The Blog City incarnation of this blog will supposedly implode as the New Year takes over, so this will be the last rerun I post. A shame. I feel a new empathy for writers who opt for creating clip shows over developing new content.
This one’s from November 24, 2005.
I saw RoboCop this weekend. A fine movie. Yet for being a totally serious, dark film, it has a running gag that seems totally out of place and inexplicable. Over and over, people keep saying the line ‘I’d buy that for a dollar!’ It means nothing — perhaps a statement of agreement or acknowledgement — and people in real life don’t say that, so every instance of the line feels like an infusion of artificial culture. The whole movie, with high-tech props and megacorporations set inside a Detroit that is basically unchanged from our reality, is like a patchwork of real reality and movie reality, with only the chosen bits covered over. It’s not wrong; in fact, I find it rather creative. But to return to the ‘dollar’ tagline, it’s about as explicit a change of culture as you get in that movie.The concept reminds me of Atlas Shrugged (why do I keep coming back to that godawful book?), in which everyone says ‘Who is John Galt?’ as a rhetorical question with the culturally assigned meaning of ‘Some things don’t have answers.’ Unfortunately, people in reality have started using that line…Ayn Rand has won.
‘I’d buy that for a dollar’ is a lot neater than the John Galt nonsense, so what I propose is that we let Paul Verhoeven win too. Stick it in your regular conversations, even if it adds nothing. Let it mean whatever you think it means. Even better: if someone catches the RoboCop reference, give them a dollar.
