No Matter What the Future Brings

Of all of these gin joints, and you had to walk into mine. (TW: Casablanca, Carly Simon)

Dear friends,

This is an extremely long post, but it might be worth your while to read it. Toward the end I get into some serious stuff. Thank you for being with me this year, whether you’ve just joined me or we’ve known each other since we were kids. A happy, more peaceful New Year to all.

Nowhere in the movie Casablanca does the line, “Play it again, Sam,” appear. I assure you of this because I have almost memorized the movie.

As I mentioned in my post on Victor Laszlo, my father introduced me to the movie but almost ruined it (I love you Dad!) by saying, “This is the best part!” almost every five minutes as my young mind registered it. It is a tough contest to figure out what the best lines that actually appear in Casablanca are, and there is enough strife and controversy in this world without adding to it by asserting that one line is objectively better than another. It’s all a matter of taste really and hopefully no one will die on this particular hill.

But!

There are some very, very good lines. As 2023 draws to a close, I would like to pause to reflect on a few of these lines, and the lessons that can be taken from them, if you so choose. Or you could just keep scrolling and read the news or look at pictures of cats.

“No matter what the future brings,” is a line that actually does appear in the song “As Time Goes By.” I love Carly Simon’s version of this song, which I highly recommend you listen to even if you think you aren’t a Carly Simon fan.

I have attempted to live my life by this song lyric this year. The future felt uncertain for me before, and it feels more uncertain now. Having abandoned the idea that life must have some kind of linear path, a path that is recognized and approved of, such as getting a PhD or being a public school teacher or doing anything even vaguely considered “normal,” I have become open to possibilities. As I’ve written at length, Marilyn’s death made me think a great deal about living life to the fullest in whatever time we have.

Another line that actually exists in the movie, that Carly Simon paraphrases at the end of her version of “As Time Goes By,” is “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Humphrey Bogart does an amazing job in this scene with that line, as he gets drunk waiting for Ilsa to come back. He seems to be cursing his fate, as though some unlikely act of chance had brought him back together with his lover who disappeared in Paris as the Germans marched in.

I would like to take issue with Rick’s portrayal of his fate. There was nothing coincidental at all about Ilsa showing up in his cafe.

There is only one way to get to America from war-torn Europe. It’s the plane to Lisbon, that leaves out of Casablanca. Ilsa and her Resistance hero husband Victor Laszlo were obviously going to try to get to America because it was one of the only places they could go where the Germans could not get them.

Now there’s no way that Rick could have figured out that Ilsa disappeared in Paris because she found out that her husband was alive, had not died in the concentration camp but had in fact escaped, and was sick and needed her. I wonder what he thought during the intervening years when he clearly thought a great deal about that scene at the Paris train station. Did she leave him for another man? It certainly seemed so once she walked into is cafe with Laszlo, and frankly, if you’re going to get left for anyone, I wouldn’t complain about getting left for Victor Laszlo. Rick may have game, but Laszlo is a Resistance hero. I’ve stated my position on that issue quite clearly, I believe.

I wonder if he thought she might have been killed. They talk earlier in Paris about how they know so little about each other. “We said no questions,” she says. The Germans marched in, and he has no way of knowing if she might be in more immediate danger than the obvious.

It was very easy to lose track of people in those days. No internet, no cell phones, no easily accessible public records and lots of people trying to disappear. Until he gets one more piece of information, that she walks into his cafe with Laszlo, he has no way of knowing if she’s alive or dead.

But!

Once he sees her alive, well, and with Laszlo, it is inevitable that she would have walked into his gin joint. There is one way to America - through Casablanca. There is one cafe that is the most famous in Casablanca - Rick’s. “Everybody comes to Rick’s” says the French police captain Renault. I was just reading in an article about how Casablanca was originally a play (I had no idea either!) some backstory about the playwright Murray Bennett.

