentions--some good, some less than good. There are many over here looking to exploit the instability of this place, people like Peter Lorre's character, Ugarte, in Casablanca. The exchange rate is favorable to most currencies, and (with the bear-hug the government is now giving to capitalist economic policy) the new religion of this place has become--aside from the State--money. Everything has a price.

Rick's greatest triumph would seem to be, towards the end of the film, his final rejection of moral relativity. When he takes Renault hostage, he finally becomes a chooser, a man who accepts the human responsibility of discerning ethical situations by himself, rather than having those decisions foisted upon him by interests who have other things besides solely an endless search for righteousness in mind. Rick always knew the angles, but his apathy was poisoning any good intentions he may have had for those besides himself. There is, I think, in this country many intelligent people who also see the angles and who have the power to do things, but who have had their desires sated with their respective "nightclubs"; with economic expansion here has come the promise of wealth, which in turn has people caring less about human rights while they're struggling to participate in the predatory system of capitalist economics that the government is currently struggling to simultaneously propagate and hold together. Folks here have been presented with the most insidious form of control--not the reality, but the convincing illusion that they are a chooser. As a friend of a friend mentioned to me in (as a matter of fact) a nightclub when I first came to Beijing, "This country is incredibly free, more free than America . . . if you don't talk about politics." I imagine that you can anticipate what I had to say in response.

From now on, by the way, I'll be playing 22 quite a bit more when I hit the roulette tables down in Atlantic City.