A few weeks ago I watched an interesting movie HappyThankYouMorePlease which tells the story of a group of young New Yorkers, struggling to balance love, friendship, and their approaching adulthoods. One of the main protagonists is Sam, an aspiring writer who falls in love with Mississippi, a waitress/singer trying to make it in the Big Apple.
Although the movie is quite ok I was suddenly interested in the phenomenon of calling people by the name of the state they come from. In HappyThankYouMorePlease the girl introduced herself to Sam just by the name Mississippi and we never got to know her real name. I was curious if there were some other similar cases of people known by the name of their origin. At first Alabama Whitman crossed my mind. Alabama Whitman is the main female character from the movie True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.
To find more examples of calling people by the name of their origin would be a massive task. So I decided to check IMDB and find US states in movie titles and as movie characters. I admit that in many cases the names have nothing to do with US states (e.g. Indiana Jones), but I did it as a funny little project ;)
I tried to avoid the movie with characters such as for example Arizona policeman, New York firefighter and similar. You’ll also see that I couldn’t find any characters and titles with South or North Carolina in it and I had problems with North Dakota and West Virginia.
So, here are all US states as character names and as movie titles:
