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Trickstering: Casablanca and Resistance
- Leigh Melander, PhD
- Mar 23
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 3
We are living in a moment where trickster energy is weaving through much of the momentum in the world. Where truth lies, who holds power, and whether our perceptions of what’s happening around us is uncertain, as it shatters many of our ideas about how things work.
This energy is truly uncomfortable, as trickster energy often is, but I’m finding myself wondering about both its oppositional and the generative power, as well as its ability to disquiet us, both individually and collectively.
The trickster in resistance: Casablanca
“Two German Couriers were found murdered in the desert. The unoccupied desert. This is the customary roundup of refugees, liberals, and of course, beautiful young girls by Inspector Renault.”
This is how Casablanca (1942) begins, rounding up suspicious characters (or as Renault says later, in a wonderful trickster metaphor, the “usual suspects”), in the ongoing dance between compliance and complicity, self-interest and selflessness, courage and defiance that runs through the film. While Renault is the most obvious trickster figure in the film, ultimately, almost no one is exactly who they seem to be, and truth and perception are fluid and unsettling. Ambiguity reigns; Sidney Rosensweig in Casablanca and Other Major Films of Michael Curtiz, cites the different names that each character gives Rick (Richard, Ricky, Mr. Rick, Herr Rick and boss) as evidence of the different meanings that he has for each person (82).
Laszlo is indomitable, elegant, and utterly vulnerable not to the Nazis, but to Ilsa, who in turn chooses passion over righteousness. And of course Rick, who “sticks his neck out for nobody,” finds the courage for both of them to reach for that rightness at the cost of their happiness.
Resisting “The” trickster
What is most intriguing about the film, though, is that the archetype is not fixed, but instead an energy that touches everyone in the film.
Place itself is liminal. Casablanca operates under its own ever-shifting rules, outside of both the structure and destruction of Europe during the Second World War. Vichy, the headquarters of the French government collaborating with the Nazis, is the site of volcanic springs that offer mineralized water that promise health and new beginnings. And always, the plane to Lisbon offers an escape to order and the freedom that the United States promised in the era.
I am reminded of David L. Miller’s insights in lectures where he has challenged the crystallization and literalization of archetypes into static figures by stressing the importance of thinking of archetypal versus archetype. It shifts archetypes from “what” into “how,” and even “why.” Understanding archetype this way, as movement rather than a fixed set of character traits, as more of a verb rather than a noun, deepens our intuiting of the power of archetypal thinking. Instead of being a conclusion, archetypes are instead flowing metaphors that exist and move both within us and outside ourselves. They provide openings rather than answers. By resisting our inclinations to say, “so-and-so is a trickster,” we can look at the movement and essence animating not just people, but also places, stories, and ourselves. Archetypes then become genuinely mythic, as metaphors that touch upon ideas that are larger than we can completely wrap our arms around, rather than simply stereotypes.
Instead of being a conclusion, archetypes are instead flowing metaphors that exist and move both within us and outside ourselves
Tricksters, human nature, shadow, and resistance
C.G. Jung argues that the trickster archetype is undifferentiated human consciousness, reflecting the earliest humans and what he perceived as psyches that had yet developed. He states:
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.
Perhaps, if we resist the temptation to perceive ourselves as “civilized” and somehow beyond this hermetic, base-line part of being human, we can begin to wrestle with our own shadows and reshape the mobilization of cultural shadows.
But ultimately, I am inspired by Campbell, with the idea that the trickster “represents the power of the dynamic of the total psyche to overthrow programs” (00:00:32-00:00:40). We can join Rick and Renault, unleash the usual suspects, and exhale, “Vive la résistance.”
MythBlast authored by:
Leigh Melander, PhD has an eclectic background in the arts and organizational development, working with inviduals and organizations in the US and internationally for over 20 years. She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into the world of imagination. Her writings on mythology and imagination can be seen in a variety of publications, and she has appeared on the History Channel, as a mythology expert. She also hosts a radio who on an NPR community affiliate: Myth America, an exploration into how myth shapes our sense of identity. Leigh and her husband opened Spillian, an historic lodge and retreat center celebrating imagination in the Catskills, and works with clients on creative projects. She is honored to have previously served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Board of Directors.
This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Trickster.
Latest Podcast
New Episodes of Pathways will begin again in June. In this episode from Season 1, (Episode 8) Joseph Campbell speaks at the Wainwright House in Rye, New York, in 1966, discussing mystical experiences. Host, Brad Olson, offers an introduction and commentary after the talk in this episode of the Pathways podcast.
This Week's Highlights
"Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being."
-- Joseph Campbell