“Stay on target!” urges Sheila, my CycleFit instructor, sweat pouring down her face. “Stay on target! Just like in Star Wars,” she shouts over the music, as we pant up an imaginary hill on our stationary bikes. There is no confusion among the members of my YMCA. As we collectively sweat through our Monday lunchtime workout, everyone understands the reference. We are a set of determined Y-wing pilots, trying to maneuver toward the Death Star reactor-port in a 46-year-old science-fiction film. We will not swerve off course.

Film references are everywhere. They’re part of how we experience life, vibrant threads running through our social fabric, connecting us to a shared cultural history and weaving us more tightly together. Films have been making reference—whether explicitly or subtly—to other films since the beginning of the artform. From the silent era to the densely self-referential worlds of latter-day superheroes and the new crop of Canadian cinema in theaters this year, the ways films reference each other can be complex or clear-cut, deep or as dumb as Joe Dirt.

But what’s in a reference? When a film references another work, is it commenting on that other moment? And if so, is it doing so positively, negatively, or is it merely reproducing it? Is the reference in conversation with that moment, translating it, or twisting it into some new shape? Does the reference align the work with its predecessor, seeking some depth or levity by association? Or is it simply an echo? What’s the value in a reference—and why is it so often funny?

Let’s start with a relatively recent example. In Marvel’s 2012 posse cut The Avengers, still reverberating thanks to the power of memes, S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) asks his team how immortal trickster Loki managed to “turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.” Not everyone in the room understands him. For Thor, the God of Thunder who spent much of his life in another dimension, the line falls flat. He sputters, confused. The super soldier Captain America, on the other hand, frozen in the Arctic for nearly 70 years, gets the reference.

Not much makes sense to Steve Rogers aka Captain America, newly resurrected from a state of suspended animation, but Fury’s reference to The Wizard of Oz? That, he gets. The fictional Steve Rogers would have been 21 when the Wicked Witch of the West and her blue-tinged minions flew on to American screens in 1939. The timeline works and so does the line, reinforcing Cap and Thor’s characters as fish out of water while injecting a bit of humor—as well as giving Cap a much-needed win among his new colleagues.

This is comedy for consumers, a reference for audiences who obsess over film and popular culture to nod along with. In order to get the flying monkey line, you have to know where the winged beasts come from. Unlike run-of-the-mill mockery or jokes obviously written to suit a specific turn of events, a reference only requires previous knowledge to function and to be enjoyed.

When executed well, a film reference is cultural shorthand. It’s a way to cut through the noise and point to something that’s already been articulated. The reference is satisfying to understand in itself, scratching that innate itch to recognize the self in the other, but it moves into proper joke territory via the successive lines of dialogue. Something new is created. Thor is mystified; Cap is happy to finally understand something. It rings a bell in Cap and in viewers. We are Cap; Cap is us.

In the Nora and Delia Ephron-penned film You’ve Got Mail, Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) hits the nail on the head when he says, “The Godfather is the answer to any question.” If you know The Godfather well, there’s a bit of dialogue to suit any occasion. You know what it means if someone sleeps with the fishes, if an offer is made that can’t be refused, if it’s time to go to the mattresses. Films like The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Citizen Kane or Gone with the Wind are so widely seen and referenced that they function as conversational shortcuts; not just in film, but in culture generally. These references have become so popular that they’re often understood even by people who haven’t seen the movies. Frankly, Rosebud, I don’t give a damn if you leave the gun and take the cannoli.

Of course, You’ve Got Mail is itself one long reference; it’s a remake of the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film The Shop Around the Corner (based on a play by Miklós László). When Joe Fox makes film references, it gives depth to his personality, shedding light on his character as someone who understands modern culture in a way that Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) does not, underlining the central themes of the film. She’s “shopgirl,” a nod to the Lubitsch film, mired in the past, re-reading Pride and Prejudice, while Fox is “NY152,” a man of New York City, a tall decaf cappuccino, bustling into the future.

