The Titular Head

    Lit,   Movies
Jan 022006
 

Agatha ChristieWe are just a day or two into the new year. The year that just passed was a year in which Agatha Christie hogged more or less all the lime­light, even though she is not that hot. In two sep­a­rate stud­ies, sci­en­tists claim to have unlocked the secret of why her books are so pop­u­lar, even though they fea­ture pro­tag­o­nists we’d rather not drink tea with.

Sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ties of Lon­don, Birm­ing­ham and War­wick “loaded Christie’s nov­els onto a com­puter and ana­lyzed her words, phrases and sen­tences.” The results of the study show that

[S]he pep­pered her prose with phrases that act as a trig­ger to raise lev­els of sero­tonin and endor­phins, the chem­i­cal mes­sen­gers in the brain that induce plea­sure and satisfaction.

[Another] find­ing was that she used a very lim­ited vocab­u­lary. “It means that read­ers aren’t dis­tracted and so they con­cen­trate more on the clues and the plots,” said Dr Pernilla Daniels­son from the school of human­i­ties at Birm­ing­ham Uni­ver­sity. [Link]

Here’s Mark Lieberman’s take at the Lan­guage Log.

Christie used a lim­ited vocab­u­lary, “pleas­ing and gen­tle” lan­guage even though the plots were macabre, and repeated cer­tain “mes­mer­iz­ing” phrases over and over again to stim­u­late sero­tonin and other chem­i­cals in the body.

Favourite words or phrases, repeat­edly used in a “mes­meris­ing” way, help to stim­u­late the pleasure-inducing side of the brain. They include she, yes, girl, kind, smiled and sud­denly. Com­mon phrases include “can you keep an eye on this”, “more or less”, “a day or two” and “some­thing like that”. [Link]

Let’s sum­ma­rize the recipe for best­sellers: Repeat­ing the same things over and over again, gen­tle pre­sen­ta­tion, famil­iar phrases, sixth grade vocab­u­lary. And let’s also state our opin­ion of the whole sty­lo­met­ric study: Duh! Just read any three books by Robert Lud­lum, and you’ll know. Famil­iar­ity sells. Famil­iar­ity and sim­plic­ity, we are con­vinced, are the key ingre­di­ents that make pop­u­lar art so… pop­u­lar. Actu­ally, duh again. There is a whole indus­try in India, um.. I mean, South Asia that has been using the for­mula suc­cess­fully for ages — Indian movies are all about famil­iar set­tings, dumbed down plot­ting and an insis­tence on mak­ing audi­ences feel good. The next time some­one asks Ram Gopal Varma why he keeps remak­ing his own movies (and those of oth­ers), he should quote Pro­fes­sor Daniels­son, sty­lom­e­try, sero­tonin, Agatha Christie and Antara Mali. And Añu Malik — what can I say? I respect him a lot more now. Some­thing like that.

The repet­i­tive nature of Bol­ly­wood means titling movies is a hard, hard task. How many ways can you head­line the same arti­cle? Guy beats up Bad Guys, falls in Love with Girl. Girl Falls in Love with Guy who beat up Bad Guys. Bad Guys beaten up by Guy that Fell in Love with Girl. Love fallen into by Girl and Guy who beat up Bad Guys. And so on. Which, by the way, is a great segue into the next Agatha Christie finding.

Accord­ing to a sta­tis­ti­cal study com­mis­sioned by Lulu.com, Agatha Christie’s Sleep­ing Mur­der is the “per­fect title” for a best­selling novel and John Le Carre is the most con­sis­tent pro­ducer of “good” titles. [Link]

Fig­u­ra­tive or abstract titles, such as “Sleep­ing Mur­der,” or “Pre­sumed Inno­cent,” pro­duce more top-sellers than lit­eral ones, such as “The Da Vinci Code.”

A title’s length does not affect sales — con­trary to pub­lishingin­dus­try wis­dom, which decrees that best­seller titles be short. Another increased respect moment here. Remem­ber all those Hindi movie titles: DDLJ. HAHK. K3G. Damn. These guys knew.

Through the Lan­guage Log a link to the sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis tool used for the study. The Lulu Book Title Ana­lyzer. Please don’t for­get to leave com­ments com­pli­ment­ing the intrigu­ing fig­u­ra­tive title I chose for this post.

[Pre­vi­ous Post on why Bol­ly­wood is high lit­er­ary art.]

PS: Agatha Christie pic­ture cour­tesy The Free Library.

 Posted by Karthik at 5:57 am  Tagged with:

  16 Responses to “The Titular Head”

  1. Bart says:
    Jan, 3 2006 at 1:26 am

    A good infer­en­tial read :) That also explains why James­Bond and Jack­ieChan movies are accepted world­wide…
    Wish­ing you a won­der­ful year ahead..

