Yesterday was the seventieth anniversary of Casablanca‘s release. Like any cultured raconteur worth his or her salt, I took a beautiful woman to a see in a theater in Arlington where it was playing for one night only, regaling her with witticisms about my great affection for this movie (she had never seen it in its entirety).

I love the film, but seeing it in crowded theater makes one realize how jaded one is towards objects of such broad cultural relevance. One sees them as cultural touchstones, but not as the things in and of themselves (I’m not trying to get all Heideggerian or Sartrean here, so don’t try to read too much rigor into my phraseology).

For example, there are a lot of very funny lines in Casablanca but when was the last time you laughed while watching it? Or were literally misty-eyed while watching the most moving scenes? It’s probably been a while. And maybe never.

But in a crowded theater, with one’s emotions heightened and feeding off the emotions of one’s fellow human beings, everyone (I included) laughed at the jokes and funny parts and got quiet and teary at Rick’s heartbroken depression and the final good bye.

The film even took on a sort of realism. Not ‘realism’ in the sense of a Mike Leigh film, but in seeing the characters as real people as well as iconic figures of culture, rather than almost exclusively as iconic cultural figures.