The bizarre link between Nicolas Cage movies and swimming pool deaths
Here’s a question I’d wager you’ve never considered: Do more people drown in swimming pools when Nicolas Cage releases movies?
Now, it goes without saying that there is probably a very good reason you’ve never pondered the question, much less answer it. For starters, it’s nonsense, and neither element of it seems to have anything to do with the other. Why, you may ask, would people falling into swimming pools and tragically losing their lives have any relation whatsoever to Cage’s wild and wacky cinematic exploits? It’s not like every time someone watches Face/Off on a Friday night or mainlines the National Treasure franchise on a lazy Sunday that some poor bastard drowns at their local public pool…right? Right?!
Well, the answer to this isn’t as simple as it appears. Obviously, unless Cage has been stalking the country for decades, secretly drowning his fans (which does sound like a cool movie idea), there is no real-world link whatsoever between him and swimming pool deaths. However, according to Tyler Vigen and his amusingly inane blog Spurious Correlations, there is a scientific link between Cage and pool deaths that may make you raise your eyebrow.
Vigen, a Harvard Law School graduate who loves statistics (especially the quirky ones), has operated his blog for more than a decade at this point, and it’s a sight to behold. His raison d’être has always been finding a random data set from an academic study of some kind, and then searching for another completely random one with a line graph that looks similar. He then superimposes these two bad boys over each other, and presto, he’s got a completely bogus correlation between two hilariously unrelated topics.
While this may sound like a terrible waste of anyone’s valuable time, Vigen is nothing if not dedicated to finding absurd correlations; for instance, did you know there’s an eerie similarity between the American government’s spending on science, space, and technology and the country’s rate of suicides by three plots of hanging, strangulation, and suffocation?
At this point, I can hear you voicing whether all of his spurious connections are this morbid, and I wish I could say different, but they very obviously are. Other Vigen comparisons include the age of Miss America in relation to murders by hot vapours and objects, and per capita consumption of margarine juxtaposed with the divorce rate in Maine, in case you were curious.
The one that made the most headlines was when Vigen overlaid the two graphs of pool mortality with Cage movie releases, compiling data from the decade between 1999 and 2009, and found that the number of deaths by drowning was plotted at almost exactly the same level in 2000 and 2001 when Cage released two films. It spiked in 2007 when he increased his output to four movies, and then plummeted back down in 2008 when he only made one movie.
At the end of the day, baffling findings aside, it is weird that the graphs line up so similarly, mostly because I don’t want to think of the death toll from 2018 and 2019, when Cage starred in a combined 14 films, each one worse than the last. Oh, think of the humanity!
