Ah, Hollywood — who else could take a lean, two-page short story and turn it into a bloated $90-million mega-production?
Author James Thurber's short about a timid, henpecked husband who escapes into adventure-packed daydreams first appeared in a 1939 issue of The New Yorker magazine, and for such a slight piece, it has certainly cemented its place in the cultural lexicon. "Mittyesque" is a term used to refer to any sort of person who imagines themselves as far more accomplished than they actually are, but that kind of misses the point of the story, identifying fantasies as self-deceit where Thurber clearly saw them as a kind of self-defense mechanism.
There was a popular 1947 movie adaptation with Danny Kaye in the lead, but for my money, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" features the most satisfyingly Mittyesque anti-hero to date. Gilliam took the daydreamer of Thurber's tale and imagined him in George Orwell's "1984," where escape from reality also meant turning a blind eye to the horrors right before you.