When life imitates art

TOM Hanks in “The Terminal”

Some years ago, Steven Spielberg directed Tom Hanks in a film, “The Terminal,” in which the acclaimed actor played an Eastern European who lived for months at an airport terminal, the temporarily “stateless” victim of an international dispute.

Last week, uncannily enough, we read in the papers about a visitor from Poland who did the same things at Naia (Ninoy Aquino International Airport) for several days. Life imitates art!

The uncanny similarity made us wonder about other instances of life turning out to be at least as strange or remarkable as fiction, so we did some research and came up with other uniquely instructive instances of the same pop-cultural phenomenon:

After “Fight Club” was screened, its tale about angry, young men trying to reclaim their supposed white masculinity gave rise to the furtive formation of real streetwise fight clubs in the underbelly of some US cities, with the dark view in mind of creating their own “public mayhem.”

Things got out of hand when imitators became even more infatuated with violence for violence’s sake, like the college student who started planting pipe bombs around the United States!

Later, another impressionable gonzo who started his own fight club detonated a bomb outside a coffee shop, declaring that he was “inspired” by the film’s “Project Mayhem.” Uh, guys, don’t do this at home!

“The Matrix” has also inspired a criminal following in real life—sometimes, to a ghastly conclusion. In San Francisco, to cite an extreme example, a man dismembered his landlady and resorted to “the Matrix Defense,” pleading that he was not guilty—by reason of insanity!

In “Say Anything,” John Cusack played a loopy-love-crazed stalker so entertainingly that he encouraged some particularly impressionable men to do the same in real life—with eventually scarifying results! Hey, guys, real stalkers are not just “hopeless romantics,” so look for more positive and less potentially dangerous models to emulate!

Magical powers

When “The Craft” came out, all of a sudden, half the girls in some schools thought they definitely had magical powers!

“K-9” was a film about a police dog who gave up his life for his human buddy. It was inspired by a real-life Kansas City police dog. Two years after “K-9” was shown, the real police dog, exactly like the movie character he inspired, was shot and killed during the investigation of an attempted murder. How weirdly uncanny is that?

Finally, in “Proof of Life,” Russell Crowe played an expert in dealing with kidnappers. After shooting the film, the actor became even more of a real expert—he became the target of an actual kidnapping plot—and the FBI and Scotland Yard had to provide protection for him!

Is that one for the books? Would it qualify for the perfect example of “life imitating art imitating life imitating—

etc.”—?!

Excuse us while we rearrange our neurons….