10 Internet Memes And Their Cinematic Counterparts

By Jon Marco / April 15, 2013

Internet Memes are what happens when the hive mind of the internet meets the short attention span of the character-limit generation. Where once a person may have written a full story to explore characters, now we have character observations boiled down to their purest form and injected straight into our veins. One image, two captions; a moments foreplay, then punch line. These images work as jokes because of our preconceptions about their characters, having already encountered people like that in our lives, and seen them played out in countless popular films and TV shows. Indeed, many of these images involve screen caps of movies, capitalising on our familiarity with that character to make their point. In this article I will present the cinematic equivalent of ten of these Internet Memes. For the purpose of this list, I will omit any Internet Meme derived directly from a film (Condescending Wonka, Am I The Only One Around Here... Walter or One Does Not Simply... Boromir etc). With that out of the way, lets begin.

10. Overly Attached Girlfriend

Cinematic equivalent: Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn) in Bringing Up Baby Overly Attached Girlfriend is the girl that would poke holes in her boyfriends condoms while he was in the shower. Screwball comedy Bringing Up Babys Susan Vance deserves the mantle of most overly attached girlfriend ever, her possessiveness made all the more salient by the fact she is not her love interests girlfriend at all, and they barely know each other. Watching the film with a friend recently, she and I were struck with how easily this movie could be remade as a horror film, with only a few changes in the lighting and score. Susan Vance takes a contented, soon-to-be-wed man named David Huxley (Cary Grant), drags him off on a fools errand in a car she steals (she also steals Davids car earlier in the film), leaves him in constant fear for his life in the presence of her pet leopard, steals his clothes so he is unable to attend his own wedding, endangers his career, assaults his museums benefactor, and has him wrongfully arrested. He somehow falls in love with her at films end, or as Wikipedias plot summary phrases it ...David gives up and admits he cannot do without her. Psychoanalysts call this Stockholm Syndrome.