The Terminal Man
The Terminal is an entirely disposable and remarkably sweet comedy in which Tom Hanks, basically the Jimmy Stewart of our times, plays an Eastern European businessman who is forced to live in a New York airport when his passport is invalidated by his home country’s collapse, meaning he is neither allowed to board an airplane home nor to leave the airport and enter the United States. Pluckily, he finds ways to get by; earns money by collecting abandoned luggage trollies, learns English in the airport bookstore, and falls in love with a beautiful stewardess who might learn to love him back, if only he can keep secret the poverty of his existence. There’s not a second of the movie which isn’t entirely charming, and the discovery that the whole picaresque narrative was inspired by a real life event set my heart to singing like a lovestruck Pepe Le Peu. The Terminal Man, as it turns out, bears only a tenuous relation to the film of similar name; and that, all things considered, is probably just as well.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri has, indeed, lived in an airport; for about 18 years, in fact. He has not, however, learned to cope, fallen in love with an improbably gorgeous airline employee, or been stranded by adminstrative catastrophe. He is not clever, amiable, or infinitely resourceful, struggling cheerfully to work his way out of a tought spot. He is simply, sadly, beyond all shadow of a doubt, mentally ill.
The “co-written by Andrew Donkin” autobiography is not explicit about this. It allows Nasseri the same stilted unreflective self-expression and obsessive repetition of the narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and depicts without alloy the autism of his behaviours; his compulsive hoarding, his inability to comprehend other human beings, his attention to tiny detail at the expense of the bigger picture. It’s a bit like watching a YouTube walkthrough of Might and Magic VI uploaded by an agoraphobic; Nasseri plunges straight into the dank dungeons of his logic, promptly gets lost, then spends the rest of his time turning away from exits like they were dead ends. Initially, his refusals of help play like pig-headedness, an unwillingness to accept parole on any terms other than his own. Over time, as his demands and pseudo-concerns become more and more unrealistic, it becomes clear that he is simply determined never to leave the airport, and has accepted his life there as being a good one, or the best of a bad job. He has money, food, stuff enough to keep him happy. He’s taken care of. Nothing too terrible can ever happen to him there, under the constant watchful eye of local celebrity and CCTV. Most importantly, he’s somebody. Nobody special, to be sure, but still and all, he’s somebody. That guy on the airport bench. Look at everybody looking at him!
Much of the book is concerned with identity. National identity, obviously, and familial identity too, courtesy of a subplot about Nasseri’s dubious parentage. But these are just signposts, though, and the real business of the day is just that of asking “Who am I? What’s the point of me?” By sitting on his little bench like a statue on a museum plinth, a bored, wing-clipped macaw on a conservation branch, Nasseri has found a way of being which doesn’t actually necessitate the frightful responsibility of being anything in particular. Yes, Nasseri is a spare part, of course he is; but what does that make the rest of us but cogs?
Almost all of us are, in one way or another, sitting on our little airport bench, barricaded by the piles of stuff, the towers of brittle newspapers with our names in them. That’s what this book is about. You wouldn’t know it from the cover, which makes Nasseri seem like some sort of cross between Che Guevara and the Fonz. He’s not. He’s empty. It’s not “one man/team/country’s quest to…” It’s about a guy who is very sick in a way which most of us are only a little ill.