Look At Me, I'm The Captain Now

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About

"Look At Me. I'm The Captain Now." is a quote from the 2013 movie Captain Phillips, in which an American cargo ship is hijacked by Somali pirates.^[1] One of the pirates, taking command of the vessel, delivers the eponymous phrase after storming the bridge and taking the previous captain hostage. The phrase is used online to illustrate a take-over or major change spearheaded by one individual.

Origin

In Captain Phillips a band of Somali pirates led by Abduwali Muse, played by Barkhad Abdi, board a container ship, the MV Maersk Alabama, which is the first United States cargo ship to fall prey to piracy in over two hundred years. The titular character, Captain Phillips, has his authority revoked by Muse when the pirate tells him "Hey! Look at me. Look at me. I'm the captain now." The film was critically acclaimed, receiving six Academy Award nominations, and a box office success, grossing over $218 million internationally.^[5]

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Spread

A GIF of the scene was uploaded to Imgur on October 8th, 2013, and has since acquired just slightly under a million views as of March 2015.^[9] The earliest known use of this scene in a reaction image was posted to FunnyJunk on February 6th, 2014, by user nlee. The picture only accumulated 5 upvotes, less than 1300 views, and two comments.^[2]

Over the course of the year there were more popular uses of the quote, which gradually gained popularity. On May 3rd, Reddit user Robitix posted an image referencing Muse's quote to the /r/pokemon subreddit showing the player character from a Pokémon game sitting in a captain's seat. Before it was archived, the image accumulated 419 upvotes and 14 comments.^[3]

Another FunnyJunk post on August 19th included a compilation of various edited versions of the scene, portraying Muse as Captain America, Captain Hook, and Captain Crunch. This picture achieved over two thousand upvotes and sixty-three thousand views.^[4]

On March 27th, 2015, a user submitted a question about the meme to the subreddit /r/outoftheloop, which received 72 points (74% upvoted).^[6] The image has several popular pages on meme generator pages, like ImgFlip^[7] and MemeGenerator^[8]. Hundreds of examples of the meme can be found on Tumblr using the tag "I'm the captain now"^[10].