7/27/2019 Round Up the Usual Archetypes!
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Round Up the Usual Archetypes!
By Tansy Couture
As our favorite hero rides off into the sunset with the fair
maiden, we are leftwith a sense of completeness. What was supposed
to happen happened. When moviesdon t end the way we think they
should, we are outraged! "Why didn t she marry him?
" or, "He wasn t supposed to die!" has been uttered a few times
from my own disappointment after a movie. Today, movies are trying
to get away from the "Typical Hollywood Happy Ending," and are
experimenting with the unusual endings. Why arethey doing this?
Maybe it is to grab the audience in at the end, or maybe they are
just tired of using the same characters and plots over and over
again. But those Same Olds, or archetypes as semiotician Umberto
Eco would call them, are what make a movie a success. According to
Eco, an archetype is a, ". . . preestablished and frequently
reappearing narrative situation, cited or in some way recycled by
innumerable other texts and provoking in the addressee a sort of
intense emotion accompanied by the vague feeling of a dj vu that
everybody yearns to see again" (200). It is the typical character
in the typical scene with the typical ending. Usually you don t
recognize that the character is the same from another movie that
you have seen, because there are different variations of them, but
the more you see a film, the more you see similarities from other
films. Eco believesthat it is because of these archetypes that
Casablanca, a movie produced in 1941, was such a success. Countless
movies have spun off of Casablanca, such as Sabr
ina, a movie involving two brothers caught between a beautiful
woman (only in this film, the Rick-type character wins the girl),
or Play it Again Sam, a Woody Allen play-off, but where the
original ideas came from we may never know. I agree
with Eco when he says that, "it is not one movie. It is movies "
(208)."Here s looking at you kid," the words of Humphrey Bogart s
character, Rick, were ones that I had heard many times before ever
finding out the source. To the people
of my generation, Rick is the ultimate archetype, but, as Eco
points out, we have seen his character several times before. Rick
is the Fatal Adventurer ("I m willing to shoot Captain Renault, and
I m willing to shoot you."), the Self-Made Businessman ("Your money
is good at the bar."), the Tough Guy from a gangster movie("I stick
my neck out for nobody."), the Cynic ("Who was it that you left me
for. . . or aren t you the kind that tells?"), the Redeemed
Drunkard (Rick s nationality: "I m a drunkard."), and the
Disillusioned Lover ("Of all the gin joints in all
the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."). More
recently he has becomeknown as the Hemingwayan Hero ("You always
happen to be fighting on the side ofthe underdog.") (205). Glen
Gabbard, a psychoanalyst, believes that the Rick character was
taken from Sophocles Oedipus. Like Oedipus, "Rick Blaine is an
outcast
from his own country" (Internet). There are endless
possibilities.Always dressed in white, Paul Henreid s character,
Victor Laszlo, plays the Uncontaminated Hero. He is Civilization
fighting against Barbarism. He seems to be the
perfect character, but since nobody can be perfect, they made
him unknowledgeable of his wife s involvement with Rick. Even when
Laszlo suspects, he asks no questions; this raises our opinion of
him. He is the Sir Gawain of the 40s: heroic, virtuous,
understanding, and forgiving, seemingly without flaw. To some he is
too
perfect, unreal, creating the desire for Rick to win the girl.
But in the end Laszlo wins her, and the audience realizes that the
ending is the only one that w
ould have been correct.The beautiful Ilsa Lund, played by
Ingrand Bergman, is the typical Maiden in Distress, the Enigmatic
Woman, the Femme Fatale. She is confused and doesn t know what to
do: "You ll have to do the thinking for both of us, for all of us."
She is afollower, one who loves the one she s with. With Rick, they
are Romantic Lovers, nothing exists when they are together. With
Laszlo she is his helpmate, his reason for resisting. The
admiration you can see in her eyes for Laszlo during the
Marseillaise scene is undeniable. To her, Laszlo is a father type
figure. She is Beauty, the Nazis are the Beast, and Laszlo is the
Hero who is there to save her.
The love between Ilsa and the two men, mixed with the admiration
the men have f
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or each other creates an archetypical Love Triangle.Conrad Veidt
played several bad Nazis during his acting career, which helped
him
play the role of Major Strasser, the Evil Villain. The Bad Guy
and his Thugs show up, and nobody really likes them. He is the
Bully and when things don t go hisway he takes his frustration out
on others, shown in the Marseillaise scene when
he closes down Rick s Cafe. But in the end the Villain never
wins, and rarely continues living, so it is all too appropriate
when Rick, the Fatal Adventurer, shoots him in a Western-type
draw.
Being an Outlaw, Rick s character can t have friends, but he can
have buddies that join him in his adventures. Every Desperado needs
a Sidekick, and Sam fulfills that part. With Rick through thick and
thin is Sam, played by Arthur "Dooley" Wilson. Sam is the Jim of
Huckleberry Finn. He is a black man running from the law who meets
up with a white boy doing the same. The similarities to Jim end
there;besides that, they are complete opposites in every way, which
is good, because if Sam was just like Rick than Ilsa would have the
problem of trying to pick from
a third man, and we would have trouble discerning why Rick and
not Sam!Every Outlaw also needs a Semi-Corrupt Law Official to help
him escape, and Caption Renault is that character. Played by Claude
Rains, Renault is almost as corrupt as those he apprehends. This
Buddy-Buddy relationship becomes the "start ofa beautiful
friendship," but not a friendship as we would normally think of.
They will be there for each other, but only to bail each other out
in time of need.There are many other little characters that assist
in creating the minor archetypes throughout the movie. The
Bulgarian couple help show how Rick is a Sentiment
alist. The scene where Ugarte gets arrested gives the movie an
Adventure archetype, while his character is the typical dark and
unlawful character portrayed inNorthern Africa, willing to do
anything for money. The Dark European Pickpocketis a kind of
comical foreshadower who shows us the true nature of what is
really
going on in Casablanca on a larger scale. It is true when he
says that, "Thereare vultures, vultures, everywhere!"
T.S. Eliot believed that the reason Shakespeare s Hamlet was so
fascinating and successful wasn t because it was a good story. T.S.
Eliot didn t really like the story, but liked the idea that it was
a combination of several other unsuccessful Hamlets, thus creating
a complicated, yet integrated plot. In a way, the same thing
happened with Casablanca. Improvising as they went along, they
were trying anything that had made a successful movie before(Eco,
201-202). All of the character
s were already firmly planted in the writers minds because they
had all been donebefore, enabling the writers to create such a
wonderful film in such a short amount of time.Hollywood films have
constituted a never-ending reunion of archetypes. Casablanca is not
much different from most other films created there. It represents
the culture of the West with all of our archetypes. Screenwriters
do not spend quiteas much time thinking about and creating
characters and plots as others do analyzing and criticizing them. I
do not think that they consciously plan out where they are taking
their ideas for characters and plots from. I agree with Mark Twain
when he says in a notice at the beginning of his story Huckleberry
Finn: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will
be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be
banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot"
(vii). Maybe screenwriters and authors won t agree to this
to such a great extent, but I think that the reason films are
made is for enjoyment, not for complete analytical break-downs.
When you spend so much time tryingto find things in the film that
weren t meant to be found it takes away from the
magic of the film.
Works Cited
Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Perf. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid
Bergman, and PaulHenreid. Warner Brothers. 1942.
