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[Co-writer] Julius Epstein would later note the screenplay contained "more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there's nothing better."Hmm! When corn works, there's nothing better. Very interesting idea. When I googled the quote, I got a number of pages about ethanol and such, and Mr. Epstein is not currently available for further interviewing, so I'm going to guess at what he meant. To me the movie recalls Kurt Vonnegut's description of another work as "a sugar pill with a bitter coating." It features cheerfully cynical, amoral characters who nevertheless fall all over themselves to act nobly in a crisis, risking their lives for causes and each other. This is a bit at odds with one of the main themes of so-called "serious" art of the modern period: that human life is bleak and hopeless, that each human is alone in a hostile and meaningless universe.
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a pretty good example of this seriousness. It was written two years after Casablanca, and Epstein and Beckett were contemporaries. And surely Epstein was aware of this and similar works, and thought his own was corny by comparison.
Me, I try to straddle these views. I happen to be an agnostic existentialist myself: I don't think there's any meaning to life other than the meaning we assign to it. But I reject the idea that virtues flow only from religious belief, that life without God leads only to madness and amorality. Beckett risked his life in the French Resistance. If he had been caught, and he nearly was, he would have in all likelihood been tortured to death. You can't ask more from anyone than that.
I don't know what set of influences made him able to do that. But cooperation and self-sacrifice is hardwired into most social animals. A bear will defend her cubs quite enthusiastically without ever having read the Bible, and a dog will protect a member of its pack against a stronger opponent—it's just how they are. People are more complex, of course. But we've got that sense in our psyches. The greater complexity, however, means we need more sophisticated models for our behavior, and it's been long noted that stories can help people remember and act upon a society's ideals. For all its cynical winking at the ways of the world, Casablanca strongly suggests that meaning of a kind can be found in serving others. It's not philosophically sophisticated. It's much more about the ideal than the real. But as Beckett's contrasting life and work show us, and the daily lives of most people who strive to be decent also show, the real and the ideal, despair and hope, cynicism and cheerfulness are inextricably intertwined. The one movie undoubtedly called "corny" more often than any other is also a dark vision of how bleak life can be. And it's widely shown at the end of every year, because it also cheers people up, to the point that they cry for happiness. Casablanca is not philosophically rigorous, as we've noted, but the damn thing makes you feel good. In a crisis, it might help you act with more altruism and nobility, remembering the characters. Maybe every story that gives you hope is by definition corny. But I pity people who can't derive hope and inspiration from a story. If it's corn, okay, it's corn. But if it works, I think I'm with Julius on this one—there's nothing better.
Oh, and sorry for the long post. I've been asked to do a brief presentation, just a filler really, on some thoughts I've had about literary charm, and this seemed a propos so I wanted to sketch it out. Later!
So this is like the most charming art-history story ever. It seems the painter Gilbert Stuart—do I really need to link to the Wikipedia entry? He's the guy who did the portrait of George Washington, and if you need a link to find out who George Washington is then I just give up—anyway, he was a struggling artist before he painted this. The subject, a William Grant, showed up at his studio to have a portrait done one winter's day in 1782 or thereabouts. Grant remarked that it was a day better suited for skating than sitting for a portrait. And evidently they were both fairly free spirits, because that's what they did—they went skating. A portrait like this had never had action in it before, and for once it didn't create a big shocked scandal because this was the 18th century and people were pretty cool in the 18th century. The portrait made Stuart's reputation and assured his future, although he was kind of lax about money and got into debt a lot anyway.
Now, I'm not recommending that we all be free spirits and go skating when we ought to be working. Stuart actually was working while he was skating, when you think about it. At any rate, I love the painting and the story behind it too.
Afterthought update: You know, I looked this over and asked myself why I called the pre-"Skater" Stuart a "struggling artist," like that's a kind of species of person. Wasn't he more an artist who was struggling (to make a living, of course)? And then I decided not. A struggling artist often has characteristic traits—a perverse satisfaction in his or her financial embarrassment comes to mind—that a struggling regional sales manager, say, usually doesn't. If Stuart were really worried about money, he wouldn't have paid much attention to the skating idea. "Yeah, yeah, whatever," he'd have said. "Now siddown over there and let's do this thing—I got bills to pay, buddy." But he didn't. Bless his whimsical heart, he went skating.
Not every attempt to please an audience is a case of shameless pandering, in other words. But then there's this. I mean, sheesh.
From a slide show in Slate about an exhibit of Joan Miró pieces at New York City's Museum of Modern Art:
"I have to tell you," Miró wrote a friend in 1927, "that I look at real things with increasing love—the fuel lamp, potatoes."
