As a screenwriter, I’m always looking for ways to create characters and stories that will grab a viewer and move them in ways they won’t forget.
Sometimes that’s done with the perfect visual. Because film is a visual medium, right? Say Anything – John Cusack holds up his boombox in the rain to woo his girl and we get all the yearning, the romance, the devotion. Finding Dory – a line of seashells tells us everything about parental love. Raiders of the Lost Ark – the ark gets wheeled into an endless warehouse of crates and we understand how bureaucracy is inevitably myopic.
And let me state right here that even if you just have two people talking, it’s always way more interesting if it’s in a cool setting that says something about the scene.
But I’m going to argue that, for all the visual splendor we go to the movies for, the part that sticks with us most long term is usually a line of dialogue.
Why?
For the simple reason that a thought perfectly expressed in dialogue is easier to take away with you so it can be accessed when needed. Try Googling inspiring movie quotations. You’re almost certain to find a few that resonated with you when you first heard them and they probably still do.
For me, an early one was in Flashdance. “You give up your dream, you die.” It still stirs me.
And the romantic in me was fueled by Brigadoon’s “My, my, you must really love her. You woke me up.” “I told ye, if you love someone deeply enough, anything is possible … even miracles.” Because, well, it’s just true, isn’t it? So many adventures, discoveries, rescues motivated by love.
More recently, I talked with a lawyer who was wrestling with the personal implications of a difficult case she was taking to trial. I remembered Dr. Strange and knew she’d enjoyed the movie. I reminded her of the Ancient One’s admonition (apparently Benedict Cumberbatch’s favorite line in the script) – “It’s not about you.” It helped.
Of course all these lines are inextricably linked to the stories they’re part of, the struggles, character arcs, the actors, the images. But when perfect line sums up the key inspiration or growth point, our brains can neatly bundle all of those things together and tag them with the line. Later, the line becomes the key to unlocking all the associated sights and feelings and revelations. Say the line to yourself and it floods back. Say it to someone else who’s seen the film and bond as they share their experience of it…and probably other lines they love just as much or more.
It’s not just inspirational lines that can capture an important essence of a movie, of course. Try Googling depressing movie lines, or funny movie lines, or wise ones, or the most unintentionally revealing – yay, subtext! – or ones that express a favorite theme like love, forgiveness, revenge, etc.
They’re all magic that screenwriters have found inside themselves in the heat of creation, or had forced out of them by the demands of an end-of-act-two revelation or end-of-movie affirmation. Sometimes they’re arrived at by committee, or pasted on by a producer or the seventh writer having a go at a script, or even ad-libbed by an actor in the course of filming. “You can’t handle the truth!” “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Doesn’t matter. Because when they work, they’re gifts that let you take away a part of that movie experience forever. They can comfort, heal, make people laugh, make them feel understood, make them want to try again.
The line can even become bigger than the movie it sprang from. “I’ll be back.” “Allllrighty then!” And it can get “improved” in the retelling. “You feeling lucky, punk?” “Mirror Mirror on the wall.” “Luke, I am your father.” (Look these last three up to see what the movie line actually was.)
At which point they may be used to express our innermost thoughts more elegantly than we could express them ourselves. “I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!” (Note that Monty Python’s fart line was probably stolen from Ben Jonson’s 1612 theater masterpiece The Alchemist, where Subtle, the alchemist of the title, insults Face with “I fart at thee.” See how a good line carries?)
So am I saying it’s all about the dialogue? Never. Movies are a comprehensive medium. Like life. Everything’s important. But it’s often the spoken words we remember that carry a movie into eternity.
“Rosebud.”
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