Idina Menzel, the Broadway chanteuse best known for her irradiated turns in Rent, Wicked, and Frozen, chose a typically in-your-face name for her new solo album, out this week. It’s Idina., with the period, a typographical flourish that cries out at once “behold,” “look no further,” and “The press will almost certainly style this title wrong, but I care not.”
Self-titled albums are so common as to have lost any glamor, but the full stop feels like a rare power move. The mark shuts down discussion, offering up the definitive representation of Idina-ness in album form. It also turns punctuation into adornment, as if Menzel’s name couldn’t possibly swan onto the iTunes listings without a gem or two encircling its wrists. Like a feather or tiara, the period is there because the singer’s starry presence demands something extra. It is a placeholder for whatever dramatic accent one imagines should follow the utterance of “Idina.” (A burst of colored powder? A cymbal clap? A voluptuous slow-motion hair flip?)
It’s also an act of escalation. Idina. shows ups Beyoncé, Adele, Ciara, and other dot-less practitioners of the divalicious surname-drop. They want to say their one-word personal brands are all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know. But only Idina. drops the mic at the end of the broadcast.
In 1993, amid sneers that she’d ridden to fame on her family’s matching checkered coattails, Janet Jackson released her fifth album, Janet. The end-stopped title—“Janet, period”—unyoked the singer’s image from her brothers’. She’d co-produced the album and written all its lyrics. The matter-of-factness of her punctuation registered as cool confidence—not only was Janet. staking everything on its leading lady, but it wasn’t worried about it.
In movie titles, a period neither underscores an individual star’s charisma nor, alas, implies that you’re in for a period drama. Films salt their names with punctuation to add a tinge of character, whether it’s manic (Airplane!), spooky (The Next Voice You Hear…), or eccentric (Crazy, Stupid, Love). The parentheses in (500) Days of Summer speak to a sensibility that is wry, self-conscious, and full of asides to the viewer. But periods in movie titles are multivalent. The sober finality of Good Night, and Good Luck. intensifies the moral seriousness of Edward R. Murrow’s signoff. It also hints at the downfall of certain American ideals at the hands of McCarthyism. You can’t go back, that ineluctable mark warns. Meanwhile, there’s a deadpan quality to the punctuation in Comedy Central’s one-hour special Demetri Martin. Person. “Here I am,” Martin declares, perhaps a bit nervously. The air of resolution in the title suggests in its unexpectedness that the comic finds his membership in the “person” category ever so slightly improbable.
Then again, with its closing dot, the quirky Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There. seems to be after a blend of unusualness and offhand frankness. This period feels understated, ironically conjuring the more exuberant punctuation the filmmakers could have used but didn’t. Like Dylan, the title comes off as reserved, a little off-kilter. It is also declarative, inarguable, and slyly self-contradictory. I’m not there, say the words, but the period mutters otherwise.
