By
Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D., Esmeralda Cardenas, Angela Hernandez, Korey Wyatt, Jarod Young,
and
Rachel Gordon,
Executive Editor, Journal of MediaPsychology
Introduction
"You can't handle
the truth!" The truth is that
film quotes have become an integral part of our everyday language to such an
extent that they become separated from their filmic origins. People use them everyday as a form of informal communication
to convey a variety of attitudes and expressions.
Quotes like, "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you happy to see
me?" and "Here's looking at you kid" are prime examples.
In this day and age, film quotes have not only become a way of
expression, but also a top interest in our culture.
Different mediums of communication have devoted attention to this topic.
Newspapers (e.g., Seiler, 1997; Wloszczyna, 1991, 1997) books
(Bainbridge, 1999; Corey 1995; Nanda, 1996), and television programs have
disclosed information about favorite film quotes. The World Wide Web has made film quotes and databases
accessible to all individuals (e.g., Internet Movie Database). In addition, there are even a number of web sites that quiz
one's knowledge of film quotes and film sources.
Why
is it that some quotes have disappeared while others have stood the test of
time? One element could be that
what we remember is a reflection of who we are and, according to Denzin (1991),
people’s self-perceptions are increasingly influenced by film.
Personal
efficacy (Bandura, 1986) is also an element that contributes to individuals’
reliance on movie quotes to express themselves during contentious situations.
For our purposes, an individual may feel more personally efficacious in a
conversation when using a movie quote to convey difficult emotional issues.
For instance, many men may find themselves at a loss for words when their
partner says, “I love you.” By
using Patrick Swayze’s pithy response “Ditto” from the movie Ghost,
men evade what could have turned out to be a disaster. Humorous quotes (e.g., “Who you gonna call?” from
Ghostbusters) function in much
the same way as they take the edge off thorny situations.
So, it seems, we often borrow
quotes from films to fill in the gaps in our imagination.
We use phrases created by wordsmiths superior to us, to impress others,
if not so much with our creativity, then in our recognition of eloquence
and the facility to conjure up the bon
mots. Certain quotes exquisitely capture the mood or feeling we wish to
communicate to someone. We hear
them in movies and store them away for future use.
Some
memorable quotes are jarring in their ability to encapsulate the sturm
und drang of an entire movie and
reveal, in an instantly relatable and recognizable way, the frustrations that
both the onscreen character and the off-screen audience have experienced in not
dissimilar fashions. It is a phrase
that may provide a perfect ending to a perfectly awful ordeal.
Such a quote is a phrase which is often less elegant than it is
thundering in its emotional exactness. Robert
Redford’s line, “What do we do now?” at the end of the movie, The
Candidate, when he won a senatorial election and now is confronted by the
awesomeness of the task before him, captures a moment that many of us have
experienced when we fought the good fight but aren’t quite sure we’re up to
the task now that it’s upon us. Or,
in a different emotional chord, we have Rhett Butler’s parting line to
Scarlett O’Hara in the classic Gone with
the Wind, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Both quotes have a timeless utility for all of us, for all of us know
that someday, somehow, somewhere, we will need the strength or the
self-knowledge to meet the painful truth of the moment.
These are “moment of truth.” quotes.
It
is also true that words or phrases enter into the public sphere precisely
because they capture the mood of a country and express it in a way that is
instantly recognizable, e.g., “Go ahead, make my day,” uttered by the
memorable Clint Eastwood character, Dirty Harry, in the film, Sudden
Impact, a sequel to the eponymous original Dirty
Harry. The eloquence is less in
the exact phrasing than in the succinctness with which it captures a “cultural
zeitgeist.” Some of these cultural moods have lasting quality, such as
irritation at the perceived spread of unchecked, unprosecuted violence in a
country, and thus, “Go ahead, make my day” becomes embedded in our cultural
lexicon. These are “zeitgeist”
quotes.
The
popularity of other phrases, however, may be short-lived.
