Over the course of the class “Video Graphic Criticism”, which was taken as a part of the honors program in the Steve Tisch School for Film and Television in the University of Tel-Aviv, we were asked to comment on a video essay of our choosing, as long as we take it from the “Best Video Essays” list of a certain year. I landed on the video “What Makes a Movie Line Memorable”, from the 2020 list, made by Mark Forsyth as part of White Little Lies.
As part of my comment, I tried to think what makes a movie line memorable for my generation? Giving that Forsyth’s answer did not seem to work for that, I put a thought out there – maybe, it is the lines that become successful memes.
With that thought in mind, this Video was Created. To try and answer this question, I decided to put my communications studies knowledge into good use.
Memes are, technically, a visual cultural unit that is being transformed and replicated between different people and platforms, and used in different contexts. The first meme ever, for example, was the writing.
In the internet era, that definition is shifting and changing even more – in her paper “Testimonial Rallies and the Construction of Memetic Authenticity”, Limor Shifman explains that a meme is something that is being changed from it’s original, recreated, reuploaded, and goes viral from there. These Videos are usually simple, humoristic, playful, and a lot of the times also include some sort of flawed masculinity or even humanity (like “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” with the dancing banana, or any animal meme out there).
In the making of this Video essay, I choose to work around the same way the original video was made in, given that it is a comment to it. With this language of Voice Overs and dictionary definitions and quotations, I tried to incorporate as many movie memes that can demonstrate my thoughts as possible. When choosing the memes, I tried to mostly use ones who fall under the characteristics described by Shifman, alongside ones that are usually taken out of their original movie context (while still acknowledging their pop cultural background).
When it comes down to it, maybe the repetitiveness is not entirely admissible in this situation. It simply changed. Instead of having a repetition or multiplication in the sentence itself, we get in for the entire complete sentence. The entire segment is repeated, over and over, around different people and platforms, until it becomes, essentially, a meme.
And that, in my opinion, is what makes a line memorable these days.
Bibliography
Shifman, Limor. Testimonial Rallies and the Construction of Memetic Authenticity. The European Journal of Communications, Vol.33, pp. 172-184. 2018.
Filmography
What Makes a Movie Line Memorable, Created by Marl Forsyth, White Little Lies, 2020
*This work was created for the class “Video Graphic Criticism”, taught by Ariel Avissar as part of the bachelor’s degree in Film and Television from the Steve Tisch School in Tel Aviv University .
