A tale of two idealists

A week ago my friends and I arranged to watch Citizen Kane together. This evening we gathered again to watch Casablanca. We deemed it fitting to begin the semester with these two movies, which often grapple for the top honor on lists of great American films. I also considered it necessary because several of us had never seen either.

I observed last week after finishing Citizen Kane that it and Casablanca are spiritual mirror images. Kane portrays the destruction of a great reformer. Casablanca depicts the rehabilitation of an influential misanthrope. Both men are charismatic idealists. The key factor in both stories is love. Therefore, I was looking forward to the chance to compare the two movies tonight.

In the first film, Charles Foster Kane remains throughout his life a driven, crusading champion of the people. He destroys himself and those who love him, however, by proving himself unable to love anyone. He yearns for love throughout his life but fails to give himself to others; he uses others to define and glorify himself. His high abstract ideas mean nothing in his own life. This is his ruin.

Casablanca's Richard Blaine, on the other hand, desires not to love. Having been betrayed, he pushes away almost every person and every cause. He does not pretend to greatness or conviction. Ideals have given way to particulars; politics are repulsive and principles are cant, but practicalities and expedience are absolute.

Bitter and cynical, Rick does not pretend to love his fellow man. He is loyal to no abstract principle; he is loyal only to those few men who offer him unconditional loyalty first. I believe that these men are the ones who save him. Rick does not expect love, but they offer it nevertheless -- the reverse of Kane's condition.

Then Ilsa reappears, as neither Rick nor she expected. She is the reason for Rick's bitterness, and her arrival in Casablanca shatters the icy peacefulness of the Café Americain, Rick's own Xanadu. Ilsa truly loved Rick once; indeed, she still loves him, despite having remained faithful to another pledge. Unable to choose between two contradictory commitments, and unwilling to forsake Rick again, Ilsa finally places herself in Rick's hands. "You have to think for the both of us," she tearfully tells him. "I can't think anymore."

The woman he loves has forced Rick to take responsibility not only for himself but for someone else. He can no longer sit by to watch humanity destroy itself. He must answer for the fate of another human. He no longer values his own security above all else. There is something he loves more.

In a world that despises weakness, the only way for Rick to honor himself is to honor others. Amidst human catastrophe, self-sacrifice is the only way for him to save himself. This is the lesson that Charles Foster Kane never learns in the other film.

I have a deep interest in both of these stories. I maintain that all cynics are idealists; cynicism presupposes a clear distinction between the concepts of good and evil, at least as sharp as anything held by the optimist. As an idealist with a well-developed awareness of the darkness of our age, I find the stories in both films deeply moving. Kane's life warns of the original depravity that can control even a man of great moral force, while Rick's story hints that meaning may be found even in the blackest times and is worth fighting for. Neither movie attempts to disguise the wickedness that rules the affairs of men. Both warn of the evil that threatens to destroy those with open hearts.

It's sort of like the gospel, really. Kane's strength is the law; Rick's is love. Good works fail and condemn, but love endures and redeems. Both men are sinners, but one of them knows it.