They are funny, raunchy, sexy, hostile, etc.
But it is the rapid transmission through the culture of words and phrases
in an immensely popular movie that motivates people to exploit them for a while,
which is the fuel for the phrases’ popularity.
The salaciously uttered phrase, “Yeah, baby,” from the successful spy
spoof series, Austin Powers, is
illustrative. The quote announces
to listeners that the person who uses the dialogue is pop culture cutting edge
and knows what’s hot and what’s not in the film marketplace.
But as the popularity of the film passes, so may the use of the phrase,
because it possesses no particular elegance or pungency.
The wave subsides and the culture moves on.
These are short-lived, “fad” quotes.
Still
other memorable lines of dialogue from films appeal to a particular segment of a
population and become “insider” phrases, phrases that any self-respecting
member of that segment will instantly recognize, know their filmic origins, and,
in a flash, identify the user as a kindred spirit.
Gays, for example, might be expected to immediately recognize the phrase
from the gay-themed film Boys in the Band,
“Give me Librium or give me death,” whereas non-gays might not be expected
to either use or recognize the quote or know the film origin of the phrase.
Alternatively, gays might remember a quote not because of what it says
but because of how the actor delivered it.
Thus, Bette Davis delivered the line “I’d kiss ya, but I just washed
my hair,” from the film Cabin in the Cotton. Is
it the quote itself, the context of the quote in an obscure movie, or the fact
that Miss Davis is so enjoyable to imitate, almost regardless of what line she
is delivering? These are
“niche” quotes.
Beyond
quotes, of course, some people remember whole passages of dialogue from movies
as either tour de forces or because they are simply eternally caught up in the
movie and its dramatic atmosphere and characters.
The movie Godfather is one such
famous example. This places a movie
beyond the realm of a good source of quotes to a cult classic that invites
people to not only memorize whole passages but inhabit favorite roles within the
movie for the delight of themselves and their friends.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
is another fine example of the spell that can be cast by certain movies.
Clearly then, movies put words in the mouths of audiences and serve a multitude of social and individual purposes. Moreover, it would seem that movies have replaced books as the chief source of memorable lines in contemporary Western cultures. If we look at what are the currently popular and/or most memorable quotes from films, it might provide us with some sense of what our culture thinks about and highlight the social agendas that film dialogue often has an uncanny way of revealing. After all, it can be argued, we are what we find memorable.
But
at the same time, can we meaningfully speak nowadays of a single American
culture? With the diversity of
ethnic groups and gender preferences in films and with the increasing chasm
between generations of Americans fueled by an entertainment industry which finds
that the bottom line is best tended to by the dictum, “youth must be
served,” might it not be expected that different demographic groups have their
cache of memorable quotes from films and that a substantial overlap would be the
exception rather than the rule?
Compared
with films produced under the aegis of the Motion Picture Code (The Hays Code),
which lasted from about 1933-1964, films today are far more sexually explicit
and violent and the language is far more laden with sexual and violent
sentiments (Shales, 2000). Previous research on favorite films by the first author
(Fischoff, 1994; Fischoff, Antonio, & Lewis, 1997) has clearly indicated
that young people tend to prefer films released during their lifetimes; older
people tend to have a more chronologically broad distribution of favorite films
but with an emphasis on films released before the late 1980s.
It might be expected then, that there would be age differences in
favorite quotes.
Young
people, reared on post-Hays Code cinematic freedoms, should prefer more
aggressive and profanity-suffused quotes than older people.
Naturally, the release dates of films which are the origins of these
favored quotes would vary chronologically as a function of the age of the
respondent, with young people preferring more recently minted films and older
people casting a temporally wider net from which to draw favorite quotes.
While this would seem less inevitable given the availability of so many
early and late films on videocassette, research by Fischoff (1994) found that
people were more impressed by films seen originally in theaters than by films
first seen on television, however the picture is delivered.
