How modern meta art incorporate Eastern philosophies

Metafiction and meditation, although more often than not perceived as far cry from each other, can find their common ground when one is to observe the intersection between the two using mere subjective viewpoints from the audience.

I will go on to elaborate thoroughly in this essay the similarities between meditation and metafiction, how they are related to each other in terms of underlying ideas, thought experimentation through the variety of media in which they are presented and how filmmakers can utilize this to create future, better and more refined works.

In short, this essay is set out to show you the means by which the very meditative (and to an extent, metaphysical) nature of the human condition flourishes in mainstream media (fiction) and for the most part, almost as a given, metafiction. 

The recent masterpiece Everything, Everywhere All At Once, as an example is a meta film and clearly influenced by Eastern concepts. It plays with the multiverse concepts which in the last fifteen years have found its way to the mainstream audience thanks for the large part to Marvel Cinematic Universe, combining and subverting many tropes from martial arts movies to science fiction which leave many audience in awe due to the sheer effort and details put into each scene.

My little write-up hereby will also touch upon the definition of metafiction, meditation, naming fictional examples ranging from video games to literature to music to film, and brief introduction to Eastern concepts that can be found in modern Western cinema (ma, mu, etc.) and such, the gap between what are essentially foreign concepts and Western contemporary fiction enjoyers is therefore closer than ever.

Thanks to the enormous amount of resources on the internet, you don’t have to look anywhere far to find numerous essays and video essays on both metafiction and meditation. 

First one has to consider, what can be defined as metafiction? 

There have been many definitions in the past. According to Oxford University Press: 

“Metafiction is a style of prose narrative in which attention is directed to the process of fictive composition. The most obvious example of a metafictive work is a novel about a novelist writing a novel, with the protagonist sharing the name of the creator and each book having the same title”.

Also, “Playfulness on the page is a frequent feature of metafiction, serving as a friendly reminder that this new type of novel is less a representation of reality to be projected in the reader's mind than it is an event happening on the page”

Metafiction became particularly prominent in the 1960s, with works such as Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, "The Babysitter" and "The Magic Poker" by Robert Coover, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and Willie Masters Lonesome.

Take, for instance, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, written in the style of semi-autobiographical science fiction-infused anti-war, the book takes the reader on a journey from a perspective of a soldier who is constantly asking questions about the nature of the war and occasionally travels back and forth through times. 

With unique means of narration, Slaughterhouse-five follows and subverts, and plays with tropes that long ago had been used extensively in modern pop culture and was popularized to a certain degree with the release of Vonnegut’s masterpiece.

Metafiction often deals with the metaphysical but in a rather post-modern manner and plays with the very structure of a fictional work (within-universe logic, as an example).

One of my favorite metafictional examples is Mr. Palomar, a 1983 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino when the main character of the story goes out of the story to analyze the very nature of how everything works and in the process finds himself in an existential crisis.

In Mr. Palomar, Calvino continued to explore his fascination with literary self-consciousness. Comparing the book to his other novels, Calvino noted Mr. Palomar is "a completely different work" in which he sought to respond to "the problem of non linguistic phenomena. . . . That is, how can one read something that is not written."

How can one read something that is not written leaves us an eternal question and at the same can leave everything that we see on the pages up for interpretation. 

“The first section is concerned chiefly with visual experience; the second with anthropological and cultural themes; the third with speculations about larger questions such as the cosmos, time, and infinity. This thematic triad is mirrored in the three subsections of each section, and the three chapters in each subsection.

For example, chapter 1.2.3, "The infinite lawn" ("Il prato infinito") has elements of all three themes, and shows the progress of the book in miniature. It encompasses very detailed observations of the various plants growing in Mr Palomar's lawn, an investigation of the symbolism of the lawn as a marker of culture versus nature, the problem of categorizing weeds, the problem of the actual extent of the lawn, the problem of how we perceive elements and collections of those elements ... These thoughts and others run seamlessly together, so by the end of the chapter we find Mr Palomar extending his mind far beyond his garden, and contemplating the nature of the universe itself.”

It also should be mentioned that the 2011’s The Stanley Parable (using Source Engine), one of the most prominent examples of metafiction that you could say was vastly important to the early 2010s video game scene. The Stanley Parable stood out from most of the video games at the time of its release when the game purposely introduced a whole new aesthetic, or in more correct words, drastically stretched the boundaries of what can possibly be done through enough effort put into storytelling with the aid of the rise of cyberculture (manifested through and the interactive aspect of modern video games that nobody had seen before with the exception of choose-your-own-adventure style novels/light novels that are of their own categories whose root can be traced back to as far as the late 1970s and early 1980s).

