Abstract
Film dialogue has
a substantial presence in the popular circulation and
consumption of films, from the AFI’s celebration of the most
quoted movie lines to viewer practices of memorizing and
reciting favorite lines as a sign of fandom. Yet, the
relationship of movie quotation to fandom and to viewing
pleasure more generally remains unexplored. By considering
quotation as part of the theatricality of everyday life, I
examine its role in both confirming and challenging identities,
particularly gender identities. As a common expression of
fandom, quotation also focuses attention on the ways in which
aspects of the media experience associated with spectacular
fandoms and/or with digital technologies — immersion,
interactivity, and community — intimately define everyday
viewing, though not always in the utopian terms that often frame
discussions of participatory culture. My essay draws from
different sources, including audience surveys, ethnographies,
films, TV shows, music, and the Web, to discover how this mode
of film reception operates in contemporary media- and identity-scapes.
Key
words: fan
studies, theatricality of everyday life, replay culture,
participatory culture, gender identity, karaoke, Movieoke,
performance
In 2005, the AFI
celebrated Hollywood history by producing a three-hour
television special to showcase the top 100 movie quotes of all
time.[2] Proceeding in countdown
fashion, with Titanic’s (1997) ‘I’m king of the world!’
assuming perhaps the less-than-regal 100th spot,
Gone with the Wind (1939) took top honors with ‘Frankly, my
dear, I don’t give a damn’. Second, third, fourth, and fifth
places went, respectively, to: The Godfather’s
(1972) ‘I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse’; On
the Waterfront’s (1954) ‘You don’t understand! I
coulda had class. I coulda been a contender’; The Wizard of
Oz’s (1939) ‘Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas
anymore’; and Casablanca’s (1942) ‘Here’s looking
at you, kid’.
A few years
earlier, in 2002, friends Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt set up
a booth at a tattoo convention to sell T-shirts and other
paraphernalia. To kill time during slow periods, the two quoted
dialogue to each other from Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big
Lebowski (1998); soon, people in adjacent booths joined in,
creating a memorable moment of bonding for all. After this
exchange, Russell and Shuffitt began to think that if a tattoo
convention could draw enthusiasts of skin marking and piercing,
why couldn’t a gathering be held to celebrate their favorite
film? Thus was born the Lebowski Fest, held in Louisville,
Kentucky the same year and attended by 150 fans from across the
US. The Fest has since become an annual celebration that takes
place in locales such as New York City, Austin, Texas, and Los
Angeles, and is attended by thousands of fans, including
international devotees.[3]
While
the former example represents an official industry event, the
latter a fan-generated proceeding, these cases begin to suggest
how movie dialogue, detached from its typical supporting role in
motion pictures, can define the means by which films circulate
culturally and become emblazoned in memory long after theatrical
premieres. Certainly, media industries invest in various ways in
dialogue’s potential for giving films sustained visibility.
Studios and screenwriters pepper scripts with phrases they hope
audiences will embrace — ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ from
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) comes to mind — to
advertise the blockbuster through sales of goods that sport the
phrase, while extending the mega-film’s reach into everyday
parlance. Assisting this process of penetration, popular sayings
from one film often find their way into others; witness, as a
small example of endless inter-media referencing, Shrek the
Third’s (2007) ‘You had me at vermin’, a de-romanticizing
play on Jerry Maguire’s (1996) ‘You had me at hello’.
The
detachability and circulation of film dialogue is thus often
propelled by production and marketing decisions that use
‘catchy’ sound bytes to sell products and attract audiences.[4]
As the AFI
broadcast indicates, movie lines have other functions that serve
the industry as well. Defining the film quote as, ‘A statement,
phrase or brief exchange of dialogue spoken in an American
film’, the AFI’s website envisions quotation as central to
cinema’s cultural impact and legacy. Because viewers cite bits
of dialogue ‘in their own lives and situations’, these citations
become part of popular culture, entering ‘the national lexicon’.
When film phrases gain this kind of
visibility, they also evoke memories of treasured films,
‘ensuring and enlivening’ cinema’s heritage by reigniting
‘interest in classic American movies’
(www.AFI.com).
From this perspective, the well-wrought, eminently repeatable
film line, firmly placed in everyday discourse, links citizens
together through language, while testifying to and promoting the
classics’ enduring relevance.[5]
Beyond
official film institutions, the public market for and interest
in the cachet of movie lines is extensive and diverse. It
stretches from books such as
I Know What You Quoted Last Summer:
Quotes and Trivia from the Most Memorable Contemporary Movies[6]
and refrigerator magnet sets
that allow imaginative rearrangement of famous movies lines for
comic effect (e.g., ‘May a Royale with cheese be with you’) to
online movie databases, such as IMDB.com which features a
‘memorable quotes’ section for many of its film listings, and
other Internet sites that run contests to determine the all-time
top film lines or encourage users to post favorite pieces of
dialogue. In this world of apparently trivial pursuits, the
Lebowski Fest’s origin story provides a different, but related
view of quotation’s importance: it represents the potent role
dialogue plays, not only in expressing fan enthusiasm, but in
building organized fandoms from the ground up. By memorizing
dialogue, Russell and Shuffit internalized the Coen film so
fully that they could spontaneously repeat the script’s choice
parts for sustained mutual entertainment. Trading quotes with
fellow conventioneers led them to recognize the presence of
shared tastes in cinema that then stoked passions for creating a
forum — the Fest — where fans could congregate to pay tribute to
a beloved text. This example further indicates that a film’s
quotability — its existence as a source of catchphrases that
become part of a collective discourse — plays a vital role in
its attainment of long-term popularity.
Selling films and
film goods, commemorating and canonizing Hollywood cinema,
furnishing a genre of movie trivia, knowledge and games, and
acting as a lingua franca amongst fans only begin to describe
film dialogue’s myriad functions in contemporary culture.
