Casablanca and The Music of War

The World Heard: Casablanca and the Music
of War
Paul Allen Anderson
It is a poor idea of fantasy which takes it to be a world apart from reality, a world
clearly showing its unreality. Fantasy is precisely what reality can be confused with. It
is through fantasy that our conviction of the worth of reality is established; to forgo
our fantasies would be to forgo our touch with the world. And does someone claim
to know the specific balance sanity must sustain between the elaborating demands of
self and world?
—stanley cavell, The World Viewed1
Perfect repetition is impossible in live art performances, but its approxi-

mation remains indispensable. A sense of repetition in the performance of
everyday life is even more indispensable; nothing else could make our form
of life intelligible. Going on in the same way demonstrates our trust in the
world beyond ourselves, a world similarly marked by constancy and rule fol-
lowing. Despite its wayward tendencies, a well-maintained fantasy life is nec-
essary as well. Like the second leg that lets us walk, the second life of fantasy
works in tandem with our foothold in the everyday world. An unexpected
slipperiness threatens our movement and “our touch with the world,” how-
ever, when this second life of idealizations and wayward imaginings becomes
confused with the everyday world to which we are also answerable. A 1931
ballad offered a reassuring promise of steady forward movement when it re-
peatedly concluded, against countervailing evidence from science and society
alike, that “the fundamental things apply, as time goes by.” The “fundamental
things” in matters of courtship and love, the lyrics promised, lie in clinging
to beliefs about the lawlike character of romantic destiny. The song would
have been forgotten had it not been for the immensely popular war film to
which it has since been tethered. In that context, one consoling fantasyswirled
together with another as Hollywood reinscribed “the fundamental things” of
rule following, love, and destiny on behalf of the music of war.
Early versions of this essay were presented to the music of the Americas study group, the junior
historians workshop, and the American culture workshop at the University of Michigan. I am
grateful to these colleagues for their commentaries and suggestions. I would also like to thank
Michael Szalay, Naomi Silver, Rob Genter, John Behling, and John Carson for their careful
readings of earlier drafts.
1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971; Cambridge, 1979),
p. 85; hereafter abbreviated WV.
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Critical Inquiry / Spring 2006 483
If “movies are no longer easy in the nests of wish and myth that gave its
media their conviction for us” (WV, p. 146) as Cavell observed in the early
1970s, the nests have not simply broken down. Instead, some of them, ac-
companied by those who maintain them, have moved. Those who produce
political spectacles of “wish and myth” and who find Hollywood an incon-
sistent ally have only redoubled their efforts at public pedagogy through
other media representations of political unity. How long ago it seems that
hundreds of members of Congress crowded the Capitol steps one Septem-
ber evening to surprise a huge television audience by singing Irving Berlin’s
“God Bless America.” The world heard—but what? A humble request for
a blessing after an unbearable Tuesday; an adamant announcement of con-
tinued strength in the face of an unknown threat; another verse in the music
of war’s unending melody? The world heard all these things through a mu-
sical performance that sounded the political representatives’ voice vote of
“unisonance.”2 The performance belonged to the genre of political rituals
dedicated to the restorationist fantasy of perfect repetition. These rituals
dust off and lubricate the machinery of collective remembrance and strive
to do the impossible—to control that machinery and homogenize its un-
avoidably unruly and contradictory output, not least as it moves through
such wayward media as song. Stage-managed patriotic gestures like these
embolden a collective resolve to dream, sing, and act in one voice, to per-
severe under the sign of unanimity in a reinscription of the past. Our actions
in the coming days, such performances promise, will be continuous with
our birthright; a righteous past will sanctify, speak through, and be repeated
in our roles; each of us will grow through these actions as we rise to join a
collective national destiny. What contemporary political professionals call
staying on message starts to look like a wartime vision of automatism where
unthinking constancy doubles as eschatological fulfillment.3
2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism (London, 1991), p. 145.
3. Cavell’s sense of “automatism” in The World Viewed is different. There, he approaches
artistic media in general as distinctive “automatisms” and develops the point in a Wittgensteinian
key; hence, automatisms are bundles of customary rules that generate further applications, human
conviction, and normative standards. As such, we might call them soft automatisms, for they are
P a u l A l l e n A n d e r s o n is an assistant professor in the program in American

culture and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of
Michigan. He is author of Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance
Thought (2001). He is currently working on a book about the dream life of
American jazz, Hearing Loss, from which this essay is drawn. His email address is
paanders@umich.edu

484 Paul Allen Anderson / The Music of War
“Performance,” according to Joseph Roach, “stands in for an elusive en-
tity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace.
Hence flourish the abiding yet vexed affinities between performance and
memory, out of which blossom the most florid nostalgias for authenticity
and origin.”4 The patriotic stagecraft outside the Capitol on the evening
of 11 September 2001 aspired to embody in song an otherwise “elusive
entity”—a republic truly shaken but even more truly united and indestruc-
tible. Sixty years earlier, the film Casablanca provided instruction to Amer-
icans in how the musical unisonance performed by a political crowd could
wash away fears of retribution and defeat while drowning out the alternative
melodies of hostile forces. When the employees and clientele of Rick’s Café
Americain follow Victor Lazlo’s lead in spontaneously singing the “Mar-
seillaise,” their tribute to French republicanism makes a symbolic stand
against the German soldiers seated nearby and the Vichy collaborators who
accommodate them. As the Nazis failed in their demand for respect when
they sang “Die Wacht am Rhein,” the film taught, so too would their fascist
movement and expansionist war fail. Whether on the Capitol steps or in an
imagined café in colonial Morocco, musical performances undertaken in
the name of collective or shared remembrance extend an ambitious per-
formative promise: they will not merely reference some “elusive entity”
through the ritual of commemoration; they will bring it into being. Thus
the live performance of the “Marseillaise” in Casablanca transforms the
café’s multinational crowd into something at once new and old, a newly
unified collective that can give form to an originary and indestructibleentity
through song. The political sing-along is hardly the film’s only performance
to function, like so much music, as “a tool for the creation or consolidation
of a community, of a totality.”5 Max Steiner’s nondiegetic orchestral score
defined by finitude and adaptability. “When such a medium is discovered, it generates new
instances: not merely makes them possible, but calls for them, as if to attest that what has been
discovered is indeed something more than a single work could convey. . . . The automatisms of a
tradition are given to the traditional artist, prior to any instance he adds to it; the master explores
and extends them” (WV, p. 107). The modernist situation is Cavell’s name for the breakdown of the
automatic or “natural relation between your work and its results” (WV, p. 107) and the lapsing of
the medium’s conventional power to draw conviction from the audience. “The modernist artist
has to explore the fact of automatism itself, as if investigating what it is at any time that has
provided a given work of art with the power of its art as such” (WV, p. 107). In 1971, he warmly
welcomed the modernist situation in painting but was disinclined to celebrate its apparently
growing influence in contemporary Hollywood. Thus, The World Viewed preceded Cavell’s other
valuable works on film (notably, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage
[Cambridge, Mass., 1981] and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown
Woman [Chicago, 1996]) with numerous passages, and elegiac personal asides, on the passing of
classic Hollywood as a medium with automatisms capable of delivering great instances blessed
with unexpected philosophical depth.
4. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, 1996), pp. 3–4.
5. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis,
1985), p. 6.

(the film’s pit music, so to speak) furthers this project of public pedagogy
by reinforcing a sense of identification and solidarity between the viewing
audience and the crowd of exiles and refugees who bravely sing the “Mar-
seillaise” before their Vichy captors and their German associates.6 Likewise,
Sam’s diegetic performances of “As Time Goes By” for Rick and Ilsa engi-
neer an equally necessary related project of collective restoration.
The contrast between a romantic song about how “the world will always
welcome lovers” and a national anthem forged in a revolutionary moment
maps onto the conflict that gives Casablanca its dramatic shape, the rift
between Rick’s private and public desires.7 Taken together, the pair of songs
gives wing to the film’s allegorical vision of the “relationship between erotics
and politics” as not merely incidentally connected but, instead, interlocking
and complementary.8 This interconnection explains why the ballad’sprivate
fantasy of constancy and romantic security and the republican anthem’s
patriotic call to arms must ultimately merge rather than simply move in
parallel. Meanwhile, to ensure the smooth working of the film’s allegorical
machinery, Sam must disappear from the world of Casablanca, once the
antifascist crowd has taken up its unisonant political hymn. The African
American’s presence and his music may move the romantic plot along from
Paris to Casablanca, but ultimately Sam’s music plays best outside his pres-
ence, when the white American hero rejoins the war walking alongside a
new white European partner. Competing with and ultimately victorious
over Sam’s function, Steiner’s string-dominated orchestra captures the sig-
nature ballad, reduces it to a leitmotif, and repeats the truncated melody
over and over again until its triumphant merger with the political anthem.9
Despite the resolution of the melodies when “As Time Goes By” folds into
the “Marseillaise” at the film’s finale, Sam’s vanishing act hints at the quiet
pull of wartime realities on the world viewed in Casablanca. It is but one
example of how cast-off elements of the world like the racial conventions
and military conveniences of wartime America washed back onto the shores
of one of Hollywood’s most enduring fantasies.
The management of Sam’s presence and his rarely noted disappearance
in Casablanca is continuous with the film’s baseline of colonial amnesia as
well as the prominent presence of the European resistance in the film, es-
pecially the Free French, in contrast to their relative absence from Allied
6. For the useful importation of the term pit music from classical opera to the recorded
orchestral music of classical Hollywood’s sound era, see Michel Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on
Screen, trans. and ed. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1994), p. 80.
7. Casablanca, DVD, dir. Michael Curtiz (Warner Home Video, 2000); hereafter abbreviated C.
8. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley,
1991), p. 43.
9. On the scoring of Casablanca, see Martin Marks, “Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The
Cases of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon,” Michigan Quarterly Review 35 (Winter 1996): 112–42.

war planning. Quietly pushing Sam away—making him vanish from the
screen but covering the loss by musical proxy—and evading the recalcitrant
facts of Allied policy while playing the “Marseillaise” work together in
Casablanca as strategies for stopping up, or at least covering, the gaps be-
tween the music of war and the practice of war. Fantasy is necessary lest we
“forego our touch with the world,” Cavell argues, and the peculiarly human
“touch with the world” results in part from our learned or second nature—
including instruction in rule following and its applications into the future,
the blossoming and decay of public and private ideals and fantasies, and
“all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life.’”10 Frictionless
sites in the “whirl of organism,” man-made sites of mendacious fantasies
and destructive misconceptions, affect this whirl and throw us off balance.
Thus, the whole business of the music of war is to stop up the gaps between
fantasy and reality, to reduce the distance and necessary friction “between
the elaborating demands of self and world.” Once the balance between the
two is so compromised, all judgment begins to falter and all wars can be-
come, for example, a restoration and replaying of the fabled Good War by
proxy.11 But, as Casablanca reveals about its war, the fantasy of perfect repe-
tition did not even hold true the first time around.
“Welcome Back to the Fight”