“Doug is thinking that the film reference is going to create common ground only to show just how different these two characters’ worlds are,” Johnson tells me. “Nothing says ‘Doug throwing a guy a bone’ like mentioning the most popular movie in the entire world. Doug knows every movie, but he’ll mention this stupid movie that everybody knows to connect with Jim and Jim is like, ‘I haven’t seen it.’ Doug is like, ‘This isn’t gonna work. I have no idea who this person is.’”

Here, the film reference is used to highlight the cultural chasm between the characters. “All the film references are things that, to me, help describe the sense of justice and morality and good-versus-evil that Doug stands for,” Johnson explains. As far as Doug is concerned, he is John Nada (Roddy Piper) in They Live and he can see Jim Balsillie for who he is: the alien who’s come to destroy them.

It’s an interesting choice to characterize Doug Fregin, the Canadian businessman who co-founded Research in Motion (later renamed BlackBerry Ltd.), as a film fanatic. When Johnson and Miller were researching the film, they spoke with former engineers at the company who revealed an organizational culture informed by an appreciation for science fiction. “That’s what led Miller and I to making Doug into a bit more of a media cipher,” Johnson says.

Johnson and Miller are walking in the footsteps of other great Canadian comedy filmmakers, including writer-actor Mike Myers and director Penelope Spheeris, responsible for arguably the best collection of pop culture meta moments ever to grace the silver screen. It’s on the shoulders of ’90s-defining consumer comedy Wayne’s World (co-written with Bonnie and Terry Turner) that BlackBerry stands. Both films follow an upstart duo approached by an industry-savvy player who convinces them to take their product to the next level.

Each film features a scene in which the sidekick expresses grave doubts about the deep-pocketed third wheel. “Benjamin is no one’s friend,” says Garth (Dana Carvey) in Wayne’s World, talking about the TV producer (Rob Lowe) bringing investors to their small-time cable-access show. “If Benjamin were an ice cream flavor, he’d be pralines and dick.” Likewise in BlackBerry, Doug voices his concerns about the partnership at hand. “That guy is sketchy,” he says about Jim, the businessman sidling in to become co-CEO of their company. “The guy’s a shark.” Both films are laden with pop-culture winks which help flesh out the stories’ milieux.

“I wanted to pay tribute to the media-saturated engineering nerd culture of the ’80s and ’90s that led to all of the technological innovation that occurred in the late ’90s, early 2000,” says Johnson. On one level BlackBerry is about the characters’ journeys and the myth associated with pioneering smartphone technology. But on another, it’s about the importance of science fiction in inspiring a generation of computer engineers. “I don’t think that science fiction gets the credit that it deserves, for, in some ways, creating the future,” Johnson adds.

At one point, however, the film was becoming overburdened with references. Its runtime sits just below the two-hour mark but there were many more references the team wanted to include. “Ultimately it is not a movie about movies,” Johnson says. “It’s a movie about a smartphone.”

For director Chandler Levack, whose debut feature I Like Movies premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 and released theatrically in March (now on VOD in Canada and the global film festival circuit; a US release still pending), movie references represent the worldview of a character and act as the thrust of a film. In the beige suburbs of Burlington, Ontario, teen film snob Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) dreams of attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and becoming a director. “Movies are my entire life,” he says plainly. “I need to watch movies like I need to breathe air.”

It’s an obsession that Levack echoes when recounting her own teen years spent working in a video store in Burlington. “Walking around the suburbs when I was in high school, so obsessed with film, I had to romanticize where I was from. I would pretend I was in a movie,” she recalls. She would imagine herself in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, drifting through the Burlington Mall listening to Jon Brion, or in a Wes Anderson film, dramatically alighting from a bus to Nico’s ‘These Days’. Levack wonders if most people who want to make films are yearning for a more elevated experience of life. “Maybe that’s why we imprinted on cinema so much. It was a way to feel our feelings safely or read ourselves into being the main character. Movies, in a certain way, legitimize narcissism.”