Moreover, line quotation is a pervasive feature of audiences’
relationship to multiple media. Songs, such as Ricky Martin’s
‘Livin’ La Vida Loca!’, TV shows, such as Seinfeld (a
veritable goldmine of quotables from ‘Close talker’ to ‘Yada,
yada, yada’), and ad slogans, such as Nike’s ‘Just Do It’, have
been as prominent publicly, if not more so, than The Sixth
Sense’s (1999) ‘I see dead people’. Any source can launch a
catchphrase that storms the nation or captures the imagination
of certain groups. Cinema is simply part of an extended family
of media forms that contributes to the vagaries of pop language
and, beyond that, to the vast referential and intertextual
network of discourses that characterize culture. Even so, aside
from periodic lionization by industry organs and fandoms, the
omnipresence of movie dialogue in interpersonal exchanges and
social language has not attracted much scholarly commentary.[7]
Instead dialogue leads a quiet existence as a subset of a
larger, more recognizably important work — the script, its
source. Quotation is thus rooted in a relatively neglected
aspect of the cinematic experience: that part of the soundtrack
devoted neither to booming digital sound effects nor the
stirring musical scores that fill the theater, but to the aural
delivery of words.
Although I will
explore links between dialogue quotation and certain popular
musical trends (such as karaoke), my analysis cannot address the
full extent or abundant implications of this enormous linguistic
landscape. Rather, granting that media quotation is neither new[8]
nor characteristic solely of cinema, I want to focus on the
phenomenon as a pervasive aspect of contemporary film
consumption. Over the last twenty-five years an especially
intensive ‘replay culture’ has developed, owing to the increased
horizontal and vertical integration of corporations owning media
concerns (thanks in part to President Ronald Reagan’s emphasis
on deregulation),[9]
the growing number of exhibition windows for media texts,
viewers’ ability to rent and own titles, and the playback
technologies that enable repeat screenings. Together these
factors dramatically enhance a single text’s presence and
availability, enforcing its iteration across multiple platforms
— from theatrical screenings and home distribution on numerous
formats (including VHS, cable TV, and DVD) to novelizations,
soundtracks, and theme parks — while providing viewers with
unparalleled personal access to media. Because of cinema’s
ubiquitous exposure in multiple forums and the audience’s
ability to watch favorite titles repeatedly, many film phrases,
not to mention the films themselves, literally become memorable.
Among its other functions, then, replay culture acts as a
mnemonic device.
As I will argue,
the practice of dialogue quotation provides insight into a
significant mode of viewing pleasure involved in cinema’s
reception, especially in home contexts where repeat viewings are
a convenient remote control button away. As we shall see, the
viewer’s immersion in film dialogue acts as an unexpected
gateway to narrative engagement and constitutes its own
aesthetic. This immersion also inevitably represents the
interactive potentials of media consumption through a literal
talking back to the screen. However, while fan studies scholars
often regard personalization and interactivity as populist
interventions in the media industry’s preferred meanings, I hold
that dialogue memorization is not restricted to exceptional acts
of textual appropriation — say, raucous mimetic audience
behavior at midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture
Show (1975); rather, it strongly characterizes ordinary
dimensions of viewing and fandom.
At another level,
the viewer’s immersion in dialogue vividly demonstrates how,
through repetition, films are personalized, brought so close
that they provide a means of self and social identification,
including gender identification. The kind of familiarity bred by
repeated contact with a title enables it to become a part of a
viewer’s identity, a unit within a repertoire of elements that
he or she may draw upon in diverse circumstances to momentarily
or in a more sustained fashion occupy different subjectivities.
In this light, quotation can be seen as part of what Erving
Goffman has referred to in other contexts as the theatricality
of everyday life — the infusion of daily existence with
performances that constitute individual and social identities.[10]
The applicability of the term performance not only to
official forums such as the stage or screen but to everyday
activities enables a view of even small-scale responses such as
movie quotation as ‘technologies of the self’[11]
— devices that express and embody identity in specific
situations and social contexts. The microcosm of movie quotation
thus furnishes insight into the ability of apparently
insignificant actions to demonstrate ‘how persons choose to
represent themselves, how they construct their identity, and,
ultimately, how they embody, reflect, and construct their
culture’.[12] Like song lyrics, film lines
provide ready-made scripts for potential deployment in both
personal interactions and public discourse.
Audience research
that I have undertaken and other findings suggest that, while
most demographics enjoy repeatedly watching films, men find
particular pleasure in re-watching to memorize, quote, and enact
dialogue. Among other things, quotation allows a special focus
on male audiences to gauge the role cinema plays in the daily
performance of masculinity and perhaps even of national
identity. As we shall see, even when lines are used in a casual,
throwaway manner, they play a sometimes stable, sometimes more
volatile role in presenting private and public faces of
masculinity and Americanism. In what follows, I draw from a
number of different sources of data concerning quotation; by
analyzing audience surveys, mass market books, the press,
ethnographies, TV shows, films, music, Web sites, and public
performances,[13]
we can pursue just how and to what ends this mode of film
reception operates in the identity-scape.
Notes on an
Audience Study
Much of the
dialogue chosen in the AFI competition to represent the top 100
movie lines of all time represents phrases that have retained
their salience through the decades, thus emerging as the closest
thing to ‘immortal’ that this aspect of cinema’s popularity can
attain. Not all quotables are in the same category as
Casablanca’s canonical ‘Here’s looking at you kid’, however.
While any divisions we might establish between quotables are
ultimately permeable, many movie lines that function as popular
vernacular are generational, sectarian (as in the case of The
Big Lebowski fandom), and/or individual or they fall into
other categories equally circumscribed by time and affiliation.
In a study I
conducted in 2000 of a large group of undergraduates to examine
the pleasures they gained from re-watching the same films in
domestic space, many invoked line memorization as a motivation
for re-viewing, but few mentioned the ‘immortals’.[14]
Born in the 1980s, this group was among the first raised in the
video era and thus had never known a time when films weren’t
replayable at will within a context defined further by the
increased vertical and horizontal integration of media companies
that gained momentum during the Reagan years. While the heady
synergistic environment of this and subsequent periods offered
an extensive library of possibilities for quotation from films
old and new, most titles these students deemed worthy of replay
were made slightly before or during their lifetimes and thus
obtained a generational character.
