Examining The Waters

A closer look at the triangulations of Rick Blaine suggests the pretty blond isn't always the hero's motivation. 

In its final throes of death, roughly 1992 or so, the remaining drive-in theater in Oregon made a last-ditch effort to bring some light into our tiny little lives by showing four weekends worth of film noir double features. When the last reel of the current blockbuster finished and all the teenagers had driven off into the night to resume their clumsy fumblings, the promo cards flickering forty feet high would stop with the muffled thump of an audio channel being switched, followed by three hours of un-interrupted shadows, trenchcoats, and intrigue. At the time I was very unengaged with the style, as I felt things moved along too slowly, hardly anything burst into flames, and not enough information was spoon fed to me. With Casablanca, however, I was happily surprised to see Peter Lorre slimily oozing his way through his dialogue. I was familiar with Lorre from his catalogue of monster films, and didn't need to be told that his involvement could make a passable movie momentarily great. For two decades, Casablanca has stayed in my regular rotation of comfort movies, and eventually an urge came to solve a question that had always confused me: why did Rick come for the waters?

Not to drink them, that's what vodka is for.

You, by whom I mean Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, are familiar with the film. Some may be uninitiated, however, so for them: Casablanca tells the story of Rick Blaine, an ex-patriated American who owns and operates the most popular nightclub in World War II Nazi-controlled Casablanca, who inadvertently becomes re-entangled in a love triangle he thought long dead while simultaneously working surreptitiously to aid the Nazi resistance and keep himself out of prison. It is a famous touchstone film in our time, frequently misquoted and re-enacted in homage, but when released it was just one among fifty films produced by the assembly-line studio system of Warner Brothers. 

"Might be Bogart, might be Garbo. Hard to tell…"

The waters I referred to are addressed quite early in the film. Rick (played, as I don't need to tell you, by Humphrey Bogart before he was "Bogie") has just ejected a very lovely young woman from the nightclub and is walking back inside when he is engaged in conversation by the Police Captain, Renault (played by another of my spookshow heroes, Claude Rains). The camera sits a medium distance away, framing the two men in front of the nightclub but surrounding them in fog so that they feel removed from the background action. During their talk, a plane is seen and heard flying overhead on the way to Lisbon, mentioned as the first waypoint on the trip back to America. While Rick is denying Renault's charge that he desires escape back to the States, a searchlight appears and crosses the scene several times, returning when Rick speaks of his reasoning behind relocating to Casablanca in the first place. I don't know how deeply one digs into these things to find symbolism, but an expatriate reminiscing while a searchlight peers into the fog doesn't seem terribly subtle. I can also easily imagine the more innocuous spotlight-running stagehand, an hour after lunch, forced by his bladder to stay in motion because he didn't leave enough time for a rest stop before work resumed. 

So much fog, the original footage came out looking like 2D cell animation.

Rick explains to Renault that he came to Casablanca "for the waters," a poetic notion which Renault scoffs at, as they are in the Northern region of Africa where "there are no waters." "I was misinformed," Rick replies. The tale is clear: he's been used up by life, forced to rely on bad information and bouncing from place to place in an effort to find any safe harbor to live quietly and stay drunk. He'd been done wrong and left to rot, with not a friend in the world to call on for help. I still think it's masterful writing and character development, but I've since discovered that Renault was inexcusably stupid and Rick was either equally ignorant or (as I assert) deliberately lying his ass off, and I think I've discovered why.

There are only two concrete things that can be known about Rick based on the information provided in the film: he both ran firearms to the Ethiopians and fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War before arriving in Casablanca. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War would be chronologically first, and Rick's involvement in running guns there means that he was helping to supply Emperor Selassie of Ethiopia with the outmoded and obsolete firearms that directly caused their decimation in the war. They were vastly outgunned by the Nazis, and if Rick was the one to put them in that situation, he surely bears a personal responsibility in the subsequent Nazi victory. Ethiopia had fallen by 1936 and Rick had to flee, traveling north to engage on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (which, coincidentally, was the same thing George Orwell was doing at the time) and fight in the losing battle against the Francoists.

Francisco Franco, seen here at an auction bidding on a chin.

Following these back-to-back defeats, Rick fled in the opposite direction as the bulk of the refugees (who were heading en masse to 1939 France, what luck!) and made his way to the North African country of Morocco and the Vichy/Nazi-controlled Casablanca to open an expat nightclub acting as a front for the rebellion directly under the Nazi's comical noses. Now, I am not inclined to argue the logistical nightmare it must be to keep a handle on money and possessions whilst traveling across half the globe to engage in the losing end of two battle theaters, then presumably liquidate your remaining assets to purchase a nightclub. I am more interested in arguing against the popular interpretation of Rick's motives in helping his former love Ilsa and her new companion Lazlo escape Casablanca to continue the resistance, or at least refining it with a more keen instrument.

The popular position is that Rick, who originally resisted aiding Ilsa and Lazlo to escape when they first arrived in town, changes his mind when he gains a better understanding of why his relationship with Ilsa ended. Originally it seemed she jilted Rick, but she later explains her relationship with Lazlo came first, and she had only been with Rick because she thought Lazlo had been killed. This news is supposed to have softened Rick's heart, we are told, as his anger is supposed to have originated with her unannounced departure. I argue his decision was made based on a motivation to regain control over some aspect of his life, ensuring that his desired outcome was the result.

Nicely summed up here.

Rick is an anti-fascist and a man of the people, if his popularity in the community is any reliable metric. He seems to desire, generally speaking, the fostering of celebration and the potential of the celebration to cause money to change hands at his establishment. He tried to supply weapons to aid the Ethiopian resistance to fascism, which directly cause their loss. He again tried to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and was again on the losing side of the conflict. I argue his every waking moment in Casablanca was torture by dull knives, living under the constant shadow of his failures and the potential to have everything taken away by the Nazis. In ensuring Ilsa and Lazlo's escape from the fascists, Rick was undertaking the first resistance-based action for which he could personally guarantee success. Once the final airfield scene of the movie arrives, Rick personally moves the story forward at gunpoint, seeing to it that every critical step in the escape is accomplished in the narrow window of time allowed before the Nazi reinforcements arrive to keep Ilsa and Lazlo's plane from takeoff. Alone, Rick could never have accomplished supplying weapons to the entirety of the Ethiopian army or single-handedly defeated Franco's troops, but I think we have all met an individual who is easily capable of personally shouldering the failure of an endeavour they could never have prevented solitarily. I propose Rick saw enabling the escape as an act of absolution, knowing he could no longer fight personally but could instead immeasurably aid those who could still fight while giving his Nazi town leaders the finger. 

Since we've got this lying around…

"The waters," I argue, can be seen as the thirst-like need to resolve what once went wrong. The single-minded need of which one never needs reminding and the fulfillment of which is capable of overriding our primary preservation of well-being. Surely this need will be different for each of us, but writing into the script either Rick or Renault's explanation for their motivations would be pointless, as any map will show they cannot be trusted. "The waters?" Renault scoffed. "There are no waters in Casablanca." Casablanca is situated directly on the coast of Northern Africa, you see. The waters are everywhere.

It looks quite lovely, actually.