The game (The Stanley Parable) contains multiple layers of meta-ness, and for the most part walks the thin line between light-heartedness and seriousness which gives it an edge over most video games on the market.

 It does not seem to take itself seriously and always renews itself with every room the in-game character walks into and comments on the events that are happening on the screen real-time. The Stanley Parable was revolutionary in 2011 the way Bandersnatch was in 2019 and how it took over Netflix is that it could resonate with the viewers on many levels.

The Stanley Parable pretty much acted as a setting stone to the video game world, as important and influential as the very first interactive film to cinema, Kinoautomat: One Man and His House, when the brainchild of Radúz Činčera hit the theater in 1967. Many interactive fiction had existed before either of them, but could only be described as “tame” in comparison to what can be said about Kinoautomat or for the matter we are regarding, The Stanley Parable. 

The Stanley Parable is an interesting case. Narrated by arguably one of the best voices in the industry, Kevan Brighting, The Stanley Parable captured and took part in shaping the essence of not only classic British humor but also a whole generation of video game players/makers which I would like to use the term “discord generation” to describe: aware of the common cliches usually made in video games, in a tone of self deprecating mockery (that sometimes gets to the point of absurdity purposefully), playing with in-game law of physics and occasionally making commentaries on the game’s (and most video games of the same vain) very own shortcomings including glitches, easter eggs upon easter eggs, the absurdities of video games’ in-universe logic and even, of course, the choices that people make during the gameplay which are a, in fact, impacted by the narrator.

The Truman Show is usually cited as a prominent example of an existential, borderline meta film which I would like to use the word “meta-meta-film” to describe. The movie is layered with so many different subtext that it’s very difficult for me to pick a scene that resonates with me the most. The Truman Show is an example of “a play within a play”, a film set within a film set, a metafiction within a metafiction within a fiction and seems to be very aware of this fact and not only takes advantage of it but also utilizes the fact to create a dynamic and thought provoking movie world.

 And with social media being the main thing in everyone’s life from now on, the “meta-ness” and The Truman Show can only hit more close to home than its premiere. The film, once again, mocks even the viewers, those watching the film, in a very subtle yet clever manner when the all is cleared up and everyone cheers for Truman (as we should, in real life when our eyes are glued on the screen as the audience watching the very last episode of a 29-year-long show in the movie are!).

“What do we see of the TV audience in The Truman Show? A couple of waitresses at a bar surrounded by customers; a couple of old ladies on a sofa with a Truman sampler cushion, grotesque creatures who (it’s suggested) might be lesbians; a geek splashing around in a bathtub; a few Japanese spectators gawking and gesticulating; a few members of Christof’s crew; Christof himself. They’re supposed to represent us, the real world, not the artificial and phony world of Seahaven. But apart from the film’s bland gestures of affection toward the waitresses and the preternatural awe it expresses for Christof, it’s a world plainly unworthy of redemption” - The Audience Is Us

Plato's allegory of a cave is an example of such that was created much earlier and relevant to the point being made in this essay. We can however take many other works throughout history as examples of the depiction of Plato’s Allegory of The Cave.

When the original Westworld movie came out in 1973, albeit very much of its time, it is considered rudimentary to the development of the last half of Western films that take technology as their main subject. So much so that there was a television adaptation of the movie in 2016 and exceeded even the success of the original work in terms of popularity and reach to the mainstream audience.

As a clarification: Westworld is NOT metafiction, per se, for one work must match one or all of these conditions: 

- To break the fourth wall (see definition here) in one or multiple ways

- The said metafiction might or not might not involve the characters from said (meta)fiction to communicate with the viewers through the screen (or dialogues, or lyrics).

One should not be deceived by Westworld's simplistic plot that you can always find in a manga chapter or turning point from a light novel.

The idea of the world being a simulation had been beaten to death since the dawn of humanity, through different kinds of manifestations and expressions. But Westworld, despite the hundreds of examples that eventually came after, was significantly influential, a precursor, and more or less drilled such concepts as the world being a simulation (or in this case, an amusement park) into movie enjoyers’ subconscious minds way before modern science fiction had its turning from merely depicting technological standpoint (i.e. “A.I. shall take over the world”) to the gritty, philosophical “the world is a facade, we don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, no other point to live besides reproduction”. 

