Heroes and Heterotopias: Geopolitical Intrigue in the Warner Brother's Casablanca

This article examines the Warner Brothers film Casablanca (1942) as a rich site of geopolitical meaning-making, situating the film within the broader context of American propaganda during the early stages of World War II. Drawing on frameworks from critical geopolitics and cultural geography, the analysis argues that the film operates as a carefully constructed geographical text, deploying maps, globes, newsreel footage, and layered spatial imaginaries to build popular support for US intervention in the war. The article traces how the film moves deliberately across geographical scales from the global to the regional to the local to construct a series of politically charged spatial oppositions: Europe as imprisoned, America as free; the Orient as corrupt, the West as redemptive. Rick's Café Américain is interpreted through Foucault's concept of heterotopia as a paradoxical counter-site in which competing national identities, political allegiances, and spatial logics collide and are ultimately resolved in favour of Allied intervention. The character of Rick Blaine is read as an embodiment of American isolationism whose gradual political awakening mirrors the broader trajectory of US foreign policy toward engagement. Situating Casablanca within the critical geopolitics tradition developed by scholars such as Ó Tuathail and Dalby, the article argues that popular cultural texts are significant and frequently underexamined vehicles through which geopolitical discourses are naturalised and disseminated to mass audiences. The analysis concludes by calling on geographers to engage more systematically with popular media as constitutive of geographical imagination and political consent