Morocco

Morocco is my favorite movie, and I've visited it on a regular basis over the last 35 years. When a movie becomes so much a part of one's life, one watches it differently: it becomes a psychic space to explore, and whole viewings might be devoted to coaxing details out of the background, or creating a new schema and seeing how extensively one can apply it. One of the things that makes film buff culture important to me is that many such movies are held in high collective regard, and we all have our own maps to these private worlds that we can access and compare at a moment's notice.

Here are a few new things that occurred to me about Morocco after seeing it on Saturday at MOMA:

• The extras in the film really take up psychological space: hunching over tables in robes and turbans, fanning themselves silently in sweltering heat, impassive and unknowable. Unlike most extras, they are powerful, heavy, substantial.
• For a film in which von Sternberg claimed that he tried to avoid any resemblance to reality, Morocco contains a fair amount of plausible detail. We hear characters speak Arabic, French, and Spanish, all languages that are prevalent in Morocco. French is spoken by aristocrats in the film, and Spanish by the peasant women who are the prey of the Legionnaires: I wonder whether this class distinction reflects a real-world stratification, as seems plausible. Many of the Legionnaires are German and speak with a German accent, which Wikipedia tells me is historically accurate. There is at least one piece of music in the film (for the erotic dance in the cafe in the film's penultimate scene) that sounds like European Orientalism, but perhaps this cafe caters to Europeans; one scene previous (Amy Jolly's visit to the hospital), we hear an authentic Arabic song and singer.
• Many have noted how Sternberg's characters are forever playing idly with objects, with an air of detachment that suggests that their minds are on some abstraction even as their hands make a random connection to the physical. For some reason I had never noticed how this penchant makes one of the most powerful moments in the film: Tom Brown's proposition to Amy in her dressing room, the first of three times when Amy's conscious reservations about Tom blow away like smoke when reality tests her. After the proposition, and before she accepts, Amy hits the rim of the glass in her hands twice, as if testing to see that she is still in the material world.
• All three lovers are used by love in different ways. Tom's realization that he is in love, his becoming "decent," means to him that he must avoid Amy: his conversion is partial, he still doesn't see himself as a fit partner. Amy is surprised by love again and again: though she acts like a madwoman on several occasions, she cannot get it through her head that she is now powerless. And for la Bessiere, of course, love is neither self-abnegation nor compulsion, but service.