It is the first week of December 1941 and Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart)
runs a nightclub in Morocco popular among European refugees desperate
to escape Vichy-controlled French territory to Lisbon and then the Amer-
icas. Under the scrutiny of the French protectorate’s Vichy administrators,
Rick declares his indifference to political matters—“I stick my neck out for
nobody”—but also does nothing to discourage a black-market trade in pre-
cious exit visas at the club (C). More valuable still are the two letters of
transit the black marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre) has killed German couriers
10. Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Must We Mean What We Say?
(New York, 1969), p. 52.
11. Along these lines of repetition as restoration, consider the following stunning example from
President George W. Bush’s speech on 30 August 2005 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of
V-J Day and simultaneously defend his own war policies:
With Japan’s surrender, the last of our enemies in World War II was defeated, and a World War
that began for America in the Pacific came to an end in the Pacific. As we mark this
anniversary, we are again a nation at war. Once again, war came to our shores with a surprise
attack that killed thousands in cold blood. Once again, we face determined enemies who
follow a ruthless ideology that despises everything America stands for. Once again, America
and our allies are waging a global campaign with forces deployed on virtually every continent.
And once again, we will not rest until victory is America’s and our freedom is secure. [http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050830-1.html]

to steal. Ugarte explains to Rick that the letters of transit (pure Hollywood
fantasy, the stuff of magic) are extraordinarily valuable because, unlike exit
visas, they “cannot be rescinded, not even questioned.” The theft inspires
a visit to the Atlantic port city from the Gestapo to investigate the case and
related matters. Shortly before his arrest and death in the hands of Major
Heinrich Strasser (Conrad Veidt), Ugarte entrusts Rick with the escape tick-
ets from German and Vichy power. The club owner hides the letters inside
Sam’s upright piano and maintains his façade of neutrality when Ugarte is
apprehended. Rick’s mask begins to fall, however, shortly after his ex-lover
Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) enters the club with her husband Victor Lazlo
(Paul Henreid). She asks the maitre’d’ about “the boy who’s playing the
piano” (C). “Miss Ilsa,” as Sam (Dooley Wilson) calls her, only wants to
hear one old song. She hums a few bars after Sam claims to have forgotten
it, and now he has no choice but to play and sing “As Time Goes By.” The
film’s first act ends when Rick angrily halts the performance of the song that
betrayed him in Paris, a musical memento that promises “woman needs
man / and man must have his mate / that, no one can deny” (C).
The plot of Casablanca came from Everybody Comes to Rick’s, an un-
produced 1940 play written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The script
landed on the desk of Steven Karnot, a story analyst at Warner Brothers, on
8 December 1941. An “excellent melodrama,” with a “colorful, timely back-
ground,” he enthused. All in all, the story was “sophisticated hokum” and
“a box office natural—for Bogart, or Cagney, or Raft.”12 Though shot and
completed in 1942 the film followed the source script in being set prior to
December 7. “If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca,” Bogart’s character muses
bitterly, “what time is it in New York?” (C). The question matters because
the film rewound the clock to present American audiences with Lazlo’s el-
oquent brief for the resistance, Rick’s barely submerged antifascist past, and
the latter’s quiet solidarity with the resistance. Although a majority of Amer-
icans in 1941 had turned away from the pre-Pearl Harbor case for interven-
tion, Casablanca invited them to screen out the recent past, to overlook their
pre-Pearl Harbor mentality, and finally to identify with Bogart’s character
in a face-saving gesture of historical revisionism. Similarly, although Roo-
sevelt and his top war planners largely avoided the various French resistance
groups and pursued an alternative strategy toward Vichy, the film encour-
aged audiences to imagine a more frankly idealistic vision of U.S. war policy.
The anti-Vichy charities France Forever and the Fighting French Relief
12. Quoted in Harlan Lebo, Casablanca: Behind the Scenes (New York, 1992), p. 27; hereafter
abbreviated CBS. I am indebted to Lebo’s book for much of the background information on the
film’s production.

Committee welcomed the film’s political posture and hosted a fundraising
extravaganza that segued directly into the glamorous New York premiere
on 26 November 1942 (see CBS, p. 188). “I bet they’re asleep in New York,”
Bogart’s character tartly surmises. “I bet they’re asleep all over America”
(C). The film’s wartime audience was instead wide-awake for a star-studded
“A” picture helmed by one of Warner Brother’s oldest and most successful
directors, Michael Curtiz, and supported by a barrage of advertising. Casa-
blanca was an instant popular and critical hit.
Spectacular war developments added gravity to the film’s premiere in late
November 1942. “Remember,” Harry Warner later boasted, “that [Casa-
blanca] was completed and ready weeks before our forces invaded North
Africa.”13 The Hollywood studio had been planning on a summer 1943 re-
lease but pushed the date forward six months to follow the news of early
November. “Almost on the heels of the first invasion barge to touch African
soil with our soldiers,” the studio chief continued, “it was on the screen,
helping in its definite way to interpret the action for you, to explain Vichy
France to you.”14 No studio had been friendlier to Roosevelt in the preced-
ing years or more committed to using feature films as public pedagogy on
behalf of the war effort. When rivals began backing away from war films in
favor of more commercially promising “non-war, escapist pictures” in 1943,
the elder Warner thundered back. “Any arbitrary exclusion of war films,”
he charged, “either to satisfy a small appeaser element or for personal rea-
sons without regard to the general public interest, is equivalent to sabo-
tage!”15 While the newly formed Office of War Information would have
preferred a less reluctantly heroic Rick, Casablanca was made available in
1943 to American soldiers and others overseas. The OWI banned distri-
bution of the film to domestic populations in North Africa, however, on
the grounds that its Gaullist affinities were “bound to create resentment”
(CBS, p. 114).
Warner’s comment on the film’s role in “interpreting the action” and the
OWI’s concern about anti-Gaullist “resentment” were references to Opera-
tion Torch, the Anglo-American alliance’s first major offensive.16 The targets
of the long-awaited campaign were Casablanca, Algiers, and Oran, port cit-
13. Quoted in Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World
War II (New York, 1993), p. 200.
14. Quoted in ibid.
15. Quoted in Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Millner, Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner
Brothers Story (Rocklin, Calif., 1994), p. 255.
16. Useful accounts of Operation Torch include Arthur Layton Funk, The Politics of Torch: The
Allied Landings and the Algiers Putsch, 1942 (Lawrence, Kans., 1974); Norman Gelb, Desperate
Venture (London, 1992); Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the
Peace They Sought (Princeton, N.J., 1957); and Mark W. Clark, Calculated Risk (New York, 1950).

ies in French Morocco and Algeria. Continued autonomous rule over
France’s colonies and protectorates as regions of unoccupied France had
been a central point in the armistice Marshal Philippe Pétain signed with
the Axis powers in June 1940. The Pétainists boasted that a homegrown
National Revolution would proceed in a neutral France with an intact em-
pire in North Africa and beyond. The French Navy, also largely intact, and
the small, newly created Armistice Army had standing orders to repel any
non-Axis landing anywhere in the empire as an attack on French sover-
eignty. The new and popular dictatorship’s repudiation of the Third Re-
public included a raft of ultraconservative measures in metropolitan and
colonial France, many of which were pursued independently of German
collaboration. Great Britain gave support to the largely unknown General
Charles de Gaulle, who was exiled to London at the end of June, as self-
appointed “leader of all the Free French, wherever they are to be found, who
rally to him in support of the Allied cause.”17 Outside his political and mili-
tary foothold in French Equatorial Africa, however, de Gaulle had little to
show for himself. The military facts and the small size of the Free French
movement did not deter the dissident French general from demanding that
his fledgling movement serve not as a military auxiliary to the regular Allied
forces but rather as an equal and independent political and military partner.
It was a posture that greatly irritated Roosevelt and Churchill, and, as de
Gaulle later put it, “many painful ups and downs would have to be endured”
by the Free French, most especially in their relations with Washington.18
In contrast, Roosevelt maintained relations with Vichy and instructed
his ambassador to pull at the loose strings of an unstable regime bent on
collaborating with Germany. Vichy’s leadership believed that a partnership
with Germany was possible in the short term and would strengthen the
defeated France’s postwar prospects as a great power in a Nazi-dominated
Europe. The Americans hoped to draw the Pétainists into the anti-German
camp by convincing them that Axis collaboration was counterproductive
for France; the Germans were making only the paltriest of concessions,
whereas their demands for French manpower, foodstuffs, war material, and
the payment of “occupation costs” were only escalating. Eager not to alien-
ate the Pétainists by recognizing de Gaulle, Roosevelt held to this policy after
America’s official entry into the war. Meanwhile, December 1941 saw a new
low point in U.S.-Free French relations when de Gaulle decided to liberate
17. Quoted in Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford, 2001), p. 390.
18. Charles de Gaulle, The Call to Honour, 1940–42, vol. 1 of War Memoirs, trans. Jonathan
Griffin (New York, 1955), p. 216; hereafter abbreviated CH.

several Vichy-controlled islands close to Newfoundland. “The action taken
by three so-called Free French ships” at the islands, the American Secretary
of State Cordell Hull commented bitterly, “was an arbitrary action contrary
to the agreement of all parties and certainly without the prior knowledge
or consent of the United States Government” (quoted in CH, pp. 215–16).19
After a tense transatlantic debate in early 1942 preceding the Allied de-
cision to invade French North Africa, American operatives in Algeria and
Morocco worked on two tracks. They made simultaneous efforts to locate
Vichy commanders there willing to aid the Allied invasion and they culti-
vated local resistance cells willing to lead local anti-Vichy putsches to ac-
company the invasion. De Gaulle expected a role in any Allied invasion of
French territory, but Anglo-American planners learned that the Free French
movement had only a minor presence in North Africa and was an irritant
to the handful of Vichy commanders otherwise inclined to collaborate with
the Americans. Thus de Gaulle was left in the dark about Operation Torch.
Churchill later wrote that he “planned to tell him just before the blow fell.”20
Similarly rejected was the prospect of inviting Arabs (such as those loyal to
Sultan Mohammed V, the de jure sovereign authority in Morocco) to take
up independent arms against French authorities. Nonetheless, Mohammed
(who had declared his support for France after the initial German invasion)
ordered those loyal to him not to join the Pétainists in resisting the Torch
invasion.21 Throughout October the Allies cultivated not de Gaulle but
Henri Giraud, an anticollaborationist French general, as a potential French
figurehead for the invasion. Giraud, who had escaped from a German
prison camp in April 1942, became effectively unmanageable after learning
that he would have power over neither American nor British troops. Nor,
it was discovered, did he hold sway over local French forces. As it turned
out, the Vichy gamble would depend instead on Fleet Admiral François
Darlan, the powerful commander-in-chief of the Vichy military. Since the
fall of France, Darlan had advocated German collaboration as the best av-
enue to preserving France’s long-term interests. The admiral was never-
theless eager to keep his options open with all the major players. As early
as August 1941 he suggested to the U.S. Ambassador that “when you have
19. See also de Gaulle’s characteristic reaction: “In the United States, for three weeks, the
tumult in the Press and the emotion of public opinion went beyond all imaginable limits. This was
because the incident suddenly offered the American public the opportunity of manifesting its
preference as between an official policy which was still based on Pétain and the feeling of many
which was inclining towards de Gaulle. As for us, the end having been attained, we now aimed at
bringing Washington to a more just understanding of things” (CH, p. 216).
20. Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Boston, 1950), p. 605.
21. For an overview, see E. G. H. Joffé, “The Moroccan Nationalist Movement: Istiqlal, the
Sultan, and the Country,” Journal of African History 26, no. 4 (1985): 289–307.

