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Do You Know Who I Am?
“Do you know who I am?”
Not a question that elicits any particular reaction on its own (unless you live in Little Italy or the one who says it is a big, fat, Japanese guy with a bad perm and missing half a little finger. But I digress…), but there is one sure-fire way to make it legendary. Follow three steps: 1. Put it on the big screen. 2. Have it (or damn near anything) come out of Christopher Walken’s mouth. 3. Use ”I am the Anti-Christ” as the follow-up sentence. Voilá! You have the pure magic of cinema perfectly encapsulated. It is no coincidence that this hidden art of movie quotes has spawned a full blown, and some would argue irritating, cultural phenomena. Bookstore shelves are bulging with the topic and you only have to look at the google list of over 14 million sites elicited by key words ‘movie quotes’ to see the interest is very widespread. Of course, one should probably minus three million of those debutantes who’ve missed the point of the exercise and pretty much written the entire (un)funny screenplay of ‘Kindergarten Cop’. They haven’t understood that a real, honest-to-god, bona fide quote must stand on its own without the aid of the visual. This is not to be mistaken with quotes that are enhanced by the visual clues showing us exactly how to stand/hold the firearm/stare the enemy down/sit at the bar when you say it à la Joan Crawford: ”Don’t f*ck with me boys, this isn’t my first time at the rodeo” (she is standing in front of a board room for that one). True to the bona fide movie quotation tradition, however, you don’t need to see the movie to feel that particular barb AND they generally carry the added bonus of being good for all occasions (job interview, negotiations, at the bank). The quotes that carry the most zing (although not necessarily status) are the brief ones. Take the Addams Family perfect and morbid one-liners: “I would kill for her. I would die for her...either way, what bliss.” Quoting is obviously in our blood, so why only quote from movies? Consider the alternatives. If you quote from a book, you sound pretentious. If you quote anything other than Sting lyrics, you sound like an idiot (“You touch my tralalala …..Need I say more?). And famous quotes are, well, boring. A show of hands for all of you who need to hear someone say “Seize the Day” on more f-ing time? I thought so. Movies on the other hand, there we have a ticket to major coolness and group recognition (from the people we like). We get to adopt the impossibly cool character who had the cochones to say it in the first place AND we get to show off our fantastic memory skills (thus showing we have no life apart from playing with ourselves in front the DVD, but let’s not go there). But more than anything else, we wish we’d said it first, ‘Aliens’ style Male marine to badass Female Marine: "Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?" Badass Female replies: "No, have you?" Or, conversely, those things we wish someone had said to us. “I am like putty in your hands.” “Nothing turns to putty in my hands…” I don’t even HAVE male anatomy and steam would still blow out of my ears if someone (good-looking) fired that off in my immediate vicinity. But for every good quote, there’s got to be at least ten on the other end of the spectrum we’d rather slit our wrists than ever have to endure again, like Andie MacDowell in a torrential downpour to Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. ”Oh, is it raining? I hadn’t noticed” It doesn’t help that Andie MacDowell can’t act to save her life in that movie, but it seems hardly fair that we are subjected to both bad dialogue AND terrible acting. Unfortunate combinations aside, sometimes you just need a really good one hibernating in the back of your head for the moment you most need it (bosses will generally oblige with unreasonable demands/denial of a raise/derogatory remark). Then you can simply lean in, take a deep, fight club breath and say very precisely: “Do you know who I am? I am the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood. You’ll tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.” Just make sure you’re not in Little Italy when you say it.
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