In the spring of 2009, I was at my local cinema, talking to my friend Bill, who works there. (Incidentally, you can and should follow him on Twitter @The_MovieStar.) Nicolas Cage had a new picture in theaters – as he always seems to – entitled Knowing. It was a sci-fi, thrillery kind of thing about a college professor who finds a list of numbers that, when deciphered, seem to predict world catastrophes. Astoundingly, the list somehow fails to foresee Season of the Witch, but that’s a subject for another day. Bill commented to me that a lot of theater patrons were calling the movie by the wrong name. Instead of Knowing, they were calling it The Knowing. They were adding the word “the” where no “the” existed.
Coincidentally, another movie playing around that same time was a typically ignorable Channing Tatum vehicle called Fighting. (Imagine a tween-centered remake of Fight Club, and that’s Fighting.) I asked Bill if people were doing the same thing with this movie, ordering tickets for The Fighting. He informed me that they most certainly were not. This sparked an intense discussion of a completely trivial and insignificant issue…but hey, that’s the kind of dudes we are. Eventually, we agreed that people were getting the name wrong because they’d been conditioned to expect a certain kind of title from sci-fi/horror/thriller films. In those genres, it is common to turn a gerund into a noun: The Shining, The Reckoning, The Reaping, The Happening, etc. Given that Knowing had an eerie preview, these title-mangling folks were simply assuming that it wasn’t about about a guy knowing something, but rather about some cataclysmic event called a “knowing.” In short, they weren’t paying very close attention.
Bill and I then realized that all movie titles suddenly sound more menacing and creepy when you turn a gerund into a noun and add the word “the” at the beginning. Over the next few months, we began testing this theory on every new movie possible. Pixar’s Up became The Upping. Orphan became The Orphaning. Bandslam became The Bandslamming. Fall of 2009 brought us The Extracting, The Whiteouting, The Boxing, and, of course, The New Mooning. You get the picture. Some titles didn’t lend themselves to the game as easily. When I told Bill I was heading in to see Tyler Perry’s The I Can Do Bad All By Myselfing, he looked at me the way a dog looks at a Shake Weight, i.e. with a combination of confusion and pity.
Truth be told, I haven’t been able to stop playing this little game. Once we started goofing around with names, I found that I was attempting to apply our theory every weekend, with each new batch of film titles. In 2010, I went to see The Inceptioning, The Salting, The Towning, The Burlesquing, and, naturally, the uber-creepy Julia Roberts flick The Eating, the Praying, and the Loving. Earlier in 2011, multiplexes saw movies I privately referred to as The Hall Passing, The Sucker Punching, The Hopping, The Source Coding, and The Priesting. Playing at my local theater as I write this are The Helping, The Driving, The Shark Nighting, The Debting, The Contagioning, and The Moneyballing. Don’t they all sound creepy?
Funny I should mention Contagion. My reason for writing this blog is to spread the disease. I can’t stop doing it, but maybe if I pass it on to you, the personal torment will subside and I will be spared any future horror. Kind of like the way making copies of the deadly videotape saves Naomi Watts and her son in The Ring. Or, as I call it, The Ringing.
You forgot Transformers: Dark Side of The Mooning