20 Meta Facts About the Most Meta Movies

Today, the word “meta” is associated with the dumb dreams of billionaire weirdos who have already ruined social life, and now want to ruin it even more. But the prefix meta actually comes from the Greek word for “above” or “beyond”, as in the phrase “dude, we don’t care about ancient Greek, just give us the facts.” Sheesh, alright, we will – before that, let us go over the basics: meta-movies are movies about movies. In our current, originality-stifling, nostalgia-ridden times, we’re used to this, as we cannot watch a single rom-com or horror movie without some character calling attention to the rules of their universe, as in that Age of Ultron scene where Hawkeye said “boy, Phase Four sure is getting boring and overstuffed, uh?”. Well, something like that.

At the risk of repeating the point, though, things weren’t always like this. Youngsters with their Soundcloud rappers and climate anxiety will not get this, but we remember back when Pulp Fiction was praised (and criticized) with phrases such as “postmodern pastiche,” which was just fancy academia to say it was a movie built on references to other movies. At least in the realm of cinema, this was considered a novel idea. Yet Pulp Fiction wasn’t alone, as we will see in this Pictofact, nor was it a novel idea, as we will also check out. In fact, one could say fiction is always already meta-fiction, and that even the modern dream of stories about “external” themes or realities is already sustained by its own references to other similar works. So as we prepare “20 Insane Facts About Derridean Deconstruction (Because No, It Isn’t ‘Postmodern Marxism’),” enjoy this Pictofact on 20 awesome meta-facts about classic meta-movies.