Old Jonathan Lapper's daughter was only six years old. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate (to borrow a phrase from Charles Dickens).
So on Saturday I had to drive the six year old Little Miss Lapper and her six year old friend to her
soccer game. It's a fascinating weekly event in which six year olds wander aimlessly in circles and oblong formations attempting to kick a ball with some sense of purpose. Occasionally, if the planets are aligned correctly and the universe engages in a brief quantum flux, the ball rolls into one of the goals. The planets do not align correctly often.
On this past Saturday we arrived to find the game had been cancelled due to the muddy field from the previous day's rain. Being the responsible and resourceful father that I am I decided the perfect alternative to a vigorous and healthy workout on the soccer field was a trip to the ice cream shop. Besides, I had a hankering for a malted. So I packed up the two little ham balls into the car and drove across town to a nice little locally owned ice cream shop for a bit of creamery delight.
The six years olds confirmed their age by ordering the oddest combination of flavors and toppings available. Maybe I'm too unimaginative but in my book gummy bears don't go with Dulce de Leche flavored ice cream very well. But who am I to judge? I got my malted, paid and we all took a seat.
Upon sitting down it wasn't long before Little Miss Lapper inquired as to the deliciousness of my malted. I told her it was indeed delicious. She (and this should be no surprise to anyone with children) immediately wanted some. I gave her the malted for a taste. She took it in both hands, as children are want to do, and that's when it happened. She looked me squarely in the eyes, furrowed her brow and said:
"I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!"
"Wow," I thought, "it's official. That goddamn line is now known by every human being on the planet."
Now obviously, movies are discussed quite a bit in my household and if I may brag for a 
moment, the Little Miss Lapper, at the tender young age of six, can identify by face or name most of the big stars of the thirties and forties, which places her far ahead of most casual moviegoing adults. She loves "old movies", as she says, and indeed The Awful Truth is one of her favorites, with the scene of the cat holding back the door against Cary Grant guaranteed to crack her up every time. And it's not just classics but older movies in general. Last year for a playdate she wanted to bring a DVD and picked Murder Ahoy with Margaret Rutherford. Not wanting her to face the rejection of this choice we explained that other children might not appreciate Miss Marple on the same level that she does. But at home we've watched all four of Rutherford's Marple series many times over. Margaret Rutherford fascinates the Little Miss Lapper.
But There Will Be Blood? I saw it in the theater. I still don't have it on DVD. And yet there she was, quoting Daniel Plainview to me at the local ice cream shop. Amazing.
What is it about certain movie lines that they are immortalized almost instantly? Why do some lines become ubiquitous while others go unnoticed? Casablanca is famous for it's wealth of quotable lines from "shocked, Shocked!" and "hill of beans" to "here's looking at you kid" and "round up the usual suspects." Hell, it's got so many memorable lines people even remember lines that weren't there ("Play it again, Sam"). In keeping with the classic Hollywood film theme of this comparison, Citizen Kane has a screenplay filled with great lines as well, including one of my favorites, "You know Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich I might have been a really great man." But what's the one Kane line that everyone knows? "Rosebud."
I don't have the answer for why some lines become immortal while others do not. Some are understandable. For instance, "May the Force be with you" is not only a simple statement along the lines of "Good Luck" or "Break a Leg", it also has the fortune of being spoken in a film seen more times by more people than most other films in history. Same goes for "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." Outside of the obvious advantages of that line (spoken by Clark Gable, appearing in generationally popular movie) there's also the context: It's being said to someone who connives and schemes by someone who is, to quote an old internet joke, just so tired of all her shit. It provides the audience with a "finally!" moment that they love.
So is it context that makes a line immortal? The context of the milkshake scene in There Will Be Blood could certainly fall into the same category as the Gone With the Wind line in the simplest of comparisons in that one character is telling another character off, a character the audience has been waiting to see get told off. Only in There Will Be Blood the character doing the telling off, Daniel Plainview, is decidedly less likable than Gable's Rhett Butler. But what about those famous lines that have practically no context like "Yeah Baby!" from Austin Powers that people started saying because they didn't know how to be witty or clever on their own. Or "I'm the King of the World!" from Titanic? It's not a particularly deep line or containing any kind of clever play on words but for whatever reason it became famous. A seemingly coke-addled James Cameron even yelled it out when he won one of his many Oscars that night, acknowledging it's ubiquity.
Is it quality? Doubtful. There are many lines from many a bad film that are utterly immortalized. But quality films do seem to have the advantage. More people know "I'm gonna
make him an offer he can't refuse" from The Godfather than "muzzled by army brass" from Plan Nine from Outer Space (or it's almost orgasmic description of Solaranite, one of my favorite scientific explanation movie moments in film history) but Plan Nine does have its share of famous lines nonetheless.
The thing with immortal movie lines is you never know which ones are going to become immortalized and which ones aren't. So maybe it's the mood of the country or the world at any given time. I've often thought that despite its cleverness as a line, one of the reasons that "We're gonna need a bigger boat" caught on so well was due to the sinking ship feeling all over the world in 1975. Gas shortages, meat and sugar prices shooting up, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Watergate, the drawn out end of the war in Vietnam, recession and so on and so on. It was a mess and nobody had the answer. But in that movie, Jaws, Chief Brody saw the problem and addressed it succinctly, honestly and appropriately. I think everyone in the seventies felt like we needed a bigger boat.
So what's the zeitgeist now? Why is the milkshake line so ubiquitous? Is it because it uses the word "milkshake?" Seriously, is that why? If he had said "water" instead would it have stuck? I don't think it would have so the wording definitely goes a long way in explaining its popularity.
Or is it the internet? It seems more movies have memorable lines now than ever before if only because we can watch clips from them over and over at our leisure. And that goes for television shows too. Most people can quote episodes of The Simpsons or South Park liberally and with ease so maybe it's just the access we have now. Maybe if There Will Be Blood was released in 1957 the line would've disappeared without a trace.
And this technological advantage of the internet and DVDs has helped out smaller movies immeasurably. The ability to watch the movie on DVD or online again and again has helped movies that would've fallen down the memory hole just a couple of decades before become cult 
classics. Take The Big Lebowski. It had a lukewarm reception in the theatres during it's opening run. It got mixed reviews and seemed destined to be one of the lesser known Coen brothers' films. Then it was released on video and took on a brand new second life as a cult classic. With its release on DVD it became even easier to go to favorite scenes over and over. And the price didn't hurt either. The Big Lebowski was one of the first DVDs I ever bought, partially because I liked the movie and partially because it's price point was around seven bucks. Today its fans (and most cinephiles in general) can quote the movie endlessly even though many of the quotes are only funny within the context of the film and don't stand out as anything special on their own. The line on the phone, for instance, when the Dude tells Walter that, no, he didn't think the kid was about to crack, is hilarious, but only if you've sat through the astonishing homework interrogation scene before it.
So will there be more out of context quoting of 'R' rated movies by six year olds in the future? Almost assuredly. We have entered the golden age of movie quoting, aided by technology, that allows moviegoers the world over to connect with each other on the basis of shared knowledge. In this case, shared knowledge of movie or television dialogue. When people unfamiliar with each other can recite a scene from a favorite movie together or knowingly laugh when the other says, " I don't roll on Shabbos!" we've entered a new age; the age of quote conversations, as I like to call them. I've had many quote conversations with people I would have otherwise had nothing to say to. Usually it ends there, but sometimes it goes further and who knows, with all these quote conversations going on, some of them may end up as the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I think I heard that in a movie somewhere.
