Casablanca (1942) is love story in many different regards, involving the love of the past, selfish love and love one’s nation. The third loves stands triumphant as the ideal romance the characters aspire to. It’s a love not directly tied to a country’s geography, per se, but rather the values that nation stands for. In the midst of the second world war, this meant the Allies’ ideals of freedom and individualism against the Nazis’ totalitarian control over everyone and everything.

The movie’s main character Rick appears to start out at this ideal love in his youth, back when he was more of a “sentimentalist” as Captain Renault would call him. He ran guns to Ethiopia and fought against the fascists in the Rif War, supposedly believing in something. However, a dalliance in Paris with Ilsa changes his attitude. For a short time, there is no impending war or conflict but instead a blossoming romance. Ilsa is free from the responsibility of ideals at this moment because her husband the freedom fighter Victor is apparently dead. Both characters are granted the liberty to endeavor in a selfish, seemingly harmless romance.

Then the reality of the crazy world they live in crashes their affair, as the Germans invade France. Ilsa discovers Victor, her hero and symbol of everything that is good, is alive and realizes she must drop the childish charade that was Paris. Rick is left ignorant, his heart broken and disenfranchised with any sort of idealistic love. He becomes a cynic who “never sticks his neck out” for anyone, much like the corrupt police Captain Renault. Both figures are neutral that can be swayed one way or another. No longer do they truly stand for anything.

To dwell on Renault, he at first seems like a two dimensional character. A typical dirty cop who partakes in illegal affairs at Rick’s club, Renault is revealed to have more depth when he makes it clear he does not like his German superior Major Strasser. He is not inherently an antagonist nor a protagonist. Contrast this to Victor, who is a legend not solely due to his concentration camp escape but the values that escape stands for. He is a hero, the opposite of Rick who gave that life up long ago when his heart was broken.

If any scene establishes the belief systems of Rick, Renault and Victor, it is when the Nazis are singing a German ballad in the club. Renault looks from their performance to Rick and Victor’s entrance, seemingly caught in the middle of this conflict, interested in what will follow. Victor, enraged by this, asks the band to play “La Marseilles”. Rick, very passively, gives the band the OK. The club then erupts, singing the French anthem, overpowering the German song. Even Yvonne, who was just early courting a German officer, joins in, moved by the performance. Here, the power of values is put on display.

Since he is the film’s protagonist, Rick isn’t entirely cynical. A semblance of compassion lingers in his soul as he’s willing to help a young Bulgarian couple flee Casablanca by fixing the roulette in their favor. This young husband and wife resembles what could have been between Rick and Ilsa, only unlike the estranged couple, this couple has a clear future mind: to go to America. America in this film represents a number of virtues: salvation, freedom, hope, a new start. The love of the idea of America is what drives many of the desperate souls who dwell in Casablanca in an imprisoning limbo.

Is there hope for Rick to change? Will he stand for a cause bigger than his own survival, like he did when he was younger? As his romance with Ilsa reignites entering the movie’s final ten minutes, it seems doubtful. The movie subverts the viewer’s expectation by portraying Rick selling his club to Signor Ferrari, as if he is preparing to leave Casablanca with Ilsa. Renault is fooled, too, as Rick leads Victor and Ilsa into what appears to be a set-up. He even goes on to say that “love has triumphed over virtue”, until he realizes it hasn’t. Rick has set him up, actually preparing the trip for Victor and Ilsa, choosing to remain in Casablanca. In this moment, Rick proves that he understands there’s a picture much bigger than his past romance, that “this crazy world” as he calls it is not dependent on selfish lovers’ quarrels but the ideals Victor stands for.

Even Renault is swayed by the end, as he does not report Rick for the murder of Major Strasser. He finally takes a side in perhaps one of the film’s most powerful shots when he drops the bottle of Vichy wine into a waste basket, visually denouncing the puppet government he answered to out of self-interest. Ilsa and Victor are flown from Casablanca, knowing they have the capacity to change the world while Rick and Renault walk on the ground beneath them, only now understanding that capacity. Or in Rick’s case, rediscovering it.