The study showed
that dialogue memorization served multiple, overlapping
functions. Generally, the desire to learn movie lines was
inextricably connected to social considerations, as it furnished
a means to achieve self and group identification. A male student
stated, for example, that Richard Linklater’s Dazed and
Confused (1993), a film set in 1976 about the last day of
high school in a small Texas town, and Tamra Davis’s stoner
comedy Half-Baked (1998) were an important part of his
high school experience: ‘We used to watch the films, quote the
lines, and choose which characters were fictional
representations of our friends and ourselves . . . Quoting lines
from films is a part of my life and a bond within my group of
friends. We constantly return to certain scenes because of their
humor’. Another male viewer who re-watched Dazed and Confused
and Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) found that the films’
‘one-liners and humor’ reminded him of his friends, because they
‘got a lot of [their] language from these movies’. When he and
his companions ‘mixed the two movie lingos’ together, it made
for ‘some funny conversations’. Relatedly, a student, who was in
a rock band and repeatedly viewed the heavy metal mockumentary
This is Spinal Tap (1984) as a source of catchphrases and
inside jokes, remarked: ‘If you’re in a band you must
know every line by heart’.
As these viewers
fixed on character/star dyads as offering fictional
representations of themselves and their cohorts, memorization
helped to cement their identification with actors and roles.
Further, a viewer’s impersonation of characters by reciting
their lines helped to verify and solidify membership in
sub-communities — friendship circles, rock bands, etc. Quoting
thus appears to be part of what Eric Havelock has called a
‘tribal encyclopedia’, a common idiom that unifies a social
group.[15]
This unification takes place across social strata, from those
operating within the status quo to more embattled groups who use
movie language to establish a common bond under social duress
(for instance, in Tarnation [2003], Jonathan
Caouette’s autobiographical
documentary about his dysfunctional
family and his struggles with homosexuality and drugs, he
recounts how he and his first boyfriend ‘quoted movie lines from
Carrie [1976] and The Exorcist [1973]’, an
activity that presumably allowed them to express solidarity in
the midst of keenly felt marginality).[16]
In any circumstance, movie quotation can operate as the verbal,
cinematic equivalent of a secret handshake.
Comments from
study participants also indicate that dialogue recitation
provided a vehicle for displaying mastery and proficiency and,
hence, distinction within a group. Students often remarked how
much they enjoyed quoting scenes verbatim to impress friends or
they prided themselves on having memorized entire scripts, from
blockbusters such as the first Star Wars (1977) to more
obscure martial arts titles. By showing conversancy with
favorite texts and superior skills at memorizing, they appeared
as film experts and otherwise savvy media consumers. The impulse
toward comprehensive memorization is discernable in other
quarters as well; websites with titles like ‘Are there any
movies you know by heart?’ or those that discuss having
committed to memory the entire scripts for films such as John
Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off (1986) suggest that this kind of mastery
is part of broader patterns of film consumption, at least among
young adults.[17]
Recitation’s tribalism operates additionally, then, to establish
hierarchies based on textual expertise — a signifier of status
as definitive of some corners of mainstream film reception as it
is of ‘Trekkies’ and other more spectacular fandoms. Moreover,
dialogue memorization produces an aesthetic, a canon of
‘quotable’ favorites that make audiences a linguistic offer they
can’t refuse.
Because film
dialogue is portable, its social use extends beyond the
screening itself into diverse situations in everyday life,
giving movie lines a presence not only in the ebb and flow of
conversation, but in the fine tuning of gender identities that
occurs on a daily basis, a subject to which I shall return. For
now, it’s worth noting that many study participants repeatedly
viewed films to ‘steal the dialogue’ so that they could employ
it later in social interactions. Thus, friends watched The
Big Lebowski to utilize its Zen-like sign-off, ‘The Dude
abides’, in conversations ‘either as an allusion or because the
dialogue’ struck them ‘as particularly relevant or effective in
a situation’. A viewer who re-watched Tony Scott’s Top Gun
(1986) and Peter Farrelly’s Dumb & Dumber (1994) with
his friends commented that, ‘We know most of the lines so we
will say them when they come up or after we’re done watching the
movie when we get into one scene and reenact the whole thing for
fun’. A social setting was not necessary for another viewer who,
after buying a copy of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet
(1996), performed solo: ‘Now that I own it I will have it on
while I’m cleaning my room so I can quote the movie while
cleaning’.
Those memorizing
film lines are evidently just as committed to performing them. A
male viewer, who knew the dialogue from Dazed and Confused
by heart, remarked that, ‘watching a movie repeatedly helps me
to memorize . . . I love being totally accurate when I quote a
film’. For him, accuracy meant not only knowing all of the
lines, but ‘the delivery, the context, the visuals, everything’.
While I don’t have visual evidence from the study that shows the
process of memorization at work, an episode of Veronica Mars,
a TV show with a high school-aged sleuth as its heroine, offers
a possible scenario. As Veronica (Kristen Bell) watches a scene
from The Big Lebowski on DVD, she repeats what Jeff
Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) — a character who prefers to be called
‘the Dude’ — says to his wealthy namesake as he utters it,
trying to capture his vocal qualities and exact mannerisms.
Thus, Veronica intones along with the Dude: ‘Let me explain
something to you. I am not Mr. Lebowski. You’re Mr.
Lebowski. I am the Dude. So that’s what you call me. Or . . .
