Casablanca: What is a Classic?

What is a "classic?"

Something made before you were born? Something in black and white? Something that you were introduced to by a loved one? Something you have an emotional connection to?

Everyone has their own answer, but when asked the question, you've got to at least consider Casablanca—even if you haven't seen it. Maybe especially if you haven't seen it. 

Casablanca is the purest example of the "Golden Age of Cinema." A heavy-shadowed noir with impeccable lighting, superstar romantic leads, great character actors—and quotable lines that have been memed, mixed, parodied, referenced, mocked, and reclaimed thousands of times in the 80+ years since its release.

Even people who haven't seen it know the basics. A soup of pop culture references, like the tacky paintings pressed onto diner walls where Bogart sips milkshakes with James Dean. Nostalgia defined and commodified, flattened and shrink-wrapped and mass-produced, until even the silhouettes of the characters are recognizable, their words processed and twisted until they are not endlessly quoted, but endlessly misquoted, like "Play it again, Sam"—a line that no one in the film ever utters.

What do people mean when they say "Play it again, Sam?" Or "Here's looking at you, kid?"  Or "We'll always have Paris?" Does anyone even know anymore? These lines have been elevated to the pop culture pantheon alongside other memes like "Mai waife!" and "Luke, I am your father"—another common misquote—with no consideration that these were once written by a screenwriter, memorized by an actor, and delivered on a set. Lines that were created to evoke an emotional response unique to the film they were written for have now been disseminated throughout modern culture, stripped of their initial meaning, now heavy with personal emotional investment.

With all the misquotes, tacky posters, bad Halloween costumes, and Animaniacs parodies, of course, Casablanca is "good." If it wasn't, how has it survived? We all know Casablanca is "good," even if we haven't seen it.

But here's the thing: Casablanca is REALLY FUCKING GOOD.

It's good now, in 2023, and it was good in 1983. It was good in 1953 when it was rediscovered and elevated beyond the standard studio picture the cast and crew thought they were creating: another noir romance, with maybe a touch of geopolitical reference to add authenticity, rushed out the door by the studio when the actual Second World War made the film's themes all too relevant.

It is astonishing this was made DURING WW2. Every character represents their own country's involvement in a war that was being fought while the cameras were rolling. 

Bogart's Rick is an American opportunist, made cynical by personal heartbreak, secretly doing the right thing behind everyone's backs—or whenever it suits him. Bergman's Ilsa is an Eastern European refugee who is wracked with guilt over her romance with Rick in Paris while her lover was tortured by the Nazis. The only real hero in the film is Paul Heinreid's Lazlo, a world-famous resister who uses the power of nationalism, courage, and a brass band to wage a guerilla culture war against the Nazis. 

The standout is Claude Rains as the local police captain, a pure opportunist who hangs out at Rick's to collect blackmail material and because he just likes the guy. In a movie literally stuffed with character actors, even the cartoonish performances have meaning, like Rick's jovial German stereotype. No scene is wasted, every line lands. 

And those lines! 

"Here's looking at you, kid." What starts as a cliched pickup line Rick has probably used on hundreds of girls morphs into a requiem for the time they had, the people they used to be, forever destroyed by war and heartbreak.

"Play it, Sam." The "it" is "As Time Goes By", a song about the fundamentals of romance and how love can survive the most horrific occurrences. A song loaded with the movie's themes written ten years earlier. Sam's reluctance to play the song for Rick or Isla and how he tries to pull Rick out of his depression gives Sam way more depth than any parody allows, where he is often portrayed as a piano-playing idiot savant. Rick saved Sam from Paris at great cost to his own happiness, and Sam's debt is to keep his boss happy and distracted—something Ilsa's arrival makes impossible.

Finally, "We'll always have Paris." Often omitted from this quote is the rest of the line:

"We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night."

The film's thesis distilled into three sentences, circling back to the groundwork laid by "Here's looking at you, kid" and "Play it, Sam." How many people even know this line comes from Casablanca? That it's Rick's last-ditch attempt to get her on the plane, absolving her of the guilt she feels for leaving him in Paris and to absolve herself for romancing Rick in the first place, for daring to be happy when her husband, the film's real hero, who roused an entire city with nothing but La Marseillaise, was languishing in a German concentration camp. 

