Meta-Narrative

I really don't like meta-narrative, especially when someone makes a movie about making a movie, or something to that effect. Making a movie about being a musician, or putting on a play, or writing a book, or something like that, that's fine, because you're working with different mediums and as such aren't treading into ouroboros territory. It's when people start making movies about making a movie, or plays about plays when it starts irritating me. Unless the story of the people making the movie, play, etc, is particularly interesting, most of the time I'd rather just be watching the movie within a movie. Take Tropic Thunder for instance. The meta-humor in that film is great, but I almost think the movie would have been funnier if they'd just made the movie within the movie and left the meta-narrative stuff as a twenty-minute epilogue to the actual film. This isn't so much an issue with music, because if a song about writing a song is particularly good, or even passable it can easily stand on its own, but can just as easily fall into the trap of thinking that simply being "meta" is enough to keep it alive. Movies about making movies, books about writing books, etc just seem self-indulgent, and that's part of why meta-narratives irritate me. Too much fourth-wall-breaking can destroy a work's appeal. It always irritates me when a song references itself as a song, and although it can work fairly well when used humorously, meta jokes are easier to mess up than just playing something straight. That's part of the reason I didn't like Thor Ragnarok, the comedy was botched meta-narrative nonsense for the most part and always made me wish they'd played it straight.