Popular Movie Quotes: Reflections of A People and A Culture

By

Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D., Esmeralda Cardenas, Angela Hernandez, Korey Wyatt, Jarod Young,

and

Rachel Gordon, Executive Editor, Journal of MediaPsychology

  Based on a paper presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 7, 2000

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?

Methods

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  

  Based on group deliberations, 23 of the 31 sentiments were then collapsed into and classified under clusters or categories.  These clusters were composed of subgroups of conceptually related sentiments.  The remaining 8 sentiments were viewed separately because the quotes either didn't really fit into any existing cluster or the sentiment expressed was viewed as worth evaluating separately.  For example, any quote expressing defiance seemed to reflect a particular sentiment that possessed a particular psychological meaning that warranted special attention (e.g., "Freedom" from the film Braveheart.)  Clusters with multiple sentiments were assigned 3-digit codes (e.g., Sentiment 102 (Attachment) "I'll never let go" from Titanic) while single sentiment clusters were assigned a 2-digit code pertaining to that particular sentiment (e.g., Sentiment 25 (Identity) "Bond, James Bond" from the 007 series).

        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)  

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)