The references in I Like Movies are partly autobiographical, based on movies that left a strong impression on Levack during her high school years. There’s a scene in which Lawrence approaches a couple perusing DVDs in Sequels, his video rental store, and—despite not being an employee—recommends Todd Solondz’s black comedy Happiness. It’s a window into his soul. Happiness is a comedy about a pedophile, a challenging film Roger Ebert said was “not a film for most people.” So if you get the reference, you know: Lawrence can see only himself, only what he finds interesting.

When Lawrence is leaving Sequels and trying to decide on the one rental DVD he’s allowed to take home, he sighs and finally throws one to the side. The camera lingers so we can catch the visual gag: it’s the 1982 drama Sophie’s Choice, about an Auschwitz survivor who was forced to make a heartbreaking decision.

These references heighten our understanding of Lawrence, his experiences limited to his sheltered life and what he’s seen and felt via screens, his taste contained to a well-tread catalogue of male filmmakers. “Sometimes people will criticize the film and say, ‘Lawrence has such basic entry-level film tastes!’ I’m like, ‘He’s a seventeen-year-old boy in Burlington, Ontario! What do you want from him?’” Levack laughs.

Much of the filmmaker’s inspiration for I Like Movies, though, comes from Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird, also about a creative seventeen-year-old with aspirations of escaping their hometown for New York City. “The movie, aesthetically, bleeds Lady Bird,” she says. “So much that there’s not a lot of other references. That’s the DNA of it.”

Alice Wu’s The Half of It, and Do Revenge, directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and written by Robinson and Celeste Ballard, are a veritable parade of references. The Half of It puts a modern spin on the 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, with a queer twist and a feast of literary and film nods. Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) is erudite and hard-working, doing her classmates’ homework for a fee, with aspirations beyond her small town. Soon, she’s penning love letters to the charming and charismatic Aster (Alexxis Lemire) on behalf of verbally challenged athlete Paul (Daniel Diemer), training him in Jean-Paul Sartre and Wim Wenders, and catching feelings along the way.

Ellie’s father Edwin (Collin Chou) is a dispirited widower and railroad engineer who spends his days watching classic movies—his late wife’s favorites: City Lights, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and Casablanca, all of which echo the film’s three-pronged character structure. “They all have triangles in them,” says Wu, discussing her film on Netflix’s short-lived Watching With… podcast. 

Also referenced are Wings of Desire and The Remains of the Day, speaking to the yearning Ellie feels and then slowly releases as she learns to express herself. Even Ellie’s father emerges from his despair, as sharing film experiences and cultural knowledge brings the pair closer and more fully into themselves. The references offer a bridge, both between on-screen characters and between film and audience.

There’s the tour of the cliques (Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls), the makeover (The Princess Diaries, She’s All That, Jawbreaker), the girls playing “Light as a Feather” (The Craft), the paint-doused date (10 Things I Hate About You), the scene at the campus fountain (Scream), the croquet (Heathers), the vanity plate (Jawbreaker), the songs “Flagpole Sitta” (Disturbing Behavior) and “Praise You” (Cruel Intentions), the voiceover (Election), the admissions party outfits (Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion) and, perhaps most deliciously, the casting of Sarah Michelle Gellar (star of Cruel Intentions, I Know What You Did Last Summer) as the headmaster. If Urban Outfitters were a film, it would be this one.

Sometimes, what’s funny in a reference is the sheer effort of its construction. The viewer’s delight comes first from recognizing the reference and then from appreciating the attention to detail and craft in it.

Adam Nayman, film critic and author of Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, uses scenes from various animated TV series to illuminate reference styles. “When I teach satire at Toronto Metropolitan University, I use the example that The Simpsons will satirize a movie and Family Guy will copy it,” he says. “Both are funny, because in the case of Family Guy what’s funny is the absolute granular, bone-deep similarity of what they animate to the movie. Or in South Park, another example, when they reproduced the six-minute fist-fight from They Live, that’s really funny. And it’s an unmistakable reference. I don’t know what it says about the movie, other than that they’ve seen it and we’ve seen it, which is not nothing.”

Indeed, it’s not nothing. The recognition of the reference is the heart of the matter; the connection established between viewer, art, and history is a line traced through time and space, from one consciousness to another.

