‘Blood’ fans drink up milkshake catchphrase
LOS ANGELES ó If you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, then you have Hollywood’s hottest catchphrase.
Every year, we seem to get at least one. “I see dead people.” “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Anything from Napoleon Dynamite.
This year’s latest cinematic must-say comes from There Will Be Blood, the oil drama in which Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a crushing insult to a nemesis with the punch line “I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!”
Relatively few people have seen the movie ó this past weekend, it expanded to about 1,500 theaters and its gross so far is $21.1 million ó but the dialogue has taken off nonetheless.
A “There Will Be Milkshakes” video, with scenes from the film playing to Kelis’ song Milkshake, has more than 60,000 views on YouTube.
IDrinkYourMilkshake.com has become a popular forum to discuss the films of There Will Be Blood director P.T. Anderson.
New York magazine even offers a user’s guide to the phrase. It suggests using it as sports metaphor (“The Celtics drank the Knicks’ milkshake last night”), a sexual double entendre or a taunt, as in “You’d best back down before I drink your milkshake.”
Anderson concedes that he’s puzzled by the phenomenon ó 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.”
So have the movie’s fans.
Kevin Kunze, 18, a student at the University of San Francisco, says he created the YouTube video “just to get people to see the movie. I loved it. I had no idea it would take off like this.”
Nor did Jurgen Fauth, the website creator.
He says he wanted simply to have an audio clip of the line, delivered in Day-Lewis’ booming baritone.
“But (Anderson’s) fans started using it to talk about his movies, so I made it a forum,” he says. “Although I think some people turn up the volume and hit refresh to drive their co-workers crazy.”
Not that Anderson minds ó or worries that it will undermine the gravitas of the movie, which is up for eight Oscars, including best picture, director and actor.
“I love the YouTube video,” he says. “It’s completely insane and hilarious. It’s crazy what people latch on to.”
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