It
would also be expected that young people would favor film quotes with more
explicit sexual, obscenity-laden or aggressive images given prevailing film
production patterns and formulas since the demise of the Hays Code.
Previous
research by Fischoff (1994), also found significant gender differences with
males favoring films with more violence and action than females, who, in turn,
favored films with more relationship issues and romantic storylines.
It might be expected that similar preferences would reveal themselves in
film quote preferences.
While
there are many popular sources of movie quotes, surprisingly, the present
authors were unable to find any scholarly research articles which sought to look
at people’s favorite movie quotes and/or draw any conclusions about what such
a repository of popular cultural memories says about our society.
The present research was undertaken to explore this surprisingly untapped
source of cultural revelation, untapped from just such a research-based
perspective. Specifically, the
present study sought to explore the following hypotheses (Hs)
and research questions (RQs);
H1:
People recall predominantly negative
sentiments
H2:
Males will cite more negative valence quotes than females.
H3:
Males will cite more aggressive/hostile quotes than females.
H4:
Females will cite more romantic and affectionate quotes than males.
RQ1:
Are the quotes that individuals remember actor gender specific, e.g. males
select more male originated quotes while females select more female originated
quotes?
RQ2:
Is age a determining factor in the
sentiment of the quote that is remembered?
RQ3:
Is there a bias in the age of respondents regarding the release dates of the
films that originated the quotes they favored?
RQ4:
Do some films generate more memorable individual quotes than other films?
Respondent
Sample
A
nation-wide independent, cross-sectional, convenience sample of 1,083
respondents, ranging in age from 10 years old to 90 years old, and primarily
representing the racial/ethnic groups of White (n = 449), Latinos (n = 263),
African-Americans (n =174), Asians (n = 151) and (n = 46) other groups or those
who gave no ethnic affiliation. Respondents were grouped according to age with the
Young group < 25 years old (n =
389), Middle group 26 to 49 years old (n = 385), Older group 50+ (n = 303), and
those who did not provide an age (n = 6). There
were 521 females and 562 males in the sample.
Respondents
were contacted through a variety of sources including mail, street interviews,
e-mail, web-site solicitations, and e-mail in response to live radio interviews
where the first author discussed the topic of favorite quotes.
In addition, data was collected through cooperation by faculty and
students at universities in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New
York. Data was collected between
May 1999 and April 2000.
Questionnaire
Respondents
were asked to list up to 15 of their favorite film quotes.
Quotes cited by respondents were coded according to the gender or
character type of the speaker of the quote and the sentiment expressed in the
quote within the context of the film. Student
researchers at the Media Psychology Lab at California State University, Los
Angeles analyzed the data and participated in the development of a coding system
by which the quotes were classified into sentiment categories.
Sentiments were derived from pilot survey data and represented
generalized themes. The sentiment
of a quote was determined by the context in which it was used in the film. These
sentiments were then collapsed into 30 new sentiments that were then classified
into 13 clusters. Quotes were
classified into 3 different valences according to their affective tone; i.e.
positive, negative, and neutral. Quote accuracy was verified using the Internet
Movie Database and, when necessary, watching videotape of a film to accurately
capture a quote’s contextual meaning.
The
valence category was classified based upon the quotes given by the respondents.
There were 3 types of valances: positive, negative, and neutral. Positive valances were assigned to quotes that expressed
sentiments such as affection, attachment, and romance (e.g., "Here's
looking at you kid" from the film Casablanca.)
Quotes that expressed sentiments of irritation, disrespect, anxiety,
physical/verbal aggression, etc. were coded as having negative valances (e.g.,
"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" from Gone
with the Wind.) Neutral
valances covered quotes that showed neither positive nor negative content (e.g.,
"You gonna finish that?” from Diner).
There
were 31 sentiments extracted from the quotes cited.