3,000 tanks, 6,000 planes, and 500,000 men to bring to Marseilles, let me
know. Then we shall welcome you. . . . And I shall be in a position to have
this order carried out.”22 America’s official entry into the war encouraged
Darlan to maintain lines of communication with the Allies throughout 1942
even as he pursued further collaboration with the Germans.
The invasions of 8 November were accompanied by a recorded American
message over French radio channels in North Africa. The message sought
to erode the distinction between occupied and unoccupied France and sub-
stitute the notion of an Allied liberation for that of a hostile invasion and
occupation. “We come among you to repulse cruel invaders who would
remove forever your rights of self-government,” Roosevelt argued. “We as-
sure you that once the menace of Germany and Italy is removed from you,
we shall quit your territory at once.”23 Vichy forces put up a defense against
the 100,000 troops that landed at the three port cities but were over-
whelmed. General Eisenhower and his command staff were eager to seal a
local armistice quickly and continue the drive eastward to Nazi-held ter-
ritory. In what Churchill later called an “odd and formidable coincidence,”
Darlan happened to be visiting an ailing son in Algiers.24 Caught by surprise
and captured, he ordered local French forces to suspend hostilities within
two days. Vichy promptly dismissed the admiral, countermanded his order,
and instructed French troops in Tunisia not to resist fresh German forces
arriving from Italy. On 11 November German and Italian forces violated the
June 1940 armistice and crossed the demarcation line to occupy what had
been the “Free Zone” of metropolitan France. Vichy was thrown into a new
crisis, and Darlan conjured a patriotic rationale to defend his hesitant se-
dition: Pétain was essentially a prisoner of the Germans and his orders, Dar-
lan contended, were being coerced. This rationale let Darlan and Pétain
loyalists in North Africa see themselves as faithful links in the French mili-
tary’s command chain, leading Darlan to sign an agreement on 12 Novem-
ber that stabilized Algeria and Morocco by retaining the Vichy political and
military administrators who, like Darlan, now agreed to collaborate with
the Allied invaders. The Darlan deal meant that the tables had now been
turned for the officers and rebels who had undertaken, in consultation with
the Allies, the local putsches prior to Darlan’s cease-fire order. They were
removed from duty, labeled traitors, jailed, or worse. One former conspir-
ator described the new reality: “The army brass hats and the people of the
Préfecture whom we arrested hate us. . . . They hate us because we know
22. Quoted in Arthur L. Funk, “Negotiating the ‘Deal with Darlan,’ ” Journal of Contemporary
History 8 (Apr. 1973): 85.
23. Quoted in Gelb, Desperate Venture, p. 227.
24. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, p. 611.

what cowards they are. You should have seen how miserably they acted when
they saw the tommy guns, the brave Jew-baiters. The chief of the secret
police, who has been of course restored to his position, kneeled on the floor
and wept, begging one of my friends to spare his life.”25
Many American and British commentators reacted bitterly to the mili-
tary pragmatism that carried the day with Operation Torch. Why, they
asked, had the Allies been so quick to make deals with vicious Nazi collab-
orators and turn their backs on the heroic Resistance? Why had the Allies’
joint crusade against fascism ignobly jumped track—and on its very first
outing? The powerful commentators Walter Lippmann, Walter Winchell,
and Edward Murrow reinforced the moral outrage streaming from Roo-
sevelt’s liberal political base. Republicans, whose party had just badly beaten
the Democrats at the November polls, joined this latest snowball of criticism
about Roosevelt’s prosecution of the war. As one NBC correspondent sum-
marized the general complaint, “we were collaborating with the wrong
Frenchmen.”26 In Britain, Clement Attlee asked Churchill whether, “if some
Fascist overthrew Mussolini, the United States of America and Great Britain
would accept peace overtures which would leave the Fascist regime intact.
If so, where is this to stop?” “The majority of the people of the country,”
Attlee continued, “regard the war as a crusade for ideals.”27 The domestic
political fallout of installing Darlan as the French high commissioner of
Allied-occupied French North Africa led Roosevelt to redefine the situa-
tion at a 17 November press conference. Granting power to the arch-
collaborationist was only a “temporary expedient,” Roosevelt insisted, a
military convenience and not a political declaration of support. (Fuming at
the criticism, he spoke otherwise in private to an associate of de Gaulle’s:
“Darlan gave me Algiers, long live Darlan! If Laval gives me Paris, long live
Laval! I am not like Wilson, I am a realist.”)28 The problem was not only
one of domestic politics for Churchill and Roosevelt. The Allies’ installation
of Darlan also stunned the resistance throughout colonial and metropolitan
France. The criticism quieted, however, after a Frenchman linked to mon-
archists and Gaullists assassinated Darlan on Christmas Eve. It has been
suggested that Roosevelt may “have been telegraphing a change of strategy”
in screening Casablanca at the White House on New Year’s Eve.29 Giraud
had just succeeded Darlan as the French high commissioner of North Af-
25. A. J. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris (New York, 1944), p. 228.
26. Quoted in Gelb, Desperate Venture, p. 273.
27. Quoted in Funk, The Politics of Torch, p. 260.
28. Julian Jackson, France, p. 447.
29. Harvey Roy Greenberg, Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch
(New York, 1993), p. 44.

rica. Churchill and de Gaulle independently requested screenings of Casa-
blanca in London and spread word that the deal with the devious Vichyite
Darlan (which Churchill had agreed to) had always been the Americans’
idea. Watching the stirring new film must have buoyed de Gaulle’s confi-
dence that American public opinion was moving more decisively toward
him and the Free French cause than Allied military leaders were. The film
may also have reinforced his conviction that the Free French National Com-
mittee, though based outside of metropolitan France, was the main political
inspiration for the various resistance groups in occupied and unoccupied
France. If Casablanca was, as Warner put it, “helping in its definite way to
interpret the action for you, to explain Vichy France for you,” it did so by
celebrating a morally pure “fight for love and glory” in a reassuring fantasy
of wartime morality, a misleading fantasy that quietly countered the con-
ventions of military and political expediency at play in Allied policy both
before and during Operation Torch. The film’s broad rhetorical strokes thus
whisked away the complexities of Vichy and anti-Vichy politics, creating an
idealistic picture of the French as preternaturally antifascist and hostile to
Axis collaboration.
Casablanca went into wide release to domestic U.S. audiences on 23 Jan-
uary 1943. On the next day, the Casablanca Conference made public the
Allied demand for “unconditional surrender” from its Axis enemies. Peace,
Roosevelt stated, can “come to the world” through one route alone. “The
elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the uncon-
ditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan. . . . It does not mean the
destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan,” he clarified, “but
it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which
are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.”30 This would
not be a war of half-measures or half-victories, Roosevelt’s Appomatox al-
lusion suggested. Although Darlan was not mentioned, the statement im-
plied that the Darlan deals, Vichy gambles, conditional surrenders, and all
opportunistic compromises were, if not mistakes worthy of an apology,then
at least matters of the past.31 Even if Allied leaders were more likely to regard
the Darlan episode as a successful piece of military expediency, Roosevelt’s
discourse for public consumption badly needed to play the music of war.32
30. Quoted in Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, p. 109.

31. Grant’s precise terms to Lee were those of a conditional military surrender. For details on
Roosevelt’s use of the much-discussed “unconditional surrender” phrase, see ibid., pp. 109–12.
32. General Mark Clark, deputy commander to Eisenhowever in Operation Torch, rejected any
second-guessing about the Darlan deal in his memoir.
It is a situation that Americans cannot easily understand, but in effect it was true that in this
confused period Darlan was the one man whose authority was recognized by all the French

It needed to paper over the gap between an idealistic vision of war based
on pure intentions and an instrumental rationality focused on military ex-
pediency, precisely the gap exposed by the politically and militarily contro-
versial Darlan deal. Thus the “unconditional surrender” climax of the
speech from Casablanca declared an unaltered commitment to the idealistic
bases of the war. Roosevelt, still on the defensive, reiterated the point in a
major domestic speech in the following month: “The world can rest assured
that this total war, this sacrifice of lives all over the globe, is not being carried
on for the purpose, or even the remotest idea of helping Quislings or Lavals
in power anywhere on this earth. . . . The only terms on which we shall deal
with any Axis country, or any Axis faction, are those proclaimed at Casa-
blanca: ‘unconditional surrender.’”33 This newly seamless unity of purpose
and practice in a “total war” were two more “fundamental things” that
needed to apply as time went by, two legs marching in perfect stride. These
statements on “unconditional surrender” “represented FDR’s attempt to
assuage his liberal critics in America and give the war a moral purpose, a
rallying cry it had thus far lacked.”34 Certain other decisions made at the
Casablanca Conference about how to stabilize French North Africa received
little publicity. Vichy’s notorious Statut des Juifs would be upheld, intern-
ment camps for Jews remained in operation, and Roosevelt assented to fur-
ther discriminatory measures. The long-term prospects of Moroccan or
Algerian independence were excluded from the conference’s official busi-
ness.35 Allied publicists used the Casablanca Conference to advertise the
appearance of a rapprochement between the rival generals Giraud and de
armed forces in North Africa. Military expediency dictated that we do business with Darlan to
minimize bloodshed and get on with the war against the Germans who were pouring into
Tunisia. Once he was committed to our service, he never deviated. He did the job. If I had to
do it over again, I would choose again to deal with the man who could do the job—whether it
turned out to be Darlan or the devil himself. [Clark, Calculated Risk, p. 132]
33. Quoted in Steve Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion,
and the War against Nazi Germany (New York, 2002), p. 120.
34. Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War (New York, 2001), p. 180.
35. On the wartime persecution of Jews in North Africa by the French and the Germans, see
Michael Curtis, Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime (New York,
2002), pp. 166–70. During his visit for the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt held a historic
meeting with Sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef after which the latter declared “a new future for my
country” (Benjamin Rivlin, “The United States and Moroccan International Status, 1943–1956: A
Contributory Factor in Morocco’s Reassertion of Independence from France,” International
Journal of African Historical Studies 15, no. 1 [1982]: 64–82). Though of no immediate consequence,
the 22 January meeting bolstered the sultan’s prestige at home and gave the Moroccan nationalist
movement (with which Mohammed was not yet aligned) a hint that American policy tended
toward anti-imperialism in North Africa. In the years preceding Moroccan independence in 1956,
however, U.S. diplomatic language and action was most often keener to avoid alienating its cold
war ally France than defend the Moroccan nationalist movement or its case for independence.

