Why do we quote movies? I often think about this fascination we have as a culture to repeat and relive moments from our favorite films. Large number of clips exist on YouTube devoted to capturing that magical moment when a character utters an unforgettable line. But why? What is it that drives us to remember a great line or identify with the person who uttered a quote?
This question came up over the dinner table one night and, as I reflected on this question, my thoughts were drawn to an explanation about speed reading that I had once come across. The author went to great trouble to make the point that that the trick to speed reading was to see groups of words in a sentence as a single chunk of information.
To understand that point, consider the words you read in a sentence. To make it concrete, let’s take the word ‘understand’. When you read the word ‘understand’, you are seeing a group of 11 individual letters, but are you really conscious of each letter at a time? Do you really see a ‘u’ followed by an ‘n’ followed by a ‘d’ and so on? No. What each of us with any sophistication in reading accomplishes is to perceive these 11 letters as a unit that conveys the word ‘understand’. Of course, this is why we can read a sentence with a misspelling quite comfortably and often we may not even notice.
This idea of chunking and clumping comfortably scales upward to where common phrases can be consumed with a glance without a detailed examination of the individual words. Two common approaches are to either abbreviate the phrase into some short form. Expressions like ‘LOL’ or ‘BTW’ or any of the other text and chat speak concepts are excellent examples. The other approach is to pick lyrical or repetitive expressions to encapsulate a phrase. The famous ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ from the Homeric epics or ‘ready, set, go!’ are examples of these kinds, respectively.
But there is an even more compelling approach – the concept of the metaphor. The idea here being that we liken an object to another object, one with well-known properties. The properties of the second object are then inherited by the first simply by the equating of the name. Some examples of this include the following sentences.
- ‘That guy’s a Benedict Arnold for leaving our team for that other one.’
- ‘How was the date last night, Romeo?’
- ‘Stay away from her, she’s Mata Hari through and through!’
- ‘That man is death itself’.
I think that our desire to quote movies is indicative of this. That by repeating the dialog of the movie, the quote itself becomes a cultural metaphor for the feelings and experiences expressed in the movie. This idea was brilliantly explored in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok.
In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise are coaxed into a meeting with a Tamarian ship in orbit around a mostly unexplored planet. Despite their universal translator, no ship of the Federation had ever been able to crack the Tamarian language. The words themselves could be translated, but the syntax and context seemed to be utterly devoid of meaning. The Tamarian captain, Dathon, seeing that this meeting was no different from previous encounters and that the ordinary avenues for communication were not working, arranged for himself and Captain Picard to be trapped on a planet.
On that planet, both captains were confronted by a dangerous creature. This shared danger spurred a meeting of the minds and eventual understanding dawned on Picard. The Tamarian race thought and communicated in metaphors. They would say statements like ‘Tember, his arms wide’ to mean the concept of giving or generosity. Back on the Enterprise, the crew had also come to a similar epiphany. By analogy, they constructed a Tamarian-like way of expressing romance by saying ‘Juliet on her balcony’, but they lamented that without the proper context, in this case Shakespeare’s tragic play about Romeo and Juliet, one didn’t know who Juliet was and why she was on her balcony.
The episode closes with Dathon dying from the wounds inflicted by the creature, and with Picard arriving back aboard the Enterprise just in time to make peace between the Tamarians and the Federation by speaking their language.
The episode left some dangling ideas. How do the Tamarians specify an offer that involves a choice between many things, or how an abstract idea, like giving someone his freedom, would be expressed. Nonetheless, it was a creative and insightful way of exploring how powerful metaphor can be and how abstracted can be the thought that lies behind it.
So, the next time you quote a movie, give a thought to the metaphor that you are tapping into and take a moment to marvel at the miracle of speech and thought.