Rick: She tried everything to get them
and nothing worked. She did her best to
convince me that she was
still in
love with me. That was all over long
ago; for your sake she pretended it wasn’t and I let her pretend.
Victor: I understand.
Well, I certainly don’t understand—did they do it or not?Maltby's solution is to insist that this scene
provides an exemplary case of
how Casablanca 'deliberately constructs itself in such a
way as to offer distinct and alternative sources of pleasure to two people
sitting next to each other in the same cinema,' that it 'could play to
both "innocent" and "sophisticated" audiences alike'. While,
at the level of its surface narrative
line, the film can be constructed by the spectator as obeying the strictest
moral codes, to
the sophisticated it simultaneously
offers enough clues to construct an alternative, sexually much more daring
narrative line. This strategy is more complex
than it may appear: precisely because you know that you are as it were
'covered' or
'absolved from guilty impulses' by the official story line, you are allowed to
indulge in dirty fantasies. You
know that these fantasies are not 'for serious', that they
don't count in the eyes of the big Other. Our only correction
to Maltby would be that we do not need two spectators
sitting side by side: one and the same spectator is sufficient.
********** **********
The infamous Hays Production
Code of the 1930s and 40s was not simply a negative censorship code, but also a
positive (productive, as Michel Foucault would have put it) codification and
regulation that generated the very excess whose direct depiction it forbade.
The prohibition, in order to function properly, had to rely on a clear
awareness of what really did happen at the level of the outlawed narrative
line. The Production Code did not simply prohibit some contents,
rather it codified their enciphered articulation, as in the famous instruction
from Monroe Stahr to his scriptwriters in Scott
Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon:
At all times, at all moments
when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard ...
Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks
down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food
it is to give her enough strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no
time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping
with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified.
We can see here how the
fundamental prohibition, far from functioning in a merely negative way, 'is
responsible' for the excessive sexualization of the
most common everyday events. Everything the poor starved heroine does, from
walking down the street to having a meal, is transubstantiated into the
expression of her desire to sleep with her man. We can see how the functioning
of this fundamental prohibition is properly perverse, in so far as it
unavoidably gets caught in the reflexive flip by means of which the very defence against the prohibited sexual content generates an
excessive all-pervasive sexualization --the role of
censorship is much more ambiguous than it may appear. The obvious retort to
this point would be that we are thereby inadvertently elevating the Hays
Production Code into a subversive machine more threatening to the system of
domination than direct tolerance: are we not claiming that the harsher is
direct censorship, the more subversive are the unintended by-products generated
by it? The way to answer this reproach is to emphasize that these unintended
perverse by-products, far from genuinely threatening the system of symbolic
domination, are its built-in transgression, its unacknowledged obscene support.
Slavoj Žižek, “Ego Ideal
and Superego: Lacan as a Viewer of Casablanca” (from How to Read Lacan, 2007)