Gaulle, and de Gaulle succeeded in the coming year in building a partner-
ship with and then wresting political control of French North Africa from
the older general and in overturning some of the anti-Semitic laws in effect
there. Still, under de Gaulle’s authority, leaders of the Moroccan nationalist
movement were arrested after founding the Istiqlal or Independence Party
in 1944.
Filmed while Operation Torch was still in its planning stages, Casablanca
introduced its major French character neither as a senior figure loyal to
Pétain but opposed to collaboration like Giraud, nor as a Free French dis-
sident in the political Gaullist mold, nor as a central advocate of German
collaboration like Darlan. Among these three, however, Captain Louis Re-
nault (Claude Rains), who describes himself as “a poor corrupt official,”
most resembles Darlan; above all, he is dedicated to keeping his options
open. “I have no conviction,” he claims. “I blow with the wind and at present
the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy” (C). Anything but a steady
idealist in the “fight for love and glory,” Renault is a charming and unsen-
timental narcissist whose masterful wit steals many scenes. When Rick aims
a gun at his heart the captain coolly replies, “That is my least vulnerable
spot.” The exchange between Rick and Renault steers Cavell’s observation
that “it is through fantasy that our conviction of the worth of reality is es-
tablished” in the direction of meaning that valuing a world beyond the self,
as Rick does, is a matter of consistently projecting value outward from a
reservoir of narcissistic self-regard and thereby opening oneself to disap-
pointment and regret (WV, p. 85). Renault the skeptic blows “with the
wind” rather than burdening himself with convictions about the “worth of
reality” like the heroes of Casablanca whose actions are driven by moral
purpose. An egoist delighted with himself, Renault instead pokes at the con-
victions and certainties of his various interlocutors while reveling in ironic
verbal play and abrupt shifts in expectation and tone. If Rick is introduced
as a melancholic who represses his grief behind a mask of cynicism, Re-
nault’s cynicism bares no prior egoic wound. “I am shocked, shocked, to
find that gambling is going on in here,” he announces as a justification for
closing Rick’s Café Americain after Lazlo’s stirring musical demonstration
of political will (C). The prefect calmly pockets his winnings, politelyadding
“thank you very much” without missing a beat.
The opportunistic Renault’s lack of conviction only appears to change
in the final scene. Rick has killed Strasser and helped Lazlo and Ilsa escape
to Lisbon. The turbulent winds over the French empire are changing di-
rection; Renault will blow with “the prevailing wind” and make accom-
modations once again. Although the strains of heroism emanating from
Steiner’s pit orchestra work hard to enliven Renault’s shift to Rick’s side with

the glow of virtuous conversion, his turn toward the resistance may be less
a matter of newfound idealism than another measured extension of his self-
interest. As he earlier tells Strasser, “Personally, Major, I will take what
comes” (C). We have no reason not to believe of Renault what Rick half-
heartedly says to Ilsa in a bitter exchange: “I’m the only cause I’m interested
in” (C). Renault and Rick will flee south to a Free French garrison in the
Congo city of Brazzaville. By contrast, the film’s “official hero,” Lazlo,
speaks with such unwavering selflessness and sings the “Marseillaise” with
such soaring conviction that he has to actively work to convince Rick that
he is not only “a leader of a cause” but “also a human being.” The American
club owner is the film’s “outlaw hero”; he does not sing, but instead gen-
erates conviction by speaking in an earthbound manner about a “crazy
world” in which he’s “no good at being noble.”36 Even as Rick offers this
speech, however, Steiner’s music pulls him aloft from the world viewed to
the world heard. The music accompanying Bogart’s characteristically self-
contained performance evokes another world Rick also lives in, holds him-
self accountable to, and acts in accordance with. This second world, the
metaphysical region from which Steiner’s pit music figuratively com-
mences, is an invisible world of ideals that the modest hero can neither sing
about nor speak of with Lazlo’s impressively eloquent self-certainty. Instead
Rick authorizes surrogates to represent him musically and in this way joins
the voice vote of unisonance.
Music and the Promise of Unisonance

As we have seen, the actual politics of Vichy and the Allies may have
troubled viewers’ access to the realm of moral fantasy from which Casa-
blanca sought to “explain Vichy.” To align itself with a second world of ide-
als, a world that could judge the everyday world, the film had to loosen its
historical moorings in the colonial and military particularities of the
Maghreb. Legend has it that when Paul Henreid complained of the plot’s
manifest implausibility to Curtiz, the director shot back, “Don’t worry
what’s logical. I make it go so fast no one notices.”37 The producer Hal Wallis
likewise monitored the film’s editing to ensure that the storytelling moved
as quickly as possible, using speed to hold together an illogical story line
and a rough mix of colonial exotica, criminal intrigue, wartime heroism,
36. For political discussions of Casablanca in the language of the Hollywood Western, with its
“official hero” Lazlo and its “outlaw hero” Rick, see Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the
Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), pp. 89–112, and Krin Gabbard and Glenn O.
Gabbard, “Play It Again, Sigmund: Psychoanalysis and the Classical Hollywood Text,” Journal of
Popular Film and Television 18, no. 1 (1990): 7–17.
37. Quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Bogart: A Life in Hollywood (New York, 1999), p. 148.

and romantic melodrama. Upon cataloguing the crowd of clichés and nar-
rative fragments in Casablanca, Umberto Eco once suggested that “two cli-
chés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly
that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.”38 Eco
should only have added that, as one would expect from a true celebration,
the buzzing crowd of clichés ultimately celebrates its reunion in song.
While the narrative of Casablanca provides few moments for the audi-
ence to catch its breath, Sam’s diegetic music in the film’s first half and
Steiner’s nondiegetic music in the second wrap several glamorous layers of
romantic and political fantasy around the world viewed. Alongside the film-
makers’ commitments to speed in traveling through the forest of clichés,
Steiner’s deeply repetitive orchestral music works especially hard to slow
things down, to make things matter. His score returns again and again to
its pseudo-Wagnerian leitmotifs of regret and idealism, remembrance and
love, in order to charge the busily edited action with the force of unwavering
conviction. Moreover, a feedback loop develops between Sam’s versions of
“As Time Goes By” and the variations produced by Steiner’s pit orchestra;
the loop intensifies as the on-screen action rushes toward its salutary con-
clusion. The circulating flow of melodies and leitmotifs acts to fill up a pow-
erful reservoir of constancy, an invisible reservoir into which past romantic
and political certainties can be stored and from which they can be accessed
as present certainties. Steiner’s music pushes the audience to intuit that
Rick’s continuity with his righteous past will guide, speak through, and
sanctify America’s wartime idealism. To find oneself moving with these cur-
rents of music and reminiscence is to find oneself passively joining the voice
vote of unisonance. Ilsa, for example, is one so moved. She admits to having
“looked up to” Lazlo “with a feeling she supposed was love,” only to find
her declarations of true love for Rick met by his cruel characterizations of
them as “pretend.” “I’ve heard a lot of stories in my time,” he replies. “They
went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor down-
stairs.” Rick’s musical distinction ironically speaks to the grandeur of
Steiner’s pit orchestra. Finally, Ilsa can only throw up her arms and lay her
agency at Rick’s feet. “You’ll have to think for both of us. For all of us” (C).
Romantic agency, like the work of politics and war, must be surrendered to
the world of men in Casablanca, but only after the men have first surren-
dered to the soaring music of war, “the sound of a tinny piano.”
Rick’s house band takes up its instruments to support Lazlo’s crusade
only after the owner’s silent nod of approval. He makes possible the band’s
performance, but he will not participate. Lazlo has demanded the “Mar-
38. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, 1986), p. 209.

seillaise” from the band in order to drown out the German soldiers singing
“Die Wacht am Rhein.” The Czech writer transforms the club’s interna-
tional visitors, local patrons, and employees into an oppositional mass by
leading them in the incendiary anthem. So successful is the campaign that
even the token French collaborator Yvonne spontaneously converts. When
the singing stops, she tearfully cries out “vive la France!” This song, the first
modern national anthem, was written in April 1792 as “le Chant de Guerre
pour l’armee du Rhin” and invited identification from the soldiers from
Marseilles.39 By August it was a patriotic rallying point for Republican par-
tisans and known as the “hymnes des Marseillais.” Banned at numerous
points in French political history for its revolutionary imagery, the song
later vied with “L’Internationale” as the leading anthem of the revolutionary
left across Europe. Less than five years after its adoption by Leon Blum’s
Popular Front government, the anthem presented problems during the Vi-
chy period due to its strong associations with the Third Republic. Vichy
appreciated the anthem’s nationalistic resonance too much to outlaw it, so
they matched it with a brand new alternative anthem, “Nous Voila Mare-
chal” (“Here We Are, Marshal”), more suited to the cult of personality sur-
rounding Pétain. Although rarely sung in its entirety, the older song’s chorus
and seven verses famously linger over the furrows of “impure blood” needed
to secure the revolution’s promise against traitors, tyrants, mercenaries, and
all conspirators at home and abroad: “Aux armes citoyens, / Formez vos
bataillons / Marchons, marchons / Qu’un sang impur / Abreuve nos sil-
lons.” The anthem’s centrality to the political climax of Casablanca owes a
debt to its similar function in La Grand Illusion (1937), about which
Roosevelt proclaimed “everyone who believes in democracy should see this
film.”40 In Jean Renoir’s classic story of World War I, a British officer leads
a crowd of prisoners of war in the French anthem after hearing positivenews
from the front lines. The officer jumps out of his drag role during a staging
of the Folies-Bergère, throws off his wig, and leads the band in an im-
promptu rendition of the “Marseillaise.” A crowd of prisoners at a diverting
amusement transforms into an inspirited collective when the spontaneous
performance of soldierly manhood spurs the singer’s fellow prisoners, on
stage and off, to join in the anthem’s first verse and chorus. Renoir’s tableau
of singing prisoners crystallizes the film’s Popular Front vision of true
French patriotism as continuous with left wing internationalism across the
lines of class, nation, and religion.41 Rick’s Café Americain serves as a tense
39. Michel Vovelle, “ ‘La Marseillaise’: War or Peace,” in Realms of Memory, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (New York, 1998), 3:29.
40. Quoted in André Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans. W. W. Halsey II and William H. Simon, ed.
François Truffaut (New York, 1973), p. 60.
41. Renoir, of course, could not control audience reactions in France or elsewhere: “Yet
paradoxically the success of The Great Illusion was partly tricolore, as the public rose to sing the

