Its prevalence spans all genres and all eras, from The Philadelphia Story to The Ringer. If the phrase shows a natural habitat, it's in films with an undercurrent of corruption or doom, screenplays like Donnie Darko, Chinatown, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Saturday Night Fever, or M. (All got it.) Characters in lighter films tend to shy from its undertone of menace, opting instead for soundalike commands with happier implications. Pretty Woman contains "Let's get started" and "Let's get one of these on you." Terms of Endearment has "Let's get her" and "Let's get this off." It's completely absent from fluff like Bridget Jones's Diary, Dirty Dancing, and The Sound of Music. But Love Story has it. I guess a heaping helping of impending mortality can carve out a niche in even the treacliest story. (Surprisingly, however, the phrase is equally rare in horror films. It's not in Nightmare on Elm Street, or Friday the 13th, or Psycho, or Night of the Living Dead, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is probably due to the dependable lack of problem solving ability amongst slasher film victims. (Friday the 13th Part III does contain "Let's just get the hell out of here", but to my thinking that doesn't count.)

Is the phrase the screenwriter's version of the Wilhelm scream, that know-it-when-you-hear-it aiiiieeeee that smirky sound engineers like to toss into the mix whenever they can, as a wink to their colleagues? Is it a screenwriter's unconscious aside to the unreality of the situation, the cosmic joke equivalent of the "555" prefix on a phone number that throws you back into the fiction of the movie you're watching. Ask yourself this: How often have you needed to say "Let's get out of here" in real life? And on the rare occasions you have, wasn't it at times when, as Liz Phair puts it, "your circumstance is movie sized"?

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The man leads the woman into the vast decaying mansion, his arm amiably stretched over her tense shoulders. "Is this where you live?", she asks, her voice tight with the fear he'll tell her the truth. He doesn’t pull any punches. "You bet," he says, with the casual cool of the truly cynical. "Whose house is it?" she says as her eyes scan the vast interior. "Hers." he replies.

"Whose?" She's genuinely confused now. The man is just getting started. "Just look around," he says. "There's a lot of her spread about." It's true, every surface, every French colonial bureau and Deco cabinet and hand-carved end table is encrusted, barnacle-like, with silver-framed photos of the same woman – pinched lips, upturned profile, round staring eyes. "If you don't remember the face, you must have heard the name of Norma Desmond." he chides.

The woman is still trying to make sense of the situation, trying to understand what connection exists between her good friend Joe and that witchy, melodramatic voice purring evil insinuations. "That was Norma Desmond on the phone?" she asks. But the man pretends not to hear. "Would you like something to drink? There's always champagne on ice, and plenty of caviar."

She persists. "Why did she call me?" she pleads. He tosses the answer out as if it were of no consequence. "Jealous." he says, letting the silence explain what she might be jealous of. He changes the subject. "Ever see so much junk? Look at this." He tugs on a rope and lowers an immense projection screen, ratioed not for Cinemascope but for the squareish frames of silent films. Voila, his jaundiced smirk implies." Her own movie theatre."

The woman's tone is sharp but her hands wring of their own accord. "I didn't come here to see a house. What about Norma Desmond?"

"I'm trying to tell you." he says. "This is an enormous place." Bitterness leaks through his inventory. "Eight master bedrooms. A sunken tub in every bathroom. There's a bowling alley in the cellar." He paces across the room and turns away. Maybe it's easier to say what he's about to say without looking into Betty's pretty, kindly face. "It's lonely here, so she got herself a companion. A very simple set-up: An older woman who is well-to-do. A younger man who is not doing too well ..." He lets his footsteps click on the spotless tile floor, audible ellipses for her to fill in the blank. "Can you figure it out yourself?

"No." she snaps, too quickly.

"All right." he growls. "I'll give you a few more clues."

"No, no!" She thought she knew all about Tinseltown's corroded underside could but this is beyond belief – her beloved Joe, gigolo to some mouldering, menopausal starlet? "I haven't heard any of this. I never got those telephone calls. I've never been in this house. Get your things together." she begs. "Let's get out of here."

