A triptych-style protest inspired by the Oscar favourite Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is only the latest example of demonstrators taking inspiration from cultural landmarks

Three billboards outside the Houses of Parliament (and other London locations) last week read: “71 dead”, “And still no arrests?”, “How come?” The 71 are the Grenfell fire victims and the group behind the boards was Justice 4 Grenfell. This week, following the shootings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, three billboards outside a Florida senator’s offices read: “Slaughtered in school”, “And still no gun control” and “How come, Marco Rubio?”

This new adaptable protest meme comes, of course, from Oscar favourite Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, in which an outraged mother puts up three billboards after her daughter’s murder remains unsolved. Call it Three Billboarding, perhaps. The tendency of life to mimic art has become a staple of protests in recent years. It’s now almost impossible to tell the difference between a good riot and a particularly angry cosplay expo.

Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta kickstarted the trend. The Guy Fawkes masks in the 1988 graphic novel and 2005 film began to turn up on 4chan boards and were taken up by Anonymous for an anti-Scientology event in London in 2008, then spread like wildfire, flooding the Occupy protests. They still appear at the annual Bonfire night anarcho-libertarian Million Mask March in London.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters wear costumes inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale at a rally in Washington DC in June 2017. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

More recently, protesters have borrowed from The Handmaid’s Tale – the dystopian 1985 Margaret Atwood novel about enslaved women – using the white visors and red dresses of the 2016 TV adaptation to protest against Trump’s presidency, repressive patriarchy and much more.

In Thailand, in 2014, the junta warned protesters it was monitoring a new form of resistance – a three-fingered salute borrowed from The Hunger Games. In the books and films, the gesture moves from a respectful farewell to a revolutionary code – a way for the citizens to say goodbye to repressive power.

Finally, the ultimate case of life imitating art is the most meaningless. Up and down the land, be the cause tuition fees or the customs union, placards bearing the phrase “Down with this sort of thing” – originating on 90s sitcom Father Ted – have found their way into real life as a kind of embarrassed trope about the awkwardness and ineffectualness of protest itself. Yes, we can. But we’d really rather not.