Dudeness, Duder, El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole
brevity thing’.[18]
Memorization here is intimately tied to enactment, to an aural
and physical performance of dialogue that, in this case,
attempts to reproduce faithfully the original.
 |
 |
Fig. 1 |
Fig. 2 |
Quotation thus
provides a means by which some viewers identify and position
themselves within a social aggregate, make claims about popular
cultural mastery, and, through memorization and mimicry, become
apprentices in the art of movie performance. Further, the
study’s testimonies, as they reveal the importance of immersion,
interactivity, reenactment, improvisation/play (‘mixing the two
lingos together’), community, and the demonstration of expertise
to the pleasurable dimensions of film reception, invoke aspects
of fandom more commonly associated with other media. In terms of
digital technology, for example, Kurt Lancaster has written in
many of the same terms about the world of online role-playing
games associated with the cult TV series, Babylon 5,
where players assume the identities of series characters within
a rule-bound narrative trajectory.[19]
Certainly, film dialogue obtains an online dimension with sites
devoted to canonizing quotables or to contests focused on movie
line knowledge. However, the presence of experiences associated
with the ‘digital revolution’ in film reception indicates not
only that dialogue quotation is a lower-tech, less formalized
version of digital manifestations of fandom such as
role-playing, but that the digital is not a privileged sphere
with respect to such elements as interactivity, which have long
had a more casual, prosaic place in the daily transactions
between films and audiences.
Within the
everydayness of participatory acts of media reception —
especially acts that move beyond the formal moment of media
engagement (e.g., attendance at a film screening, a video game
competition) into other social situations — movie quotation may
have the closest association with modes of consumption
characteristic of popular music. Those gravitating to movie
quotation as a pastime or obsession are typically attracted to
the stars, characters, and attitudes they convey. The
unavoidable aural qualities of quotation drive the viewer’s
desire to perfect mimicry by capturing the star/character dyad’s
delivery and affect; in this way, the aural, gestural, and
otherwise physical aspects of the original performance become a
repository for the film’s pleasures and a launching pad for
imitation. While the performances that viewers find quotable are
not typically or literally musical (although fans do memorize
songs from films), connections to forms of reenactment
characteristic of popular music, materialized perhaps most
notably in karaoke, help to illuminate the relationship between
movie quotation and gender.
Cinema,
Karaoke, and Masculinity
Many media
consumers have had the experience of singing along with a song
played on CD, iPod, or the radio. Most have also memorized
lyrics that they then perform in venues as diverse as the shower
and the local karaoke bar. Karaoke simply supplies a formal
dimension to this routine appropriation of musical language and
melody; practiced in bars across the world, karaoke is the art
of singing in the shower writ into public space. Invented in
Japan in the 1970s and popularized in the US and elsewhere in
the 1980s, karaoke involves amateurs who perform familiar songs
to recorded musical accompaniment in front of an audience. Like
singing one’s favorite song lyrics, part of the pleasure
contemporary film viewers find in vocalized performance lies in
the amateur enactment of bits of cinema. The analogy between
musical and cinematic karaoke rests, then, on the fact that
regular people wed themselves to mass cultural texts in acts of
performance that rely on the recitation and embodied execution
of well-known lines.
This analogy is
explicitly recognized in ‘Movieoke’, one of the few public
instances to date of cinema’s performative allure for amateurs.
Called ‘karaoke for movie lovers’, Movieoke was developed in
2003 by independent filmmaker Anastasia Fite and is held in New
York City’s ‘Den of Cin’, a pizzeria and video store. Here,
would-be thespians stand before a movie screen where a film is
projected and, reading from activated DVD subtitles, perform a
scene in front of audiences.[20]
 |
Fig. 3 |
Matthew Dujnic, a
cartoonist and computer programmer, is a frequent Movieoke
participant. Claiming he ‘can do nearly all of Glengarry Glen
Ross (1992) from memory’ (no small feat given writer David
Mamet’s loquacious style), Dujnic has reenacted Anthony
Hopkins’s fava beans and Chianti scene from Silence of the
Lambs (1991) and Jack Nicholson’s ‘You can’t handle the
truth’ scene from A Few Good Men (1992), along with
moments from such films as The Breakfast Club, Fight
Club (1999) and Zoolander (2001).[21]
His comments about his desire to perform at the Den of Cin,
‘This is what I do in my living room anyway’, indicate that
Movieoke is a public extension of private fan practices more
common than we might otherwise think (a possibility further
suggested by the number of reenactments of movie scenes posted
on Youtube.com). Fite also observes that the Movieoke
experience has caused her regulars to view films differently:
they watch ‘searching for scenes, searching for themselves in
the movie, more literally than ever before’. Hence, amateur
movie reenactments appear to enhance the processes of
identification and personalization that occur as movies are
viewed and reviewed, memorized and performed.[22]
While I will
return to the informative parallels between musical and
cinematic karaoke, taking stock of the kinds of lines viewers
memorize as they bring movies so close reveals the gender
dimensions of this practice. Like Dujnic’s attraction to
Nicholson’s line and to Mamet’s aggressive dialogue, male
viewers in my study were drawn to ‘tough guy’ catchphrases
(e.g., ‘Zed’s dead, baby’ from Pulp Fiction [1994] and
‘Hasta la vista, baby’). Students were also captivated by
sarcastic or anti-authoritarian comebacks (e.g., ‘Does Barry
Manilow know you raid his wardrobe’ from The Breakfast Club
and ‘You’re an asshole Rooney, an asshole!’ from Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off) and to comic lines (e.g., ‘Why it’s just
a flesh wound’ from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
[1975] and ‘He slimed me – actual physical contact’ from
Ghostbusters [1984]). Such dialogue provides these viewers
with images of masculinity — the imperturbable hyper-masculine,
the rebellious youth, the absurdist clown — that they can
perform repeatedly to articulate what they experience as a
rebuttal of and resistance to social norms. When those
participating in the ritual of memorization are in their
formative years, movie quotables function to rehearse different
types of masculinity they deem attractive as they attempt to
figure out their identities, including familiar forms of
rebellion against authority figures. Comments suggest that,
rather than indulging in more daring experimentation (for
example, male students rarely quote from female characters),
this play involves vicarious identification with a range of
commonplace masculinities that can secure individual and group
identities and confirm gender and generational ties.