Examples of these sentiments are physical/verbal aggression, romance,
sarcasm, disrespect, and enthusiasm. Sentiments
were then classified as subgroups of clusters. (see Table 1, below)
TABLE 1
Sentiment Clusters by Sentiment Classification
|
Cluster
# |
Name |
Sentiment |
Sentiment
# |
|
100 |
Emotionally/Sexually
Open |
|
|
|
|
|
attachment |
102 |
|
|
|
sex |
101 |
|
|
|
romance |
100 |
|
|
|
verbal affection |
103 |
|
101 |
Hostility/Aggression |
|
|
|
|
|
physical/verbal
aggression |
105 |
|
|
|
disrespect |
104 |
|
|
|
kiss-off |
30 |
|
|
|
sarcasm/bitchy/catty |
38 |
|
102 |
Advice/Assistance |
|
|
|
|
|
warning |
107 |
|
|
|
wisdom |
106 |
|
|
|
sharing information |
41 |
|
|
|
bless/inspire/motivate |
27 |
|
103 |
Agitation |
|
|
|
|
|
irritation |
110 |
|
|
|
anxiety |
108 |
|
|
|
astonishment/shock/bewilderment |
109 |
|
104 |
Emotionally Closed |
|
|
|
|
|
defensiveness |
15 |
|
|
|
distrust |
20 |
|
|
|
rejection |
34 |
|
|
|
cynicism |
13 |
|
|
|
depressed/defeated |
52 |
|
105 |
Emotionally
Expansive |
|
|
|
|
|
braggadocio |
9 |
|
|
|
enthusiasm |
22 |
|
|
|
playful
exaggeration/humor |
33 |
|
|
|
|
51 |
|
Independent
Sentiments |
identity |
|
25 |
|
|
nonsense
phrases/music notes |
|
32 |
|
|
irony |
|
29 |
|
|
directive |
|
17 |
|
|
declaration |
|
14 |
|
|
dying/expiring |
|
49 |
|
|
defiance |
|
50 |
Realizing that film dialog comes from a wide variety of characters, it was decided to code the type of character who generated the quote. Therefore, the character type of the quote source was broken down into the following subcategories: male, female, animated male, animated female, animal, and alien/non-human.
RESULTS
A
total of 1,083 respondents generated 5,652 movie quotes.
If each quote is counted only once, there were 2,638 separate quotes
cited. The average number of quotes
cited per person was 5.26.
Only
the “Top 20” for each demographic segment of the sample will be cited and
discussed here. Later discussion of
results will focus on all quotes and movie sources viewed collectively in terms
of valence, sentiments, and clusters.
Quotes
Table
2 (below) shows the results of the “Top 20” movie quotes (in
most tables more than 20 actual films are included because of tied ranks),
their film sources, release dates of film sources and additional statistics to
be discussed below.
Table 2
"Top
20" Quotes for All Respondents
(N = 1,083)
|
Rank |
Quote |
Citation
Frequency |
Film
Source |
Release
Date |
Number of
Quotes From Film Source in "Top 20" |
Film
Source % of Total "Top 20" Quotes |
Percentage
of "Top 20" Quotes
(N = 1,554) |
|
1 |
I'll be back |
159 |
Terminator |
1984 |
1 |
3.8% |
10.2% |
|
2 |
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn |
145 |
Gone With The Wind |
1939 |
1 |
3.8% |
9.3% |
|
3 |
Show me the money |
140 |
Jerry Maguire |
1996 |
2 |
7.7% |
9.0% |
|
4 |
Go ahead, make my day |
123 |
Sudden Impact |
1983 |
1 |
3.8% |
7.9% |
|
5 |
Mama always said life is like a box of chocolates… |
108 |
Forrest Gump |
1994 |
2 |
7.7% |
6.9% |
|
6 |
You can't handle the truth |
85 |
A Few Good Men |
1992 |
1 |
3.8% |
5.5% |
|
7 |
Hasta la vista, baby |
82 |
T2 |
1991 |
1 |
3.8% |
5.3% |
|
8 |
May the force be with you |