It's breathtaking writing from a forgotten, unproduced play, delivered by one of the world's biggest movie stars, who thought he was making just another in a long line of forgettable studio pictures, elevated and sanitized and polished to a mirror sheen by pop culture erosion. The dopamine hits like a tidal wave: the peanut butter of nostalgic recognition blending with the chocolate of expert filmmaking.

If classics are tenured members of the faculty of film, some of them, as relics of their time, aren't allowed to teach anymore. But Casablanca is out there giving 1 hour and 52-minute lectures on the transcendent power of a good story, well told, every day.

Avatar: The Way of Water

The best science fiction serves two purposes: to transport us to impossible worlds with fantastic technology we can only dream of and to make an existing social issue digestible through a technological or sociological abstraction. It's entirely possible to watch Aliens and think, "Wow, cool machine guns," but there is an allegory for American imperialist bravado post-Vietnam there if you choose to engage with it.

Avatar: The Way of Water delivers impossible worlds and fantastic technology, but its allegories are shallow.

Straight off, the movie is way, way too long. You could easily shave the first hour down to fifteen minutes. My sympathies to the FOUR credited editors, but a movie that takes this long to get going and has intermittent voiceover is a structural weakness inherited from the first film. In Way of Water, the cracks in the foundation have spread to the walls and ceiling. 

When the evil human megacorp returns to Pandora, Jake Sully and his precocious teen Na'vi kids, including born-on-Pandora human kid Spider, wage a year-long guerilla war against them. They blow up a train and stage a very cool nighttime rescue mission in the rain, but when it's revealed that The Bad Guy from the first film has been reincarnated in his backup Na'vi body, the Sullys abandon Spider to torture and death and flee to the ocean. 

(The Sully family motto, repeated ad nauseam, is "Sullys stick together," but I guess that doesn't include their adopted human son. The implications of this racial segregation are explored about as much as any of the movie's themes, but I'll get to that.)

That paragraph worth of story takes an hour.

Hour two begins with the Sully family finally arriving at the Polynesian-inspired water tribe. It took me until minute 85, but I finally accepted that the movie doesn't really have a plot for 2/3s of its runtime. 

Those captivated by the potential of Pandora as a "real place" will probably love this part, as the movie fragments into a series of vignettes exploring the society of the water tribe, a mishmash of Polynesian culture, which was very hot when this movie was being shot. 

The main tribe, whose name I cannot remember and will not google, is covered in Polynesian tattoos. They exhibit elements of Maori war culture (though they never do a full haka, thank god) and are pretty much just Pacific Islanders but green. To my ignorant eye, there isn't any creation here, just elements taken from existing human cultures and blended into a soup, except now they ride dolphins.

I'm fine with taking existing human cultures and grafting them onto alien species: it brings an authenticity that is extremely difficult to manufacture. But why does the Na'vi islander tribe exhibit elements of Earth-bound islander culture? What is the connection between elaborate, flowing tattoos and the ocean? Why do the Na'vi warriors stick out their tongues as a sign of aggression, just like Maori? Is there a lore reason, or is it to make them more understandable to us, the Earth-bound audience? The answer to both these questions is yes. 

Consider the criticism of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, which took elements of Middle-eastern and African culture without casting many MENA actors. Villeneuve and his team put a lot of effort into making Arrakis feel like a place distinct from Earth-bound deserts, like the ocean tribes of Pandora, but Arrakis is still populated by humans. 

What's the first thing you think of when you think of Arrakis? It's all desert, and it's hot. Humans adapt to hot temperatures in specific ways and leveraging that history works in Dune's favour. It's not perfect, but there was an intention to the design and casting choices made that I just don't see in Way of Water. Javier Bardem as Stilgar is one thing, at least he's from Spain, but in Avatar 2, the ocean tribe's queen is played by Kate Winslet.

Maybe it's not fair to compare James Cameron to Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve is the best storyteller filmmaker on the planet, whereas Cameron is more of a tech genius. Both are interested in pushing movies forward, but Villeneuve feels like he's working out of a big city opera house, while Cameron works at NASA. 

The second hour of the film is truly beautiful. The open spaces of the island village and vast underwater areas give Cameron a wide canvas not possible in the claustrophobic jungle of the first film. There's something about the way the characters look in the water that makes them seem more real than they do out of it.

