Paul Thomas: Life imitating art can be painful to watch

There's a Monty Python sketch in which Oscar Wilde and his cronies try to drop each other in it with the Prince of Wales by repeating to his face an insolent remark one of them has made behind his back.

Facing instant social death, the fellow put on the spot has to explain how what appears to be unpardonable rudeness is actually a particularly unctuous piece of toadying.

The point of the sketch is that sayings which lean heavily on irony and ambiguity can mean as little or as much as you want them to mean. When recalled in the cold and sober light of day, one-liners that at first blush seemed witty or profound can appear banal, contradictory or plain fatuous.

Wilde's aphorism that life imitates art far more than art imitates life is a case in point. It sounds good but does it withstand scrutiny? A brief contemplation of the contents of the Louvre suggests otherwise.

The relationship between life and art defies easy categorisation.

Take the seizure and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. These events and Israel's subsequent pursuit and assassination of the perpetrators were the subject of Steven Spielberg's 2005 film Munich.

Spielberg described the movie as a work of "historical fiction", which is a rather coy way of saying that he played fast and loose with the facts to create a more dramatic story.

Given that Munich contains newsreel footage of the actual event and has actual protagonists - such as Israeli leader Golda Meir - as characters, how many viewers factored in Spielberg's calculatedly equivocal disclaimer?

The Munich massacre also inspired author Thomas Harris (of Hannibal Lecter fame) to write a novel, Black Sunday, in which Middle Eastern terrorists attempt to detonate a bomb attached to the underside of an airship over a US football stadium during the Super Bowl.

Now Harris didn't anticipate 9/11 but he did grasp that, post Munich, we'd entered the age of hyper-terrorism in which localised causes would have a global theatre of operations and terrorists would seek to harness advanced technology for strikes against targets selected for their symbolic value and potential for mass casualties.

Harris' novel imitated Munich the event and, in the sense that Black Sunday premised an airborne suicide attack on a uniqely American target, 9/11 could be said to have imitated Harris' novel.

In Sydney this week people gathered at the scenes of two car crashes to jostle for a better view, take photos, chat, drink coffee - pretty much everything in fact except try to help the dying victims trapped in the wreckage.

The repulsive spectacle of people treating fatal car crashes as a form of entertainment brings to mind J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel, Crash.

Although the novel portrays a level of psycho-sexual disturbance thankfully absent in the Sydney incidents, it's discomforting to reflect that the extreme indifference to the suffering of one's fellow human beings which critics found so chilling 35 years ago is now evident on the streets of a city where many New Zealanders feel very much at home.

Michael Wharton was one of the first satirists of the liberal consensus which emerged in the 1960s and the forces that have since been lumped under the heading of political correctness.

His long-running Way of the World column in the Daily Telegraph, written under the pseudonym Peter Simple, featured the likes of the absurdly pretentious writer Julian Birdbath, Marylou Ogreburg the feminist performance artist from Dissentville, California, and Dr Llewellyn Goth-Jones, Director of Community Medicine for the mythical and godforsaken borough of Stretchford.

In 1977 this caricature of the earnest if not fanatical health bureaucrat was demanding that all cigarette packets carry the warning "Smoking Kills".

That was satire then; now it's the way of the world. Wharton, a true reactionary in that he wanted to turn the clock back as opposed to merely preserving the status quo, would be vexed but not surprised that life is now doing a perfect imitation of his art.

This week a severed head was discovered in a field in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, home of the pork pie, which in my humble opinion doesn't travel well, and of Stilton cheese, which does.

While briefing the media Detective Inspector Julia McKechnie of the Leicestershire Constabulary revealed that "we are keeping an open mind as to how and why the head came to be in the field".

By his own estimation Wharton's collected columns amounted to more than 4 million words but I seriously doubt he ever came up with as perfect a parody of the bureaucratic mindset.

Life wins this one hands down.