You know, this scene is so powerful to me that sometimes I forget that not everyone who watches it will understand its significance, or will have seen Casablanca. So, because this scene means so much to me, I hope it’s okay if I take a minute to explain what’s going on here for anyone who’s feeling left out.
Casablanca takes place in, well, Casablanca, the largest city in (neutral) Morocco in 1941, at Rick’s American Cafe (Rick is Humphrey Bogart’s character you see there). In 1941, America was also still neutral, and Rick’s establishment is open to everyone: Nazi German officials, officials from Vichy (occupied) France, and refugees from all across Europe desperate to escape the German war engine. A neutral cafe in a netural country is probably the only place you’d have seen a cross-section like this in 1941, only six months after the fall of France.
So, the scene opens with Rick arguing with Laszlo, who is a Czech Resistance fighter fleeing from the Nazis (if you’re wondering what they’re arguing about: Rick has illegal transit papers which would allow Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, to escape to America, so he could continue raising support against the Germans. Rick refuses to sell because he’s in love with Laszlo’s wife). They’re interrupted by that cadre of German officers singing Die Wacht am Rhein: a German patriotic hymn which was adopted with great verve by the Nazi regime, and which is particularly steeped in anti-French history. This depresses the hell out of everybody at the club, and infuriates Laszlo, who storms downstairs and orders the house band to play La Marseillaise: the national anthem of France.
Wait, but when I say “it’s the national anthem of France,” I don’t want you to think of your national anthem, okay? Wherever you’re from. Because France’s anthem isn’t talking about some glorious long-ago battle, or France’s beautiful hills and countrysides. La Marseillaise is FUCKING BRUTAL. Here’s a translation of what they’re singing:
Arise, children of the Fatherland! The day of glory has arrived! Against us, tyranny raises its bloody banner. Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers? They’re coming to your land to cut the throats of your women and children!
To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let’s march, let’s march! Let their impure blood water our fields!
BRUTAL, like I said. DEFIANT, in these circumstances. And the entire cafe stands up and sings it passionately, drowning out the Germans. The Germans who are, in 1941, still terrifyingly ascendant, and seemingly invincible.
“Vive la France! Vive la France!” the crowd cries when it’s over. France has already been defeated, the German war machine roars on, and the people still refuse to give up hope.
But here’s the real kicker, for me: Casablanca came out in 1942. None of this was ‘history’ to the people who first saw it. Real refugees from the Nazis, afraid for their lives, watched this movie and took heart. These were current events when this aired. Victory over Germany was still far from certain. The hope it gave to people then was as desperately needed as it has been at any time in history.
God I love this scene.
not only did refugees see this movie, real refugees made this movie. most of the european cast members wound up in hollywood after fleeing the nazis and wound up.
paul heinreid, who played laszlo the resistance leader, was a famous austrian actor; he was so anti-hitler that he was named anenemy of the reich.ugarte, the petty thief who stole the illegal transit papers laszlo and victor are arguing about? was played by peter lorre, a jewish refugee. carl, the head waiter? played by s.z. sakall, a hungarian-jewwhose three sisters died in the holocaust.
even the main nazi character was played by a german refugee: conrad veidt, who starred in one of the first sympathetic films about gay men and who fled the nazis with his jewish wife.
there’s one person in this scene that deserves special mention. did you notice the woman at the bar, on the verge of tears as she belts out la marseillaise? she’s yvonne, rick’s ex-girlfriend in the film. in real life, the actress’s name is madeleine lebeau and she basically lived the plot of this film: she and her jewish husband fled paris ahead of the germans in 1940. her husband, macel dalio, is also in the film, playing the guy working the roulette table. after they occupied paris, the nazis used his face on posters to represent a “typical jew.” madeleine and marcel managed to get to lisbon (the goal of all the characters in casablanca), and boarded a ship to the americas… but then they were stranded for two months when it turned out their visa papers were forgeries. they eventually entered the US after securing temporary canadian visas. marcel dalio’s entire family died in concentration camps.
go back and rewatch the clip. watch madeleine lebeau’s face.
casablanca is a classic, full of classic acting performances. but in this moment, madeleine lebeau isn’t acting. this isn’t yvonne the jilted lover onscreen. this is madeleine lebeau, singing “la marseillaise” after she and her husband fled france for their lives. this is a real-life refugee, her real agony and loss and hope and resilience, preserved in the midst of one of the greatest films of all time.