From the LA Times article about the staging of the play:

He [Bennett] wrote the play with Alison in 1938 after a trip to Vienna, where the Nazis were a dominant force and anti-Semitic propaganda was everywhere. Burnett recalls seeing a huge billboard in a Vienna square, with a grotesque caricature of a Jewish man and the words murderer and thief beneath it. Burnett, who is himself Jewish, describes Vienna as “an indescribable horror, a city of marching feet. I will never ever go back there.”

He returned to New York, related his experiences to Alison, and wrote “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” in what he calls “the white heat of anger--anger at stupid people who refused to acknowledge that Hitler and Nazism were a threat.”

Somewhere, as the Google machine made it possible for me to read various commentaries that I now can’t locate on the words of the play and the movie, I read, “‘Everybody comes to Rick’s’ means that everyone sooner or later must make a moral decision.”

That seems like a bit of a stretch to me, though certainly three characters in the movie make world-altering moral decisions. Ilsa, Rick and Captain Renault all make decisions.

Laszlo makes no decisions. He made his decision long ago, and it has given him a single minded purpose and focus. No doubt it has kept him alive. People complain that Victor is a flat character because of his lack of visible internal conflict. I think he would be a very interesting character if we were to see the series of events that led to him pledging his life, and if need be death, to the Resistance. If Casablanca were an HBO series, there would be a prequel in which we could see how Victor Laszlo became Victor Laszlo, how he met Ilsa, and perhaps get a better look at the European Resistance. I’d renew my HBO subscription for that.

Our friend Eve Barlow clearly made her decision long ago. As I spent a great deal of time fighting with fear and contemplating what, precisely, is the right thing to do, my best friend frequently reminded me of that.

I do not think that “everybody comes to Rick’s,” in the interpretation that everybody eventually makes a moral decision. I think that most people just wait around drinking and listening to music - or doing whatever they do - hoping the storm will pass and they’ll get out without having to take a stand.

But some people do not have a choice. Now is a time when many of the people closest to me are facing the consequences of rising global antisemitism, and they don’t get any choice about it at all because they were born Jewish. I’m sure most would prefer to live their relatively happy, successful American lives and not worry about this. We live in a strange land where half the people around us don’t even care that there’s a war (a friend of mine said, “What happened on October 7?” as we were driving to do an errand. I screamed and jumped out of the car. No, I didn’t, but I thought about it. You can’t stay neutral in a moving car, but you can rapidly end up seriously injured if you jump out.) Many of the people around us are on fire with a kind of hatred that we wish we did not have to see.

For many of my friends, taking a public stand would be dangerous to their careers and the way they provide for their families. I understand that. Sometimes I feel like I am writing for you… even though you may disagree with some of what I say. You may hate the movie Casablanca, for instance, but be glad that someone is calling out the rabid antisemites at our collective door. You may see nuance and context where I see a clear and present danger to my friends, Western civilization and the freedoms we take for granted in America. Still, if I can push the conversation toward calling out worldwide antisemitism and give others the courage to speak up, I have made some kind of contribution. Feel free to write me with any suggestions, critiques, and thank you as always for continuing to read.

There was no coincidence at work at all in Casablanca. Were it not for Ilsa’s prior relationship in Paris with Rick, Victor Laszlo might not have gotten to impress the other half of the world. He probably would have been captured again, with his wife, in Casablanca. That would have made for a terribly depressing war movie.

“Of all of the gin joints in all of the towns in all of the world…”

Of course she walks into yours.

Onto my least favorite line in the movie. Wait for it.

“I love you so much, and I hate this war so much.”

That line still makes my skin crawl. It’s just so trite. All of that feminine helplessness… I can’t stand it! But I get it. Poor woman. She’s war-torn herself. I feel bad for her. She needs a large potted plant to hide behind.

It’s hard to say what my favorite line in the entire movie is, but I think I will go with Captain Renault, the most morally ambiguous and funny character.

“I know a little about women, my friend. She went, but she knew you were lying.”

In case you missed it, here’s the Carly Simon version of “As Time Goes By.” Play it.