The Weekly Pleasant: Coconuts, Rocket Design, Ridiculous Puzzle Challenge

And a long, long discussion of Casablanca!

I’m getting the cartoon out of the way right off because I’ve got a lot of text this week.

CASABLANCA REACTION REACTION

As an autistic person, I occasionally get into very intense sensory ruts. Usually it’s a song I’ll listen to over and over a hundred times in a single week or two until my brain gets over it. But sometimes it’s also programming. Two years back, for example, I was obsessed with the radio show “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar” and listened to the entire multiyear run several times over the next few months. I can still identify any episode from the first few lines.

But the big new thing for me this past week has been Casablanca reaction videos. There are a LOT of people out there on YouTube who have channels where they watch movies—putatively for the first time—and record their reactions. On one hand, this is as baffling a form of entertainment as watching people play video games or watching people unwrap boxes, both of which, it turns out, are hugely profitable forms of entertainment that have only existed since YouTube started revealing how weird we are as a species. On the other hand, as much as I never would have guessed that watching other people watch a movie was entertainment, I have to confess that for the past several days I’ve not only been entertained; I’ve been obsessed. Most of these videos are about 30 to 40 minutes long (they can’t show the whole film for Fair Use reasons), and there are a LOT of them. I think I’ve seen 30 by now.

Here’s what I’ve discovered after watching dozens of 20- and 30-something YouTubers encounter Casablanca blow by blow. (Warning: contains spoilers for “Casablanca”)

1. When Ugarte asks Rick to hold the letters of transit, most YouTubers instantly assume that Ugarte is setting up Rick for a sting of some sort. That would never have occurred to me.

2. As soon as we enter Rick’s Cafe Americain, you see people light up. The music still works. Everyone loves it. They think Sam’s amazing. If there’s one element of the film that seems timelessly appealing across the board, it’s the music.

3. An absolutely astonishing number of people cannot figure out what’s going on when the young bride, Annina, tells Rick about her fears about getting a visa from Renault by “doing a bad thing.” They express absolute bafflement and for some reason don’t pick up on the two earlier references to Renault’s sexual predation. I would have expected the younger generation to be extra sensitive to sex pests, but they seem to have also never needed to censor themselves, or to learn to read a politely censored conversation.

4. No one recognizes “La Marseillaise.” It is very common for the YouTubers to sense a break at this scene and start talking without realizing how important it is until halfway through. (Relatedly, they also have no idea what the Cross of Lorraine in Berger’s ring means, nor the Free France literature is when the man’s shot in the first scene, but that’s more forgivable, since I didn’t know what they meant either my first time. Why would we?)

5. A surprising number of viewers claim to be genuinely unsure who could get killed (they really worry about Laszlo going to the meeting) or what Rick’s going to do. When the ending arrives, they’ve been surprised multiple times in a row.

THINGS I PERSONALLY REALIZED AFTER THIS SUDDEN VIEWFEST:

1. In the very beginning, when Rick refuses a German entry into his gambling area, the man says something that has always sounded to me like “This is outrageous! I shall report it to the Angritte!” as he stalks off. I assumed this was some French international diplomatic organ like an embassy. It never occurred to me to look it up. What he says is "I shall report it to The Angriff!” Der Angriff, it turns out, was a Nazi newspaper. He was threatening Rick with the 1942 equivalent of a bad Yelp review.

2. For some reason, precisely because you’re supposed to picture Laszlo running from shrubbery to shrubbery under sweeping headlights, living in freight cars, always only one step ahead of the Gestapo hard behind him, you forget that, technically, Laszlo is really loaded. Ugarte says he was going to sell the letters [to Laszlo] “for more money than I’ve ever dreamed of.” Since he smuggles desperate humans for a living, this is saying a lot. Laszlo later offers to buy the letters from Rick for up to 200,000 francs—which, with a little Googling, seems to amount to 40,000 dollars in today’s money. He’s no millionaire, but that’s an awful lot to throw around. I wonder where he was keeping it.

3. I have always cringed at Ilsa’s line where she tells Rick “I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore. You’ll have to do the thinking for both of us.” But this week it hit me: Back in Paris, by refusing to meet at the hotel, and then leaving Rick at the station (so he wouldn’t stick around and get picked up by the Gestapo), Ilsa had done the thinking for both of them the first time around. You could argue that it’s now Rick’s turn.

4. I never really appreciated that the ACTUAL reason the ending works is not because Bogart does the noble thing, but because, in the eleventh hour, RENAULT does the noble thing—the last guy you’d expect, so it’s a genuine surprise. (And it’s 100% necessary; without his twist, there’s no happy ending.) But his ambivalence about the Germans is always present from the first meeting, and it gets subtly more acute as the movie goes on, so it’s a perfect example of a surprise that you were, in fact, always being prepared for.