I remember when I first saw Casablanca, and being struck by this scene, and that was without knowing the history behind it or all that Madeleine Lebeau – and so many more refugees- had suffered.
Do yourself a solid and watch this film. Watch this scene. And most of all, remember refugees, the ones who lived then and especially the ones who live now.
I knew this movie, of course, it’s one of the mains from my mother’s list of movies you should see “At least once in a lifetime”, but I had never until now felt any desire to watch it.
It’s one of those movies where context and the (not so quite) subtle subtext are vitally important to understanding the importance of it, not only as a classic piece of film making (hokey old timey speech and all), but as a political and social commentary of the times, rooted fiercely in protest and a whole lot of “fuck you fascists”.
I never really got it until my father (raised by his Jewish grandmother who fled Austria with the clothes on her back and a single suitcase and swathes of dead loved ones left behind) sat me down and told me the full context of when the movie was made, what it was actually about and who it was made for.
It made his casual way of saying “here’s looking at you kid” whenever we skipped school to go to protest rallies (start of the Iraq war) all the more poignant for me. I just thought he was being an old man quoting the popular cult media from his youth. But it means so much more than that.
Cause here’s the thing about that iconic line from the end of the movie: you’ll find screeds and screeds of people talking about how he’s using it to flirt with her once last time and just how suave it is, alluding that it’s purely about her youth and beauty and his ever lasting love for her even though she’s married to someone else.
But that line? Had been in use for a good 50+ years prior to Casablanca gracing the screens. It’s a toast, a wish for your health. And the people watching would have known the significance of it, particularly the displaced Europeans knowing that they’ll likely never see their loved ones again.
Cause here’s looking at you kid– and the unspoken meaning behind it– one last time.
Rick isn’t just letting go of the love of his life in that scene. He’s using his position of power and privilege as an American with access to outside networks (predominantly crime related, but hey) to help her escape the country with her highly persecuted and sought after husband to a place of safety.
He had the option to just take her himself and run– and her husband even urges him to do so at one point. But Rick endeavors to get them both to safety, and he shows up armed to do so. He fights for their freedom even though he doesn’t have to. He goes from staunchly refusing to help them out of bitterness and cynicism, to realizing that if he doesn’t do something people are going to die. And he doesn’t just save the woman he loves, which would be oh so easy. He saves the man he hates too. Because he can, so he must.
The final scene ends with Renault (played by Claude Rains, an Englishman), head of the local police (and a character largely played for laughs), making the decision not to arrest Rick or anyone else involved when ordered to, actively defying the orders of a fascist. When he and Rick are walking away, he insinuates that he and Rick should join the French Resistance movement in
Brazzaville, and Rick again delivers the other iconic line from the movie: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Casablanca is about forging alliances in the face of tyranny. It’s about doing what is right, even though it goes against the law when the law is corrupt. It’s about being willing to give up your own liberties and comfort to preserve the things you love, even though it won’t directly benefit you. Hell, it might even kill you. But someone’s got to do it.
And yea, it’s old, it’s dated and a product of it’s time and it shows. There are times when the modern viewer will cringe and rightly so. But it was also incredibly out there for its time, when the world was going to absolute hell in a hand basket and it seemed like the walls were closing in, it held many important messages, but primarily: Resist.
So here’s looking at you, kids.
I did not watch the video, and read but a single, italicized word.
The sudden record scratch that sounded in my mind stilled all thought, as I realized
Somehow
Inexplicably
Through my entire childhood and (short) adult life
I had always thought
That Casablanca and Les Miserables were the same thing
Just so everybody knows, this interpretation of the Yale strike is from Fox News. What is actually happening is if a graduate WORKER must stop fasting for health reasons or otherwise collapses, they can start eating and another graduate worker can take their place.
