This past Friday’s Stew has a piece by Chris Borrelli on the Congressional-hearing-quote-cum-“There-Will-Be-Blood”-coda-cum-instant-amorphous-catchphrase “I drink your milkshake.” So while Chris discusses various possible uses before it gets tired in a few weeks, can we point out that when we were watching the movie and Daniel Day Louis used straws and milkshakes to fashion an analogy for oil extraction with the now-famous line, we had an instant flashback to an irritating oil company commercial that employed the exact same imagery to the exact same end?
We can point this out because we have the video to prove it. The clip is part of Shell’s “Eureka” campaign about how one of the company’s engineers serendipitously figured out a method of efficiently tapping hard-to-reach oil patches. The entire commercial, all nine minutes of it, is available on Shell’s website, but the stripped-down YouTube version has everything you need (especially starting around 50 seconds in):
So Paul Thomas Anderson got the line from a 1924 Congressional hearing, according to that USAToday article, and Shell’s Jaap Van Ballegooijen got the concept from his deadbeat son’s sweet tooth. Even though this is coincidental and not causal, maybe the phrase is registering with people so strongly now because the seed was planted via that commercial. We await the squid-ink-ice-cream-as-light-sweet-crude shake, coming soon to a petrodiner near you.
I drink your milkshake meets where’s the beef in catchphrase territory [The Stew]
’Blood’ fans drink up milkshake catchphrase [USAToday]
Eureka - Shell Propaganda [YouTube]
Eureka [Shell]
