I just watched Casablanca again — I don’t know how many times I’ve watched it. It’s an excellent movie of its kind — well plotted, well paced, full of suspence and wit and romance. It is not profound. Plumb its depths and you will come up with nothing. It is entertainment, and that is all.
But I could enjoy it without having to deny my nature, which is that of a 76 year old man. I am an adult. “Casablanca” was made for adults. And it came toward the end of the times when mass entertainment was made for adults.
I believe that popular entertainment, by and large, stopped being suited for adults shortly after World War II. It began to be suited for adolescents, the reason being that people that age now had money to spend on entertainment. In the newly prosperous America, there were jobs for teenagers — part time, poorly paid, but enough make adolescents the arbiters of taste in mass entertainment. And it is an unhealthy taste.
In the preface to his long poem “Endymion”, John Keats wrote:
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.
Mawkishness and bitters, indeed. It’s the way our world is and will be for who knows how long. I feel like reading ‘The Spoils of Poynton.”
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