“THAT’S SO META”

Everyone has been using the word “meta” quite a lot these days. Fans, critics, scholars. So much so that the prefix has graduated to the status of adjective. A book such as this one could even be said to be helping it along its way to the status of noun and, more importantly, autonomous concept. The fact that it’s being used so much and in such a carefree manner would suggest that its meaning is fairly obvious and that we all know what we’re talking about when we talk about meta. And yet, as a student of US-American literature who became a scholar in film and television studies, I, for one, am not at all sure that such a complex word is being used in the exact same sense by all those concerned. And it is the variations—and above all what they have to say about art, media, our contemporary world, and basically what it means to be human—that interest me.

“Meta” is not just a fashionable word used in the restricted circles of academia; it is all over the Internet. Acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s recent venture, Pain and Glory (2019), has been described as “all very meta” by executive editor Gordon Bowness for Xtra and as a “remarkably mature meta-fiction” by film critic Peter Debruge for Variety online. The adjective is regularly used to describe mainstream series and films as well. “For ‘Community,’ how much meta is too much?” asked UPROXX Senior Television Writer Alan Sepinwall in an online article devoted to the NBC sitcom (2009–15) posted in May 2010. Writing for the AVCLUB in November 2015, Genevieve Valentine stated that “Scream Queens [Fox, 2015–16] gets meta as hell with a few ‘Ghost Stories.’” “The Cabin in the Woods [Goddard, 2011] is about as meta as horror gets,” opined Josh Hammond on a blog in October 2017. “Is the show getting too meta?” an anonymous blogger worried about the animated sitcom Rick and Morty (Comedy Central, 2013–) in 2018. In December 2020, freelance writer Grant Hermanns posted a list of “The 13 Best Meta Episodes of Supernatural [The CW, 2005–20]” on comingsoon.net.