Other findings
describe similar patterns of movie-line adoption by male
movie-goers, including older demographics, showing that the
negotiation of masculine identity is not an activity consigned
solely to youth. Based on a 1000-person survey conducted in 2000
of the ‘most popular movie quotes’, Stuart Fischoff et al
discovered that Americans may sometimes gravitate to ‘romantic
movie quotes and words of wisdom’, but ‘they prefer . . . quotes
[that] express aggression and sarcastic one-upmanship’. The
survey found that variations in the sample’s responses — where
participants were equally divided between male and female,
representative of four ethnic groups, and aged ten to ninety —
resulted primarily from differences in gender and age. Except
for men over fifty who preferred sarcastic lines, most other
male demographics almost exclusively cited quotes with a hostile
valence. To wit, the number one and two quotes amongst men
overall were ‘I’ll be back’ and ‘Go ahead, make my day’, threats
spoken, respectively, by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The
Terminator (1984) and Clint Eastwood in Sudden Impact
(1983). The survey’s women also demonstrated a preference for
such lines, but mentioned romantic and affectionate quotes in
their top twenty more often than men (i.e., Jerry Maguire’s
‘You complete me’ and ‘You had me at hello’). Continuing the
trend amongst male viewers, the top thirty most memorable movie
lines listed on AskMen.com invoke quotables ‘with
attitude’ with the top line being The Godfather’s ‘I’ll
make him an offer he can’t refuse’.[23]
The popular film
lines that I have discussed thus far define masculinity as
infused with a sense of cool that, in turn, is composed of a
variable mix of elements: rebellion, determination, aggression,
power, subversive humor. Given the plentitude of such lines in
‘quotable’ canons, it would be difficult to argue that they are
genuinely transgressive; rather, their performance invokes
enshrined forms of rebellion against authority that allow a
temporary experience of civil disobedience. As well as
suggesting the possible prematurity of Susan Jeffords’
declaration that the ‘hard body’ film hero (such as
Schwarzenegger) declined in popularity after the 1980s,[24] the pervasive presence of
such lines also demonstrates that this interaction between
resistance and social norms occurs every day, with line
performance functioning as one of many ritual, customary
expressions of male discontent and protest. Further, this
‘disobedient’ brand of masculinity is deployed to confirm
certain overtly heterosexual notions of masculinity.
The relationship
of ‘cool’ movie lines to the production of heteronormative
notions of masculinity is both further demonstrated and put to
the test in Straight Plan for the Gay Man,
Comedy Central’s parody of Bravo’s
series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.[25]
Straight Plan also overtly raises the issue of the role
humor plays in enacting masculine slogans from cinema. As
opposed to Queer Eye’s premise, in which a team of gay
men attempt to make over straight men with no sense of style,
Straight Plan’s group of heterosexual men try to teach gay
men how to become ‘regular guys’. In a scene from the first
episode (which, like the rest of the series, is at least
partially scripted), the troupe of straight men — Rob Riggle,
Kyle Grooms, Billy Merritt, and Curtis Gwinn, aka ‘The Flab
Four’ — wants to show New York-based fashion consultant Jonathan
Schneider how ‘to shoot straight’. In a gun club sporting the
banner, ‘My President is Charlton Heston’, Rob tells Jonathan
that he is about to be introduced to ‘one of the greatest
straight-man traditions of all time: firing a gun for absolutely
no reason at all’. One thing Jonathan might not know, Rob
continues, is that ‘whenever straight men fire weapons, they say
movie quotes’. Three troupe members go first: Curtis takes aim
at the target and fires his weapon, reciting, ‘Yippee-ki-yay,
motherfucker’, Detective John McClane’s (Bruce
Willis) famous line from Die Hard (1988); when it’s his
turn, Billy states, ‘No Mr Bond, I expect you to die’, quoting
the title character (played by Gert Frobe) from the James Bond
classic Goldfinger (1964); and Kyle intones part of Jules
Winnfield’s (Samuel Jackson) Biblical speech from Pulp
Fiction, ‘You will know my name is the Lord when I lay my
vengeance upon you’. As Jonathan finally prepares to shoot, he
quotes Rhett Butler’s (Clark Gable) ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t
give a damn’, much to his companion’s consternation; they remind
him that he holds a 44 Magnum, ‘Clint Eastwood’s gun, what Dirty
Harry shoots’. Although the Gone with the Wind quote has
often been construed as the ultimate ‘tough guy’ line, its
source doesn’t measure up to ‘straight plan’ standards; Butler’s
old, rather polite put-down can’t compare in testosterone value
to McClane’s hip blend of harder-core profanity and neo-Western
machismo. Jonathan is thus given another chance. After Rob says
with great expectation, ‘Ready, aim, quote!’, Jonathan
accompanies his second round of firing with, ‘Fasten your
seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!’ This time, there’s
greater consternation — no one has heard of this quote before.
When they find out that the source is Bette Davis (as Margo
Channing in All About Eve [1950]) and that Jonathan
missed the target on every shot, the troupe agrees that his
‘quotes left a lot to be desired’.
 |
 |
Fig. 4 |
Fig. 5 |
In this scene,
each man uses quotes that align him with character/star dyads
that simultaneously exhibit his existing and aspirational
masculine identities. For instance, in an act of matching, Kyle,
the only African-American troupe member, quotes a fellow
African-American whose character exudes an utterly controlled
toughness that Kyle presumably does not possess in the same
measure. Even though Jonathan cites treasured movie dialogue
that often crops up on ‘best of’ lists for movie quotables, in
this super-heterosexual context, his choice of older classic
lines (especially one spoken by a female character often
associated with homosexual audiences) demonstrates not his macho
movie savvy, but his gay and camp sensibilities. Thus, Jonathan
is similarly matched via camp with star/character dyads that
represent his sexual identity, while, once more, these dyads
also signify more self-possession than he appears to possess. As
quotation expresses existing and aspirational identities, its
enactment appears to furnish an aural/visual display that
confirms dominant social notions of sexual identity.
