"Casablanca": A Critique or Defence of Centrism?

How a movie from eighty years ago lives on today, and what it says about remaining "neutral".

1.

Cinema was dead, to begin with. According to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, film is a “dead medium”. Live theatre allows for accidents and variations in performances that create different viewing experiences; film is recorded once and finally, freezing it in everlasting stasis. Kaufman’s method for mitigating this in his own movies is to build in so much information to his onscreen world that repeat viewings offer different experiences. What was overlooked at the start of the movie becomes salient once you know how the movie ends.

This is why it is in the re-watch – a second go around in which I know now what comes next – that I can really tell whether a movie has life. If it is alive, then each scene still sings with a voice I want to hear again, and the film surprises me with fresh wonder, in spite of my knowledge of how the scene and the larger plot will unfold. When a movie is alive, prescience does not impede awe.

By contrast, a movie with no life is crushed on second viewing by t…