holding cell for displaced European men and women, not altogether unlike
the numerous German military prisons from which Renoir’s protagonists
escape in La Grand Illusion. Indeed, Casablanca further plays on the pre-
cedent of La Grand Illusion in implying that the Germans were the true
prison-keepers over unoccupied France in 1941, despite the contrary truth.
Renoir revisited the French anthem in another 1937 film, this one pro-
duced in association with the labor group Confédération Générale de Tra-
vail and funded by a popular subscription drive. The epic drama La
Marseillaise (originally titled La Révolution Française) commemorated what
Renoir called the decency of “the man in the street” and “the greatness of
individuals in the midst of a collective act” through the story of one bat-
talion’s march from Marseilles to Paris in the summer of 1792.42 As the lik-
able republicans travel, by foot, they carry their new song to Paris and with
it the populist spirit of the revolution. The film followed La Grand Illusion
by crystallizing the spirit of popular democracy in spontaneous collective
performances of the “Marseillaise.” The song’s prominence in the Renoir
films and in Casablanca captures the theatrical and ideological function of
national anthems, a function Benedict Anderson has described as “the
echoed physical realization of the imagined community.”43 In the world of
Casablanca, the anthem’s performance in the French protectorate of Mo-
rocco—a performance that is rebellious precisely by being restorative—
promises to conjure an invisible place, the imagined community now
embodied in the dream of an international resistance movement united
against the Axis powers and the Vichy collaborationists, though certainly
not united against colonial domination. The political reverie of musical un-
isonance that Lazlo—a Czech writer rather than a French patriot—sets in
motion transforms and enlists the club’s random crowd of exiles, refugees,
and all sympathetic viewers into members of the resistance’s imagined
community. The vocal defiance of those who catch Lazlo’s sociomusical
contagion evokes both the “Fighting France” of Gaullist legend and an in-
ternationalist ideal closer to the prewar Popular Front.
As a performance, the musical demonstration of unisonance is precisely
not about variation, improvisation, or interpretation but is instead meant
as a faithful repetition or restoration of some “elusive entity,” something
“that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace.”
While calling the effort toward musical unisonance a fantasy of perfect
repetition suggests passivity and automatism to outsiders, for insiders cre-
‘Marseillaise’ along with the prisoners who sang on the screen—and sang it sometimes with arms
outstretched, giving the fascist salute” (Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s [New
York, 1994], p. 234).
42. Quoted in Célia Bertin, Jean Renoir: A Life in Pictures, trans. Mireille Muellner and Leonard
Muellner (Baltimore, 1991), p. 145.
43. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 145.

ativity and agency merge in a magical restoration: the politicized singers
expand from a random crowd of disconnected and desperate individuals
into a collective newly inspirited by the certainty of destiny. This ritualized
scenario of dynamic echoing and expansion, one where performers will-
ingly subordinate themselves to a collective role, celebrates what Renoir
called “the greatness of individuals in the midst of a collective act” (Lazlo
channels the power of musical unisonance into the present music of war
and restores an anthem to its source as a rallying call for active resistance
and war against tyrants and traitors). Major Strasser, a keen musicologist,
commands Renault to shut Rick’s café down immediately. While only a tiny
percentage of France’s metropolitan and colonial population was ever active
in the organized resistance, Gaullist or otherwise, the musical climax of Cas-
ablanca provides a reassuring counterimage of the “fighting French” captive
population on the verge of rising up in the republican tradition against a
traitorous Vichy regime in the service of Nazi tyrants. The film encourages
this useful fantasy by having the Gestapo leader give the order to halt the
anti-Nazi musical performance. The detail quietly insinuates that Nazi di-
rectives and demands lay behind Vichy’s self-initiated pursuit of collabo-
ration at home and antirepublican extremism at home and in the colonies.
Despite the stirring force of Lazlo’s musical protest, the unity actually
achieved by the “Marseillaise” in Casablanca is easy to overstate. Sam, oth-
erwise the film’s leading musician, does not appear in the scene and, once
the political anthem is sung on-screen, he disappears altogether. While the
performance of the “Marseillaise” makes manifest a unisonant spirit of re-
sistance, Sam’s lighter professional fare in Rick’s Café Americain through-
out the film’s first half seems to extend a different promise, one of easy
sociability outside the strictures of unisonance. African American musi-
cians enjoyed a strong foothold in the 1930s jazz scene of Paris, but the sit-
uation changed in 1939 during the uneasy “phony war” and the German
occupation of the city in the following year. The Nazis did not ban jazz in
occupied France, despite its being condemned in Germany as “Negro-
Jewish-American” music, nor did the Vichy regime outlaw it in the “Free
Zone.” Instead, American involvement in or recent overt influence over
French popular music simply had to disappear. The performance and dis-
semination of jazz music survived through a strategic “whitening” and de-
Americanization. Nonetheless, the music often served as a symbolic “form
of resistance to the Nazi occupation and the cultural revolution of the Vichy
government.”44 The fantasy site of Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca pre-
serves the cosmopolitan ambience of prewar Paris by featuring an African
44. Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham,
N.C., 2003), p. 193.

American singer and pianist who performs American jazz in English. The
nightclub recalls the recent French past and its music offers refugees and
exiles a taste of freedom overseas. An appealing world of racial comity is
evoked when Dooley Wilson’s Sam leads the band in “Knock on Wood” (a
song not to be confused with the Sam and Dave soul classic). Unlike the
“Marseillaise,” the song unfolds through a series of brief eight-bar choruses
and has no verse-chorus structure to provide intervals between the repe-
titions of the climactic chorus. It is not constructed to climax at all, but
rather to move along like an unrushed conversation among male friends.
The musicians’ vocal performances of “Knock on Wood” direct the lis-
tener’s attention to an interracial band’s demonstration, however stiff, of
black leadership, friendly interplay, and agreeable turntaking. In the on-
screen performance, the African American leader coolly poses a series of
questions in swing time to which his white bandmates respond as a collec-
tive. The first chorus’s lyrics establish the eight-bar pattern of antiphony:
Sam: Say, who got trouble?
Band: We got trouble.
Sam: How much trouble?
Band: Too much trouble.
Sam: Well now don’t you frown.
Just knuckle down, and knock on wood. [C]
Rather than impressing listeners with unisonance and an unmistakable cres-
cendo that promises movement toward a grand destiny (the function of slow
music in this fast film), the song offers simple antiphony and a gently swing-
ing dance tempo. “Knock on Wood,” however, moves far more briskly than
the march tempo of the “Marseillaise,” or, for that matter, “As Time Goes
By,” or Steiner’s lugubrious neoromantic score. Neither brisk nor crawling,
the song’s tempo provides an accompaniment to the lyric’s breezy discussion
of how to manage mounting troubles through a discourse of luck rather than
the grander talk of destiny and certainty. The partly sung and partly spoken
melody breaks the first two lines of a standard three-line blues lyric into a
rehearsed antiphonal chorus of questions and answers. The vocal lines are
divided between leader and band and unfold in an affable accord amidst the
unifying force of the metronomic swing tempo. Sam saves the final line of
each chorus for himself. The second chorus’s final phrase, “when you are blue
just knock on wood,” summarizes the lyric’s blues terrain of trouble, luck,
and grief management and concludes with a humbling reminder to “knock
on wood.”45
45. Although Sam is a singing pianist, Wilson was a singing drummer; Sam’s repeated call to
“knock on wood” tips its hat toward Wilson’s home in the rhythm section.

We have seen that the seeming vocal homogeneity of unisonance can
speak to a political fantasy of interchangeability in space and time. “We are
united” becomes “we are one” in the restorationist fantasy of perfect repe-
tition: collective action in the present under the sign of perfect repetition
imagines itself taking place outside secular history in a mythic vision of rule
following as inexorable destiny, where behavior close to automatism takes
on the glow of eschatological fulfillment. Casablanca, however, is the quin-
tessential liberal prowar movie, for while it plays to the unisonant music of
war it plays to other musical fantasies as well, fantasies embodied in the
person of Sam. Some might imagine the seemingly improvised rhythmic
hesitations familiar to jazz vocal stylization, for example, as ciphers of re-
sistance to the strict regularization needed for unison collective perfor-
mance, or even as a kind of general strike against constricting norms. Such
notions would not have been alien to connoisseurs of le jazz-hot and African
American popular music in France, some of the most prominent of whom
were also active in the resistance. Wilson’s agreeable vocal performance of
“Knock on Wood” (and, as we shall see, “As Time Goes By”) begins to hint
at the appeals of such notions of differentiation outside unisonance. Sam’s
absence from the group performance of the “Marseillaise,” then, casts an
especially long shadow over the latter performance’s confident expression
of musical unisonance and international solidarity. Rick’s general super-
vision of Sam’s fate positions Sam as the surrogate for other nonwhites in
the world of Casablanca. Native Moroccans and nonwhite French colonial
subjects—whose anti-imperial grievances could be directed equally at
Gaullists and Vichyites—are similarly not highlighted in Lazlo’s opposi-
tional spectacle of democratic internationalism. The pianist’s subsequent
disappearance from the film signals the limit of the film’s racial liberalism,
as if to find an unobtrusive way to assent to the U.S. Army’s impossible ideal
of segregation without discrimination.
Applying the Fundamental Things

The “Marseillaise” may have been unavoidable in a film honoring the
Free French movement, but Max Steiner would have preferred Casablanca
without “As Time Goes By.” He just hated the song. Hollywood’s leading
film composer also must have hoped to revisit the popularity of “Tara’s
theme,” part of his vast original score for Gone With the Wind (1939).
Nevertheless, Herman “Dodo” Hupfeld’s song (present in the original
Burnett-Alison script) survived every studio revision.46 Sam’s command
46. Steiner’s account tells of him wielding his influence over Hal Wallis, with the producer
agreeing to restage the relevant scenes with a new love ballad. Lebo’s survey of existing
documentation at Warner Brothers Studios counters Steiner’s questionable testimony; see CBS,
pp. 182–83.

