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Some movie titles pretty clearly explain what the film’s about. Star Wars? Well, wars among the stars. Toy Story? That would be a story about toys.

But other are a bit more confusing, and don’t immediately seem to have much to do with the films themselves.Here are six puzzling movie titles, decoded.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)

The title for Steven Spielberg’s film about alien visitors comes from the work of famous UFO specialist Allen Hynek. He was a consultant to the US government on reported alien visitations and divided them into three kinds. Close encounters of the third kind, Hynek said, were the most intense ones, involving apparent sightings of alien beings themselves.

Spielberg used Hyneck’s system as inspiration for the movie’s title, and hired Hynek as an expert while making the film. He even gave Hyneck a cameo role in the movie. That’s him meeting Spielberg’s movie aliens in the picture above.

Arachnophobia (1990)

An irrational fear of spiders is one of the most common phobias, so it might seem odd to make a movie that is likely to have a fair proportion of its audience covering their eyes or fleeing the cinema - if they even decide to watch the film at all.Perhaps it’s why the filmmakers chose the scientific name for a terror of our eight-legged friends! The word has its roots in the Ancient Greek words arakhnē (spider) and phóbos (fear).

The Grapes Of Wrath (1940)

Based on John Steinbeck's 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes Of Wrath (1940) is set in the depths of The Great Depression, and follows the Joad family, who are uprooted from their home in the Dust Bowl and join the great migration to California.

The title is taken directly from the Battle Hymn Of The Republic, an American patriotic song written in 1861. It says: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/He’s trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

The implication of the song is that the ‘grapes of wrath’ are the evil on Earth and that God is pressing these, delivering vengeance and bringing justice to the world. The film is all about the great suffering visited on the Joad family and the struggles they endure as they search for a better life. But the title gives a sliver of hope that there may be a reckoning and that justice might, eventually, prevail.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

When writer/director Charlie Kaufman released his film Synecdoche, New York (2008), it sent viewers and film critics scurrying to the dictionary, first to find out what on earth the title meant, and then how to say it. (It’s pronounced si-neck-duh-key.)

A synecdoche is a figure of speech where a part of something represents the whole, or vice versa. A good example is ‘Where are your wheels?” where ‘wheels’, a part of a car, represents a whole car.

The movie is about a writer, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who constructs a vast stage-set and populates it with actors playing people from his real life. It’s a doomed attempt to understand the whole of his existence by replicating a part of it - hence the title. But, just to make it even cleverer, the title also includes a pun. Schenectady, New York is the (real) town where Caden Lives.

Quantum Of Solace (2008)

James Bond titles have always tended to be simple and dramatic. Think Live And Let Die or A View To A Kill. So when it was announced that the 22nd 007 movie would be called Quantum Of Solace, it had a lot of Bond fans scratching their heads. What on earth did it mean?

In fact it’s the title of a Bond short story by Ian Fleming published in 1959. But the plot of the story doesn’t have anything to do with the events of the movie. One reason for choosing it might have been that it’s one of the only original ‘Fleming’ titles that the movies hadn’t used yet.

It seems to have left the writers trying to find some justification for the title. Quantum’ generally means ‘very smallest amount’, and ‘solace’ means ‘comfort’. “Bond is looking for his quantum of solace,” star Daniel Craig tried to explain at the time. "Ian Fleming says that if you don't have a quantum of solace in your relationship then the relationship is over. It's that spark of niceness in a relationship that if you don't have you might as well give up."

Hmm. Still quite mysterious, but it doesn’t hurt that it sounds pretty cool

Double Indemnity (1944)

Film noir is among the most difficult film genres to define, but most experts would agree that a sense of all-pervading mystery is key to most noirs. Double Indemnity was one of the earliest Hollywood noir films, and the mystery starts with its title. What does it mean?

The film’s chilling plot is about a woman and an insurance executive who plot to kill her husband, make it look like an accident, and claim the money from his insurance policy. The victim has a provision in the policy called a ‘double indemnity’ clause which means that if the victim’s death is accidental his beneficiary will get twice the payout. Hence the motive for murder, and the title.

This article was published in June 2022