Flashy Titles That Are Cool And Smart And Also The Titles Are Well-Worded

Last week, my partner and I watched the first half of Black Hawk Down. Not a good movie. I think you could save Black Hawk Down as a film, though, if at the end, when all the post-script text is telling you how these soldiers ended up, they told you about the medals Jeremy Piven's character was posthumously awarded, and then added in a line that said, "In real life, Jeremy Piven will one day die." You'd be like "Hey, not so bad."

I have problems with Black Hawk Down's politics (do not look up why they agreed to change the Ewan McGregor character's name), but the immediate issue that hits you in that movie, the visceral challenge it'd still face if you watched with the sound off, is that it takes 45 minutes for the Black Hawk to go down. I tend to remember Black Hawk Down as "What if the Normandy scene in Saving Private Ryan was the entire film?" and this is not the case. Steven Spielberg takes 4 or 5 minutes to get to Normandy and then there's a whole real movie with characters and sub-plots and the rest after you're allowed to recover from that early splash of ice water.

It's possible I misremember Black Hawk Down's bloat because its title is so direct. And I do like the title. As long as you can figure out that a Black Hawk is a helicopter, you can deduce most of the film's plot. It's as concise as Assault on Precinct 13. The surviving protagonists are going to wind up in the middle of enemy territory and they're going to have to get back to safety.

It may also help its appeal as the title of a movie about confusion in a war zone, that's shot all choppy and manic like somebody taped a camera to a ferret's ass, that "Black Hawk Down" is so percussive-sounding, with two 'k's, a 'b' and a 'd' in three short syllables. Phonetically, it sounds like trouble. John Early has a genius bit about the wording of an iPhone prompt, which comes to mind.

A couple days before we sat down for Black Hawk Down, I rewatched a movie I love, Rachel Getting Married. It's a very plain title, but it's so effective, given Anne Hathaway's character, the one we see in almost every scene, is named Kym, while Rosemarie DeWitt's character, Kym's sister, is named Rachel. It's like Kym's so self-destructive and self-centered that she forgot whose story she's in. This isn't supposed to be about you. This isn't Kym Returning From Rehab, dude. Get your shit under control.

The movie has enough empathy for Kym that the title never feels as finger-wagging as I may be making it sound. It's understandable that Rachel is frustrated after years of dealing with Kym, but it's also understandable that Kym is a wreck. God damn, what a good movie. Maybe Jonathan Demme's best.

I've been trying to make the time to revisit another Demme movie, maybe his most famous and acclaimed. I'm speaking, of course, of Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids. No, I'm referring to The Silence of the Lambs. That's a great title for a different reason. It's sort of one step removed from Nelson Muntz walking out of Naked Lunch and saying "I can think of at least two things wrong with that title." If you haven't already seen the movie or read the Thomas Harris book, "The Silence of the Lambs" would seem like a non-sequitur for a serial killer cannibal thriller. After you're already immersed in the movie and you've got a handle on what it's going to be about, Clarice Starling explains her childhood, growing up on a farm, hearing lambs slaughtered, wanting to save them.

It's a bit pretentious, like Harris thought he was writing The Glass Menagerie instead of a story about a cannibal who bites into a person's head and wears their face and a serial killer who's trying to sew together a skin suit so he looks like a woman (the novel's original title was Carvin' Kissers and Tuckin' Pissers), but there's a cool mystery to it that I appreciate. Of all the symbols and horrible images in The Silence of the Lambs-- the death's head moths, the well in Buffalo Bill's basement, the metal/flesh masks Hannibal Lecter wears– that's the one that gets a spotlight.

Is the title supposed to sell you on the movie? Michael Mann had changed Red Dragon to Manhunter when he adapted that a few years earlier, there was already precedent for streamlining Hannibal titles and I'm sure Demme could have called this anything else. Somebody in the Orion marketing department must have wanted a shorter, more descriptive title to go up on all of those theater marquees. I'm glad it stayed, though. Even before you know what it means, maybe especially before you know what it means, The Silence of the Lambs is a creepy combination of words that sets a tone.

So many of the great narrative art titles sticking in my head are like that: An intriguing phrase you can't initially comprehend, but whose feel you want to be able to decode.

David Mamet used to be good at the mystery title. I was going to say that shifted when he lost his mind around 9/11, but Spartan, a contemporary action thriller whose title reference only becomes clear toward the film's end, came out in 2004. I've always loved American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. The latter is almost entirely a case of musicality. Once you know what it refers to– the names of the Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms developments the story's salesmen consider stealing leads for– it doesn't change much, but "Glengarry Glen Ross" is such a smooth, almost bouncy phrase that hits the way I assume ASMR does. And you can't tell me anybody sitting down for their first time with that play or movie knows what those two entirely fictional land developments are.