performance for Ilsa in Morocco introduces the melody to the film. The
dubbed pianist’s stride-style left hand mimics the duties of a swinging
rhythm section while his right hand provides chords and ornamentation.
Wilson’s vocal timbre, at once airy and husky, and his manner of artful
relaxation reference stylistic conventions in popular ballad singing estab-
lished by Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. Armstrong’s influence is stron-
gest early in the film, as Sam’s vocal songs are mid-tempo or faster, except
for this signature ballad. His second performance, for example, is of
“Shine,” an up-tempo song identified with Armstrong (who recorded it in
1930 and performed it in a legendary short film in 1932). Armstrong’s stun-
ning vocal exuberance and his practice of improvising show-stoppingtrum-
pet solos in live performances of the song, many have argued, effectively
overwhelmed its minstrel-flavored lyrics. His approach to vocals resembled
aspects of his trumpet style and inspired listeners to imagine that each per-
formance was positively brimming over with fresh improvisational sur-
prises and that the score, the lyrics, and other rehearsed elements were
nothing more than suggested parameters for an ecstatic improviser. Jazz was
a performer’s music rather than a composer’s music, of course, and leaders
and soloists like Armstrong felt free to skip the written rubato introduction
of a Broadway show tune (as became customary), reword or delete verses,
and, not least of all, reharmonize or substitute novel chord changes. Lis-
teners were not so much to sing along (though recordings let them) as to
marvel at the improviser’s artistry in the course of what might be heard as
spontaneous reinvention and rearrangement.
Although the realities of performance infrequently fulfilled the fantasy
of spontaneous reinvention, the impression of improvisational freshness
and originality remained crucial to many jazz musicians’ acts and the mar-
keting of “hot jazz” as a specialty taste in popular music. Especially in the
wake of Armstrong’s influential work of the mid- and late-1920s, the im-
portance of what seemed like spontaneous reinvention rather than re-
hearsed repetition or “restored behavior” in the act of performance was
turned into an enduring romantic ideology by connoisseurs and record col-
lectors. Among the young critics for whom Armstrong was nothing less
than “hot made flesh,” the central criteria for hot jazz emerged from an
adamant request for authenticity in solo and group improvisation, for un-
rehearsed improvisation as the crux of authenticity.47 Wilson’s urbane but
docile screen persona in Casablanca amounted to a greatly toned-down
version of the exuberant Armstrong persona; the possibility that one of
47. Matthew F. Jordan, “How Jazz Got Francisé: A Case Study in the Ongoing Construction of
Cultural Identity,” French Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2002): 201.

Sam’s performances might figure as something else, an occasion for ecstatic
reinvention or improvisational surprise, haunts Wilson’s performances
throughout the film. The hot jazz fantasy of spontaneous creation, on the
one hand, and the details of Wilson’s up-tempo singing and his slower
crooning in the film, on the other, are worlds apart from Lazlo’s unisonant
call to arms and the equally emphatic and scored-through bowing of
Steiner’s pit orchestra. While unisonance moves to deny or stop up the gaps
between present performances and the time and place of the anthem’s origi-
nal moment in a restorationist dream of perfect repetition, the art of the
improvising jazz soloist seeks to highlight those gaps and the present per-
formance’s newness and originality in a determined refusal of repetition, as
if to say this has never happened before. Ultimately, the fantasy of perfect
originality in improvised performance may be as doomed as the dream of
perfect repetition; the two fantasies can begin to look like mirror images of
the same romantic ideology. But the desire to leap beyond one’s repertoire
and history with a blast of novel transformation has much to recommend
it against the desire to transcend history and difference in a mystic embrace
of perfect repetition. The two ideals quietly duel in Casablanca, but the
match is hardly a fair fight.
Sam’s command performance of “As Time Goes By” accompanies an
extended and immobile close-up of a tearful Ingrid Bergman. She is glowing
under muted lighting and frozen in listening during an uninterrupted shot
that lasts no less than twenty seconds. Steiner’s orchestra makes short work
of transforming the melody’s first eight bars into a Hollywood version of a
Wagnerian motif of reminiscence. It is a stark shift: Steiner’s surrogate for
the A section of Hupfeld’s song altogether bypasses the singer’s jazzy hesi-
tations between melodic line and rhythmic accompaniment and replaces
Sam’s style with undifferentiated melodic consonance. The orchestra’s
string section bows the newly harmonized Hupfeld melody with an em-
phatic swoon and the stylistic transition turns the melodic hook of a re-
flective and oddly worded ballad into a manipulative and urgent anthem
for love’s demands. The orchestra’s rearranging of the song closes up the
gaps that Sam’s swing phrasing opened between the “straight” or scored
written melody and the melody as sung, the kind of gaps that one of jazz’s
more illustrious philosophical critics heard as parts of “a trend to expand
syncopation and rhythmical somersaults into a smart, virtuoso trick system
that combines rhythmical sophistication and harmlessness.”48 In either
case, the stopping up of these gaps or opportunities for improvisation and
48. Theodor W. Adorno, “Jazz,” in Encyclopedia of the Arts, ed. Dagobert D. Runes and Harry
G. Schrickel (New York, 1946), p. 512.

individualized alteration stands as a musical signal of the film’s initial ascent
to the ethereal allegorical register where politics and romance will merge in
a mythic vision of destiny: “it’s the same old story / the fight for love and
glory.” The allegorical machinery is churning hard when Wilson’s faintly
registered musical alternative surrenders without a fight to Steiner’s pit or-
chestra and the music of war’s endless melody. As is the case with Steiner’s
surrogation of the “Marseillaise” elsewhere in the film, the pit orchestra’s
invisible handling of “As Time Goes By” instructs the audience about the
truest connection between the separated lovers Rick and Ilsa and illustrates
the characters’ submerged feelings through neoromantic musical gestures
rife with metaphysical implications. The cool veneer of jazzy reinvention
and reflectiveness in Sam’s version has given way to heated retrospection in
a demand for repetition and restoration.
“Films are fantasy,” Jack Warner noted, “and fantasy needs music” (CBS,
p. 177). Steiner’s famous and prolific work in the 1930s stood as a template
for the linking of film music and fantasy at Warner Brothers. His charac-
teristic use of the Wagnerian motif of reminiscence as an illustrative device
also lent a semblance of musical development and wholeness to the oth-
erwise fragmented and largely discontinuous film music idiom. The motivic
device and the neoromantic coloring of Steiner’s orchestration added an
undertow of uncanny metasubjective forces to many films.49 In particular,
the lead pair of orchestral leitmotifs in Casablanca function as mnemonic
devices for the audience and sonic surrogates for the characters’ fantasy
states of erotic and political fulfillment, magical states that the music of war
promises to weave together and restore. According to Wagner’s operatic
model (a model he did not follow strictly), a proper “motif of reminiscence”
would arise first on stage in a sung melodic line, be subsumed into the pit
orchestra’s score, and return at later moments of the orchestral score. The
orchestra’s repetitions of the leitmotif would reference a character as well
as metasubjective forces through a signature melodic line and explore the
line’s dramatic and musical potential, thereby exteriorizing the character’s
invisible or unconscious motivations and broader allegorical significance
through musical gestures. While Wilson’s first vocal interpretation of “As
Time Goes By” precedes and runs counter to Steiner’s instrumental version,
49. For recent discussions of the Wagnerian dimension of film music scoring, see Caryl Flinn,
Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, N.J., 1992), pp. 13–50;
Scott D. Paulin, “Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity” and Justin London,
“Leitmotifs and Musical Reference in the Classical Film Score,” in Music and Cinema, ed. James
Buhler, Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H., 2000), pp. 58–84, 85–96; and Gary
Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, N.J., 1999), pp. 107–46. See also the
germinal text for this critical discourse, Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(London, 1991).

the “Marseillaise” is first heard in the nondiegetic score. Steiner’s sym-
phonic micro-overture to Casablanca introduces the instrumental leitmotif
of political unity and virtuous resistance; the melodic phrase accompanies
the full-screen credit that reads “Music by Max Steiner.”50 As if promising
aid from the invisible world of ideals, Steiner’s overture tucks the anthem
in a musical envelope and sends it into the troubled diegetic reality of
Casablanca as a promissory note, the film’s first magical letter of transit.
Scored primarily for brass and evoking the march of a soldierly collective,
this initial reference to the “Marseillaise” ends with an ominous tritone that
does not resolve into a major chord (the quintessential sign of social dis-
harmony via musical dissonance in Steiner’s vocabulary of dramatic illus-
tration). Lazlo’s rendition of the anthem late in the film may conclude with
reassuring harmonic resolution, but the shuttering of Rick’s café signals fur-
ther dangers. Final harmonic resolution from Steiner’s pit orchestra can
only come after the most substantial heroic actions of the film’s protago-
nists, when the magical letters of transit are securely in the hands of Ilsa and
Lazlo and the overture’s promise has been fulfilled.
The film’s other key source of leitmotivic material, “As Time Goes By,”
was a long-time favorite of Murray Burnett. It first appeared in the 1931
Broadway revue “Everybody’s Welcome” and was recorded that year by the
popular white crooner Rudy Vallee, the Jacques Renard Orchestra, and oth-
ers. A decade later Burnett and Alison incorporated the song into “Every-
body Comes to Rick’s.” Casablanca gave “As Time Goes By” a second life
as a popular hit, but the American Federation of Musicians recording ban
ensured that only older recordings of the song could share in the film’s suc-
cess. Recordings of the ballad made in the 1930s stayed on the hit parade
for months during the general release of Casablanca, and Vallee’s version
sat at number 1 for four weeks. Wilson particularly suffered from the AFM
ban, as his version of the record only arrived in October 1943, after the ban
but too late to share in the song’s revival.51 Its musical form is generic (with
an unremarkable cycle of ii–V–I chord changes), while the odd lyrics discuss
romance as if looking through a telescope from the heavens toward Earth
rather than listening through the neighbor’s window to a quiet crooner’s
romantic report.52 “It’s still the same old story / A fight for love and glory /
A case of do or die / The world will always welcome lovers / As time goes
50. For a detailed musical account of Steiner’s micro-overture and leitmotivic handling of “La
Marseillaise,” see Marks, “Music, Drama, Warner Brothers.”
51. For a musical biography of Hupfeld’s only enduring song, see Will Friedwald, Stardust
Melodies: A Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs (Chicago, 2004), pp. 213–41.
52. Does any other popular song about romantic love, or anything, include the rigorous term
fundamental ? I am indebted to Richard Crawford for this question.

