It’s been a hard day, and you need something to eat. So you sit on a bench and eat whatever you’re eating on a bench while informing your friend that you’ve drilled his abbeys, and there’s no oil left. You try to explain this to your friend, but he doesn’t understand. So you have to go into a long-winded definition about drainage to make sure he knows what you’re talking about. And you have to keep eating what you’re eating, because you’re hungry. Your friend still isn’t understanding, so you feel compelled to fix him with a hard stare. The kind of hard stare that would send Paddington Bear running on his merry way.
Then you inform your friend that you’ve drank his water. His water being the oil of course, but it’s more fun to phrase it like that because it sounds like an argument you’d have on a playground in the early stages of primary school. Except you’re not in a playground. You’ve got an intimidating moustache and an intimidating sweaty face. And now you raise the volume of your voice to try and get your point across. You smile and you carry on chewing what you’re eating. Food is important. Your friend still doesn’t understand, but you’re feeling generous, so you allow him to sit down. You’re not a maniacal oil baron, after all. You’re just a hungry man. Your friends carries on talking about how he’s down on his luck, that he needs a friend, then his voice increases to Riddler volume, and you start losing your patience a bit and you stand up.
You decide to give him a pep talk and push him a bit for motivation. You interrogate him for his lack of motivation, and give him a few choice insults regarding his mother to try and get some spirit into him. He still doesn’t understand what drainage means, so you feel compelled to shout the word in a crazed yet calm matter. But he still isn’t getting it. So you go in for the big shot. The milkshake metaphor. You do a nice little demonstration, ‘cause that’s just the kind of stand up guy you are. Then when you get back over to your friend, you deliver the zinger, loud and clear: I…DRINK…YOUR…MILKSHAKE. There it is. Beautiful. But he doesn’t appreciate it. Just like he wouldn’t appreciate any of the fine beverages in Moo Moos Oxford. There’s no saving this man now.
You throw him across the room. As the Don said, a man who doesn’t appreciate Moo Moos can never be a real man. So you improvise. You chuck a bowling ball at him. You put the fear of God into him with a few raving monologues, as only you can do. It’s like Wii bowling, except your target is a man, and your strike involves striking a man over the head a few times until he’s dead (Get it? Strike! Like when you get a strike in Wii bowling). And as you shout that you’re finished, those wonderous sounds from the Wii bowling completion sound screen start playing. Or Johnny Greenwood’s dramatic strings. The choice is yours.
(But, in all seriousness, this scene is genius. It’s darkly comic and rather scary, and all of those feelings are cultivated through the fine acting chops of Daniel Day-Lewis and a terrified Paul Dano who had a decent go at practicing his dramatic Riddler voice pitches before he bagged the role. And all of this tension without a single bit of music apart from the final image. Impressive stuff.)