76 |
Star Wars |
1977 |
1 |
3.8% |
4.9% |
|
9 |
There's no place like home |
67 |
The Wizard of Oz |
1939 |
2 |
7.7% |
4.3% |
|
10 |
Yeah, baby |
49 |
Austin Powers Films |
1998 |
1 |
3.8% |
3.2% |
|
11 |
Here's looking at you, kid |
46 |
Casablanca |
1942 |
2 |
7.7% |
3.0% |
|
11** |
E.T. phone home |
46 |
E.T. |
1982 |
1 |
3.8% |
3.0% |
|
12 |
(I'll) make him an offer he can't refuse |
43 |
The Godfather |
1972 |
1 |
3.8% |
2.8% |
|
12** |
Bond, James Bond |
39 |
James Bond Films |
1981 |
1 |
3.8% |
2.5% |
|
13 |
Are you talking to me? |
35 |
Taxi Driver |
1976 |
1 |
3.8% |
2.3% |
|
14 |
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore |
34 |
Network |
1976 |
1 |
3.8% |
2.2% |
|
15 |
Fasten your seatbelts it's going to be a bumpy night |
33 |
All About Eve |
1950 |
1 |
3.8% |
2.1% |
|
16 |
You complete me |
32 |
Jerry Maguire |
1996 |
* |
* |
2.1% |
|
17 |
Hakuna Matata |
29 |
The Lion King |
1994 |
1 |
3.8% |
1.9% |
|
18 |
Play it again Sam (Play it once, Sam, for old time's
sake. Play "As time goes
by.") |
27 |
Casablanca |
1942 |
* |
* |
1.7% |
|
18** |
Run, Forrest, run |
27 |
Forrest Gump |
1994 |
* |
* |
1.7% |
|
18** |
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more |
27 |
The Wizard of Oz |
1939 |
* |
* |
1.7% |
The
five most popular quotes all received triple-digit citations.
In ranked order they included "I'll be back" from The
Terminator (159 citations). "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn"
from Gone with the Wind (145
citations) "Show me the money" from Jerry Maguire (140 citations), “Go ahead, make my day” from Sudden
Impact (123 citations) and “Mama always said life is like a box of
chocolates, never know what you’re going to get,” from Forrest
Gump (108).
Age
There
are obvious differences between the three ages groups in terms of what films and
what quotes stand out as memorable (see Tables 3, 4, and 5), suggesting dynamics
that will be discussed below. But,
there are also some strong similarities. Some
film quotes seem to transcend age. In no particular order, the quotes that
reverberate across the three generations are as follows:
“Here’s
looking at you, kid.”
Casablanca
“Go
ahead, make my day.”
Sudden Impact
“There’s
no place like home.”
The Wizard of Oz
“I’m
mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Network
“Frankly,
my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Gone With The Wind
“I’ll
be back.”
The Terminator
“(I’ll)
make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
The Godfather
“Mama
always said life was like a box of chocolates…”
Forrest Gump
“You
can’t handle the truth.”
A Few Good Men
“Show
me the money.”
Jerry Maguire
“May
the force be with you.”
Star Wars
Table
3
"Top
20" Quotes
Young:
Ages 15-25 (N = 389)
|
Rank |
Quote |
Citation
Frequency |
Film
Source |
Release
Date |
Number of
Quotes From Film Source in "Top 20" |
Film
Source % of Total "Top 20" Quotes |
Percentage
of "Top 20" Quotes
(N = 620) |
|
|
1 |
I'll be back |
82 |
Terminator |
1984 |
1 |
3.7% |
13.2% |
|
|
2 |
Show me the money |
59 |
Jerry Maguire |
1996 |
3 |
11.1% |
9.5% |
|
|
3 |
Mama always said life is like a box of chocolates… |
49 |
Forrest Gump |
1994 |
2 |
7.4% |
7.9% |
|