The Casablanca Threshold

A thought experiment.

How many purely fictional universes are complex enough to support something like the movie Casablanca?

Casablanca does very little of its own exposition, because the school system handles most of the heavy lifting in history class. But think about the number of things the audience needs to know to understand whats going on. France, Germany, the Vichy regime, the situation in ’41, that the US is still neutral, why both sides can sit next to each other in North Africa.

Specifically, think about the scene with the competing national anthems! The movie has to do very little to explain why that woman is crying to "La Marseillaise”, and part of what’s so great about it is that everyone already knows, no one has to narrate to the audience what’s going on. How many fictional settings could pull off a scene with that much subtext and moving parts without needing somebody like Spock to explain everything right before it happened?

Lord of the Rings could do it. Star Trek could probably do it in some cases. Game of Thrones?

This idea spun out of a conversation about Star Wars, and how “Rick’s” is mood it often tries to hit, despite the “vibes-over-lore” worldbuilding meaning that it has no way to do anything like the national anthems scene. (Which is not even remotely a criticism, just a different approach to that kind of fiction. And, to be clear, Star Wars is mostly successful at it.)

It’s an interesting threshold to think about for fictional world-building. Is the world built out enough, and has it already delivered enough exposition, that it could pull off something like Rick’s?