“Retracing our steps, now Westworld’s relationship with The Truman Show can be seen under a completely new light. Whether we are talking about Dr. Ford’s theme park or Christoff’s TV set, the two works portray a world-within-a-world. By means of this Russian puppet of settings, the Shakespearean notion of “all the world’s a stage” is made more explicit than ever: here we have worlds that are literally stages and/or narratives, the latter being precisely the term which Westworld’s characters use to refer to the park’s interactive storylines. Furthermore, to make reflexivity even more clear, Peter Abernathy—a host who used to be programmed as a professor and who accidentally becomes aware of his reality in the first episode—quotes King Lear’s famous metadramatic complaint: “when we are born, we cry we are come to this great stage of fools”

With this, the showrunners also seem to be openly acknowledging The Bard’s influence on Westworld, which could be by itself the topic of another paper. This notion of the amusement park as a great stage seems to raise several parallelisms, to the point of building a complex allegory. Who is who in such a literary equation? Plainly speaking, Dr. Ford and his team would be the metaphorical equivalent of authors, film scriptwriters, and/or directors; the androids would be the equivalent of characters; and the visitors would be the readers or audience. 

A similar approach and a possible forerunner of this is, once again, The Truman Show. However, that film was explicitly metacinematic in that it was a film about a TV show in which we had characters who were scriptwriters, directors and actors in the strictest sense of words. As opposed to the literalism of -Weir’s picture, Westworld would be better described as a “metafictional allegory,” one in which the functioning of the park is metaphorically equated to the functioning of fiction” - All the Park’s a Stage: Westworld as the Metafictional Frankenstein

in the words of writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge, “we are on the edge of a change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth, . . . [a change triggered by] the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence” (12). This momentous event known as the “technological singularity” 

Albert Brooks’ Real Life (1979) is another such example. Early Brooks' works were not received well by the critics then or now. Some would say deservedly, for it was not one of the better works to reflect Brooks’ style of filmmaking (which can be shown through examples such as Mother (1996) or Defending Your Life (1991)).

Nonetheless, Brooks’ Real Life, much like the name would imply and almost two decades before The Truman Show, questions the very nature of how media in the future (now the present with social media existing) work, our securities and interesting existential questions that regard technological advancement which people were not so unfamiliar with at the time of the film’s release.

Being John Malkcovich is also another over-the-top, post-modern example in cinema and therefore I think should be examined partially in this article.

The humorous take on John Malkovich’s personal, actual life is captured in this turn-of-the-century film. John Malkovich at the time of the film’s release was already a major movie star and had had a run of starring in famous Hollywood movies - a recognized face to the mainstream audience. Being John Malkovich took this fact and made one of the most meta fiction ever to be put on screen in the late 90s, all the while fitting into the ordeal of late 1990s 

Man-losing-himself-over-capitalism-rat-race, in the same vein as Wachowskis’ Matrix or Fincher’s Fight Club.

In other words, metafiction, while at times a tool to criticize such overused tropes in popular culture (i.e. Deadpool) is also a (often humorous) celebration, and even an exhortation of the absurdity that is the human condition. More specifically, human life is represented through modern art forms. The media that are consumed by most people tend to stray away from such topics due to the heavy nature - or the weight of the implications that they tend to carry.

Death, as an example, is still taboo among many mainstream works. Or, if death is not presented in a taboo manner, then is regarded as something more grandeur than what the human condition can ever grasp. And when concerning death, Eastern philosophy tends to be glossed over when analyzed by Western scholars.

“In the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu the notion of void is sometimes expressed in terms of static shots, which detail empty railway tracks, deserted interiors and barren landscapes, while at other times it is manifested in more subtle ways such as the intervals between characters’ delivery of dialogue” - Ma, Mu and the Interstice: Meditative Form in the Cinema of Jim Jarmusch 

Yasujiro Ozu (12.12.1903 - 12.12.1963) was one of the first filmmakers to implement aspects of Eastern philosophies that are recognized worldwide. Many figures had had the honor before, but Ozu was above and beyond in numerous ways when he was able to describe the human condition with minimal effort through the lens of a Zen master, a “Tofu maker”, as the term he used to describe himself as a director. 

Asides from the reflective nature of his films, Ozu’s scripts are contained within the spectacular camerawork which relies for the most part on minimalism. 

The mu is expressed constantly in his film, through different means that might or might not be conveyed through dialogues (which seem to cater to the common audience by subjects that everyone can relate to: relationships between members of family, general human concerns, love, death, etc.) and also camerawork that puts emphasis on silence partly using the famous “pillow shots”.

Silence is important in Ozu’s films. Silence became one with Ozu’s films, a part of his essence. After each time a character says their respective line, they have the tendency to express themselves (through a smile, saddened face, or a vague emotion disguised by a positive expression) and more often existing a gap between the moment of their expressions and the scene after. 

