Isn’t that more or less how they handled the aliens in The Faculty?
BTW, here’s an ATMB thread about YouTube fragments (or clips from larger works) I posted earlier today.
Meat of the post from Mr. Zotti:
So you would expect a full-scale legal investigation into any and all material that may possibly be copyrighted in any link before posting it? Ridiculous.
Yes, and that was my first reaction to the person who reported this. They countered by saying that the situation is different when the entire movie is available on YouTube, broken into ten-minute fragments. I was in a hurry this morning and decided that discretion is the better part of whatever, so I removed the link and sought rulings from them as knows (and are in power.)
Having received that ruling, that it’s OK for folks to post such links, I will happily restore the link in Bryan’s post… as soon as he emails it to me. (Blush. I said I was in a hurry, I didn’t save it, I just killed it.) I have notified him of such.
link killer!
I can’t access youTube from this computer, but if it matters, I guess anyone can find the sequence I described by searching youTube for “House of Wax 7/10”. The relevant footage starts at around 7:10 of the 10-minute clip.
Nitpick: You don’t mean “meme,” you mean “trope.” (Finding the appropriate trope is left as an exercise for the student.)
“It’s only a flesh wound!”
::d&r:: 
Here are the definitions of meme and trope:
meme (mēm)
n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Cite This Source
trope (trōp)
n.
- A figure of speech using words in nonliteral ways, such as a metaphor.
- A word or phrase interpolated as an embellishment in the sung parts of certain medieval liturgies.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
I looked both of these up before writing the OP. According to these definitions, meme seems much more applicable. Of course, YMMV, reasonable men can disagree, etc., etc.
J.
My dad put it this way, after watching the hero take a serious beating, fall about three prison stories onto a concrete floor, then get up and continue fighting (and win!):
“Oh, right! ‘You could cut off both my arms and legs, and I’d beat you to death with my pecker!’”
Dad truly has a way with sarcasm!
I always got a kick (no pun intended) out of movies and TV shows featuring heroes that were into martial arts (I’m looking at you, Chuck Norris). For one thing, every stinking bad guy he meets is a black belt, and for another, everyone in the show is capable of taking a cowboy boot to the face without showing a single scrape, scratch, bruise, or cut. I guarantee if you get a solid blow to the face and then get kicked down a staircase, it’ll show.
Of course, in Chuck’s case, he could get knocked off a roof, fall three stories into a loaded Dumpster, roll out of it into a pile of dog feces, and his hat would be clean and his clothes still neatly pressed.
Speaking of movie beatings, another overused trope all by itself is how easy it is to knock somebody unconscious and how easy it is for them to recover. In reality, if you’re hitting someone hard enough to knock them unconscious for an extended period of time (not just stun them for a couple of seconds), you’re hitting them hard enough to cause a concussion and a non-trivial to severe amount of brain injury. People don’t just pop up from it a half hour later with no ill effects but a headache. Anyone who actually got pistol whipped into unconciousness as often as someone like Magnum PI would be walking and talking like Ozzy Osbourne after the first season.
A running gag through Due South was how pristine the Mountie character’s uniform was despite the fights and car chases and dumpster-dives.
When it’s played for laughs, I figure it’s okay.
I also love lines like, “I whacked him pretty good. He’ll be out for a couple of hours.” Oh, really? That’s kind of inconvenient. Next time, could you give him the one-hour whack instead of the two-hour whack?
Which describes 99+% of the ideas ever generated. I see no reason to make up a word when “idea” works just fine.
Where the hell else are ideas going to be transmitted, if not from one mind to another?
To me, both carry different connotations – in the language of ideas, you talk about coming up with something, about ‘having an idea’; the word ‘idea’ thus carries an implication about the conception/origin of the thing it’s describing. You wouldn’t generally talk about ‘having a meme’, as talking about those things in the language of memes generally implies concern with the way of their propagation (and variation), regardless of how they came about. All genes are chemical compounds/molecules, but calling them ‘genes’ implies you want to talk about them in a framework relating to their propagation, a genetic framework; but strictly speaking, the word ‘molecule’ works just as well, so why make up a new one?
Besides, if there wasn’t anything the word meme, at least in the public perception, conveyed better than the word idea, then presumably nobody would use that word.
(Sorry for the hijack.)
It doesn’t work just fine. Many, probably most, memes aren’t ideas in any identifiable sense. For example nobody ever actually sat down and thought “coffee beans should be roasted, ground, steeped in boiling water and diluted with cream”. That particular practice has grown organically over the years, and is likely to be passed on for the foreseeable future. But nobody ever produced that idea.
By radio signal for example.
If the definition simply said “an idea that is transmitted” then the Time Cube guy’s rantings fit the definition because they are transmitted. But they are not memes because they are not transmitted from mind to mind (most of them are never actually read and those that are are never repeated) and they are not cultural information.
IOW, while all cows are black birds any dictionary that defined a crow solely as a black bird would be misleading. While we can’t expect a dictionary to give a perfect definition of a word it needs to at least make some attempt to distinguish that word from apparent synonyms.
Many memes are ideas, but an idea is not usually a meme and a meme is not always an idea.
Your dictionary does not have all of the definitions of “trope”. Wikipedia’s disambiguation page on the subject shows:
which is a pretty concise definition of what we’re dealing with.
I must say that TV Tropes is a very fun and engrossing site. The trope from the OP is listed as Not Quite Dead.
Plus, they never mention it again. If somebody decked you, it would be the topic of conversation for days! Or if you were driving to work and two cars driving 100 mph screamed past you with guys hanging out the windows shooting guns at each other, and you had to drive into a ditch to get out of the way, you’d be telling everybody you met about it. But in movies, it happens and it’s over.
Never thought about that but you’re right. It is, however, self-consistent, since movie people are obviously in an alternate universe where these sort of things happen all the time, it wouldn’t be that memorable…
“What happened at your work today, honey?”
“Oh, you know, the usual, mostly. A murder, several pseudo-romantic stalkings, a couple fistfights. Ohh yeah I almost forgot, I did complete the Burns Report early so I can almost complete my monthly task list.”
“Wow! Tell me more about the Burns Report!”