My graduate worker’s union just fought my own university tooth and nail to keep our benefits and make our lives more liveable. Graduate workers and students are paid poverty wages, when we often are supporting our own families while under the poverty line. Don’t let this shitty interpretation of a very real struggle going on in so many US universities color how you view union struggles in higher education.
This is a good lesson in right-wing propaganda. Pretty much anytime you see folks fighting for legal rights and respectful treatment characterized as frivolous like it is here, you can be sure it’s being misrepresented to manipulate you into opposition.
This particular tactic is meant to take advantages of people who don’t know about a particular issue by presenting it in as negative a light as possible, knowing that most folks will reflexively defend their original position on an issue rather than change it when presented with new information.
This doesn’t show exactly what the caption suggests it shows.
In this scene, the lower pilot is dying. He had been captured, managed to escape, and stole a German plane to fly back. The upper pilot–his best friend and rival for the love of Clara Bow*–shot him down, believing he was the enemy. This is him kissing his friend goodbye.
“But that’s still slashy!” you can say. Yep, it is. “You can read this as homoerotic!” Yes, you can. “Why are you denying this? Is it because you think being gay or bi is shameful?” A thousand times no. I am pointing this out because I think this is an important piece of evidence about what homophobia has done to our society and to male expressions of emotion.
In 1927, the obvious reading of this scene, for audiences, was not that this was a romantic kiss. Audiences primarily understood this as an expression of friendship and love, because of course it was perfectly natural for non-romantically involved men to embrace or even kiss, particularly at highly emotional moments. Of course a dying man would want to be held during his last breaths. Of course a guilt- and grief-stricken man would want to kiss his friend goodbye.
However, not very long after this, the commercialization and commodification of homophobia became a powerful force. The market (including Hollywood) began drawing lines and graphs and boxes, declaring which emotions, expressions, habits, and even colors “belonged” to men and to women. This kind of touch, which would not necessarily have been sexualized during many eras or in many cultures, became forbidden to men in the US, Britain and Canada (and many other places, too) within the decade–and is still lost to them today. This scene–a far more honest expression of grief and affection than anything we’re used to seeing in today’s action films–became gay.
Now, if you strongly wish to write “Wings” slash, you can still do so–and not entirely by putting on your goggles! University culture of the 1900s-1920s definitely allowed for a far wider range of sexual behavior than frats do now, etc. I don’t want to police what anybody can and does find in “Wings.” But I think we should acknowledge what we lost when capitalism decided that, for men, kisses could only be sexual.
*You may recognize Clara Bow from that goddamned photo that keeps making the rounds of the internet captioned, “A sex ed class in the 1920s!” so everyone can hoot with derision at the shocked girls in their desks. The photo is actually a still from a movie, and the star, Ms. Bow, is front and center.
“I’m Dale Hanson, it’s getting harder to enjoy the day” lord jebus have marsy!!!!
I love dale hansen so much
I FUCKING SCREAMED AT WORK I LOVE THIS MAN PREACH SIR PREACH
Remember, Dale Hansen is also the one who spoke up about African-Americans taking a knee during the national anthem/White privilege (hint: He’s pro-knee)
And also about rape on college campuses (how it’s not the woman’s fault – warning, very personal):
AND about Michael Sam coming out (hint: he’s calling homophobes out)
Dale knows what’s up. Take note: This is how to be an ally. Especially in Texas.
This man is amazing!!
Here’s one more for yall on trans athletes. I love this guy, especially for his clear willingness to work on his own areas of bias and ignorance
This is how the system of white supremacy operates. The media is used 2 create stereotypes like blk on blk crime.They need black men to fill jail cells for the Prison Indstrial complex
You know what? I’m tired of this. I do not know what exactly they are waiting for. I mean our government comes up with “reasons” to invade other countries, such as Syria, like their government is allegedly violating human rights or something like that. but… I mean for other countries, they do not even have to go deep to bomb the fuck out of this place, they can just look at our media. And this has been happening to people of color since the media has existed.
Other cartoons that the publisher refused to print before firing Rogers:
A political cartoonist who had satirized every President during his 25 years at the paper is fired for drawing Trump cartoons.
