What do you want from the movies this year?
Cheaper tickets? Smarter superheroes? A love story and five watchable Oscar films?
Personally, I would settle for one great line.
You know, the kind that immediately transcends whatever picture gave it birth. It is echoed, referenced, repeated, misquoted, and, finally, embedded so deeply in our brains that we can barely communicate without it. “Show me the money!” “Make my day.” “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
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That memorable lines have evaporated from film is hardly a revelation. When the American Film Institute compiled its list of the 100 best movie quotes in 2005, only one 21st Century quote made the list. That would be the words “My precious,” from The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, released in 2002.
Film hasn’t gotten more eloquent since. Just last week, The Wall Street Journal noted that Keanu Reeves speaks only 380 words in the whole of John Wick: Chapter 4. Reeves, according to the Journal’s John Jurgensen, averages four words per line of dialogue.
“The closest thing he has to a catchphrase?” writes Jurgensen. “’Yeah.’”
Still, great movie lines were never about eloquence. Some of the best, in fact, were frightfully austere, almost abstract, like those elliptical jazz song titles, “Now’s the Time” or “Don’t Be That Way.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger and his credited writers on The Terminator–James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd and William Wisher–didn’t even need a noun to make you remember “I’ll be back.” (For the record, it was Number 37 on the AFI list.)
In truth, great movie lines aren’t so much written as discovered. They are found art–something the audience, for reasons of its own, chooses to extract from the sometimes hopeless muddle of words that find their way into a shooting script. As recently as 2010, that happened with Clash Of The Titans, which, weirdly, had a cultural touchstone on its hands when Liam Neeson, as Zeus, thundered: “Release the Kraken!”
T-shirts, angry kitty memes, voter fraud accusations all followed, not because the film’s four writers had created movie poetry, but rather because viewers had endowed their line with layer upon layer of unanticipated resonance. Why did it happen? Who knows. You might as well ask why we remember “Take the cannoli.”
The sad part is that we, the viewers, have lost the happy habit of collaborating with screenwriters to make something grand of their often modest lines.
If you look closely, the raw material is still there. That line from Everything Everywhere All At Once—“The universe is so much bigger than you realize”—has potential. (And, perhaps, the film’s title.) It’s probably no less profound than “Life is like a box of chocolates.” But I don’t think we’ll be seeing it on the merchandise in some next-generation Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Company thirty years from now.
The audience just hasn’t grabbed hold of the words, any more than it has adopted lines from Top Gun: Maverick or Avatar: The Way Of Water, two films with far higher ticket sales than Everything Everywhere.
But maybe this year. It could happen. The audience could light up to some harmless movie phrase, and make it great. “You had me at hello.” “There’s no crying in baseball.”
I hope.
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