But whose work is being referenced? By virtue of its function, a reference is an assertion of importance or ubiquity. It is built on the assumption, or at least the hope, of a viewership in possession of shared knowledge, of a cultural awareness or notions of historical notability. The shorthand only works if both ends of the circuit connect. So whose work is deemed remarkable and worthy of remembrance, of parody and aggrandizement? Whose work is deemed fit for the library of material from which seedlings of new films are planted, from which references are made?

We know by now that “the canon” in film is a problem. We know that any artform dominated by a cis male white heterosexual narrative is an unjust reflection of its society. Filmmaking and film criticism has been dominated by these narratives for so long that it should be unsurprising to note that when references appear in films, they are often nodding in the same directions. “If it’s male creators celebrating male creators, and they celebrate the most ‘visionary’ ones, their references to camera movements and compositions that are very striking become kind of samey,” says Nayman. “It is interesting to test the degree to which the hierarchies of these things and the obsessiveness of these things is gendered.”

One of the most referenced films of all time is Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 “ultimate trip” film 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Everything about the graphic and visual design and choreography of 2001 has become so embedded in science fiction that it goes beyond reference—it’s just DNA,” says Nayman. “If I were to count the number of times on TV shows and movies that one movie has been referenced—almost always with that mix of affection or awe or deference—it is probably 2001. Almost immediately, you could feel it entering into the visual language of so many directors.”

It’s a wellspring from which directors have sipped ad infinitum and beyond. From as early as 1968, the same year 2001 was released, the film has been referenced in other works. That year sexploitation flick A Sweet Sickness featured its title on a marquee; in Saturday Night Fever the disco club is named “2001 Odyssey”; in The Blues Brothers the Bluesmobile travels through a tunnel of colors; Demolition Man’s Simon Phoenix calls a kiosk “HAL”; and it’s parodied in the blissfully tongue-in-cheek opening for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

Finding references to women-directed films in works directed by men can be difficult, but there’s a stunning example in Todd Field’s 2022 tower of a film, TÁR. As Twitter user bbblanchett points out, there are a couple of scenes which visually reference Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s 1978 film The Meetings of Anna, about a filmmaker touring Germany, Belgium and France to promote her latest project. In one scene of TÁR, the titular composer (Cate Blanchett) draws a curtain from left to right and opens a set of French casement windows, right arm followed by left, and takes in the view in one long shot. In another, she walks down a hotel hallway, cleaning staff briefly visible through doorways as they lift linens into the air and make beds.

These are shot-for-shot remakes of scenes in The Meetings of Anna, meticulously timed and choreographed, aligning the characters of composer Lydia Tár and filmmaker Anne Silver—their haunted affect, loneliness, and detachment brought into sharp relief. The symmetrical shot design rewards Akerman-versed viewers with an Easter egg, but it also affirms and acknowledges her as a notable, essential artist. An artist Field has deemed worthy of cribbing from and aligning with his own creation.

Along with these odes to Akerman, TÁR’s visual influences include films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and, naturally, Stanley Kubrick (who was a mentor to Field in the ’90s). The film also explicitly references “a Marlon Brando movie” (Apocalypse Now) and the consequences of megalomania, and Italian director Luchino Visconti, whose 1971 film Death in Venice treads similar territory and also features composer Gustav Mahler’s ‘Symphony No. 5’.

“I just watched The Meetings of Anna,” says Levack, when I call her about this essay. She’s in Buenos Aires where she has been showing her film at a festival. “It’s literally about a single female filmmaker in her late thirties sitting alone in depressing hotel rooms on a film festival tour. It really shook me to my core.” While I Like Movies has taken her to various far-flung locations, Levack has been fielding many of the same questions over and over, making her examine her motivations, influences and references. “If I had found out about Elaine May in university, I think I would have been a completely different person,” she says. “Why am I not referencing The Heartbreak Kid or Ishtar in my work? I guess I’m trying to reconsider that now. I feel like I’m re-evaluating my whole education in film, which was very white, male canon-dominated.”