“This is precisely the time,” Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto (often the target of Rogers’ cartoons) said, “when the constitutionally protected free press – including critics like Rob Rogers – should be celebrated and supported, and not fired for doing their jobs. This decision, just one day after Trump labeledthe news media is ‘our country’s biggest enemy.’“
Y’know, like dictators always do under fascist regimes.
THINGS THEY WON’T SHOW YOU ON THE NEWS Because media likes to pit people against each other, enraging people, make people look bad and make more money for themselves.
Because GOD FORBID, Muslims, Arabs and especially Palestinians be showed in positive light.
Civil rights violations in the US today doesn’t look like the bad cops on TV, it more often looks like the good cops on TV
How many times in your favorote cop show have they kicked in a door and searched a home without a warrant?
How many times in your favorite cop show have they questioned a suspect without their lawyer present and after the suspect has clearly stated they don’t want to talk?
Special question to fans of Criminal Minds: how many times have the BAU purposefully taunted the unsub in a standoff to the point that they become agressive and the agents then shoot the unsub?
By the way, to be clear on the door kicking thing, I am very specifically talking about the following line I’ve seen countless times:
”Hey, did you hear screams/smell drugs inside?”
And like it’s always shown as a flimsy excuse, yet, still the right and good thing to do
The one where they make the suspect talk without a lawyer is so common it’s actually ridiculous.
Or the one where they get mad at a perp for having a shitty attitude/mocking them and end up losing their temper and using unnecessary force is always framed like the police had no other choice. Because the perp insulted their wife or dead colleague so obviously they deserve some brutality
also when the cops maybe don’t do anything wrong, but the show frames it as “if only we could violate human rights a LITTLE, then we could solve the case!” or even that the law is preventing them from doing their job. e.g. the stodgy old judge won’t give them a search warrant, the arrogant psychiatrist won’t hand over their patient’s information, the team has to do things by the book this time(!) because the FBI/internal affairs/the media are watching them.
the number of times the police stalk someone because they’re “sure” they’re the culprit, even when they have no evidence and their captain tells them not to, but it’s justified in the end because they wee right of course, looking at you SVU.
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.
Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.
But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
-advances in robotics
-advances in miniature robotics
-advances in flight technology
-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
-fucking robot bees, my friend
-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”
But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.
Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable. Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”
The only problem with those robots is a marketing one. Make ‘em anthropomorphic, like pixies, and people would be all over that shit and want them as pets.
I feel morally obligated to remind everyone, when I see discourse like this, that there are vested interests in destroying the public’s faith in
Evidence-based statements
Publicly-funded science
Critical examination of the media
Affection and investment for the natural world
And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.
And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.
We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?
Because we didn’t want to be like those wide-eyed nerds and their silly robot bees.
I think I may have rebligged the root post before without particularly examining how counter to my values it is. Though, I do truly hope that scientific research can fix the woes of ailing bees before we have to implement any robot army based solutions.
every time i see this im reminded of the “shrimp on a treadmill” thing that people were lambasted for being a “waste of taxpayer money”. DESPITE the fact that it was like a few thousand dollars MAX and done by a student in university (with a grant provided BY THE UNIVERSITY) to study how the negative water quality in the gulf of mexico caused by the bp spill would affect oxygen processing in shrimp.
which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.
my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)
anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW.
not to say you shouldnt think critically about WHY something is being studied, but the studies you usually have to look out for are the ones privately funded by groups looking to push an agenda (ones from christian “family” groups on homosexuality/lgbt issues, stuff from people with connections to big oil/etc who do studies on global warming, or on the other end of the political spectrum something from pro-marijuana lobbyist about how marijuana will cure -insertailmenthere-). there could still be good raw data in these studies, assuming it hasnt been altered or data sets excluded, but it will be presented in such a way to make their point so you have to keep that in mind (as well as their methodology and things that could have been intentionally or unintentionally skewing the data, but that goes for any study)
“anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda”
OP turns out to be a Russian propagandist
nice call
Ha! Figures. But seriously, we may need these sooner than later if we want to have fruits like blueberries which aren’t great for honeybees health but which require pollinators.
wupacing 