Casablanca's Anxiety About American Intervention

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After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, America was thrown into a war it wasn’t entirely committed to, dividing the nation on whether intervention was the right path for the country. Released as America entered the North Africa Campaign, Casablanca (1942) contained the anti­intervention sentiments dismissed by the events of Pearl Harbor, separating it from the churn of studio films offered to American audiences at the time. But it is Casablanca’s promise to overcome the audience's anxiety about American intervention through making sense of their situation that “truly summoned the frontier mythology to support its contemporary story of refugees fleeing the Nazis” (RAY, 1985:89). Like metaphors, myths help us to make sense