Got Milkshake?
With Daniel Day Lewis’s Golden Globe win and a per-screen b.o. average over $14,000
and even Republican presidential candidate John McCain taking a break from
campaigning in South Carolina to watch the movie, “There Will Be Blood”’s tagline “I drink your milkshake” seems destined to become a pop cultural
mantra, if not a new campaign slogan.
There’s already a website dedicated
to it, which ranks Plainview’s signature rant with the calling card of Tony
Montana, a.k.a. “Scarface (1983),” rendered in Al Pacino’s bad Cuban accent:
“Do you want to meet my little friend?” A fair comparison, and if your looking for other
great movie bad guys' l lines that have summed up the spirit of an
era, you might also throw in Pacino as Michael Corleone muttering (by way of Brando as his dad) “I’ll make him an
offer he can’t refuse,” in the 1972 "The Godfather".
Or Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow summing
up his résumé in “Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967,
“We rob banks.”
If there is anything in common,
maybe it's that each of these movies each released at times of governmental transition or crisis.
"Bonnie and Clyde" drew on the anti-establishment, proto-revolutionary energy of
the counter culture and the growing discontent of Democrats for their then President
Lyndon Johnson that would end with the debacle of the 1968 Chicago convention and the election of
Richard Nixon.
The Godfathers, which cynically compared organized crime with legit
business and politics, bookended both Nixon’s landslide victory over McGovern
in 1972 and his Watergate downfall in 1974.
"Scarface" and his little
friend evoked the spirit of covert violence employed by the Reagan
administration to support friendly if criminal regimes in Salvador
and the not-so-covert invasion of Grenada in 1983, which overturned an inconvenient leftist regime. We
managed to both conquer and skedaddle from the
tiny island almost immediately, unlike our current adventure in Iraq, and
Reagan defeated Mondale for President in 1984. But Reagan’s continuing policy of
dabbling in the regimes of other countries would lead to the Iran-Contra
scandal.
As for Douglas in “Wall Street,” the film remarkably coincided
with the Black Monday stock market plunge in 1987 and also, as we see in “Charlie
Wilson’s War,” with the Afghan mujahadeen offensive, covertly funded by a
billion in CIA aid, that would soon drive the Russians out of the country and
ultimately lead to the establishment of
the Taliban.
Like the above tag-lines, Day-Lewis’s milkshake remark has arisen in a period in which
these conditions tend to prevail:
a) a presidential campaign is
taking place (ending, in the previous instances, in a Republican victory)
b) the
US is involved in a dubious military adventure
c) the administration is
engaging in devious policies that will lead to scandal and investigation, and
d) an economic or cultural crisis is brewing.
Why might this be? An article in last Sunday’s “New York Times”
suggests a possible explanation. Noting the resurgence of such 80s action stars
as Chuck Norris (could he become Mike Huckabee’s running mate?), Hulk Hogan,
Sylvester Stallone (his “Rambo” is due out soon) and, though the story doesn’t
mention him, Harrison Ford in the upcoming “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull,” the writer suggests
that these heroes (and their villainous counterparts, I would add) appeal to
Americans (mostly male, unsurprisingly) who have “an appetite for characters
who tend to fix even big problems with room clearing brawls, mono-syllabic
wisecracks and large caliber firearms.”
And presumably will vote accordingly.