Tuesday, February 26, 2008

I DRINK IT UP!

I cannot think of a more simultaneously fun and bizarre quote from a recent movie than There Will Be Blood's "I - drink - your - MILKSHAKE!"

The quote is slowly starting to find its way into popular culture. There's even a website dedicated to the line.

New York magazine's Josh Ozersky was the first to weigh in over a month ago:

We have no doubt that “I drink your milkshake,” the volcanically dramatic, mind-bendingly cool line with which Daniel Plainview devastates his enemy in There Will Be Blood's final sequence, will soon enter the pop-culture catchphrase lexicon, nestling alongside such former lazy-writer tropes as “I see dead people,” “Say hello to my little friend,” “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” and all the rest. Personally, we would like to see a federal law passed preventing this from happening. “I drink your milkshake” has such Dickensian grandeur that its miniaturization in the mouths of SportsCenter anchors, scab gag writers, bloggers, and their ilk is practically a national tragedy. Nonetheless, if somebody is going to do it, it’s going to be us. The question is, what is its proper use? What situation demands the milkshake treatment?

As a sports metaphor? (“Let’s face it. The Celtics drank the Knicks’ milkshake last night.”) An amorphously obscene double entendre, hearkening back to its Kelis-ian roots? (“I’d like to drink your milkshake!”) Or maybe, in a nod to the godlike venom of its utterer, a taunt: “You best back down before I drink your milkshake, bitch.” In the end, none of these seem quite right, especially as they all omit the special genius of the line’s coda, a burst of half-mad juvenilia that captures the demented feeling of the scene better even than the line itself: “I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!” Because the child is the father of the man, and the milkshake too
USA Today also weighed in, reporting:

[Writer/Director Paul Thomas] Anderson concedes that he's puzzled by the phenomenon — particularly because the lines came straight from a transcript he found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Sen. Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for oil-drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California.

In explaining oil drainage, Fall's "way of describing it was to say 'Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I'll end up drinking your milkshake,' " Anderson says. "I just took this insane concept and used it."

Not to be outdone, SNL devoted a whole sketch to the line, with Bill Hader doing a very impressive imitation of Academy Award winner Daniel Day Lewis's performance:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought that SNL skit was thoroughly unfunny.

BookieD said...

I laughed out loud. Hader's impression was incredibly dead-on! He should have been at the Oscars, and should definitely do something with the MTV Movie Awards.

wincheck said...

I thought the impression was spot on but as a premise I thought the skit was like something you'd see in a middle school talent show. Weekend Update was rad, though.