But it was directed by a female filmmaker and, despite winning the Grand Prix at Italy’s Bergamo Film Festival, it was officially banned by the Czechoslovak government until 1967. The reason given? Depictions of wasting food.

“It’s like, how come there’s no sock-puppet parody of Daisies in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl?” wonders Levack. The 2015 film about two teenagers who make elaborate film parodies and their relationship with a classmate recently diagnosed with leukemia references dozens of movies considered classics. Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl features spoofs of the usual suspects: The Wizard of Oz (“The Janitor of Oz”), Gone With the Wind (“Gone With My Wind”), Citizen Kane (“Senior Citizen Cane”), Midnight Cowboy (“2:48 PM Cowboy”), and Mean Streets (“Grumpy Cul-de-Sacs”), among others. The production design, costumes and props contain a myriad of references in the form of posters, DVD cover art, shirts, badges, scripts and other ephemera, all nodding to films directed by men—with one exception: a cover for Akerman’s 1975 slow-cinema masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

In 2022, Jeanne Dielman was named the greatest film of all time in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll. It’s the first time a film directed by a woman has made it into the top ten, let alone topped the list, since the poll was started in 1952. “Such a sudden shake-up,” writes feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, reflecting on the poll. Thanks to the #MeToo movement and a larger awareness of misogynistic modes of production, the film industry has seen a great many cultural shifts in the last two decades. “It would be gratifying to think that the triumph of Jeanne Dielman in the poll gives an affirmation to these shifts in consciousness,” writes Mulvey. The directors’ poll, on the other hand, chosen by 480 of the world’s leading filmmakers, paints a different picture: Jeanne Dielman sits at number four while the top spot goes to the enduring 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“Works by women or people of color don’t usually find their way into the mainstream lexicon,” says Levack. “When we’re thinking about the female filmmakers being referenced, it’s often only by other women. I don’t see a lot of direct referential name-dropping of female filmmakers into texts.” She notes that Do Revenge pays homage to Clueless, which was directed by Amy Heckerling, but laments the fact that generally the pickings are quite slim. “Clueless is a masterpiece,” she says. “Everyone should be referencing it all the time.”

Recently, I watched the 1957 consumer comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? directed by Looney Tunes hall-of-famer Frank Tashlin. It’s a rollicking, cartoonish satire centered on Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall), a burgeoning TV ad-man desperate to accelerate his career and become an executive. The end of the film features the main characters coming together in a stage bow, bidding adieu to the audience while reflecting on how they’ve changed or grown. “We’ve learned that success is just the art of being happy. And being happy is—well, being happy is just… the very living end,” they announce in chorus.

Seeing this, a bell rang somewhere deep in my memory. Didn’t Wayne’s World, a film I’d watched countless times in my youth, end in eerily similar fashion? In the “mega-happy ending”, TV producer Russell professes his appreciation for camera operator Terry, then breaks the fourth wall and says, “I’ve learned that platonic love can exist between two grown men.” Benjamin comes into frame next, saying, “And I’ve learned something, too. I’ve learned that a flawless profile, a perfect body, the right clothes, and a great car can get you far in America, almost to the top, but it can’t get you everything.” Could it be? Was the ending of Wayne’s World a reference to the end of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? The question at the heart of both films is one of maintaining integrity in the face of selling out, and Wayne’s World could just as easily have been named Will Success Spoil Wayne Campbell.

When I called her, Wayne’s World director Spheeris told me she isn’t sure if her film cribs from Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?—more likely it’s a reference to Broadway shows. It also no doubt nods to Saturday Night Live, where the Myers-created characters gained popularity, and the show’s traditional closers, in which the cast bids the audience farewell and celebrates en masse. Myers and Bonnie and Terry Turner, famously, rarely talk to anyone, so their points of view remain a mystery—but the films’ parallel themes, the cast standing in a row and the dialogue symmetry all seem too similar to deny. How marvellous that a cherished film, worn to bits in its VHS shell, can still, decades down the line, offer itself up to new insights. This is what art has to give. The sweetest plum.