There Are Two Kinds of People: The Movie Cliche Supercut

Hollywood loves a false binary. Give a character thirty seconds of authority and a room full of listeners, and the odds climb that someone will clear their throat and declare: there are two kinds of people in this world. Winners and losers. Talkers and doers. Beatles people and Elvis people. The line is less philosophy than stage direction—a way to make a speech feel like wisdom while the camera stays tight on the speaker’s face.

In September 2012, Manchester filmmaker and YouTuber James Chapman turned that speech into a punchline by stacking it. His short video Great Movie Cliches: There Are Two Kinds of People is a supercut of the same rhetorical move across decades of cinema: cowboy morality, crime-boss catechism, romantic-comedy sorting hats, sports-movie pep talks. Clip after clip, actors announce the binary. The categories change. The grammar does not.

Chapman’s edit belongs to a moment when supercuts were becoming a popular critical form online—not only fan service, but a way of showing how movies reuse language until it becomes wallpaper. Watch enough “two kinds” speeches in a row and you stop hearing individual plots. You hear a screenwriting habit.

Why the line never dies

The phrase works because it flatters both speaker and audience. The speaker gets to sound decisive. The listener gets a temporary map of the world: you are in group A or group B, and the story will reward the correct choice. Westerns used it to draw moral fences. Gangster pictures used it to invent street codes. Comedies used it to mock the habit itself—characters who believe a personality quiz can settle everything.

It also travels well in dialogue. The setup is short. The second half can be whatever the scene needs: courage versus cowardice, loyalty versus betrayal, taste versus bad taste. Writers can drop the cliché into almost any genre without rewriting the surrounding scene. That portability is exactly why a supercut lands. The edit does not need context. The formula is the context.

Chapman’s compilation leans into variety. Some speakers are deadly serious. Some are joking. Some are wrong in a way the film already knows. The humor of the supercut is cumulative: after the tenth solemn division of humankind, solemnity itself starts to look like a costume.

What a supercut argues

A good supercut is an argument made with scissors. Chapman’s cut argues that “there are two kinds of people” is not a deep observation about human nature. It is a reusable prop—like a rain-soaked alley, a ticking clock, or a mentor who says “trust me.” Once you see the prop twenty times in two minutes, you cannot unsee it in the next movie you watch.

That is why the video circulated so quickly through humor and film blogs in 2012. Laughing Squid, HuffPost Entertainment, and similar outlets framed it as a walk through cinema history via one stubborn sentence. Viewers did not need a film-studies seminar to get the joke. Recognition was the joke. If you had heard the line in a Western, a courtroom drama, or a sitcom, you were already in on it.

Supercuts also change pacing. In a feature film, the speech arrives once, with music and reaction shots. In Chapman’s edit, speeches arrive as a drumroll. The binary becomes percussion. You notice how often actors pause after “two kinds,” how often the camera cuts to a listener who is supposed to feel sorted, how often the second category is the one the hero refuses to join.

A taxonomy of fake taxonomies

Inside the montage, several subtypes of the cliché appear again and again.

Moral sorting. The speaker divides the world into brave and weak, honest and crooked, those who stand and those who run. These lines pretend to be ethics lessons. They are usually recruitment speeches: join my side.

Taste sorting. Beatles versus Elvis, Neil Diamond fans versus everyone else, high-maintenance versus low-maintenance. These versions are lighter, but they still claim that identity can be reduced to a preference list. Romantic comedies love this move because it turns compatibility into a punchline.

Winner/loser sorting. Sports films and crime films lean hard on victory language. There are winners and quitters; there are people who take and people who get taken. The binary is motivational wallpaper. It sounds tough. It rarely survives contact with real complexity—and the films often know that, which is part of the pleasure when the montage exposes the pattern.

Meta sorting. Some clips wink. Characters admit the phrase is something “my wife likes to say,” or they deliver it with comic impatience. Those moments are the supercut’s secret allies: they prove Hollywood has been laughing at its own habit for years, even while continuing to use it.

Across those subtypes, the structure stays stable. Announce the division. Name the camps. Imply that the listener must pick. Exit the speech before nuance arrives. Nuance would ruin the rhythm.

Stars, genres, and the comfort of repetition

Part of the video’s charm is star power colliding with sameness. When recognizable voices—Eastwood-era toughness, Pacino intensity, Nicholson mischief, and a long parade of supporting players—all reach for the same sentence, the celebrity dissolves into the template. The line is bigger than any one performance. That is both funny and slightly eerie. Cinema trains us to treat famous faces as unique. A supercut of shared dialogue reminds us how often uniqueness is rented language.

Genre hopping matters too. Hearing the cliché in a dusty frontier scene and then, seconds later, in a glossy modern comedy collapses the distance between eras. Styles change. Costumes change. The binary speech survives like a hardy weed. Chapman’s edit makes that survival visible without a voice-over essay. The cuts are the essay.

For viewers who grew up on late-night cable and DVD extras, the supercut also feels like communal memory. You may not remember which film owned which version, but your ear remembers the cadence: “There are two kinds of people…” followed by a pause that begs for a drum hit that never quite comes.

Why 2012 was ready for it

By 2012, YouTube had matured into a place where short, tightly argued edits could travel as cultural criticism for people who would never open a journal. Viral Viral Videos–style aggregators and entertainment sites needed clean packages: a clear premise, a watchable length, a shareable title. Chapman’s piece had all three. The title tells you the subject. The runtime respects attention. The payoff is instant recognition.

It also fit a broader appetite for “movie cliché” roundups—supercuts of characters saying “we’re not so different,” of dramatic walk-aways, of everyone somehow knowing how to fire a gun with perfect form. Those videos do not kill clichés. They make audiences more literate about them. After Chapman’s cut, the next time a character begins the sentence, part of the room is already smiling.

That literacy is useful. Clichés are tools. Sometimes they land because a story needs a blunt moral map for thirty seconds. Sometimes they land because a character is full of themselves. The problem is not that binaries appear in movies. The problem is when writers use them as a substitute for character. The supercut makes the substitution obvious by removing everything else.

How to watch it (and what to notice next)

If you cue Chapman’s video today, try watching once for laughs and once for craft. On the second pass, track the micro-choices: where editors leave a breath, which reaction shots survive, how musical stings (or their absence) change the joke. Notice which binaries feel dated and which still sound like dialogue someone might deliver in a boardroom or a locker room. The cliché did not stay trapped on screen. It leaked into everyday talk.

Then, the next time a film—or a podcast, or a keynote—begins sorting the human species into two tidy piles, you will hear Chapman’s drumroll in the background. That does not ruin the scene. It just clarifies the trick. Stories love pairs. People are messier than pairs. Cinema keeps offering the shortcut anyway, because the shortcut sounds like certainty, and certainty sounds like drama.

There are, of course, more than two kinds of people who enjoy movie supercuts: the ones who collect patterns, and the ones who argue with the patterns, and the ones who only came for the celebrity cameos, and the ones who leave with a new drinking game. Chapman’s edit pretends the world is binary. The laughter afterward is proof that it is not.