2.1. You Must Remember This
Think of a favorite movie. Why does
it resonate with you? Do you have a favorite line? Why does that line work?
What ties it to its context? Conversely, what makes it . . . timeless?
If you’re into old classics, you
might think of the line “Play it, Sam!” from Casablanca, which was filmed
eighty years ago, in the midst of the Second World War. The movie is seen by
some as the greatest of all time. A version of the line (“Play it once, Sam,
for old time’s sake”) is uttered first by Ilsa (Ingrid Bergmann). It carries
mystery. The audience has seen the conversation from its start, and no referent
has been provided for the pronoun “it.” Despite Sam’s protestations (“don’t
know what you mean, Miss Ilsa”), it quickly becomes evident that Ilsa and Sam
are very much on the same wavelength. To put this in the standard language of
semantic theory, interpretation of the pronoun depends on common ground, and we
infer that there is much common ground between Ilsa and Sam. The line is
repeated by different characters, echoing in our minds, just as the referent of
it, namely the song “As Time Goes By,” provides a musical leitmotif. Together,
they strengthen resonances across scenes, picking out dots between which we
draw lines.
The second time we hear “Play it,”
the line is delivered by Ilsa’s slick saloon-owning ex-lover, Rick (Humphrey
Bogart). Rick’s rendition is the best known, though typically misquoted as
“Play it again, Sam.” Although there is again no explicit antecedent for the
pronoun, by this point we are well enough attuned to the characters that we
know the referent immediately. But constant it is not: the referent changes:
when Ilsa’s husband, anti-Nazi resistance fighter Victor (Paul Henried) says,
“Play it!” he is referring not to “As Time Goes By,” but to “La Marseillaise,”
presented as a stirring symbol of free French resistance. Still, the resonances
with the earlier occurrences of the line are strong. “As Time Goes By” has
already been tied sentimentally to France with extensive flashback montages,
and if Victor is not singing from quite the same score as Ilsa and Rick, he is
nonetheless hitting shared themes. Despite their different nationalities
(Norwegian, Czech, and “Drunkard,” as Rick famously muses), we see the common
ground of the movie’s love triangle stars as much in their common use of
language as in their common ideals, and in the united front they present
against the evil of their day.
To watch the movie is, in part, to
understand the attunements between the characters. But perhaps more important
to our current project is the question of how viewers’ attunements change as
they watch the movie. How can we understand the way that the viewer is drawn
in, and why?
Casablanca is not a pill that people
swallow, or a box containing a set of propositions. That’s not how it works. It
works by engaging existing attunements and providing a path for people to focus
their energies and emotions, through a process of what we will term harmonization.
Casablanca has many resonances, and those resonances helped shape collective
attunements both during the war and afterward, attunements to an ideology in
which Americans are plucky yet indefatigable capitalists representing freedom
in the face of authoritarianism, all in this together, everybody doing their
bit, sometimes it’s dirty work but the ends justify the means, and in which
even one of the most intensely romantic loves must be sacrificed for the
greater cause of country and freedom from oppression.
It is relevant here that the
effects the movie has on the viewer are not mere random happenstance, for the
movie was made with a quite explicit goal of drawing in a broad range of people
and helping them see the world in a certain light. It is a movie that was made
in the wake of the formation of the US Office of War Information under the
directorship of Elmer Davis, which had issued a call for patriotic support of the
war effort from the movie industry, and which was charged with overseeing a
wide range of media production, including the output of Hollywood studios. Here’s
why Davis saw movies as an important part of the war effort: “The easiest way
to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go in through
the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize they are being
propagandized.”
An overarching concept of interest
throughout this book is attunement to ideology. We seek to describe a model of
attunement that is relevant both for the strong resonances between the
characters in a story, and for the ways in which something like a movie, which
does not tell us what to believe or why, can be a powerful vehicle for
ideological transmission. It is crucial here that attunements can change
gradually. This may result from repeated exposure to propaganda or from
exposure to a changed world; it is a well-worked theme in literature, history,
and psychology that people may gradually become inured to events that were
previously unimaginable but have become commonplace, and can adaptively develop
ways of living in circumstances that they would have thought unsustainable. The
gradualness of these processes implies, we think, that attunement is not an
all-or-nothing thing, but that people can be attuned to something by degrees.
We will be interested in this chapter and the next in the mechanisms by which
degrees of attunement change. There are
various sources of change in attunement, including reflective reasoning and random
drift. Our interest is specifically in communication as a factor in creating, strengthening,
maintaining, and destabilizing such attunements.
An ideology could creep upon an entire society gradually,
without anyone in particular, even the elites, fully understanding the system
they build and the ideology they propagate. At some point a country might find
itself in peril, with no explicit theory of how it got there. In our view, what
happens in such cases is this: the strong resonances of messaging it was
exposed to (or exposed itself to) lead to it slowly becoming attuned to an
ideology it cannot survive. But this is not to say that the effects of strongly
resonant messaging are always so dire. Casablanca, in combination with a much
larger collection of wartime messaging and educational policies, had positive
effects for the war effort and for the country, effects of bringing people
together, of developing common attunements. (66-68)
Beaver, David and Jason Stanley. The Politics of Language. Princeton University Press, 2023.
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