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So far this year, no one has offered to drink my milk- shake.
No one has vowed to extend a lengthy straw across a room (the sort of straw that was banned by the Olympic Spitball Committee) and filch my milkshake.
Why would I expect someone to say such a thing?
Because USA Today promised me that someone would.
In fact, the newspaper promised me that a lot of someones would.
On Feb. 3, USA Today published an article by Scott Bowles in which Bowles claimed that the next hot movie catchphrase is destined to be “I drink your milkshake” from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning film “There Will Be Blood.”
The line is spoken by Daniel Day-Lewis during the movie’s crazy conclusion.
Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview, uses the milkshake metaphor to explain to preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) how he stole oil from Sunday’s land, just before he beats Sunday to death with a bowling pin.
After Bowles’ piece ran, New York Magazine subsequently groused that the line’s “Dickensian grandeur” would soon be “(miniaturized) in the mouths of SportsCenter anchors, scab gag writers, bloggers, and their ilk.”
These assurances aside, no local fan of the film has yet used the milkshake line on me or on anyone in my vicinity. Come to think of it, no one has beaten me with a bowling pin, either (even though I once crossed the picket line during a strike of the Manual Pinsetters Union).
It seems “I drink your milkshake” never achieved its full potential, despite some funny YouTube videos.
What happened?
Why does some movie dialogue become part of the cultural lexicon, and some (most) does not?
A popular movie line strikes a tricky – almost oxymoronic – balance, it seems to me.
It has to make each person feel as if he appreciates the line on a subtler level than millions of other people who simultaneously think they are enjoying it on an equally unique level.
It has to make each person feel unique, yet also part of some exclusive club.
Remember the co-worker who mimicked Austin Powers’ “Yeah, baby!” in 1999 after management announced that the new vending machine would dispense Hot Pockets? That guy thought he was breaking new comedic ground.
By laughing at him, you became part of his New Comedic Ground Club.
It wasn’t until everybody in the universe said “Yeah, baby!” a thousand times apiece that the line lost its capacity for being anything but excruciating in any context and membership in the club sank to zero.
One reason “I drink your milkshake” never really caught on, according to several university professors, is that “There Will Be Blood” never really caught on.
“For most catchphrases to work, … they have to come from recognizable movies,” says Dr. John Grayson Nichols, director of film studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. “Otherwise people can think you are a little crazy.”
“I usually associate (catchphrases) with big Hollywood blockbuster movies, films that get a lot of media attention,” says Robert C. Bulman, associate professor of sociology at St. Mary’s College of California. “Media saturation … concentrates the phenomenon so that even those who have not seen the movies understand the reference.”
Not only was “There Will Be Blood” unseen by a majority of Americans, it’s marginally ballyhooed catchphrase is too esoteric to be easily reused in most social situations.
“If the currency of a catchphrase depends upon its ability to be used in real life and understood by others as being from a movie, then the milkshake quote comes up a bit short because not as many people have seen the film to understand that it is from the film and because it is a strange, rather threatening quote to use in everyday conversation,” Nichols says.
Then again, perhaps the line petered out only because the Internet peters things out pretty quickly.
“I think the spread of movie catchphrases via the Internet can give a short life to them,” Nichols says. “They move quickly from a way of marking exclusivity or allowing the speaker to speak bluntly to then just becoming corny.”
“I really think that we are living in a time when the traditional rules of entertainment have been drastically realigned, if not discarded completely in some cases,” says Timothy D. Hufnagle, a former Bowling Green pop culture professor. “The Internet; digital mass media and communication; a plethora of recreation and leisure (activities) – all these things have shaken up the status quo and leave a lot of options, but little direction.”
Nichols believes it’ll be more difficult if not impossible for movie catchphrases to catch fire in the future the way they did in the past.
“Our fast-paced society burns through these shorthand means of communication quickly if their meanings become too trite and clichéd,” he says. “They become too ordinary and don’t pack the punch they did initially, so we go looking for new catchphrases.
“We are a disposable society,” Nichols says. “We use things up quickly and greedily and look for newer things to use.”
However, Nichols did use the following metaphor to describe our quick and greedy use of newer and newer things: “We drink your milkshake.”
So maybe, contrary to everything you’ve read up to now, that line has some life in it after all.