It would lose a lot of its charm, I think, if the piece was titled something like The Glengarry/Glen Ross Leads, because then I'd know going in what I was dealing with. That's the case with lot of potentially intriguing mystery titles, things like The Eiger Sanction or The Parallax View or The Manchurian Candidate (another Demme, sort-of!). I don't know what a Pelican Brief is, but I know that if I'm watching a legal thriller called The Pelican Brief, it's just going to be the name of some document related to a plan that needs to be uncovered. Parallax is a nefarious organization, Manchuria is where the brainwashing plot is enacted. Places (Zabriskie Point), names (Michael Clayton), job titles (The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter) could theoretically be vague in a Glengarry Glen Ross sense, but aren't as arresting because it often feels like these names are placeholders and the title Could be swapped out for anything. Michael Clayton could be called Fixer, it could be called The U-North Betrayal or whatever generic thing and it'd have the same significance to the art it's presenting.

I will, however, perk up for a narrative named for a seemingly incidental person, place or job. At that point, it's almost a reverse-mystery title, in that I'll probably hit "play" thinking I know what I'm getting in for and then, as the credits roll, wonder about the creators’ decision to choose that for the name, given I now know everything they were trying to tell me. Fargo is a good example of this. I know the first time I watched Fargo, I thought the story would take place in Fargo. Once you've hit the end of that film and found a story that primarily takes place in and around Minneapolis, it's fun to think about why the Coen brothers would name their story after city that houses the dive bar three of the characters meet in for five minutes. Once the Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare and William H. Macy characters confirm their plan to kidnap Macy's wife, they split off and never see each other again (Buscemi and Macy talk on the phone, but the Harve Presnell character intercepts what would have been their in-person reunion). It's like if Casablanca took place mostly in Lisbon, or if TÁR was named Staten Island (more on that one soon). It’s not that it’s hard to figure out why they used that name, it’s that it’s interesting to create expectations and then move away from them so quickly.

The Coens' follow-up, The Big Lebowski, is sneakily similar. There are two Jeffrey Lebowskis in the story. One is in every scene, but the one you see the least of, the one David Huddleston plays, is the one credited as "The Big Lebowski" in the end credits. I don't think there's anything deeper going on there, but it's an interesting choice by two people who seem to make a dozen interesting choices per page.

Amadeus rings true as a reverse-mystery, too. In 1830, Alexander Pushkin wrote his play Mozart & Salieri, and that's a straightforward "Here are the characters you're going to be watching the most" name. When Peter Shaffer adapted and expanded on that play's central relationship in 1979, he named his version Amadeus. I can’t remember why I would have thought the Milos Forman movie was titled Amadeus, rather than Mozart, other than "Amadeus" being a cooler word. Once you see how much of the film is from Salieri's perspective, how often he rages about his struggle with a higher power that would grant effortless genius to some jackass, and how "Amadeus" means "loved by god," that title becomes such a bomb. The movie isn't called Amadeus because that sounds better than Mozart, it's called that because you can't call a movie The Heart Of The Film Is The Sequence Where F. Murray Abraham Burns A Crucifix And Growls "Grazie, Signore." In a sense, this is also what I mentioned with Rachel Getting Married reminding Kym that the weekend isn't supposed to be about her: Mozart has pushed Salieri off the playbill of their shared biography.

TÁR is another good reverse-mystery title focused on the central character's name. You find out the Cate Blanchett character is named Lydia Tár and think you've got a bulletproof handle on why the movie with Tár is called TÁR. It's because it's about Tár. And then after she's been brought down and no longer holds any power, in one of my favorite movie scenes, Lydia returns to her childhood home in Staten Island, where her brother casually calls her "Linda" and we see awards for "Linda Tarr," and she watches an old video of Leonard Bernstein in a sequence indicating she may never have known him personally. Two hours into the movie, it becomes clear Lydia Tár is a persona Linda Tarr created in order to go as far as she felt she deserved to. It's just an affected mid-Atlantic accent or a sweater for a prestigious school you never went to, and the first thing I ever knew about the movie, its title, was itself a kind of lie about whose narrative I'd be following. (And then, on a deeper level, the movie raises the question of whether Lydia Tár, the chief conductor of the Berlin orchestra, is any more a creation than Linda Tarr, the young girl who fell in love with music in her New York bedroom, but we're already running long here).

