Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Whatever happened to quotable movies?

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The other day we sat down to watch Groundhog Day with the kids. Fancy that, a movie we can all watch together that doesn’t have me rolling my eyes or the kids hiding their faces in embarrassment. I forgot how many awesome quotes there are from this movie. I mean, I still say, “Don’t drive angry!” all the time.

Dialogue is one of the last layers of a script. You have to start with the story (why are you telling this?), then develop a rock-solid spine (how are you going to tell this story?), and develop the characters who are going to act this story out (you want to attract the best actors you can!). Then, and only then, do you start working on dialogue. When you’re trying to figure out the best way to have the characters talk to one another about this story. Everyone wants to start with dialogue, because it’s easy and we can write pages and pages of it. But dialogue’s the easiest part, because writers tend to be, uh, good with words. So you have to do the harder part first.

What I’m finding in most of the recent movies I’ve seen is that not only are they not doing the harder parts of “story” and “theme” and “spine,” but there’s absolutely no dialogue worth talking about. 

Have there been any great quotable movies recently? I tried to think if there were any fabulous quotes from a movie I’d seen relatively recently and I came up with “The first rule of Zombieland: Cardio.” And maybe “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” But maybe that’s just because Zombieland got me thinking about Jesse Eisenberg. 

Oh, of course: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” 

(Aaron Sorkin knows how to turn a snappy phrase. I betcha he doesn’t start with the snappiness, though.) 

I guess Joss Whedon does too: “Puny god.” Or, “He’s adopted.” “Let’s get a shawarma when this is all over with.” But I can’t see a lot of application for those in people in everyday speech.

Movies used to be very quotable. People still say, “You’re going to need a bigger boat,” all the time, and that movie came out almost forty years ago. I can’t think of any quotes from the original Alien but I can quote the hell out of Aliens. If you’ve spent any time at a computer company you can recite the entire Monty Python oeuvre without ever needing to see one of their shows or movies. Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. 

I thought about some of the possible reasons for this. 

  • Scripts by committee. It is true, scripts are massaged by tons of writers — you have the original author, then you have the guys brought in to “punch it up,” then every star has their personal writer “do a pass.” But I’m not on the “writers are just typing monkeys” bandwagon (Jesus, I hope I’m not). I guess writers might get rid of other writers’ hilarious lines in order to make sure the hilarious writers don’t get any credit when it comes time to handing out credit.
     
    (And as a mom who had to watch Toy Story and Toy Story 2 about a zillion times, I can tell you that those scripts had a lot of writers and were still quotable. So committees are not a sure way of creating dross.)
     
  • Action movies. Overseas is a huge part of the movie business now, and the less trouble studios have to go through in order to translate dialogue for a foreign audience, the better. Comedies are extremely hard to translate overseas — so what’s their excuse? 
     
  • Movies are so disposable now — putting them in the theaters is more of a promotional exercise than an income-generating one. That there’s no point in giving them any personality.
      
  • The dispersion of popular culture. There used to be three TV channels, and maybe you had one or two movie theaters nearby. Now there are probably ten multiplexes within fifteen miles of your house, and even though the same movie is showing on a huge percentage of the screens (see: “movies are disposable”), there are still a ton more movies being released every year. And the number of TV channels! And other ways to get stuff! We’re not all watching the same things any more. So even if you quote something, I might not recognize it.
     
  • Writer-auteurs work in television, not movies. (Eg. Sorkin, Whedon.) Directors are king in movies, and most of them have no clue what a halfway decent script is, let alone good dialogue.  

I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong and kids do go around quoting movies as much as we did. Or quoting TV shows. Or whatever. But I haven’t heard of any particularly quotable video games (although every time I’ve heard dialogue from Deathspank I’ve cracked up). 

If there is fabulous dialogue in recent movies, could you point me toward it? I don’t want to be all “movies were better in my day” but I’m really coming to the conclusion (especially after the horrible Prometheus) that they really, really were. 

Favorite quotes

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I like quotations. Everyone does, of course; that’s why we see them all over the place.

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.”

— Maya Angelou

I can’t remember where I first heard of the concept of a Commonplace book, but it seems like such a great idea. We’re used to having spiral notebooks full of received wisdom in classes, or in journals filled with our private thoughts and experiences. But what of books of knowledge that we compile — not secret info, but things that strike us as important or that we want to remember.

“I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all of the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors for you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. … Wherever you are, if you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

— Joseph Campbell

I use Yojimbo all the time, primarily to save web pages I find interesting, but somehow that’s different. That’s more like a shoebox full of newspaper clippings, like I (yes) used to keep when I was younger. Of course, I go through my collection of Yojimbo articles about as often as I went through that shoebox; i.e., never.

(Although that’s not quite true: I started going through the Yojimbo articles to see which ones stuck out as something I might be interested investigating further as story ideas. I came across one article about abandoned houses being used for indoor marijuana growers. Then I found another article that was almost the exact same thing, except it was printed four years later and in a different town. Apparently I’m really intrigued about the idea of marijuana growers taking over abandoned houses. And also it’s a problem that’s not going away any time soon.)

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

Anyhow. I keep a list of meaningful quotations in a file, and I add to it every so often. I find it’s very useful for an attitude reset, or a small burst of inspiration, or even to get an idea of my next reading. Honestly, I’m going to read Epictetus and William James any moment now. I’m quite sure of it.

I also find it interesting to see what quotations speak to me and which ones don’t. You’re either stirred by an idea or you’re not. Which is fine — you just have to go find the ideas you are stirred by. And if everything just brings you down, honestly… Get out more. Go photograph a flower or sniff a tree or sketch a sport car or something. Get out of the damn house.

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.”

— John Allen Paulos

I find I get the most out of the ideas I find the most shocking — like Paulos’s. Why does what he said upset me? What would it take for me to be okay with that idea? If what he’s saying is true, what does that mean about the rest of my life?

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”

— Zig Ziglar

Some of the quotes I save are repeated everywhere (like Ziglar’s). That’s okay. That reminds me that this dose of inspiration or outlook-changing I’m doing is perfectly natural. You need to keep setting course and remembering where you want to be. And anything that propels you to do it is okay.

I highly recommend keeping a list of quotes you find meaningful.

My current list of “words to check for”

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Every writer has (or should have) one of these. You know you have nervous tics when you write. You know you’re going to repeat yourself and use the same word four times in three consecutive sentences. You know you’re going to use the word “just” eight hundred million times in any work, because “just” is the American fnord.

I started with a list of words from Self-Editing For Writers but as time has gone on, I’ve kept adding to and improving the list to make it much more about my writing. You may have a completely different list of tics in your own writing that you need to be aware of oh please god yes become aware of them now please please.

Here is my current list of words I have to do a search on to make sure I really want to use them. NSFW.

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