Hence, the
scene’s overall effect indicates who belongs in the hetero- and
homosexual communities and who doesn’t, while placing straight,
African American, and gay characters right where audience
members might expect them to be. However, the show’s comedy,
premised as a way to mock Queer Eye’s gay conceits,
depends on parody and excess in its portrayals of masculinity,
just as the gun club scene additionally relies on the inherent
funniness of karaoke, of amateurs attempting to imitate
professionals. Through this overstatement and a slippage between
quoter and original performer, Straight Plan sends up
overt signs of both hetero- and homosexuality, as well as the
aspirational aspects of male identity. Still, mimicking ‘Yippee-ki-yay,
motherfucker’ involves contradictory sentiments: the silliness
rooted in inexpert imitations of film slogans charged with
heterosexuality, and the residue of the values associated with
gender already attached to those slogans. Thus, the show
maintains a tension between subverting and confirming
stereotypes that Comedy Central’s primarily male audience can
mine in different ways, depending on their predispositions. All
the same, the tension parody creates is strategically important
to promoting, through ambiguity, a sense of a familiar,
non-threatening, and inconsequential play with masculine
identities. Humor (which, as we have seen, is also key to the
pleasures of quotation for male students in my study) creates a
relatively safe haven for what otherwise could be an edgier,
less comfortable encounter of masculinities. In Straight Plan,
gay men are sent up more acceptably within a continuum of male
humor about masculinity.[26]
That the practice
of movie quotation produces dynamics of inclusion and exclusion
in relation to gender and sexuality has less ambiguity when it
comes to women. In both its musical and cinematic incarnations,
karaoke is characterized by gender asymmetry, that is, a general
lack of crossover between female singers/actresses and male
quoters. Whatever other factors may figure in this imbalance,
problematic cultural assumptions about women often pervade the
interplay between inclusion and exclusion that informs line
reenactment. Rob Drew, in his ethnography Karaoke Nights,
remarks that karaoke performers ‘tend to be cautious role
players’, a tendency reinforced by the neighborhood bar setting
in which karaoke frequently takes place in the United States.
Here, many men, wary of being interpreted as anything less than
‘solidly’ male, prefer to mimic male singers. When men do take
the stage to reenact popular songs by women, they usually do so
for laughs, aurally sending up female vocalists — ‘doing Irene
Cara’s “Fame” in a piercing falsetto, doing Helen Reddy’s “I am
Woman” in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger’.[27] Besides distancing themselves
from the feminine (‘this isn’t really me’), these instances play
up the incongruity of a male voice/body portraying a female
voice/body to parody the feminine, either literally accentuating
it to extremes through an absurdly high voice or replacing it
altogether with a masculine accent. In relation to Reddy’s
feminist anthem, the male singer doubly displaces the original
through his own voice and physical appearance and by invoking
one of the ultimate hard-body stars and political conservatives,
Schwarzenegger (himself the target of many a send-up).
Certainly,
scholars have lauded camp as a self-conscious interrogation of
the categories of masculine and feminine, just as others have
expressed concern about its tendency to reify gender and
sexuality.[28]
While camp is not an uncontested terrain in terms of its
politics of femininity, not all send-ups fall into this
category. Send-ups can simply paint the feminine as patently
outside of the masculine, as silly, or as generally outré,
demonstrating an instance of masculinity being codified by a
repudiation of the feminine. As is often the case, then,
practices of inclusion are tacitly based on practices of
exclusion: to be a heterosexual male within some group dynamics
means not to be female or to be seen as feminine. At the same
time, whether male performers parody or avoid altogether the
work of female singers, this asymmetry demonstrates the social
policing men undergo as part of their daily lives, where any
signifier of femininity might be sufficient to compromise what
the dominant culture regards as heterosexual masculinity.
Female karaoke
performers do not operate with the same onus about
gender-switching in performance. They often mimic male singers,
doing so without irony or parody as they try to capture the
original’s vocal qualities and general flavor. As in my study,
Fischoff et al found that women frequently crossed over to male
characters in their selection of film quotations. Because
Hollywood productions favor male genres and characters, he
argues, quotables from these characters comprise most of the
menu, leaving female viewers with little other choice;[29]
through this logic, since many of these characters are white
men, viewers of other races would also find themselves with
fewer alternatives. Put in other terms, those outside of the
dominant classes are invited, through cinema’s strategies of
engagement, to cross over, to be more flexible in their choice
of objects of identification as a condition for being able to
experience spectatorial pleasure at all.[30]
This does not mean that female quoters are free from
participation in inclusionary or exclusionary systems or that
parodies, including gender parodies, cannot be complex,
multivalent forms of cultural expression. The point is, rather,
that the gender asymmetry found in line quotations from cinema
and music is suggestive: it indicates a conservative flair in
the communal confirmation of gender identities that occurs in
the private and public spaces in which these performances occur.
In such ways, a seemingly insignificant activity like line
quotation contributes to the lively maintenance of the status
quo. Those brought together by a mutual interest in media
interactivity, immersion, and community are thus not necessarily
engaged in a utopian realization of an enlightened world via
participatory culture, but may be informed by and help to
perpetuate longstanding social ideologies of gender.
As most films
quoters regard as performable are U.S. products, we might wonder
additionally how this form of popular cultural literacy attempts
to preserve national identity as well — a relationship exhibited
in remarks made by former actors on the national stage. Ronald
Reagan’s famous citation of Clint Eastwood’s ‘Make my day’
applied the expression’s machismo and intransigence to suggest
that Reagan would veto any proposed tax increase; meanwhile,
Schwarzenegger’s ‘Say hasta la vista to Gray Davis’ deployed his
signature statement to announce that he would run in a recall
election against then governor Davis. On a different front,
media language is also used in programs such as Movielearn
to teach English to immigrants and others through movies and TV
shows that provide ‘exposure to conversational English not
normally taught in traditional teaching methods’.[31]
With Donald Trump’s The Apprentice as one of the
program’s pedagogical tools, subscribers also get a crash,
tycoon’s-eye-view of corporate America and its version of the
American dream. Here, media language attains a national function
insofar as it not only exposes users to a vision of the United
States but also acts as a ‘social equalizer, a sign that
[audiences] too, share the up-to-date American personality’.[32]
Dialogue quotation can act as a tie that binds people within a
nation together as they utilize colloquial national idioms
stamped with a fashionable ‘Americanness’.
