Tyler FolkedahlEmily HillHonors 2913/5/15Heres Looking At You, KidAs we started watching Casablanca, I was thinking about some of the movie tropes present in the film, and how they may have contributed to the films success as a cult classic. Then, to my delight, I read the excerpt in The Cult Film Reader entitled Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage by Umberto Eco. His article discussed the way that Casablanca utilizes nearly every film archetype, which he refers to as intertextual frames. By Ecos definition, by intertextual frames I meant stereotyped situations derived from preceding textual experience (Eco). The more I thought about this situation, the more questions it raised than answered. What is it that draws us to these intertextual frames, and how is it that they come to feel so relatable, so nostalgic? We know at this point that oftentimes a sense of nostalgia is one of the driving forces behind the cultivation of a cult audience, as stated by Mathijs and Mendik. But why do these far-off experiences entice us so much? Perhaps its our own desire to romanticize our own lives, and find ways to tie back to situations of grandeur and adventure that we will never experience.Eco states in his article that Casablanca is a hodgepodge of sensational scenes strung together implausibly, its characters are psychologically incredible, its actors act in a mannered way (Eco), and it is because of this fans can break, dislocate, unhinge [the film] so that one can remember only parts of it, reducing it to a series of excerpts (Eco). According to Eco, a great work is always a whole, and cannot be separated into small, bite-sized chunks. Cult films lie outside of this realm of great work, and are therefore more easily separated into manageable morsels. This allows us to romanticize ideas of loss, despair, and great adventure in ways that we could not for other films. For example, not many people would claim to long for the self-sacrifice presented in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but many would lust after the broken love story present in Casablanca. Both of these films center around the horror of relationships and societies torn apart by war and occupation, but only The Boy in the Striped Pajamas presents us fully with the grief of that situation. There are glimmers that show hope in desperate situations, but at the end of the day it is just that: a desperate situation. This is not the case with Casablanca.Casablanca hints at the pain of the war and skirts around the edges, but even these scenes are underscored with romantic full-string orchestrations and longing glances. Because of this, we are able to separate the romance, and imagine a love that grows hotter and more epic in spite of the war, not one that dies because of it. This image, repeated time and time again, becomes Ecos intertextual archetype, and creates a nostalgic void in our hearts. This void then seeps into our own day to day lives and interactions, causing us to long for lost loves torn apart by violence, epic romantic escapades that stand the test of time despite years apart. We cant see the true despair that realizes a situation as we could with a great work, only the bits of good that would in reality be greatly overshadowed by the rest.As for Casablanca, these are only a couple of the twenty four intertextual archetypes that Eco identifies in his article. I feel that this idea of lost love is the most effective in illustrating this point, because love and partnership are nearly universal experiences, and in the western world the ideas of romance presented in Casablanca have become ever more permeating. Next time I get wrapped up in a story of adventure and loss, Ill try to take a moment to think about what it is that Im really longing for.