‘The Terminal’: Limbo I Can Relate To

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  01.20.09 | 3:20 PM ET

Photo by Matt Biddulph via Flickr (Creative Commons)

This weekend, on a long distance bus ride, I found myself watching The Terminal. (You know, the one where Tom Hanks lives in JFK for a year and makes out with Catherine Zeta-Jones?) Under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have found it sweet, if fairly forgettable—but on the bus, with snowy, nondescript Western New York sliding by, I was surprised by the way the film’s themes, about waiting and limbo, grabbed me. Airport terminals have a static in-between-ness all their own, but long bus and train rides—despite, obviously, keeping travelers in motion—can have that same quality of suspended animation, too. Being in a strange place, surrounded by strange people, dozing and eating in semi-public, I felt much less like someone watching Hanks’ character from the outside, and more like a colleague—or, well, like a fellow-traveler.

It’s not often that I watch travel movies while I am actually traveling, and “The Terminal” made me wonder whether I’d see many of them differently if I made a habit of matching them with transit. What would I think of “Lost in Translation” if I watched it in a Tokyo hotel? Or if I watched “Roman Holiday” in Rome? I knew a girl, years ago, who swore she’d watched Alive on a flight to Ireland; I always doubted the story, but then again, I saw White Squall while attending summer camp on a tall ship. (And yup, that’s the one about a tall ship adventure gone horrifically wrong.) So I guess anything’s possible.

Have you ever paired travel with a matching travel movie?

Tags: Alive, Movies, Pop Culture Travel, The Terminal, Asia, Japan, Tokyo, Europe, Italy, Rome, North America, United States, New York, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is the senior editor of World Hum. Her writing has also appeared in the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and WestJet's Up! Magazine, among other publications. She's based in Ottawa, Canada.


1 Comment for ‘The Terminal’: Limbo I Can Relate To

TambourineMan 01.23.09 | 3:15 PM ET

Oh Eva, don’t tell me you fell for this maudlin mess of a movie. It’s “Moscow on the Hudson” meets “Forrest Gump” in the airport food court.  Not good.

And I don’t think it was your state of suspended-transit-animation that left you susceptible to Spielberg’s schmaltz. I suspect it was a lack of sleep.

Your friend is fibbing about “Alive.” They don’t show airplane disaster movies on flights.

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