  2. the_soliloquist says:
    Jan, 3 2006 at 2:04 am

    though i dont have any big com­plaints against Christie, i ve found her rather insipid.. most of the time.. except the time when i was forced to read a Poirot case from my Sev­enth std eng­lish text book… And I feel Da Vinci Code rode on con­tro­versy more than con­tent and style…

  3. Karthik says:
    Jan, 3 2006 at 2:14 am

    Bart — you have a great year too.

    Christie was insipid alright, but that’s the whole point — that is why she sells so many books. Peo­ple like the famil­iar­ity and the (more or less) mind­less enter­tain­ment she offers. Da Vinci code wasn’t even good pulp.

  4. Paavana says:
    Jan, 3 2006 at 11:18 am

    Karthik–

    Nice post. I must com­pli­ment you on the cap­tion, you are right, it is very apt. One author who also deserves very high praise for his banal plots along with some very inter­est­ing titles is Robin Cook, the med­ical mys­tery man. I think he deserves an award for being a great believer in recy­cling. He is doing his part for the environment.

    –Paa­vana

  5. Karthik says:
    Jan, 3 2006 at 11:23 am

    Paa­vana, thanks. I must con­fess — I’ve never fin­ished a Robin Cook novel. Have tried read­ing a cou­ple, but never got around to fin­ish­ing them.

    By the way, wel­come to the Blo­gos­phere. Here’s to many, many years of pro­duc­tive blogging…

  6. DoZ says:
    Jan, 4 2006 at 5:50 am

    Hey, lay off Cook. I grew up on his books. For­tu­nately, I have grown out of them, too, but I didn’t think them so bad then.

  7. Karthik says:
    Jan, 4 2006 at 6:08 am

    Ok, ok. I con­fess (again): Cook woke up the hypochon­driac in me. Halfway through coma I was con­vinced I was in one. Which is why I quit.

  8. DoZ says:
    Jan, 4 2006 at 11:22 am

    Well, you’re lucky, ‘cuz coma is one of his bet­ter works… né of his later ones might have just killed ya :D

  9. the_soliloquist says:
    Jan, 5 2006 at 6:14 am

    I used to feed on spe­cial­ity thrillers.. Crich­ton, Cook, Lud­lum, Crich­ton, Grisham… But was never able to read more than 2 books of the same author, and nver ever one behind the other.. The font size of the paper­backs used to take me to realms beyond my cog­nizance..
    Dunno y, as u grow older, ur tol­er­ance for same-ness reduces i sup­pose.. :-)

  10. Karthik says:
    Jan, 5 2006 at 6:41 am

    True, I used to like Lud­lum quite a lot. Even though I knew every book was going to be a ver­sion of “gifted young man fight­ing with his back to the wall,” I still liked to read the books — it was fun.

    I grew out of it, but some peo­ple didn’t — which is fine I guess. As long as they are happy…

  11. the_soliloquist says:
    Jan, 6 2006 at 10:02 am

    Writ­ers get away with the style and the flow more than the con­tent… The Alchemist ruled the roost with a very poigant style but the con­tent wasnt some­thing that hit the nail hard..

  12. Paavana says:
    Jan, 6 2006 at 11:44 am

    Oh, I should men­tion one more author, Mary Hig­gins Clark. She is the Chinese-sweatshop of all trash writ­ing. Don’t think I will have offended any­one sen­si­bil­i­ties here!

    –Paa­vana

    http://inquietesque.blogspot.com

  13. Gayathri says:
    Jan, 7 2006 at 12:26 am

    I con­fess. I’ve read all but one or two of the Robin Cook books. Hey, this was when I was much much younger and youth is allowed its fol­lies, right? And yes, I was an avid Christie reader too. This one I make no apolo­gies for. Noth­ing in the way of lit­er­ary tal­ent there, but still had fun read­ing them.

  14. Karthik says:
    Jan, 7 2006 at 3:10 am

    Paa­vana, yeah. Mary and her daugh­ter; Janet Evanovich, Patri­cia Cromwell. But I liked Grandma Mazur in the first few Stephanie Plum books, so maybe Evanovich doesn’t belong here.

    And Gay­athri, I have this thing against “med­ical thrillers.” Which is why I’ve never watched ER, ever. And so Robin could actu­ally be one of those great writ­ers I missed out on ;)

  15. Swathi says:
    Mar, 9 2006 at 4:34 pm

    being a big fan of Ms.Christie i hate to see the word ‘insipid’ being used in con­text of her writ­ings and com­mon plz dun com­pare the con­tem­po­rary writ­ers with a giant like Dame Agatha Christie — her plots were inge­nious and i think Her­cule Poirot is one the great­est lit­er­ary char­ac­ters ever cre­ated…
    n it also xplains y Famous Five,Secret Seven n Nancy Drews r ever pop­u­lar by young read­ers — every­one likes a mys­tery! not to for­get the great­est of them all –Sher­lock Holmes…

  16. Karthik says:
    Mar, 9 2006 at 11:37 pm

    Swathi, sorry. I grossly under­es­ti­mated the pop­u­lar­ity of Ms. Christie among SMSers. All I know to say is: thank u 4 stop­pin by. n bye 4 nw.

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