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Extra! Extra! Read all about the influence
of pop culture on baby names!
Our Question: How did the rise of the film industry from 1950 to 1962 influence Californians, and how can analyzing baby naming trends during that time reveal the impact of the most significant movie stars?
Extra! Extra! Read all about the influence
of pop culture on baby names!
an introduction
The movie is a new form of media when compared to other art forms such as literature and paintings – its significance has risen to a paramount scope within one century. The genesis was slow, beginning in 1880 during the “graphic revolution,” the creation of illustrations using small dots of ink to copy the light filtered into a lens gave the world photographs. This mechanical innovation would eventually lead to a strip, multiple of these photographs edited succinctly together to make a video that could become a film. These were silent until 1927 with Warner Brothers’ release of The Jazz Singer, the first film with dialogue; the first all-talking film would follow one year later, titled Lights of New York (Cashmore, 15-18). Movie theaters broke the block as watchers waited to see their favorite actors in a riveting new plot. The height of Hollywood, commonly called the Golden Age, took place from 1950 to 1962 as Hollywood studios experienced economic booms with every released film.
On top of the box-office successes, the actors and actresses within them received unprecedented attention. The raving reviews and nominations were only a tip of the iceberg of their influence – the American people were seemingly obsessed with these stars and proof of this remains in every vein of life. Books written on the matter underscore this era’s fascination with actors: Ellis Cashmore’s book Celebrity Culture details the cult of interest via in-depth celebrity case studies. In some cases, whole books were written to evaluate a single actor alone; Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? by Brenda Maddox postulates that Taylor was not the sinful vixen the world saw her as.
Californians surrounding the Hollywood powerhouse would have been the first population exposed to the golden spotlight of the celebrities – they drove by the billboards, they sat in traffic while streets were shut down for hot sets (a movie set actively recording), they were a captive audience to Hollywood’s Golden Age. They were the first to form opinions on the actors. Considering “culture never stands still for too long, and every change has causes and effects” (Cashmore, 8), the Californians of 1950-1962 could present a quantifiably studiable group for the influence celebrities possess over the masses, although subsequent studies could take place that evaluate the data of other states’ name occurrences. For the sake of the time and capability within it, our group could not analyze further states, although we hope that our study on California could provide a launchpad to further explorations into this phenomenon.
The question lies in how to study this group, where to derive the most information on this mass – an accessible and massive option was the naming of offspring. Parents must pick a name for their child that will shape them, that they will be known as and summoned by. There was an immediate question amongst the group: Would there be an obvious correlation between the timeline of the Golden Age’s top stars and the popularity of their name?
How did the rise of the film industry from 1950 to 1962 influence Californians, and how can analyzing baby naming trends during that time reveal the impact of the most significant movie stars?
Enough congruencies would provide supple evidence of correlations that celebrities can impact a societal commonplace as principal as naming conventions. For our project, we will be analyzing two datasets: “Baby Names in the US,” published by TimeMagazineLabs on GitHub, and “The Oscar Award, 1927-2024” published by Raphael Fontes and David Lu on the website Kaggle. “Baby Names in the US” gives a comprehensive list of all baby names in the US from 1880-2020, with the number of occurrences of each name. “The Oscar Award, 1927-2024” dataset is a list of all actors and actresses from 1927-2024 who were nominated for an award. It also includes whether or not these stars won the award. This granted us quantifiable evidence to the popularity of these stars, rather than an estimation based upon opinion. With these datasets, we will be analyzing the years 1950-1962, known colloquially as “The Golden Age of Hollywood.” The convergence of these two datasets allow us to measure the influence of celebrities on the names they brought to the forefront of pop culture. For instance, did the popularity of the name Elizabeth decline as the actress Elizabeth Taylor steeped into controversy? Using our datasets, we can isolate such case studies and study their extent of influence on naming conventions in California.
The literature on celebrity culture and baby naming highlight several key themes. Generally, most academic and professional works frame celebrity culture as a commodified entity, where the fame and persona of individuals are carefully constructed and sold to the public. This is a manifestation of consumerism that has only increased with the growth of technology and social media. Additionally, most works describe the allure of celebrities, often through specific case studies, as a combination of both perceived authenticity and idolization, which in turn influences and shapes ideologies that impact the names people choose for their children. Thus, the vast majority of sources agree on the significant impact of celebrities on social and cultural norms.
However, it is a defensible argument that naming a child after a famous individual does not necessarily result from that celebrity’s influence. This highlights a key contradiction rooted in the age-old debate between correlation and causation. Furthermore, the literature on naming structures emphasizes that cultural frameworks around naming often reflect ethnic backgrounds, which will be crucial when analyzing the processes involved in naming, especially considering the gaps in research from a non-Western perspective. Our work analyzes these issues and concepts through the lens of specific celebrities, incorporating a wide range of diverse sources, and critically examining the complexities of celebrity culture and naming frameworks as both personal and societal constructs.
This project explores the relationship between the prospering film industry of 1950-1962 and its impact on Californian society, as seen through baby naming trends. We were drawn to studying these specific twelve years as it was the birth of widespread Western celebrity worship and would provide sufficient sources without the influx that modern celebrities experience (i.e. Instagram, X, gossip websites, blogs, etc.). An examination of the cultural impact of Hollywood also felt paradoxically modern with its ties to parasocial relationships – a growing discussion active to this day about the interrelation between performers and their audience.
Through an analysis of naming patterns in relation to prominent movie stars of the era, we can quantify the extent of celebrity influence on everyday decision-making. In order to present multiple types of influence, we carefully selected four actors – two men and two women – from the actors within our Academy Award data. Debbie Reynolds stood out first after we noticed the popularity of the names Deborah/Debra/Debbie in our data. Another actress’s name appeared too, Elizabeth. A tragic young savant, James Dean, correlated to the popularity of James on our data. John was largely common and also provided an older case study to our bunch with John Wayne. This research showcases that celebrities influence not just viewing habits but more intimate aspects of people’s lives: identity.