by.” As the legato melody coils upward, an aggregate of cliches that “you
must remember” run a circuit between romantic love, the love of one’s
country or political ideals, and the world’s appealing constancy and repet-
itive certainty. Hupfeld’s lyrics are nothing less than prophetic, at least in
anticipating and smoothly reinforcing the allegorical contiguity of private
and political romance in Casablanca. The film capitalizes on the lyrics’ pass-
ing hint about the public family’s simultaneous dependence on and priority
over lovers, star-crossed or otherwise.
When Rick sends Ilsa away with Lazlo because she is “part of his work,
the thing that keeps him going,” he is keeping faith with the song’s salute
to the “fight for love and glory.” The American’s faith drives him to follow
normative rules that keep an otherwise “crazy world” going, rules that apply
“as time goes by.” “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a
hill of beans in this crazy world,” he lectures Ilsa. “Someday you’ll under-
stand that. Not now” (C).53 But maybe it is Rick who does not understand
that their romance amounts to far more than a “hill of beans” because it is
the affect from their interrupted affair that fuels the circuit relaying energy
between the states of fantasy represented by “As Time Goes By” and the
“Marseillaise.” If Rick’s circuit has temporarily fallen into grievous disre-
pair, Ilsa’s problem would seem rather inconsequential because her duty to
the public family is to serve Lazlo, to “keep him going.” Lazlo detects Rick’s
problem and tries to get it unstuck by lecturing him about how “each of us
has a destiny—for good or for evil.” “You sound like a man who’s trying to
convince himself of something he doesn’t believe,” Lazlo tells the American.
“I wonder if you know that you’re trying to escape from yourself, but that
you will never succeed” (C). Lazlo’s challenge to the American in the pre–
53. Bogart’s “hill of beans” speech echoed the memorable speech he delivered as Sam Spade at
the end of the Warner Brothers film that made him a star, The Maltese Falcon (1941). Spade
explains to the murderess Brigid O’Shaunessy why he will “send [her] over” to the police as a
murderer even though he will “be sorry as hell.” The demands of the public good of justice
supercede his romantic affection. What is “most remarkable of all” about the speech, Warren
Susman once noted, is that “Sam expects Brigid to understand and accept, and Hammett expects
his audience to understand and accept” (Warren I. Susman, Culture as History [New York, 1984],
p. 167). In The World Viewed, Cavell asserts that the mythic and moral assumptions at play in
novels and films like The Maltese Falcon were, by the early 1970s, subject to extraordinary and
widespread skepticism: “I assume it is sufficiently obvious that these ways of giving significance to
the possibilities of film—the media of movies exemplified by familiar Hollywood cycles and plots
that justify the projection of types—are drawing to an end. And this means, in our terms so far,
that they no longer naturally establish conviction in our presentness to the world” (WV, p. 60).
Cavell has not written on Casablanca or any classic Hollywood war film at length. Thus, the
present essay reads classical Hollywood’s most popular war film through a philosophical lens
indebted to Cavell on matters of automatism, convention, and normativity while also reading
Casablanca through a historical lens trained on other aspects of automatism, convention, and
normativity in the music of war and the rituals of unisonance.

Pearl Harbor setting of Casablanca insinuates that the popular current of
isolationism in 1941 was not a principled refusal of entangling alliances but
a self-destructive display of escapism, an unsuccessful retreat from a destiny
“for good.” At some level, the allegorical American Everyman knows this,
but from time to time he needs to be reminded of, or reawakened to, his
destiny. The norms or rules that guide Rick’s ultimate decision about the
letters of transit come to him as “fundamental things” that apply “as time
goes by” and they stretch out before him on a clear path through the “logical
space of reasons.”54 Ultimately, the path into the Good War is so definitive
and unyielding for Rick that it is like a mythological “section of rails invisibly
laid to infinity.”55 We are kept on the rails, or the path of correctness in
logical space, by rules habituated to the point of second nature. Even the
“fundamental things” are, decidedly, artifacts of everyday pedagogy and up-
bringing and part of what Wittgenstein called “the natural history of human
beings” (PI, §415). Acting in accordance with many of these rules, as in
moral matters, is in part a matter of social convention sustained by countless
and imprecisely repetitive acts of rule following. The lack of precision and
the persistence of friction are crucial and salutary. Such rails are sturdy
enough, but not magical or “invisibly laid to infinity”; rather, the conven-
tions are potentially open for amendment should the need arise. As Cavell
puts the general shape of this idea, “It is internal to a convention that it be
open to change in convention, in the convening of those subject to it, in
whose behavior it lives.”56 Hupfeld’s song and the swirling fantasies of ro-
mantic love and political destiny in Casablanca, however, would find such
conclusions inconvenient and unsettling in the face of the rigid demand
that “you must remember this.”
If the Wittgensteinian problematic of rules and rails seems foreign to “As
Time Goes By,” we should look to the opening verse that precedes the song’s
familiar thirty-two bar chorus. Show tunes of the period often had highly
discursive opening verses that recording artists could delete to bring focus
to the songs’ more tuneful and danceable choruses. Popular recordings of
the song from the early 1930s, including those of Vallee and Renard, began
with the introductory verse. The verse was not sung in Casablanca and has
been largely ignored in versions of the song recorded in the film’s wake.
54. For the original development of this term, see Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind (Cambridge, 1997). Sellars’s essay first appeared in The Foundations of Science and the
Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (Minneapolis,
1956), pp. 253–329.
55. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford,
1969), §218; hereafter abbreviated PI.
56. Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford, 1979), p. 120.

Frustrated with disorienting new advances in the study of nature, the singer
seems to turn to the distinctively human world of acquired second nature
for consolation and there locates some reassuringly “simple facts of life”
that “cannot be removed”:
This day and age we’re living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like the fourth dimension
Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein’s theory,
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax relieve the tension
And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed
You must remember this.57
Hupfeld’s words promise that our security lies not in “speed and new in-
vention” or wearying discoveries about first nature but rather in trusting
second nature’s “simple facts” as sources of constancy or rigid rules that
“cannot be removed” (PI, §192). Put otherwise, first nature, or at least our
knowledge of it, may be ungraspable or in interpretive flux, but second na-
ture stands firm. In its search for relief from apprehension, the song ignores
how second nature—the vast and changing ensemble of conventions and
customs that includes the self-reflexive and piecemeal critique of conven-
tions and customs—would have no grip on us were it not for first nature.
Second nature and the whole human “whirl of organism” is, after all, de-
pendent on the constancy of first nature, that which is now giving Hupfeld’s
singer such “cause for apprehension” and leading to the fantasy of meaning
adumbrated in the chorus.
“The procedure of putting a lump of cheese on a balance,” Wittgenstein
notes, “and fixing the price by the turn of the scale would lose its point if
it frequently happened for such lumps to suddenly grow or shrink for no
obvious reason” (PI, §142). If cheese, to begin with, stopped behaving in its
usual ways, then our whole system of scales, measurements, and valuations
(along with those very concepts) would be pointless. The “simple facts” of
second nature cannot ride in to the epistemic rescue were first nature’s rela-
tive constancy put into doubt. Hupfeld’s song is really calling for something
57. Herman Hupfeld, “As Time Goes By,” http://casablancagame.com/Film/index.asp?choice⳱
Media&subchoice⳱Music&lyrics⳱AsTimeGoesBy

different, something extranatural, and this explains part of its tight fit with
the music of war and the metaphysics of Casablanca. Whenever the appli-
cability of self-reflexive critique to social norms is regarded as wearying or
unnatural, a tempting picture of normativity as something like fixed rails
“invisibly laid to infinity” through the logical space of reasons slides back
into view. The pristine quality of these rails suggests some kind of myste-
rious psychological mechanism that replaces the self-reflexive subject with
something closer to an automaton or a mythically scaled figure like Rick
Blaine moving in the firmly set pedagogical tracks of a national allegory. To
borrow a thought of John McDowell, “the idea of the psychological mech-
anism correlates with the idea that the tracks we follow are objectively there
to be followed, in a way that transcends the reactions and responses of par-
ticipants in our practices.”58 The tempting idea that the world works this
way, an idea McDowell finds mistaken, is reinforced by a third-person lyric
where the “fundamental things apply” themselves in perpetuity, where a
deep structure, again like the one undergirding Casablanca, determines the
way to go on, the way to follow a rule perfectly, and does so all by itself. The
need for a corrective to this threat of strong automatism grounds our central
concern here with unisonance and the fantasy of perfect repetition. As we
have seen, the fantasy of unisonance in the film’s performance of an anthem
like the “Marseillaise” extends a promise of constancy and restorative full-
ness in perfect repetition. Such moments in Casablanca and elsewhere in
our culture undertake to stop up or obscure the gaps between ideology and
practice and between the elaborating demands of self and world (see WV,
p. 85). These moments broadcast a message that is at once political and
philosophical: what is going on here is not mere fantasy talk; we are moving
together on the rigid rails of necessary rules laid out not by us, but by our
destiny; we are following the fundamental things of how the world has been
and of how, once we commit ourselves, it will remain. But as one gap is
forced shut another is opened, and as one voice vote of confidence is ex-
tended another dissonant note may be quietly sounded. And when the in-
spiriting reverie of unisonance wears off we are left asking which rails, whose
rules, which path, whose promises? Like Curtiz’s direction, it is always the
commitment-making dream of the music of war and the makers of war to
“make it go so fast no one notices,” to make the inconsistencies and con-
tradictions unnoticeable between romance and convenience, between high-
minded ideological promises and the actual practices of mass killing. The
U.S. government recruited Frank Capra to make propaganda films about
why we fight; Hollywood enlisted itself to tell reassuring stories about how
58. John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, 1998), p. 207.

we fight with films like Casablanca. Even in a Good War, the simple facts
are never enough.
The Piano Is a Crypt