5. Even though I have now seen some 30 iterations of this tracery over the film, I STILL get choked up EVERY DAMN TIME at the end. I’m starting to think it might be one of the most solidly designed screenplays ever made (if we could tweak point 5). There’s almost no room to even breathe, much less get bored.

There is a helluva novel waiting for whoever wants to retell this story from Sam’s point of view.

POSTLOG: AN AMAZING IDEA FOR A SAM STORY

The only downside to “Casablanca” is the representation of Sam, which, while not deliberately insulting, falls into the category of “The best white people could do in 1942.” In traditional fan fashion, I have always tried to read the story as if Sam had more agency than the script technically gives him, but it’s never perfect. And it’s all the more frustrating because you could fix it in twelve lines of dialogue if you just went back in time.

BUT! While looking up various bits of information about Casablanca, I ran across a fan theory about Sam that has made me very excited. It goes like this: if we assume that Rick is not 37 (as the Germans have him) but more like 43 (as Bogart actually was), then it’s possible that Richard Blaine could have served in WWI. If he’d been born and raised in Harlem (we know he’s from New York), he could have been familiar with the 369th Divistion (The Harlem Hellfighters) and gone on to be one of the white officers serving with the Harlem Hellfighters (a segregated company active in WWI). Although the US was officially neutral, historically many of the Harlem Hellfighters acted as mercenaries to run guns to Ethiopia, and supported loyalist Spain against the fascists. If Richard and Sam did these operations together (both as officers?), it would definitely forge a friendship that would be at odds with cultural norms of the time. The 369th spent a lot of time in France during their action, and this may have led to Rick and Sam choosing Paris as a second home.

So why can’t Rick return to America? This fan theory suggests that it’s nothing that Rick did…but it’s possible that Sam was involved in the Red Summer riots (where black soldiers protested their shitty treatment back in the US after having served abroad), and if something went wrong (someone died or someone important was injured), Sam would be better off fleeing. In this reading, Rick is in Paris (and Casablanca) because he’s loyal to Sam and refuses to see him arrested by his own government. In the meantime, while they’re busy in Paris, Rick is the one who starts doing things that puts a price on his head with the Germans. Given the racism of Nazis in general, possibly any German dossier on Rick would assume Sam was his servant or employee…and maybe that’s the ruse they were putting up in Casablanca, even though Sam gets 25% of the profits at Rick’s Cafe, which suggests he’s more than just an entertainer.

Obviously there are problems with this reading (if Rick’s leaving, why wouldn’t he sell the bar to Sam instead of Ferrari?), but CAN YOU IMAGINE THE MOVIE THIS COULD MAKE, with Sam as a gun-running anti-fascist badass? Someone who’s better than me at writing serious historical fiction could make a lot of money, I think.
I’m just putting that out there. It could be the next Pym or James. And how could there not be a movie?

A TERRIBLY STUPID PUZZLE CHALLENGE!

A friend in the puzzle world, Ben Zimmer, who watches for terrible crossword grids in the wild, posted this as part of a presentation a while back:

The thing I can’t get over is the entry at 31 Across, where the solver has allegedly put in PH_NE, as if they were unsure what the central letter could be. (Although technically you could rule out PHONE because FREE PHONES is the answer to 54 Across, and you’re not supposed to duplicate words in a grid. But let’s assume we have a terrible editor or 54 Across is wrong.)

Then I thought, Wait! Is it possible that there are other words besides PHONE that fit that letter pattern? And the answer is yes: It could also be PHENE, which has three definitions. First, it means “benzene.” Second, it can be a term for “an individual inherited trait” (such as height or eye color). Thirdly—capitalized—it’s the name of a “mythical queen of Attica,” notable for being turned into a vulture after her husband was turned into an eagle. (Zeus being on his usual bullshit.)

So THEN I thought, “Is it possible to write a clue where the answer could plausibly be PHONE or PHENE, and so justify this ad’s illustration?”

I’m happy to say I’ve thought of one, which probably needs tweaking:

31 Across: Source of rings, in plastic

I leave it to the rest of you to see if you can think of others. I’m just happy to have resolved that image in a way that lets me get some sleep.

THE OTHER CARTOON, FOR WHICH I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE

I don’t actually have a poem this time around. Sometimes that happens. But I do have a second original cartoon, which I’m afraid has made me laugh every time I think of it.

Until next time, I hope this has made your day slightly more pleasant.