This brings us back to abstraction. If scifi is a way to abstract complex ideas away from fraught, real-world implications, the balance is extremely delicate. Take things too far, and the message is lost or rendered inert, don't go far enough, and the scifi element feels cowardly, a way to avoid engaging with the issue directly. Somehow, Cameron does both.

Let's count Avatar 2's layers of abstraction: 

- It's set on a distant planet, far in the future. This planet is 100% alive, even though they never say it is. It is though. Eywah, the Na'vi god, is the planet. I absolutely guarantee this will be central to the plot of one of the upcoming sequels, and it will be treated as a major revelation.

- All but one of its main characters is an 8-foot-tall blue cat person who can, through the use of glowy tendrils in their fleshy ponytails, commune with the planet and certain animals. This is also how the Na'vi fuck, which makes a sequence involving a teenage boy swimming into the mouth of a talking whale to interface with its glowing golden whale pussy pretty messed up.

- Some of the Na'vi kids call each other "bro" and "cuz" and constantly tell one another, "I got this." The Na'vi also have accents, which makes no sense since the movie shows us they speak their native tongue. Shouldn't Jake have the accent? Who cares.

- 95% of the movie takes place on CGI sets, ironically making the real sets in the human locations look fake. This is nothing normal to hold onto, especially since all the humans are either psychopathic military grunts, mercenary whalers, or a kid in a loincloth raised in the jungle.

- The intended way to watch this is in 3D, which sucks. Even in Super Laser Ultra IMAX Best Movie, the glasses dim the image and fuck with the frame rate, so the action is choppy and hard to parse. The 3D is actually less immersive since the glasses present a literal barrier between you and the movie.

All these layers pile up, like the beer glasses in that old drunk-driving commercial, presenting a movie that, despite all the filmmaker's efforts, you don't experience, you simply watch.

There is just nothing to grab onto. The characters are completely interchangeable. I kept wondering why there were two sons—I must have forgotten every other movie I've ever seen! The only character names I can recall are "Spider," because Spider, and "Toque" which is either a weird callback to Cameron's Ontario roots or proof that he hasn't been north of the border in a long time.

Zoe Saldana is as committed as ever, but she's relegated to the Mean Mom character who cares too much about nature, like a weird crystal-obsessed aunt who always smells like patchouli. Saldana doesn't really Arrive in the film until the very end when Cameron finally takes a break from trying to convince us the Na'vi are sexy and embraces the alien aspects of their design. Combat Ney'tiri is legitimately terrifying and the closest Cameron has come to horror since Aliens.

That sequence, coming about midway through Hour Three, is both exciting and a huge bummer. A really awesome whaling sequence pulls a balancing act that is very Cameron: it shows you all these cool toys and then punches you in the gut with the purpose of those toys. This leads right into the big climactic battle, the Scary Neytiri sequence, and an exhilarating, extended callback to Titanic. James Cameron is one of the greatest action directors of all time, but it's clear now his ego won't let him make a movie as simple as The Terminator ever again.

I remember watching Avatar and thinking, during the last battle, that I should be enjoying it more. "This is by the guy who made Terminator 2!" The action in Way of Water is better, cleaner, and easier to follow—the film's last third is rad!—but it takes so long to get there, with so much meandering exposition, bad dialogue, shitty teen drama, and superficial mysticism that it doesn't feel like an event. It's just another thing to watch.

2022 was the year Movies Came Back when Top Gun: Maverick made the strongest case yet for the IMAX experience. But Way of Water fails where Maverick succeeded in every way. Top Gun's cliches are just as predictable, but they elicit smiles rather than groans. Top Gun's characters are reduced to single-word callsigns, but I can remember every squadron member and not one of Jake and Neytiri's kids—except Toque. Way of Water spends a ridiculous amount of time trying to humanize its villain, a man who literally crushes his own skull with his bare hand, whereas Top Gun doesn't even have a villain! 

For all Cameron's effort into making Pandora "feel real," Top Gun was far more transportive simply due to its clarity. I would jump at the chance to see Maverick in IMAX again, but I'd much rather watch Way of Water on my TV. By streamlining the blockbuster formula, Maverick focuses on the thrills of the theatre experience. By going big, Way of Water makes the whole thing seem a little silly, like the commercials that play after the trailers promising that you'll "be a part of the movie." Despite all the money, all the time, and all the innovation, Avatar: The Way of Water never pulls you beneath the surface.