In the overall scheme of the 2008 summer movie season, which began more than a month before summer did and is already entering its winding-down stage, The Dark Knight has established itself as the Movie of the Moment, Sex and the City the stealth smash and favorite subject for op-ed kvetchers, and Robert Downey, Jr. the star who people root for as lustily as any of the characters he plays. By contrast, the fourth Indiana Jones picture performed about the way one might have expected: after months of hype and even some genuine expectations, it opened big, collected its first-weekend money, and moseyed its way out of first-run theaters. But its left something behind: a new phrase in the English language. That would be "nuke the fridge", which the urban dictionary defines thusly:
A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover. A reference to one of the opening scenes of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", in which the titular hero manages to avoid death by nuclear explosion by hiding inside a kitchen refrigerator. The film is widely recognised by fans as a major departure from the rest of the series both in terms of content and quality.
Guy 1: "Wow. Did you see the new Indy movie? What the hell was that? It was like I was having some kind of flu induced absurdist nightmare."
Guy 2: "Yep... did or did not that series permanently Nuke the Fridge?"
The obvious reference point is of course to "jump the shark", the phrase for the moment when a TV series has gone south, which was popularized by Jon Hein's website of the same name sometime around the last turn of the millennium. Hein's payday came in 2005, when the site was sold to TV Guide, and since then the phrase, which apparently originated in bull sessions Hein had with his friends back in college, has slipped its leash and entered the mainstream, where it is applied willy-nilly to anyone and anything. (Last week, wild man pundit David Brooks, going far off the reservation of conventional wisdom, opined that, with his tumultuously received speech in Berlin, Barack Obama's "unity act" had "jumped the shark.") Variations on "nuke the fridge" have already started turning up in the names of website, such as nukedthefridge.com. One of the fellows who runs one such site told The New York Times' Noam Cohen that “‘Jump the shark’ is for people over the age of 60, who remember the show.” By contrast, “nuke the fridge” offers a “new, fresh take” on long-running entertainment phenomena that have entered the sucking stages. For his part, Jon Hein is magnanimous towards these youngsters, though he does point out that it's been a while since he's heard anyone use the phrase "jump the couch" (Remember? Tom Cruise on Oprah? Anyone?), so maybe the people trying to cash in on "nuke the fridge" shouldn't jump at the chance to buy any yachts on credit. Leaving aside how weird it is that some people apparently feel that their generation will be ill-served if they don't have their very own snappy three-word on-line phrase for this sort of thing, I suspect that when a replacement for "jump the shark" that will stick does arrive, it won't be one that sort of replicates the rhythm and idea behind "jump the shark." One reason that "jump the shark" caught people's attention was that it wasn't obviously engineered to resemble something that people were already saying.