Where have all the zingers gone?

My blog-friend JES, knowing my interest in all things cinematic, sent me a link a few days ago for an article in The New York Times, reviewing some of the great quotable lines from the movies.... and lamenting that there don't seem to have been very many new additions to the canon in recent years.

Of course, I did a film quotes quiz myself about 18 months ago; and earlier this year, my 'Film List' post on Crowning Moments of Awesome included quite a few more favourite lines.

While the quotations in my quiz were a wilfully eclectic - unrepresentative - selection, there were a few from the mid-90s and a couple from the Noughties.  And I am unashamed to admit that I am a huge fan of Will Ferrell's Anchorman, the most quotable movie, I think, of the last decade, and the only one of his (so far) that's likely to prove an enduring classic. So many good lines in that: "I'm kind of a big deal around here.  People know me."  "I think I ate your chocolate squirrel."  "Leave the mothers out of this."

I wonder if the supposed shortage of 'great lines' in the last decade or so is partly the product of the 'instant communications' era: is there a faddishness problem, that the modern Internet/Twitter/SMS environment leads to 'great lines' being passed into popular culture far more quickly and pervasively than before; and they get done to death, and then recede from popular consciousness again - quickly discarded because they got too ubiquitous for a while.

You know I love any excuse to pour scorn on the Twitterati, but in fact I rather doubt if their debasing of 'popular culture' in recent years is the main culprit.  I conjecture that it's just always been - and is probably always going to be - the case that to become deeply embedded in the mass consciousness requires a decade or so, maybe a full generation.  People who saw Casablanca in movie theatres in the 1940s probably didn't go around quoting it all the time.  Kids who grew up seeing it on TV (and having their parents tell them how great it was) in the '50s or '60s did.  And for those of us who grew up in the '70s and '80s, it's just become an established cultural meme - we don't question how it got to be that way.

It occurs to me also that this process of slowly becoming a part of the general cultural landscape, part of everyone's common experience, has in the past probably been driven primarily by TV.   Our conception of what was a great film - and our appreciation of the great lines within them - was largely conditioned by the purchasing and scheduling decisions of the networks, by what we were given the opportunity to see again and again and again during our formative years.  (JES cites The Wizard of Oz as his most quotable film; while I see what he's getting at - "I don't think we're in Kansas any more." "Fly, my pretties, fly!" - I think his enthusiasm for even some of less prominent lines in the film suggests that he has re-watched it many more times than I have.  I would think that, from the 'golden age', Casablanca - and a few others, too - trumps it for most people.  And, from my own lifetime, The Blues Brothers is almost certainly the most quoted film.)

Outside of a few 'cult' classics - like The Blues Brothers, Animal House, Anchorman, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pulp Fiction - most people generally only go to see a film in a theatre once, on first release.  It's only been on TV that we'd get the repeated exposure which hardwires the greatest lines and moments into our brains.  I suppose that may now be changing with on-demand pay-per-view cable channels, cheap DVDs... and so much free online streaming.  (I don't think that VHS really had so much impact on viewing habits during the '70s and '80s.  Occasional rentals would usually be used to catch up on things we'd missed at the cinema, or to indulge in cheap trash that never got a theatrical release at all; we didn't use rented videos very much to watch a classic over and over again.  And the picture quality was too poor, the storage medium too bulky to encourage many people to build up large home libraries: I've always been an avid film collector, but I never owned much more than a hundred titles on VHS, many of them home-taped; I have something like 1,000 on DVD!)

I wonder how this shift in habits of consumption will affect the formation of our shared 'cultural database'.  I suspect there must be a tendency to fragment it - perhaps to make it more diverse, but at the cost of less and less of it (perhaps none of it?) being truly universal any more.  When I was growing up, with only two or three TV channels (the second BBC channel was, I think, launched in the early or mid-60s, but it took a decade or more before it achieved widespread uptake; whether or not you had BBC2 was still a mark of social distinction when I was in primary school - and we didn't!), the first screening of a major film was a huge event - and everyone would watch it.  Moreover, because the TV companies were having to pay so much for the rights (in that halcyon time of effectively exclusive distribution), they would run the film again, at least once or twice a year, for the next three, five, or seven years.  I think that's why people of my age know Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid inside and out; but we don't have a similarly comprehensive familiarity with Unforgiven (and I suspect almost no-one does).

Anyway, to remind us of what we may soon be missing, here is one of the best compilations I could find on YouTube just now - a '100 Best' in just 200 seconds!

And here's quite a fun countdown - literally: 100 lines featuring the numbers from 100 down to 1.  This was offered by YouTube user 'AlonzoMosleyFBI' (and much kudos to you if you if you can spot that reference!) as an affectionate parody of the American Film Institute's list of 100 Greatest Film Quotes, which you can see in four parts, here, here, here, and here.  Or make do with this teaser overview below...