Sometime in early 1947, almost a full year before its Broadway debut, Tennessee Williams presented the final draft of his play, The Poker Game, to be read by his agent Audrey Wood. She thought it was great but when she said, “The Poker Game? You can do better than that,” Williams was panicked. He thought she meant the play was a failure. No, she exclaimed, the title was. He tried several different titles and eventually settled on the one we all know, A Streetcar Named Desire. What a difference. That title evokes something The Poker Game does not. Blanche DuBois, the self-destructive figure at the play’s center, is the one chained to that streetcar, her life ruined by her desires, desires for boyish men or simply boys, a desire that runs down a single track, unable to veer from its course even when disaster clearly looms ahead. The Poker Game evokes something else entirely and, it could be argued, just as important. It seems to direct our attention more towards Stanley Kowalski, Blanche’s main antagonist, and her brother-in-law. Stanley spends the entire play essentially calling Blanche’s bluff. She’s in a poker game with an expert and thinks she can bluff her way through it, not realizing he’s holding a straight flush from the outset: to wit, he’s a better manipulator than she is and he’s on his home turf. Both titles work but the final title, A Streetcar Named Desire, says more about the hopelessness of Blanche and less about the cunning of Stanley. The audience isn’t watching a poker game to be won or lost but a streetcar, headed down the tracks towards a brick wall with nothing to stop it. It’s not just a more memorable title, and it is that indeed, it’s a more meaningful title to the story. The play would have been the same no matter what the title but it might have felt a little different. That title, whether we consciously recognize it or not, is guiding us towards a more understanding and sympathetic view of Blanche. That’s what all titles do, good or bad. They guide us to one specific understanding or feeling about the story even if, in the end, the effect is minimal.
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Titles of movies have just as much riding on their impact as anything else in the arts. Many times, the title is merely functional, a way to alert the viewer to exactly what they will be seeing. Many comic book adaptations simply use the name of the comic book (Iron Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, The Avengers, etc) and a movie adapted from a play or movie will duplicate the name (as in the case of A Streetcar Named Desire above). Biopics will use the name of the historical figure being portrayed (Patton, Silkwood, Papillon, Malcolm X), perhaps with “The Life of” or “The Story of” placed at the front. They might use a nickname instead, like Raging Bull, the biopic of Jake LaMotta, based on his book, Raging Bull: My Story, or Scarface, using Al Capone’s nickname rather than his real name which in any case isn’t used anyway which makes the nickname a signal as to who the movie’s really about. In fact, often the title signals to the viewer what the movie is really about, at least according to the writer.
One of the great movie titles is The Third Man, also one of the great movies. The movie was written by Graham Greene who wrote it first as a novella from which to base his screenplay. The title is a curious one. When Holly Martins arrives in Vienna to meet his old friend, Harry Lime, he is told Lime was killed in a car accident. Two men carried him away and Martins finds and speaks with those two men. Another witness, however, tells Martins there was a third man who helped carry Lime away but the identity of this third man is unknown. Later, at a book club meeting where Martins is giving a speech, he remarks angrily that his next book will be named The Third Man, it will be about murder and based on real events. It is only when Lime shows up that Martins and we, the viewers, finally realize that it was another person that died, Lime’s assistant, and Lime was, in fact, the third man who helped carry him away (and then used the death of his assistant as a convenient way to remove himself from the watchful eye of the police by having his two accomplices claim it was he who died). So the third man of the title is both a phantom – the unknown figure alluded to by the witness – and a real man. He’s also completely different than Martins remembered him, a duplicitous, callous, black marketeer endangering the lives of children for profit. He’s an enigma, an old friend, and a fiend. He’s three men and it’s the last incarnation, the third one, that becomes who he is to Martins. The title suggests the movie isn’t just about Martins or Lime but about their and our interpretation of who a person is and what they become over time.
A quarter of a century later, Robert Towne wrote a movie about murder, land grabs, and sexual abuse, put a former cop, now a detective, at its center, and called it Chinatown. Though we never see a younger Jake Gittes as a cop in Chinatown and never really get any specifics on what happened to him there, the location quickly becomes a shorthand for the viewer of all the things in this world you can’t control. Some places, you simply have no power. It’s rare to have the title of a movie serve as its final word, but here it does and feels right (the ending was rewritten by director Roman Polanski and actor Jack Nicholson the night before it was filmed). The moment Jake and his associates are walking away, the story has ended. One of his associates says to him, for his own sanity sake, “Forget Jake, it’s Chinatown.” It’s unnecessary to the story and indispensable to it all at once. It places the events of the story on a universal scale: this isn’t about some power grab in Los Angeles, it’s about all those things in this universe you can’t control.
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Sometimes, a title can be utterly enigmatic while the source of its enigma is rooted in the everyday, the ordinary. One such title is 8 1/2, the 1963 Federico Fellini film, a title whose origin is as dull as a title’s origin can be. From Wikipedia, sourced to a BBC review from 2001, “Its title refers to Fellini’s eight and a half films as a director. His previous directorial work consisted of six features, two short segments, and a collaboration with another director, Alberto Lattuada, the collaboration accounting for a ‘half’ film.” I’ve heard this before and, unfortunately, the footnoted source leads to a dead link, so who knows really? That could be it or it could have had some personal meaning for Fellini and it just happened to match the calculus of how many movies he’d done. Whatever the case, I love it. I think it’s a great title precisely because I ascribe no meaning to it whatsoever. The lead character, director Guido Anselmi, finds no meaning in his work anymore and continuously looks back on his life and his loves with increasing nostalgia. His next movie, a science fiction film as formless as his enthusiasm for it, could be named 8 1/2 or X or Movie. It doesn’t even matter and, as such, the title of the movie about Guido doesn’t even matter. 8 1/2 may well be one of the most meaningful titles ever by the very paradoxical fact that it is so utterly meaningless.
These are but three examples of the importance and power of a great title. I think it would be good to return to the topic again, especially given that talking about a title leads to a discussion about, and often times a greater understanding of, the movie at hand. I named this piece Titleology 101 for a couple of reasons. One, I think “By Any Other Name” would be far too obvious and, I’m sure, already taken, a thousand times over. Two, and most importantly, as I said just a couple of sentences ago, I’d like to return to this with a 102, 103, 104, and then, naturally, graduate level courses. Also, I’d like to see what everyone else has to say and the best way to do that is to keep writing about it. Titles don’t tell us everything but a good title can guide us, gently, towards one understanding or another. It rarely completely changes the movie for us (how could any title really do that?) but it does offer an entry into some of the movie’s mysteries. A better understanding. And that’s worth exploring again and again.