From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Life imitating art is the reverse of the normal process whereby art is made to resemble life. The concept derives from an Oscar Wilde aphorism, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life." Wilde follows Ovid who, in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses, depicts a scene where "Nature in her genius had imitated art." The theme of art being more real than life is central in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, one could see this novel as a philosophical manifesto at times. The plot revolves around a portrait of the eponymous character which may or may not have transformed in order to reflect the conscience of Dorian. This philosophy is linked with Wildian dandies and with the aesthetic movement of the turn of the 20th century.

Many examples exist in history. For example Italian nationalist Gabriele d'Annunzio, known as the "poet-warrior", scripted the epic Cabiria (1914), which used the Roman salute. D'Annunzio appropriated the salute when he occupied Fiume in 1919.^[1] D'Annunzio has been described as the John the Baptist of Italian Fascism,^[2] as virtually the entire ritual of Fascism was invented by D'Annunzio during his occupation of Fiume and his leadership of the "Italian Regency of Carnaro".^[3] Besides the Roman salute, these included the balcony address, the cries of "Eia, eia, eia! Alala!", the dramatic and rhetorical dialogues with the crowd, and the use of religious symbols in new secular settings.^[2] Like other neo-Imperial rituals utilized by D'Annunzio, the salute became part of the Italian fascist movements symbolic repertoire ^[1] and later adopted by Nazi Germany as the Hitler salute.

Examples

• The explicit nature of the heist scenes in Heat has been cited as the model for a spate of robberies after its release. These include armored car robberies in South Africa, Colombia, and Denmark^[4][5] and a bank robbery in North Hollywood, California.^[6]
• Toronto police have reported that every year an installment of the The Fast and the Furious film franchise has been released they have witnessed a spike in collision rates and weekly fatalities on the road.^[7]
• After the release of the film Colors, Bloods' and Crips' identifications spread to St. Louis and gang violence in the city intensified immensely.^[8]
• The release of the 2006 film Night at the Museum, which depicted the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as having its attendance increase dramatically at the end of the film, resulted in the real American Museum of Natural History's attendance increasing after the film's release. Christmas season attendance increased by 20% over the previous year.^[9]
• Motorcycle sales reached new heights after the release of the outlaw biker film, The Wild One.^[10]
• True crime author T.J. English reports that the immense popularity of The Godfather series during the 1970s reinvigorated the American mafia with a new generation of recruits.^[11]
• The Times has reported that the virtual guitar gameplay of the popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises has inspired millions of young people to begin playing the electric guitar in real life.^[12]
• The same year Birth of A Nation, a film about the civil war and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, was released, the real KKK surged from just a few thousand members to more than a 100,000.^[13]
• Astronomers who took a picture of the star V838 Monocerotis remarked that it seems to imitate Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night.^[14]
• The 1898 novella Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, about a supposedly indestructible ocean liner which sinks after colliding with an iceberg, has been noted to contain a remarkable number of parallels with the real-life sinking of RMS Titanic, which occurred in 1912 - fourteen years after the story's publication.
• Similarities between the fictional 2006 election in the television program The West Wing and the real-life 2008 U.S. presidential election have been noted in the media: young minority Democratic candidate (Matthew Santos on the show, Barack Obama in real life) has a grueling but successful primary campaign against a more experienced candidate (Bob Russell on the show, Hillary Clinton in real life) and chooses an experienced Washington insider as his running mate (Leo McGarry on the show, Joe Biden in real life), whereas the Republican contest is determined early in the primary season with an aging maverick senator of a Western state being the nominee (Arnold Vinick on the show, John McCain in real life) and then a socially conservative running mate from a small Republican state (West Virginia Governor Ray Sullivan on the show, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in real life).^{[15][16][17][18]}
• In the Green Arrow miniseries The Longbow Hunters, Green Arrow uncovers a U.S. government operation to use proceeds from an Iran arms deal to fund Nicaraguan Contras. Shortly before publication, the Iran-Contra story broke.^[19]
• At least four of the xkcd comic strips have been imitated by life: guitars in the shower, geohashing, the Cambridge park meetup, and the chess games on roller coasters^[20].
• In the 1993 Sylvester Stallone movie Demolition Man, it is revealed there was an amendment to the US Constitution that allowed Arnold Schwarzenegger to become President of the United States. According to the 2005 Year-in-Review issue of Time magazine, supporters of Arnie are hoping to amend the constitution so that he can run for President; he currently cannot run because he is not a natural born citizen of the United States.

References