Saturday, March 26, 2022

Why all the gerunds in movie titles?

Inventing Anna has been a blockbuster title for Netflix, but, being a nerd, couldn't help thinking about the similarity of many movie and series titles over the last few decades. Being John Malkovich, Finding Nemo, Saving Private Ryan, Driving Miss Daisy, Being Julia, Leaving Las VegasBecoming Mozart, Saving Flynn, come to mind, but I'm sure there are many more. This is a whole series of titles separate from those incorporating "the" and "of", e.g. The Taking of Pelham 123, The Haunting of Hill House, etc, or just a single naked gerund, e.g. The Shining, The Howling, etc.

These are all examples of what might be called the "Gerund + Proper Noun" (or perhaps the "Gerund Phrase") school of movie titling, of which Inventing Anna is just the latest example. A gerund is a part of speech in which a form of a verb (usually ending in -ing) functions in a sentence as a noun, e.g. "Reading is my passion", "Travelling expands the mind", etc. A gerund phrase is a gerund and an object noun (plus any modifiers), e.g. "Singing songs in the shower is liberating", "Buying that car on impulse was the best thing I ever did", etc.

So, why has it become so popular in movie titles? If you were hoping for a compelling explanation, I am going to disappointed you. I find that other people have commented on this, but I have still not discovered a good reason for it, other than derivativeness, if that is even a word (apparently it is), or what filmmakers might prefer to call "homage".

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