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Now I am a grownup whose dark theater-dilated pupils can take a good shock, but as a child I learned quickly there was no protective membrane between my eyes and my mind. If I saw something grotesque or unsettling, the full power of the image hit my brain like a round of cocktails swilled on an empty stomach. Images had the power to lacerate. A Gilette commercial featuring a man in cartoonish Frankenstein makeup sent me into paroxysms of terror. Another commercial, a new waveish woman chomping on a Baby Ruth kept me awake all night with the slightly too-robotic quality of her motion. Herbie Hancock's video for his song "Rockit", with its disembodied robot legs pacing a jerky circle, terrified me to the point of near vomiting. With maturity I abraded a callous between my optic nerve and my visual cortex, coarse enough that I can now watch Saloor Sweet Movie or Pink Flamingos and still sleep at night. But I wouldn't have been able to appreciate those three films – or any other worth my time – had I not been born so tender-retinaed in the first place. That's the deal you make with moving images - if you are sufficiently sensitive to their power, you must remain as open to damage as you do to transcendence.

My father remembers seeing Creature From The Black Lagoonat the Waverly Theater at Greenmount and 32nd, back when parents would send their children to the movies alone, confident that a full program (shorts, newsreel, cartoon and feature) overseen by draconian teenage ushers was a sufficiently supervised activity. Due to the filmmaker's decision to generate suspense by not revealing the face of the mysterious creature, instead shooting attack scenes from the monster's point of view, my father grew more and more nervous about the appearance of this amphibious ghoul. At the exact instant the creature finally revealed itself, the theater's air conditioner combusted with a tremendous BOOM!, its injured metal parts shrieking like an amplified dog whistle. Fifty terrified children unanimously fled the theater, racing through the lobby to stand shell-shocked on the sidewalk as the bald theater manager made grand sweeping gestures to herd his customers back inside. "It's ok now, everything's all right, come on in and watch the end of the picture." Absolutely not. Let’s get out of here.

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The white car pulls up a deserted roadway, the crunch of its fat tires on the strewn gravel of the Victory Motel the loudest sound for five miles. Exley's already waiting there, the effete prick, leaning against his black auto, his glasses glinting – Jesus, what cop wears glasses? – while a lone oil drill in the background does its lazy fornication with the bedrock below. The door opens and the man – beefy, crew-cut – wastes no time. "You wanted to meet here?" he belches out before he even shuts the door. "You called it." the milquetoast replies. "I thought Sid Hudgens was –"

The beefy man cuts him off. "Hudgens is dead."

The two men blink, speechless. Over the past month they'd slowly, independently converged on a scandal so rotten it threatened to eat this town from the core to the skin. Each thought the other one called him here, to the tell-no-secrets wreckage of the Victory Motel. Something wasn't right.

There's a hushed roar in the distance. The men turn. The silver glow of approaching headlights crown like a sunrise on the penumbric horizon. The beefy man stares at the approaching light. An ambush.

The effete man stares into the distance, the reality of the setup dawning on him. He finally speaks. "Let's get out of here."

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I remember there was no certainty. No promises were made, not even the vague succor of "we'll see." because failure to meet the promise would have been catastrophic. I can't remember if it was a school day or a weekend, a night show or a matinee. All salient details have been wiped away in the cascade of ecstasy that bathed my neurons when my father and I stepped into the Boulevard Theater on Greenmount and 33rd, sometime in the late spring of 1983, and he let me know we were here to see Return of the Jedi.

The Boulevard had seen better days. The seats were sticky and threadbare and bums nodded out in the back row. My father swears the management left the house lights on for the entire show. I could not have cared less. There is not a word to embody the complete transcendence I experienced for two hours and fourteen minutes. Zen monks would gnash their teeth invidiously over how effortlessly I shrugged off the physical world for the widescreen nirvana before me. When it was over I stumbled into the light and carried its afterglow through sleep and school and all an 8 year old's life activities for the next three distracted days. Then we went to see it again, this time with my little sister along. And it was just as good as the first time.

That's the last and best layer of meaning to the motion picture's most ubiquitous phrase. It's the invocation of the gods that accompanies every film, the blissful chance that this one, this singular piece of cinematic art will teleport you outside your anatomical self. "Luminous beings are we," Yoda scolded, "not this crude matter." When I watch a film I feel as if I've swallowed my own xenon arc light, allowing me to luminesce with the same incandescence as those lucky moving pictures on the screen. "Let's get out of here," the invitation goes. I always respond "With pleasure."

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