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)