As we cast about for alternatives to the music of war we should admit
that as much as Sam’s vocal and instrumental performances of “As Time
Goes By” and other songs gesture toward an aesthetic of surprise, impro-
vised adaptation, and “new invention,” they also operate in a spirit of me-
chanical repetition. To begin with, his performances of “As Time Goes By”
are not noticeably distinguishable from each other, and he is not repre-
sented as an improvising musician in the film’s world. Wilson’s role may
have been a progressive step forward in the history of African American
representations in Hollywood, but that is to say too little. Rick, who indig-
nantly asserts to Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) that Sam is not for sale, is
concerned to preserve Sam’s economic interest in the club when it is finally
sold to Ferrari. Nevertheless, Sam has no involvement in the business ne-
gotiation, despite his share in the café.59 He is a loving black servant in the
sophisticated shape of a nightclub entertainer and loyal sidekick. This is part
of why Rick and Ilsa do not listen for stylistic variations or new musical
conceptions in Sam’s performances and also why they would not welcome
such variations. They aren’t really listening to him at all; he is more a phan-
tom mechanically rigged to exteriorize Rick’s romantic hopes, ideals, and
disappointments through music. On the one occasion the African Ameri-
can entertainer describes the piece he’s playing as “just a little something
on my own,” his famously generous boss snaps back, “Well stop it. You know
what I want to hear” (C).
“What the gramophone listener actually wants to hear is himself,”
Adorno concluded in a 1928 essay, and “the artist merely offers [him] a
substitute for the sounding image of his person, which he would like to
safeguard as a possession.”60 Sam’s repeat performances of “As Time Goes
By” on his white piano service the memories and ideals of others just as his
body works like a dark gramophone horn sounding out the erotic fantasies
of Rick and other white listeners.61 Technologies of sound reproduction and
59. By contrast, Thomas Cripps contends that Sam is a “friend of Rick, a factor in the politics,
and far more than mere furniture, atmosphere or musical accompaniment that he might have
been in an earlier movie.” In brief, “Sam sharpens the political issues” and illustrates the spirit of
“conscience-liberalism” in wartime Hollywood (Thomas Cripps, “Casablanca, Tennessee Johnson,
and The Negro Soldier : Hollywood Liberals and World War II,” in Feature Films as History, ed.
K. R. M. Short [Knoxville, Tenn., 1981], p. 142).
60. Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, no. 55 (Winter 1990):
54. For a discussion of early sound recording and phonography in terms of “the resonant tomb,”
see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham, N.C., 2003), esp. pp. 286–333.
61. Sam’s role partially exemplified the stereotypical function of the “black cupid,” a
desexualized companion who amiably and selflessly fans the flame of romance among reluctant

the culture of phonography left modern consumers like Rick freer than ever
to drift into wayward private fantasies and dissociative reveries, auditioning
the past and other people, known and unknown. Left alone with their au-
tomated music devices, listeners could enjoy their safeguarded images and
narratives of themselves unfettered by the unpredictability and potentially
challenging presence of live musicians. These factors shed light on why Sam
is required to play the same song again and again for Rick and Ilsa, why he
is so sharply reprimanded when he tries out “a little something” on his own,
and why a kind of musical afterlife for the song must follow his disappear-
ance after the film’s climax of musical unisonance. With no musicians pres-
ent, jukebox and gramophone listeners could make new kinds of personal
claims over music. While this essay opened by stressing the impossibility of
perfect repetition in live performance, the dominance of recorded music in
our cultural life instead presses upon us the seeming inescapability of a kind
of musical repetition. But if the musical recording offers constancy itself,
repetition without alteration, it only becomes more obvious how much the
listener matters, how much our changing reactions to the music might call
for a fever chart to map not only the music but also our own shifting fan-
tasies, moods, and interests. Along these lines, “As Time Goes By” consti-
tutes such a prominent part of Rick and Ilsa’s life together and apart because
Sam’s command performances force them to revisit a contested souvenir
of their happiest moments. “And when two lovers woo / They still say ‘I
love you’ / On that you can rely / No matter what the future brings / As time
goes by” (C).
As a human jukebox Sam plays or sings the song on-screen no less than
four times, while the perspectives of his listeners stutter and shift toward
their past encounters with the song. During an extended flashback to Paris
in early 1940 (in part a fast-moving montage held together by Steiner’s mu-
sic), Sam plays “As Time Goes By” while Rick and Ilsa discuss fleeing before
German troops arrive. After first playing the song, Wilson is burdened with
one of several inane bits of dialogue: “That ought to take the sting out of
occupation. Does it, Mr. Richard?” (C) When Sam returns to the song at
Ilsa’s insistence later in North Africa, however, its reassurances about the
lawlike character of romantic destiny, about how “the world will always wel-
come lovers,” have long since been put in doubt after Ilsa’s sudden disap-
pearance in Paris and Rick’s heartbreak. Hearing Sam play the song in
white protagonists. See Robert Gooding-Williams, “Black Cupids, White Desires: Reading the
Recoding of Racial Difference in Casablanca,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in
African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge,
Mass., 1994), pp. 201–11. The cupid role only partly fits Sam, however; he also actively discourages
the reunion between Rick and Ilsa and offers to run away and “drive all night” with Rick.

Morocco at first immobilizes Ilsa just as it enrages Rick: “Sam, I thought I
told you never to play [that]!” (C) Something new must be done in con-
fronting the song’s apparently failed prophecy and the recent past’s claim
on the present. Hupfeld’s song may seem custom-built to induce nostalgic
longing, but the lyric’s emphasis on an unbroken string of things “no one
can deny” upholds a promise of onwardness amidst repetition rather than
a worry about obsolescence. Purely nostalgic listening undertaken “for old
time’s sake,” by contrast, would simply idealize an obsolete past. The
Casablanca strategy—we might call it progressive nostalgia—is to use both
diegetic and nondiegetic music to circle back to “As Time Goes By” again
and again and recharge an existing circuit of sentiment while apparently
rejecting or overcoming a regressive nostalgic circuit of melancholy and de-
cay.62 The energies of painful nostalgia and melancholic affect are needed
(even if the content of those affective states is something to overcome) to
recharge the circuitry of patriotism on behalf of the antifascist cause.
Finally, Sam’s piano is not only a gramophone or jukebox but also a clean
white coffin, a crypt built by the demands of war. “Crypts,” Nicolas Abra-
ham suggests, “are constructed only when the shameful secret is the love
object’s doing and when that object also functions for the subject as an ego
ideal. It is therefore the object’s secret that needs to be kept, his shame cov-
ered up.”63 Rick condenses Ilsa’s abrupt disappearance in Paris and his own
pain into the song “As Time Goes By” and makes them both disappear into
Sam’s piano, never to be heard of again. He works to silence the pain in a
brittle masquerade of cool indifference. Ilsa’s abandonment of Rick (after
her discovery in Paris that her husband was not dead but in hiding outside
of Paris) and the American’s despair make up the “shameful secret” incor-
porated within the crypt. “As long as the crypt holds,” Abraham adds, “there
is no melancholia.”64 Having incorporated the loss into the crypt, Rick starts
over as a club owner in the Maghreb who “sticks his neck out” for neither
romance nor politics. The thin walls of his crypt begin to shake when Ilsa
appears at the nightclub with Lazlo and implicitly fly open when Ilsa insists
that Sam play “As Time Goes By.” Rick tries to slam the crypt shut by stop-
ping the performance but fails; he must either be reunited with Ilsa (as a
beloved ego ideal incorporated into the crypt) or accept the terms of her
unavailability. His airfield speech—with its key remark about how they’ll
62. I am indebted to Doris Sommer’s theorization of progressive (rather than regressive or

backward-looking) allegory in romantic national allegories. See Sommer, Foundational Fictions,
esp. pp. 41–51.
63. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,
trans. and ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, 1994), p. 131.
64. Ibid., p. 137.

“always have Paris”—lets him revise a melancholic memory of a broken
Parisian idyll while reinstalling Ilsa as an unblemished ego ideal. Having
done so, he will mirror her willingness to sublimate erotic love into pas-
sionate antifascist public service. The crypt can finally be opened and
cleared without anguish. And so Rick reaches into Sam’s piano and pulls
out the magical letters of transit that will ensure the safe passage of Ilsa and
Lazlo.
Rick and Ilsa physically part ways at the airfield, but Steiner’s music
promises that they are also together. Viewers may hear the “Marseillaise”
and the music of war, but this musical mirror for the world viewed does
not shatter the more private reflection cast by “As Time Goes By.” The bal-
lad folds smoothly into the anthem, and the protagonists’ erotic passion
figures as the enabling double of wartime idealism. Without the closing mu-
sic, Rick and Ilsa’s love would remain unrequited; with the music, however,
comes the mythic promise that separation and sacrifice will only strengthen
their idealized bond. Meanwhile, the film’s celebrated last line—“Louis, I
think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—reveals Sam’s final
status in the world of Casablanca. The white hero relates to his compro-
mised and opportunistic French colleague as something novel, a cocon-
spirator and an equal.65 Moral training for a world shaped by racial
paternalism and segregation—a world spanning the French empire, the U.S.
armed forces, and the dreamworld of Hollywood’s most liberal major stu-
dio—made the reciprocal recognition of and true friendship with a social
and racial inferior like Sam an impossibility for the white American hero.
The structure of Sam’s helpful presence and necessary disappearance in
Casablanca was prescient about the mood of wartime America. Dozens of
race riots in 1943 accompanied the migration of African Americans from
the South eager for wartime work in northern and western industrial cen-
ters. “The series of anti-Negro riots taking place now in the United States,”
W. E. B. Du Bois noted in July 1943, “is not spasmodic nor accidental.” “The
facts before us,” he explained to readers of the Amsterdam News, “conform
to a well-known pattern.”66 Du Bois’s commentary demonstrated how
conforming “to a well-known pattern” need not follow the noble promises
of wartime righteousness and rule following on display in the world of
Casablanca. These riots, violent rituals aimed at a goal of “restored be-
65. Warner Brothers executives contemplated and rejected two possible final scenes: either
documentary footage of the November Allied invasion of North Africa or a “brief closing shot
with Bogart and Rains as Free French soldiers on board ship on their way to fight the Nazis” (CBS,
p. 188).
66. W. E. B. Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies,” 3 July 1943, “Amsterdam News,” Newspaper Columns
by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 2 vols. (White Plains, N.Y., 1986), 1:534.

havior,” were neither “spasmodic nor accidental” when they pushed to re-
align changing social realities to a “well-known pattern” of systematic white
privilege and strict rule following in industrial and social relations.67 It is
less the everyday indispensability of the rule of repetition than the brutal
fantasy of perfect repetition that captures the rioters’ political fantasies of
bringing the war back home, of forcibly teaching others about how the “fun-
damental things apply, as time goes by.”
67. In 1943, the OWI confirmed that white Americans “overwhelmingly endorse[d]
segregation” in the wartime military, stateside restaurants, and elsewhere (quoted in Doherty,
Projections of War [New York, 1993], p. 205). An OWI document on Hollywood films noted that
“in general, Negroes are presented as basically different from other people, as taking no relevant
part in the life of the nation, as offering nothing, contributing nothing, expecting nothing”
(quoted in Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “Blacks, Loyalty, and Motion-Picture
Propaganda in World War II,” Journal of American History 73 [Sept. 1986]: 399).


Casablanca and The Music of War

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The World Heard: Casablanca and the Music

Perfect repetition is impossible in live art performances, but its approxi-

Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006)

2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections of the Origin and Spread of

P a u l A l l e n A n d e r s o n is an assistant professor in the program in American

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“Welcome Back to the Fight”

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30. Quoted in Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, p. 109.

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Music and the Promise of Unisonance

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Applying the Fundamental Things

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The Piano Is a Crypt

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62. I am indebted to Doris Sommer’s theorization of progressive (rather than regressive or

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