Metafiction

Something a little less profound than usual (not that I'm chock-full of profundity, but I try), but I wanted to explore just what we could call "Stranger Than Fiction".  I know we talked about this in class, but while we talked about it as a self-aware film and even as a hypertext, I'd kind of like to give it a name with "meta" in front of it that somehow encompasses what the movie is trying to do, which is to be a movie that is aware of its own fiction, but in the form of literature.

When Mitchell introduces his essay, he calls it "an essay on pictures about pictures--that is, pictures that refer to themselves as pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is."  So, it can be gathered that metapictures refer to pictures that are aware of themselves as pictures, and by that logic a metafilm would be a film that refers to itself as a film, or a film that is used to show what a film is.  When I was trying to think about how to refer to "Stranger Than Fiction" I became confused.  It's not a film that refers to itself as a film, nor is it a literary work that refers to itself as such.

Then I remembered that there are other films like this, maybe not so technical and direct when it came to connecting the source of the novel to the characters (Harold is actually the author's creation, whom she controls in every aspect of his fate).  Think of "The Neverending Story", when Bastian realizes that the book he's been reading all along is an actual, living world separate from his own, and while he didn't create it, he does control its fate.  So technically, this film-fiction phenomena could be its own genre, but that's something else entirely, so I'll just name it for now.  I'm going to call "Stranger Than Fiction", and others of it's kind, "Metafiction".  A metafiction is a form of fiction of any medium (film, book, audiobook, play) that refers to itself as a fiction, or is a fiction used to show what fiction is and how it works in terms of tropes, plot devices, etc.  Metafiction is flexible because, like in the case of "Stranger Than Fiction", the media of film fiction is used to portray itself as literary fiction, or to show the audience what literary fiction it.  Metafiction can use more than one media in what it is portraying and what is used to portray it.

So, there it is.  My own musings that turned into a definition.  Feel free to add to it or to offer suggestions.