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That was a funny thing. First a fellow boasted how girls meant nothing to him, that he never thought of them, that they could not touch him. Then a fellow boasted that he could not get along without girls, that he had to have them all the time, that he could not get to sleep without them.
That was all a lie. It was a lie both ways. You did not need a girl unless you thought about them. He learned that in the Army. (Hemingway, 1926, p. 305)
Maybe the most influential moment in American movies is that final scene in Casablanca, as Rick—a loner and a cynic—apparently about to secure the love of Ilsa forever, apparently willing to betray the unimpeachable Victor Lazlo, turns to Ilsa on the tarmac and says: “You're getting on that plane.”
Rick: …Where I'm going you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in ths crazy world. Someday you'll understant that. Not now. Here's looking at you, kid. (Koch, 1992)1
If we have been taken up by the drama to this point we are likely to be struck by the propriety of Rick's decision, this apparent transcendence of self-interest. It is, in some vague way, what we knew Rick would do, what we hoped he would do, and this triumph is underscored for us when Rick's alter-ego, the collaborationist police captain Louis, throws a bottle of Vichy water into a garbage can. “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Rick muses, as the two men disappear into the mist; they are “back in the fight,” off to join DeGaulle in the war against