I Can't Handle the Truth: How and Why Movies Gave Way to Memes

Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it. Close your eyes. Clear your mind. Think back: when was the last time a movie line felt instantly iconic—something destined to be quoted for decades?

As a dialogue-loving screenwriter prone to pondering the current state of cinema (and struggling to finish a script I’ve been laboring on for what feels like—and is, if you ask my manager—an eternity), I’ve been experiencing a cinematic melancholy of late. Sadly, my love for film has waned, and it’s compounding my inertia when it comes to writing them. And I think I finally figured out why:

Movies just don't matter anymore.

Not to me, at least—and not to the general public either, from the looks of it. Not in the way they used to, when they felt sacred and our communal love for them bordered on religiosity.

In my belabored writer’s block, I’ve been ruminating on this decline, performing an autopsy of sorts on the filmic landscape of yesteryear in order to divine why both my own passion for the medium and cinema’s cultural standing have eroded so precipitously. And I keep coming back to what feels like an unfortunate truism:

Iconic dialogue is dead.

It wasn’t so long ago that movies were our cultural glue, and a shared language. We didn’t just watch them—we spoke them. Their dialogue became shorthand for emotions, ideas, entire philosophies.

From "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" to "We're not in Kansas anymore." From "I coulda been a contender" to "You talkin’ to me?" From "Here’s Johnny!" to "I'll be back" to “Run, Forrest, run!" and "Show me the money!" and "You complete me."

Even cult favorites like The Big Lebowski and Austin Powers weren’t box office juggernauts, yet through the glorious ritual of physical media consumption their iconic lines still broke through, branded our brains, and managed to weave themselves into our everyday lexicon.

This article is just, like, my opinion, man.

Cut to today. Cinema may be alive and well—great films still get made, to be sure—but with the exception of ubiquitous tentpole spandex superhero movies they are no longer cultural events. And when they are, like a Barbie (arguably still a superhero tentpole, if you ask me), they don’t leave behind truly quotable or iconic dialogue—just more memetic trends (Barbenheimer, anyone?).

And this, folks, after all of my forensic foraging, is what I believe to be the silent cinema killer: Memes have replaced movies in the cultural lexicon.

Instead of "We're gonna need a bigger boat," we get "Damn, Daniel," "Can I pet that dog?" and "Daddy chill."

I can’t help but feel something has been lost. Great film quotes are more than words—they carry weight, memory, and meaning. You remember when you saw a movie, who you saw it with, how it made you feel while laughing or crying in a theater full of strangers or watching with friends and family on VHS or DVD.

Now? Now we get flash-in-the-pan memes.

Memes are fun, sure. Occasionally insightful, even. But they lack experiential context—there’s no lasting emotional anchor. Who remembers where they were when they first saw even the most fire meme, or who they discovered it with? Like seemingly everything else these days, memes are disposable. They go viral, they disappear … and they’re usually forgotten when the next trend takes over.

Of course, it’s not just memes. The way we consume media has changed.

Films used to have legs. They hung around in theaters for months. If you loved one, you saw it again (and maybe even again and again). Then they aired on TV. You’d catch one midstream while flipping channels, often get caught in its web and stay until the end—even if it was an R-rated movie butchered with laughably bad dubs.

We all watched the same movies at the same time. We talked about them. We quoted them.

That rarely happens anymore. Much as video killed the radio star, social media and memes killed the cinematic zeitgeist. Now, we watch on-demand, in silos, at different times. Even if a film has a potentially iconic line (more on that in a moment), we’re not all catching the wave together. It never embeds itself into the collective consciousness.

And, to that “more in a moment” point—maybe the issue isn’t just how we consume movies. It feels as if they’re just not even being written the same way anymore. There’s good writing, sure. But where’s the ICONIC writing?

I don’t watch as many movies as I once did, when my brother and I would regularly clean out the multiplex by seeing damn near everything that made its way to the silver screen—but I, for one, can’t remember a single line from the last 15 to 20 years that stuck. That lingered. That felt immortal.

Did writers just forget how to craft iconic dialogue? Are we being noted to death by fear-stricken development execs who are too timid to put something up on screens that swings for the fences because they fear a strikeout in the eyes of the everyone’s-now-a-critic audience? Or are we, in this post-modern (or whatever the hell you’d call it) age, simply too cool or self-conscious or insincere to write it? Instead of "You can't handle the truth!" we get inundated with Whedon/Gunn-esque snark and superhero quips—or dialogue that’s been grounded into, well, the ground.

I mean, I love gritty realism; films like Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking and A War absolutely speak to me. But now it feels like everything leans too far into “realism” if it’s not drowning in irony. Even the indie darlings—A24, Neon, et al—churn out movies with competent and sometimes even great writing. But they rarely deliver lines that transcend their runtime.

So I ask again: What was the last truly quotable movie line? Daniel Plainview’s diabolical "I drink your milkshake!"—all the way back in 2007?!

Maybe I’m just succumbing to cynicism. Maybe this is merely a decades-long lull, and like Rocky Balboa iconic dialogue will make a rousing late-round comeback vs. the mohawked Clubber Lang of memes. But in this fractured, hyper-fragmented era of entertainment where movies are no longer communal, no longer sacred, no longer lasting … I’m not holding my breath.

To fuel me as I continue my Bataan march toward FADE OUT on this script, I suppose I’ll just have to settle for nostalgia in the form of my cherished old film collection, and memories of a more innocent and communal time. Back when movies truly meant something—not just to me, but to most of us.

Or maybe I, and you who share my lament, need to simply buck up and handle the harsh truth:

That cinema is no longer the dominant art form. That, as sad as it is … the algorithm won.

*Feature photo: Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men (Columbia Pictures)