Casablanca is not a love story between people or a longing of a nostalgic past, but rather a romance with principles. This love, with its ideals and values, is the idyllic love Rick and Ilsa truly need. Any selfish love pursuing fleeting feelings of pleasure is fool’s gold. In such desperate times as the second world war, it’s what must be done to avoid becoming the cynic Rick is at the start of the film and survive this crazy world.

To turn Renault’s declaration of false victory on its head, virtue must triumph over love.

If one were to ask Charles Kane who he was, the only thing he’d answer consistently with confidence is “an American.” From his poor childhood to his industrious old age, that is the one of the few things about the man that never changed. What director, screenwriter and star Orson Welles might be implying here is that despite the outrageous life Kane lived, he is not as uncommon as one would think. He was an American, or better yet, a “citizen.” It is this promise that Kane ran his newspapers on as well his political campaign: despite his immense wealth, he was merely a citizen who swore to be a man of the people.

But that’s the romantic side of being an American citizen. Kane also represents the disappointing underbelly of the American dream and in effect, capitalism. Starting an ambitious industry with the Inquirer to do good by the people (even put in ink with his own “Declaration of Independence”, as Jedediah puts it), he becomes enamored with success, participating in show-tunes celebrating his name and buying countless statues with his profits in Europe. What starts out as well-meaning dream becomes a power-hungry quest to buy as much as possible, including the support of the people and the love of his dear ones. The Kane who tells Emily “The people will think what I want them to think” is a far cry from the man who wrote the Inquirer’s declaration, as is the Kane who builds Susan an opera house and her own paradise Xanadu in an attempt to buy her love. Such is the capitalist’s problem.

What does remain consistent in Kane’s life is a stubborn refusal to be wrong, an attribute ingrained in the power-hungry American capitalist. If there was anything he was afraid of, it was losing. He’d rather fake news be released about his “affair” with Susan than withdraw from his political campaign. He’d rather finish Jedediah’s scalding review of his own wife’s opera performance than succumb to his old friend’s expectations of revising it. He’d rather clap desperately and write up false headlines praising Susan’s sub-par singing performances. Kane never wanted to lose because in a capitalist system of conquest, that was humiliating.

And Kane always cared about what the people thought of him. “He wanted people to love him,” Jedediah reflected in his old age to Mr. Thompson. This was the case for matters as big as his political campaign and as domestic as his spats with Susan he feared would be overheard. Self-image was everything to Kane because, in the spirit of true American individualism, his self was all he had, ever since he was a boy, sent off from home by his parents to a unloving guardian in Walter Thatcher. What started off as a romantic story of American resilience in his youth morphed into a disturbing tale of a man confusing himself with God, twisting truth in the papers to manipulate public opinion and, as Jedediah criticized Kane after he lost the election, trying to “own the people.” So goes the story of the American robber-baron.

And the same goes for the tale of a fascist. Early in the film, the newsreel announcing Kane’s death describes some of his wrong decisions, i.e supporting Adolf Hitler and predicting there would be no war in Europe. How could a man who was so idealistic to write the Inquirer’s declaration side with such a tyrant? It’s only natural in the life-cycle of the American capitalist, according to Welles. On his own venture into politics, Kane is preaching to hundreds in front of a poster bearing his face, swearing to do right by the people. The scenes bears resemblance to a Nazi rally, as lofty ideals are touted, hiding a shadowy ego that truly wants to control the masses underneath it all.

The beginning and end of Kane’s life presents a before-and-after contrast that demonstrates how destructive the American life can be. Though his childhood is contained in a small house amidst a brutal winter, he is happy, playing with his sled. When he dies, Kane is alone in a house, filled to the brim with material goods. As Mr. Thompson walks through the halls with the butler, the camera dollies out to a long shot revealing just how much Kane had acquired through the years. But it is a hollow achievement, as Kane, on his deathbed, clings desperately to his happiest childhood memory, contained in a snow-globe. With his last breath, he calls desperately for better times when he was happy and innocent. Despite his capitalist conquests and his materialist endeavors, Kane died an unhappy man.

In this sense, Kane was an American citizen who bought into the dream, but never woke up from it. Believing a set of principles that he eventually abandoned in his later years (quite literally when he rips up the original declaration Jedediah sends him), maintaining a stubborn individualism that refused to be wrong, and holding a hollow materialism that left his life unfulfilling, Citizen Kane is truly an American story.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

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