Why Morocco is my Flick for You!

By: Christopher Dier-Scalise

Howdy, my name is Christopher. I’m one of the 10 (or so) members of the Senate Theater’s movie selection committee. We’re the ones who decide which films are going to screen each year at the historic Senate Theater. If you’ve been a regular attendee of those Saturday screenings, you would likely recognize many of us as the volunteers who help orchestrate our consistently flawless film presentations.

I apologize for starting this brief article with a direct address between me and you, dear reader. But, since this is a new feature for our online presence, you’re likely going to be hearing more from us about our film selections, why we chose them, why we love them and why we think you will love them, too.

I’m a big fan of this idea. Not only because it gives you, dear Senate fan, a window into the diverse tastes and singular reasoning of the committee members, but it also allows us the space for a richer, more discursive venue to explain why now is the best time to be transported by the 🌠Wonders of Cinema🌠

With introductions out of the way: I think movies are a big load of baloney, and Morocco (1930) is among the phoniest of said baloney. 

That’s part of why I think Morocco is great. And it’s why I love movies in general. They’re fake. Nothing about what you see on screen is “authentic,” even in the most generous sense of the word. Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper are about as believably world-weary as a couple of cruise ship tourists swanning between beachside cabana and hotel wet bar. Mogador, where the majority of the film is set, is minimally represented by a series of palm-and-reed shaded corridors and a few arched entryways. The film features exactly zero actors of North African descent, and every close-up of Dietrich is coated in enough Vaseline to make your eyeballs spin like ball bearings.

But it’s all so gorgeously shot and glamorously performed. Dietrich makes a feast of every shot she’s in, laconically flirting and teasing everything on a set of legs, tables and chairs included. Cooper slouches and swaggers through scenes with a proto-Brando self-assuredness that’s almost childlike. The blinkered view we get of the port city’s streets are a boy’s-adventure caricatures of any internationalist city, just westernized shorthand for the edge of the world. Together, these elements create a neat little capsule of entertainment that concludes with a leap into the unknown, our characters cast out into narrative oblivion and the audience left to reckon with their fates after the credits roll.

But it’s all artifice. All films, even documentaries, are carefully constructed pieces of entertainment meant primarily to elicit a reaction from an audience.

So, as we sit on the precipice of 2026, I’d like you, dear newsletter reader, to embrace the unreality of films like Morocco. Not only because it makes watching movies a whole lot more rewarding – engaging with the decisions and accidents of the filmmaking process – but because, increasingly, that unreality is being erased. Or, more accurately, violated. 

I can’t imagine that is news to anyone reading this, given the inundation of fake news, surveillance capitalism and generative A.I. that has seemed to hijack contemporary society over the past decade. We’re all understandably skeptical of what the media presents to each of us on a daily basis and terrified of what new tricks we need to be on guard for in the future.

However, what’s more alarming, at least to me, is not that it is getting harder to believe anything you see, but that it is getting easier to willfully embrace the fantasy of what others would have you believe. 

Don’t get me wrong, humanity has always been lousy at discerning fact from fiction. There are centuries of proof for how easily we as a species can be misled, tricked, duped and otherwise made suckers of. But now, the stakes of how we engage with media and entertainment have never seemed quite so existential. 

Do I believe movies will save humanity from this imminent cataclysm? Absolutely not.

But being a thoughtful and engaged member of a community with a shared passion might do us some good. That's what I discovered as a volunteer with the Senate. And it's what I hope each of you might find coming to our modest little movie theater and enjoying the films we present. 

So please join us Saturday Jan. 3 as we collectively embark from the worn and darkened streets of the past 12 months into the empty and imposing landscape of a new year. Our only comfort is that we have the choice not to go it alone.