from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:
According to the traditional aesthetic canons, Casablanca is
not or ought not to be a work of art, if the films of Dreyer,
Eisenstein, and Antonioni are works of art. From the standpoint of
formal coherence Casablanca is a very modest aesthetic product.
It is a hodgepodge of sensational scenes put together in a rather
implausible way, the characters are psychologically improbable, and the
actors’ performance looks slapdash. That notwithstanding, it is a great
example of filmic discourse, and has become a cult movie.
[...]
When we do not know how to deal with a story, we resort to stereotypical
situations since, at least, they have already worked elsewhere. Let’s
take a marginal but significant example. Every time Laszlo orders a
drink (and this happens four times), his choice is always different: (1)
Cointreau, (2) a cocktail, (3) cognac, (4) whisky—once, he drinks
champagne but without having ordered it. Why does a man of ascetic
character demonstrate such inconsistency in his alcoholic preferences?
There is no psychological justification for this. To my mind, every time
this kind of thing happens, Curtiz is unconsciously quoting similar
situations in other films, in an attempt to provide a reasonably
complete range.
[...]
Obliged to invent the plot as they went along, the scriptwriters
threw everything into the mix, drawing on the tried and tested
repertoire. When the choice of tried and tested is limited, the result
is merely kitsch. But when you put in all the tried and tested elements, the result is architecture like Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia: the same dizzying brilliance.
Casablanca is a cult movie because it contains all the
archetypes, because every actor reproduces a part played on other
occasions, and because human beings do not live a “real” life but a life
portrayed stereotypically in previous films. [...] Casablanca stages the powers of narrativity in the natural
state, without art stepping in to tame them.
[...]
When all the archetypes shamelessly burst in, we plumb Homeric depths.
Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting—because we
become obscurely aware that the clichés are talking to one another and
holding a get-together. As the height of suffering meets sensuality, and
the height of depravity verges on mystical energy, the height of
banality lets us glimpse a hint of the sublime.
from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:
In order to transform a work into a cult object, you must be able to
take it to pieces, disassemble it, and unhinge it in such a way that
only parts of it are remembered, regardless of their original
relationship with the whole. In the case of a book, it is possible to
disassemble it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of
excerpts. And so it happens that a book can give life to a cult
phenomenon even if it is a masterpiece, especially if it is a complex
masterpiece. Consider the Divine Comedy, which has given rise
to many trivia games, or Dante cryptography, where what matters for the
faithful is to recall certain memorable lines, without posing themselves
the problem of the poem as a whole. This means that even a masterpiece,
when it comes to haunt the collective memory, can be made ramshackle.
But in other cases it becomes a cult object because it is fundamentally,
radically ramshackle. This happens more easily with a film than a book.
To give rise to a cult, a film must already be inherently ramshackle,
shaky and disconnected in itself. A perfect film, given that we cannot
reread it as we please, from the point we prefer, as with a book,
remains imprinted in our memory as a whole, in the form of an idea or a
principal emotion; but only a ramshackle film survives in a disjointed
series of images and visual high points. It should show not one central
idea, but many. It should not reveal a coherent “philosophy of
composition,” but it should live on, and by virtue of, its magnificent
instability. And in fact the bombastic Rio Bravo is apparently a cult movie, while the perfect Stagecoach is not.
from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:
According to Eliot, Hamlet is the result of an unsuccessful
fusion of several previous versions, so the bewildering ambiguity of the
main character is due to the difficulty the author had in putting
together several topoi. Hamlet is certainly a disturbing work
in which the psychology of the character strikes us as impossible to
grasp. Eliot tells us that the mystery of Hamlet is clarified
if, instead of considering the entire action of the drama as being due
to Shakespeare’s design, we see the tragedy as a sort of poorly made
patchwork of previous tragic material.
[...]
In several ways the play is puzzling, disquieting as none of the others is. Shakespeare left in unnecessary and incongruent scenes that ought to
have been spotted on even the hastiest revision. Then there are
unexplained scenes that would seem to derive from a reworking of Kyd’s
original play perhaps by Chapman. In conclusion, Hamlet is a
stratification of motifs that have not merged, and represents the
efforts of different authors, where each one put his hand to the work of
his predecessors. So, far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the
play is an artistic failure.
NB: In fact, what T.S. Eliot says about Hamlet in "Hamlet and His Problems" can be said virtually about any other Shakespeare play, as Hamlet is neither "more disquieting" nor less "ramshackled" and "unhinged" than almost any other of the Bard's plays, specifically his "great tragedies" (not excluding even the fairly brief and compact—possibly even severly cut—Macbeth).
from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:
The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature. The book is full of holes. [...] This novel is highly reprehensible from the standpoint of literary style and, if you will, from that of aesthetics. But The Count of Monte Cristo is not intended to be art. Its intentions are mythopoeic. Its aim is to create a myth.
Oedipus and Medea were terrifying mythical characters before Sophocles and Euripides transformed them into art, and Freud would have been able to talk about the Oedipus complex even if Sophocles had never written one word, provided the myth had come to him from another source, perhaps recounted by Dumas or somebody worse than him. Mythopoeia creates a cult and veneration precisely because it allows of what aesthetics would deem to be imperfections.
In fact, many of the works we call cults are such precisely because they are basically ramshackle, or “unhinged,” so to speak.