Quotation,
Identity, and Instability
Thus far, I have
weighed the normative functions of movie quotation — its role in
recycling familiar notions of gender and nation to celebrate
Hollywood, while acting as a form of currency for
identity-creation (no matter how aspirational or transitory).
Leslie Savan, in Slam Dunks and No-Brainers, a book that
investigates the habitual use of slang catchphrases in the
United States, argues that this phenomenon has only negative
implications. She evaluates pop vernacular through a single
lens: that of a ‘top-down’ approach that sees phrases such as
‘whatever’, ‘duh’, and ‘don’t go there’ as part of the
‘demagoguery of everyday life’.[33]
In her view, advertising and other media concerns promote an
automation of language to help sell products. In the process,
‘Pop’s prefab repartee can serve as thought replacement’
encouraging people ‘not to think or grapple with complications’.[34]
This lamentable state of affairs can become serious when
political figures deploy this language in international affairs
(e.g., CIA director George Tenet’s statement to President Bush
in 2002 that locating Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass
destruction would be a ‘slam dunk’).[35]
Thus, Savan regards catchphrases as problematic forms of
communicative shorthand because they characterize complex
agendas as if they had cowboy solutions, support the status quo
to sell commodities, and otherwise practice social control over
a robotic citizenry.
Granting that pop
language, movie quotation included, can act as an automated form
of expression meant to persuade through simplification,
variables exist that complicate uniform readings of the personal
and public use of such language. The nuances of performance, the
contexts in which quotation takes place, and the complexity of
identity itself lend film quotation and its cousin musical
karaoke wilder and woollier possibilities.
Drew acknowledges
that karaoke is ‘the most scripted of song performances’, where
the performer desires not only to memorize lines but also to
reproduce minute aspects of the original performance. In turn,
audiences prize this replication as a sign of the karaoke
singer’s talent.[36] Even when mimesis is the aim,
however, Drew contends that karaoke is much more than a
derivative art form that testifies to the media’s colonizing
power. Drawing on the work of performance studies scholars
Elizabeth Fine and Jean Speer, he argues that karaoke has a
‘creative, meaning-making potential’.[37]
This potential affects the performer, his or her audience, and
social elements activated by the performance. Of the
transformative aspects of performance at the individual level,
Johan Fornäs remarks that the karaoke participant may find ‘his
or her self strengthened and enlarged by the experience’;
assuming the identities of professional performers makes it
possible to ‘discover new potentials in oneself’.[38]
On stage or off, performance obliges the actor to be a ‘double
agent’ performing ‘between identities ... which makes it
possible to work on “being” and “becoming” simultaneously’.[39]
Along with the creativity of everyday enactments and the
possibility of personal change brought on by the
identity-shifting at their core, role performances incite
reflection on social mores. As Fine and Speer write, through
performance,
human beings not only present behavior ... they reflexively
comment on it and
the values and situations it encompasses. Through the
myriad number of
choices performers make ... they have the opportunity
to comment on
others, on situations, and on themselves.[40]
Hence,
performance modes such as karaoke have far-ranging effects that
stretch from dynamic makeovers of personal identity to incisive
social observation.
While the
scholarship encourages us to equate creativity and
transformation with more radical rewritings of self and society,
as we have seen, these elements are also involved in
performances that consolidate existing identities (whether
dominant or marginal) or certify the status quo. In any kind of
performance ‘double agency’ is always operative. That said, the
mutations inherent in musical and cinematic karaoke provide the
possibility for different kinds of transformations, including
those that introduce irony and a volatile disjunction in
meaning. Think, for example, of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious’s cover
of the Frank Sinatra standard, ‘My Way’ (available on
Youtube.com and elsewhere).[41]
Vicious’s version attacks Sinatra’s sincere, melodic, and
middle-aged crooning of the song through a mangling, sneering,
and defiant punk act. Vicious’s over-the-top number shows how
reflexivity can not only satirize the original, but the
imitation as well, leaving in its wake a double deconstruction
of competing musical mythologies and the competing visions of
masculinity that support them.
 |
 |
Fig. 6 |
Fig. 7 |
Although the
nuances of performance do not have to take on aggressive
reformations of the original for a process of transformation to
take place, as this example illustrates, not all performance
aims at a faithful imitation of a standard. Like other cover
songs, transformations of the standard, including parodies, may
be the performer’s goal. In such cases, the cover song’s ability
to invite its audience to comment on the values and presumptions
of an original is evident. No matter the closeness or departures
from the original, though, the audience is always positioned as
interpreter, judging the performer, as well as what is being
delivered by the performance. Even when a rendition’s parody has
conservative roots, as in the exclusionary tactics
characteristic of some gender crossovers in karaoke, the
presentation cannot entirely stabilize the meaning of the
re-performance — it is subject to the audience’s interpretive
activities which may support, see through, or otherwise depart
from intended effects.
This instability
of line performance’s meaning is further heightened by the fact
that meanings change depending on context. Film dialogue, like
song lyrics, has unpredictable, situation-dependent meanings
that can produce results running the gamut of the political and
ideological spectrum. For example, Cool Hand Luke’s
(1967) ‘What we have here is a failure to communicate’, once
embraced by liberal youth as a statement about generational
conflict, has been deployed more recently both by a press
article from the left chastising California Governor
Schwarzenegger for his inability to explain his education
policies to his constituents and a piece from the right
classifying the kind of hate mail the writer often gets from
wrong-headed liberals. Similarly, the phrase ‘Ding dong, the
witch is dead’ from The Wizard of Oz has titled press
articles and blogs as diverse as those hailing the dismissal of
Rosie O’Donnell from the TV program The View and those
cheering Harriet Miers’s withdrawal from consideration for
Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to pieces on Saddam
Hussein’s execution and Reverend Jerry Falwell’s death.[42]
Here we see movie lines that once again express aggressive
sentiments — in the film the phrase celebrates the end of the
Wicked Witch of the East — used to enunciate a variety of
political positions with the familiar phrase doing the
additional work of attracting eyeballs to the news piece.