Let's knock a couple more out. Titles that don't literally mean anything to a person who hasn't already taken in the art it represents, or that obscure their intention, or simply have a magnetic pull:

• Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy. Those words feel so perfect together, "burnt" and "heresy" add some menace. In the book (and the underrated movie adaptation), "The Burnt Orange Heresy" is a painting that may not exist.
• The Other Side of the Wind. Orson Welles' movie about a person making a movie titled The Other Side of the Wind. As a phrase, it's as meaningless as a Jim Steinman lyric, but it's also intriguing as a koan.
• Liquid Sky. In the film, "liquid sky" is the name of an alien sex drug. Hell of a movie, and especially recommended if the phrase "alien sex drug" sounds like your kind of dreamy weirdness.
• Blade Runner. A William S. Burroughs title slapped onto a streamlined adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, briefly explained in the film as a job title. Just sounds cool.
• Reservoir Dogs. Barely explained in-film when one character calls the other a 'doggy.' As with Blade Runner, this is a “just sounds cool,” and Quentin Tarantino, for all of his love of exploitation movies with attention-grabbing names, is almost never good at titling his work. But the more you think about a pack of strays thirstily wandering around a Los Angeles reservoir, the more it fits.
• A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess' book explains that a clockwork orange is an organic thing that's been hollowed out and replaced with a mechanical simulacra of the same. I think. I read the novel once, in high school, and it's been almost as long since I've seen the movie. But in both versions of the story, that's the main character, brainwashed into being less of a psycho. This one doesn't work for me. It's too intellectual, it means too little, the metaphor is too contrived. But when you're at an age where you'd find A Clockwork Orange smart, you're also most likely at an age where an obscure and important-sounding title like that can reach out to you.
• Smoking Causes Coughing. I loved this movie, which is about a French Power Rangers-like super sentai team called Tobacco Force who fight monsters and tell each other campfire stories on a teambuilding retreat. I don't know why it works for me, to have this bizarre comedy about superheroes with nicotine-based powers be titled like a anti-smoking PSA, but it does. If I'm remembering correctly, "smoking causes coughing" is just some cautionary advice one of the heroes gives to a kid who wants to light up.
• Barbarian. I still don't know what this means. The house almost all of this movie takes place in and under is located on Barbary Street. That's the best explanation I or anybody on the internet can figure. There are barbaric things happening in the movie's reality, but the first 30 minutes take place in an AirBnB house in a decrepit area, and it is so beautiful to have a movie's title create a tone that the film itself does almost nothing to support for such a long time. And unlike Black Hawk Down, the delay is part of what works, because the title doesn't point toward anything specific enough that you can ever feel like you're getting ahead of the characters.
• Weapons. Zach Cregger's other perfect title. Makes more sense for its story than Barbarian does for its, but on a basic level, "Weapons" is such a stark, spooky title. Once I'd seen Barbarian and knew where Cregger was willing to go, how both outrageous and vicious he was open to making his work, I was down for whatever came next. When that thing was announced as Weapons, a name as ambiguous as anything, I was even more down.
• Guy Maddin's got a bunch. Cowards Bend The Knee, Brand Upon The Brain!, The Saddest Music In The World, etc. When you find out an artist like Maddin has a movie called Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, you make an effort to track it down.
• Gabriel Corbera's Days Longer Than Long Pork Sausages. This is a comic I've never seen anybody else mention, but which I'd love to talk with somebody about, if you've read it. It's about two muscle bros navigating their way out of an endless dungeon. The name is so aggressively silly and idiosyncratic– using forms of "long" twice over the span of six words, feeling the need to identify them as pork sausages as if that means anything about their size, implying any sausage is famously long enough to act as a barometer– that it's a poem on its own. If I remember correctly, nobody says this phrase or anything close to it in the book itself. I bought Days Longer Than Long Pork Sausages based on its name, sold my copy to a used book store when clearing out my shelves, and then bought another copy again a few years later. The title was just too good.

I don’t need a movie to have a slightly-obscure title. Michael Mann, mentioned earlier, has never given a project one. For all that talk about the Coen bros, most of their movies have blunt, straightforward names. Nothing arty about Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure or even, really, any Bergman movie. I think about Stan Brakhage all the time and his weirdest stuff still carries normal-sounding names.

I feel like you probably thought there was going to be a thesis here at some point. Just a list of things I’ve been considering. Sorry. Life’s a mess right now. This is what I’ve got.