#MovieFailMondays: Casablanca
Every week we bring you a new movie that teaches us about a logical fallacy you’ll find on the LSAT. Who says Netflix can’t help you study?
Bought for the then-record sum of $20,000 after a professional script analyst called it “sophisticated hokum,” Everybody Comes to Rick’s was adapted by Warner Bros. studios to great success. Unlike many other classics, Casablanca received rave reviews, and word-of-mouth led to a solid initial run.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time, Casablanca tells the tale of a motley assortment of people stranded in Morocco thanks to the Nazi invasion of most of Europe. Tensions exist between the Nazis and French Resistance fighters who live in the town, but Rick (Humphrey Bogart), a jaded American, runs a lounge and wants no trouble.
While the intrigue associated with that could make a movie on its own, this is Hollywood, so a love story has to be tacked on. Enter Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund, Rick’s former love interest and current wife to a Resistance fighter named Victor Lazslo.
A love triangle develops as Ilsa is torn between the passionate relationship she shared with Rick and the respectful love she has for her husband. It’s probably a metaphor for something. But while English majors are trying to figure that out, the rest of us are swept up in a thrilling melodrama.
Embraces are shared. Violence is threatened. Crime and espionage are used for good and ill. Nazis are outsung by the French. And flashbacks are had.
In the end, Rick puts Ilsa on a plane out of Morocco with Victor, so that the Resistance fighter can continue to fight the Nazis with his wife by his side. If she stayed, after all, they probably would have regretted it. Maybe not that day, or the day after, but soon, and for the rest of their lives.
In placing Ilsa on that plane, Bogie was avoiding a logical flaw – the temporal fallacy. While the two of them have a strong connection reinforced by their passionate time together, the past doesn’t guarantee the future. Things that were associated together previously might diverge in the future, and prior trends don’t guarantee future success. Ilsa and Rick loved each other, but if she stayed behind in Morocco, it never would have been the same.
This fallacy is also known as the gambler’s fallacy, as it’s invoked constantly at Vegas to say that a certain result is “due.” But while Rick was a gambling man, the stakes were too high in this case, and he avoided falling into that logical trap.
Sample questions:
PT54, S2, Q19
PT33, S1, Q24
PT45, S4, Q20
PT60, S3, Q6
PT33, S1, Q25