Cases where movie
lines circulate internationally as a form of language
instruction attain an even greater degree of uncertainty as to
their function. For example, the Chinese TV series, Action
English, uses clips from Hollywood movies to teach ‘American
slang’. Broadcast almost nightly on the station CCTV6, the show
has reportedly become a cult hit where viewers enjoy wrestling
with terms such as ‘walking felony’ from the comedy Legally
Blonde (2001).[43]
Although the English language is often regarded as the great
colonizer, as in any discussion of globalization, the import of
international goods is not simply a matter of impressing the
values of the import culture onto the destination culture, but
about how the latter, according to its own institutions and
social habits, negotiates the meaning of what comes its way —
here, movie lines and their embodiment of Hollywood and the
United States. Once again, in any appropriation of movie lines,
context influences the decipherment of movie lingo to suit the
diverse priorities that define the setting of the enactment.
Movie lines can
be deployed, then, in almost any conceivable fashion to support
political agendas. They can also shore up, challenge, or
introduce ambiguity into ideas of identity. In fact, since
quoters may inhabit diverse star/character dyads during
performances, distributing identification mercurially across
multiple figures, Movieoke and other forms of film reenactment
may harbor yet even more complex possibilities for conceiving of
film’s relationship to subjectivity. Ultimately, dialogue
quotation is a dynamic, multilayered phenomenon that functions
in the most predictable ways in relation to identity, as well as
the most robustly unexpected. As an example of how the
performance of identity is constantly processed in everyday
life, quotation suggests that the structure of identity is
reminiscent of that of hegemony itself. Identity too is a
‘moving equilibrium’, constituted by a variety of tendencies
that cross the ideological spectrum. As such, individual, group,
and national identities do not simply reproduce the dominant
ideology as somehow given. Rather, they have to be continually
‘won, reproduced, and sustained’, meaning that, within this
struggle, there are spaces for the resounding confirmation,
ambivalent embrace, and fracturing of the status quo.[44] The point is to continue to
be ‘alert to the patternings of power’ manifested by
performances as they materialize in specific situations.[45]
*******
Quotation’s
foregrounding of film dialogue shows that this poor cousin to
other elements of the contemporary soundtrack is capable of
forging a significant relationship with audiences. Beyond
engaging viewers actively in narratives that may go on to be
canonized based on their quotability, an investment in movie
lines helps to form a film culture that galvanizes, affirms, or
transforms notions of self and associations between viewers
during and after screenings. Through memorization and
performance, viewers identify themselves and others, acquire
cultural capital as masters of movie lines, indulge in practices
of inclusion and exclusion, rehearse accepted modes of protest,
and, potentially, test the boundaries of dominant social
categories of identity. This kinetic interaction
between films and viewers has been enhanced unmistakably by
replay culture, by a single text’s iteration across multiple
media platforms and the additional repetitive availability of
that text to viewers through playback technologies. Since replay
culture extends well beyond cinema, quotation is but one sign of
the intimate ties between cinema and other media, between film
consumption and media consumption more generally.
A mainstream case
of personalized and interactive response, quotation also offers
a friendly amendment to fan studies that focus on spectacular
fandoms, such as the legendary devotees of The Rocky Horror
Picture Show. Unlike public screenings of this film or other
overt displays of investment in a text, such as the re-released
sing-along version of The Sound of Music (1965) in 2000
or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) sing-along
(for which audiences dress up as film characters, sing, chant
lines, and act out parts), memorizing and performing media lines
represents a more common and pervasive mode of ritual
re-viewing. Although self-consciously pursued, everyday
practitioners don’t always recognize the excesses of this form
of response nor its potential for camp. Yet, even the most
quotidian examples of vocal and gestural reenactment achieve
many of the same things associated with spectacular fandoms,
notably, a muscular, interactive intervention in narrative
trajectories according to personal desire, the creation of
status rooted in mass cultural expertise, and the constitution
of a body of cult films through exercises of group taste.
At the same time,
the line quotation phenomenon is circular, so much so that we
cannot ultimately draw lines in the sand between its public and
private manifestations. The case of The Lebowski Fest shows that
more mundane instances of recitation help to create spectacular
fandoms. Rooted in a casual exchange of film dialogue at a
convention, the Lebowski Fest, typically held in a bowling
alley, attracts fans that dress up like characters and engage in
their behaviors (such as bowling and drinking White Russians);
the Fest thus takes performance to a highly visible level of
embodiment. As Charles Ross’s performance of his One-Man Star
Wars Trilogy at New York’s Lamb Theater (where, in just over
an hour, he acts out all of the parts and voices the music and
sound effects from the original trilogy) further indicates,[46] ordinary fan practices of
memorization, quotation, and enactment can truly come full
circle when they rematerialize as public theatrical events.
Thus, quotation is at once an everyday manifestation of routine
fan behavior and the foundation for the growth of public, more
conspicuous displays of fandom, from costumed fandom or cosplay
to theatrical performances themselves.
Ultimately, line
recitation indicates that personalized and interactive responses
to films watched repeatedly are part of daily rites devoted to
negotiating or maintaining gender identity. As such, recitation
manifestly recalls Judith Butler’s well-known assertion that
identity, rather than being stable, is the product of a
‘stylized repetition of acts’.[47]
If we grant that managing identities of all kinds requires work
and that this work can at times appear as play, we can regard
dialogue quotation as a micro-process involved in this activity.
Such micro-processes have as much to tell us about the routine
conservation of identity as they do about experiments with
notions of the self that occur during and after movie
consumption. No matter how dialogue is deployed in this
identity-scape, replay culture and movie line performance compel
consideration of the relationship of viewers to cinema as an
aural as well as a visual medium, as a home as well as a
theatrical experience, encouraging us to venture into those
intimate territories of reception where the Dude still very much
abides.
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