IT’S THAT time of year again—the time when sitting through previews at the movies feels something like a funeral procession. The narrators get more ominous, the music more solemn, and the titles more catastrophic (“it will challenge EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE”). Every film being advertised seems more painfully philosophical and cynical than the last, as each tries to insist more frantically than the others that this breathtaking piece of art, and not the only somewhat nihilistic downer you saw last week, is Best Picture material.

During last year’s dark movie months—probably when we were getting ready to see the eventual winner, No Country for Old Men—we feasted on one of the most ominous and forbidding trailers in recent movie history: the feverish, startling preview for There Will Be Blood. Set to Johnny Greenwood’s alienating, cacophonous score, scenes from the oppressively depressing masterpiece cut in and out, making even the most placid scenes feel terrifying. When Daniel Plainview laughed maniacally, the screen went black, and the title blinked on in distressed, Old English letters, chills ran down spines everywhere. Mystery, intrigue, and fair warning: this will be a great experience as long as you don’t bring your all-American chick-flick/action thriller friends.

Everything went according to schedule. When There Will Be Blood opened in New York and Los Angeles on December 26, 2007, the Oscar buzz was electric: “hits with hurricane force.” “Visionary stuff.” “A force beyond categories.” “Filmmaking at its highest level.” Not much surprise there. But then something hit that no one expected: your cinephile friends who saw Blood the day after Christmas came back babbling incoherently about milkshakes. “What? But I thought this movie was about … oil? And capitalism? And the self-destructive ravages of greed? Milkshakes?” Something besides the soundtrack was weird about this movie, and you knew at that point you had to see it for yourself.

Some people did, especially after it landed its expected Best Picture nomination, but not all that many: the film grossed a very modest $40 million total at the box office, something a vile pedestrian mess like Four Christmases can accomplish in two weeks. But the ones who did had to show everyone, even the Transformers and Mean Girls in their lives, that Epic Last Scene. By early February, it was popping up all over YouTube, and people were giggling, quoting, and impersonating: “I. Drink. Your. Milkshake! I drink it up!”

The Kelis song was a wunderkind of off-key, quotable, can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head awfulness, exactly the kind of thing upon which the hipsters prone to like There Will Be Blood are inclined to bestow ironic respect. Much like Fergie’s “London Bridge,” the Kelis smash hinged on a vaguely sexual but technically meaningless metaphor: “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, and they’re like, it’s better than yours / Damn right, it’s better than yours / I could teach ya, but I have to charge.” Not only were milkshakes pretty funny in that context, but the song was everywhere. Everywhere all the time. Mean Girls. Date Movie. Norbit. After that, anyone could reference their “milkshake”—and that could be just about anything—for an obligatory, eye-rolling snicker.

So when the movie buffs and hipsters and the otherwise pretentious (myself included) plastered their Google talk statuses and Facebook feeds with the great Plainview milkshake line, maybe they really were enamored with the way the script so perfectly rose to the occasion. But whatever the motive, the old milkshake joke quickly merged with the new. Even before There Will Be Blood expanded its release on January 25, 2008, a hilarious montage showed up on YouTube setting clips from the movie to, you guessed it, Kelis. A month later, Saturday Night Live reported the culture’s temperature in a sketch called “Milkshakes,” with Bill Hader spinning out a deadly Day-Lewis impression while traveling the country speculating for “the perfect milkshake.” The internet, now a harbinger of tomorrow’s television, had successfully written humor into the very serious, pre-murder monologue in There Will Be Blood’s final scene—before most people had seen the movie.

There’s no proof the unexpected popularity of Daniel Plainview’s milkshake diatribe helped the movie’s numbers, but it certainly propelled the 2007 Best Picture also-ran to its status as one of the best-remembered, most-quoted films of last year’s Oscar season. And most unlikely, it helped a slow-moving three-hour epic beat out even Heath Ledger’s psychotic Joker for the movie line of this year. True, Blood would have made its impact with or without an unintentional viral marketing campaign. But for a brief season—and forever in its great milkshake line—a hard-to-watch movie brought highbrow and lowbrow together for one glorious, hilarious cultural moment. That, my friends, is an occasion worth screen-printing into our memories.