Who said roundup the usual suspects




















Do we even have to say where the biggest reference to this quote can be found? Okay, we'll say it since, you know, it's our job. The biggest reference to Casablanca's "usual suspects" line is… The Usual Suspects , the top-notch, twisty-turny crime thriller that launched the career of director Bryan Singer and nabbed Kevin Spacey his first Oscar.

The shout-out nods to that fact the movie is based around a bloody event that happens after a bunch of criminals meet in a line-up. If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of So what if quoting a classic movie like Casablanca makes you sound a little pretentious? Anyway, if you drop this one at a party, a lot of people will think you're just referencing the Bryan Singer movie.

Quotes Shmoop will make you a better lover Major Strassor has been shot. Being Darth Vader for Halloween, having a light saber duel with friends, eating Star Wars cereals, or playing Star Wars chess are all creative retellings and reenactments of the saga.

So are commentaries, exhibits, and documentaries about the movies. But just combining a narrative analysis of movies with an archaeology of their cultural fallout will not develop the anthropological study of films far enough.

These patterns are persistent categories, cultural themes, interpretive strategies, integrated sets of symbols, and world-views that members of that society see as normal and natural. The way to see these habits and patterns is to look at how the movies and their related artifacts are used to define, create, and challenge cultural categories. The categories we use are culturally specific, not universal ways to organize the world. Movies are rich and vivid demostrations of our categorizing, even if they are not real accounts of actual events.

Instead they are idealized accountings of generic events, making a story out of possible scenarios. The criticism that often accompanies fictional movies based on real events—that the movie is not faithful to reality—becomes irrelevant if the analysis of a movie is based on describing and engaging its cultural categories, what is in them and what is left out.

Not every member of a category is as good a fit as the prototype, but the process of comparing potential members to the prototype is what constitutes thinking. Many movies address the difficulties of defining some of our most important categories. Kinship is a classic category of anthropology that still has its uses, defining who qualifies as family and who does not.

In the process a whole series of taboos, indiscretions, and illegalities are set up. Efforts to define and thwart the category of kin is always revealing about a culture. In The Birds , the small town of Bodega Bay is attacked by common birds after an attractive young woman, Melanie Daniels, comes to town.

Annie is the schoolteacher in Bodega Bay who uses both her students and her garden as substitute children. Melanie takes over mothering roles from Lydia as the bird attacks accelerate, but by the end of the movie, Lydia remarkably becomes nurturing to an injured Melanie as they flee the birds. But the category being challenged is not simply nature or the nature of women, but that of the natural mother. The category of the real mother suffers in the face of what we learn about so many different kinds of failed mothers.

This may at first sound boring, but this is exactly what makes movies entertaining. Ambiguous things are disturbing but also very interesting. One mark of success in independent filmmaking is to subvert the tone, style, content, or telegraphed meanings often found in Hollywood studio films. We are looking for the important cultural categories that any type of film should be able to address as it shows us what our culture is trying to say about itself.

Like anthropology, movies show us worlds that we cannot usually access directly, safely, or practically. These alternative views of what the world is or could be require us to think about our established categories.

While we may have little individual control over our categories, it is the work of the human mind to think about changing them, fitting in new things, throwing out old ones, and squeezing and stretching the boundaries which only occasionally will break. A few seconds later, the Harbormaster's boat put out to recover the "body".

Just when detectives were ready to order the usual suspects to be rounded up, the grappling hooks came into contact with a heavy object. Raised, it proved to be a cigaret [ sic ] vending machine which had been rifled.

That story illustrates the routine and groundless nature of the rounding up of suspects - in that case when there was no crime to be suspected of. A close match to the "round up the usual suspects" expression is found a little later, in The New York Age newspaper, November The rubbing out of Schultz and a few of his aides by their hoodlum contemporaries, as usual leaves its aftermath.

New York's "criminologists" are rounding up the "usual suspects".



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