Or it could be argued that, through the notion of void, Ozu’s films, Jim Jarmusch’s films manifest themselves with the benefit of the cinematic medium.

“Mu” (void) can manifest in many ways (intentionally, or unintentionally) in music, cinema, or literature. From a monolith, to the silence dividing the last section of Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever (which in retrospect was birth to fake ending in pop music) into half, to Meshes Of The Afternoon’s unconventional ahead-of-time jump-cuts, to the whole of La Jatee’s and much more examples that you might know from your own popular culture database.

Coffee and Cigarettes, as an example, is dialogue-driven film which essentially focuses on conversations of random people in a cafeteria, yet is very much aware of its effects on the audience.

- One must also bear in mind that meditation is essentially focusing on one’s emotions and thoughts, to observe them passing by without any judgments and to have complete control over these thoughts and emotions (which takes a whole lot amount of self-discipline)

- To practice meditation is also to practice self-control, to become aware of your own surroundings through actualization, relaxation, etc. or the combination of all said aspects.

- Some forms of meditation include Vipassana, float meditation/therapy, and sometimes even martial arts is considered to be a practice of meditation as demonstrated by no other than Bruce Lee in this clip below:

The Beatles were among the first major people in the west to have popularized transcendental meditation in mainstream media, along with The Beach Boys (especially Mike Love) during their retreat in India, 1968, where most of the Beatles' White Album as well as their last, Abbey Road was constructed.

Lyrics such as “Hang Onto Your Ego” (referring to the state when an individual is under the influence of psychedelics/dissociatives or deep meditation and completely loses their ego) - a demo title of the Pet Sounds track “I Know There’s An Answer” were common.

Although some of them might have been inspired by psychoactive drugs (i.e. psychedelics), they were at the same time pushing Eastern philosophies into mainstream Western media cleverly and subtly. The Beatles are a classic example, in particular John Lennon and George Harrison with lyrics such as the scrapped off Circles by Harrison which can be heard in the Esher Demo tapes:

Or when the sitar was introduced on The Kinks’ See My Friends and The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) for the first time in a Western song, the doors were opened for so many people who came after.

(An interesting fact being that The Beatles were also the first band to write lyrics in the way that would refer to the character in their song in second person - so the feeling of them speaking to the listeners is clearer, hence a sense of breaking the fourth wall is there. 

“I Want To Hold Your Hand”, for instance, when seen in the British Invasion light as they came to the United States for the first time, is also The Beatles trying to say to the audience of America and the youth in general that they wanna know their hands; and you, too, as a listener, and through the optimistic innocence which they gave back to the Americans that anything was possible after the unfortunate assassination of John F. Kennedy).

Now, for those who see meditation as a completely foreign concept (sometimes even as negative as along the line of woo) and does not even remotely have anything to do with Western philosophy concepts in modern cinema, or see that it does more harm than good, here are some of examples which go to show that since the gap between Eastern philosophy and Western media was closer in the 1970s.

David Lynch has reportedly stated to be a long time practitioner of transcendental meditation and is the founder of The David Lynch Foundation - created to fund the teaching of TM in schools.

This is reflected through the surrealistic aspects of his films, from Eraserhead to Mulholland Drive, from Lost Highway to The Elephant Man ( which perfectly encapsulates the complex range of emotions of a man inside a body of thanks for the large part to the spectacular acting by John Hurt) when interstice is used to so regularly and with multiple purposes in his movies and even TV series.

Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker whose films focus mostly on subjects regarding topics such as gang wars or gritty New York or Western religions (i.e. The Last Temptation of Christ), which are far cry from, say, the philosophies which can be found in Buddhist or Taoist teachings.

Scorsese is surprisingly also known for being a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation and has been a true advocate of the practice, alongside David Lynch. 

Just as meditation (or mindfulness) in general bears the increase of our overall mental health and assists us to get in touch with our thoughts and emotions, fictional works that are aware of their own existence are beyond great exercise for us to reflect and yet, at the same time has the ability to relieve us through light-heartedness.

It is to question the nature of the film’s universe as well as to question our thoughts and emotions as we are watching the movie.

Metafiction as we know it, carries a tremendous amount of weight. The blurry line between fiction and reality is crossed and then completely broken down, played with and mocked with to the point that even the work itself is aware of the blurriness of the line.

So what has meditation got anything to do with aspects of metafiction?

To meditate is to become aware of one’s surroundings. Metafiction is a variation of such a concept. Metafiction helps us reflect on ourselves whenever we catch ourselves being aware of watching the film by no other way than pointing out the very fact that we are, well, watching the film. So, in a way, metafiction helps us bring about our inner selves to ourselves, by raising awareness of the fact we are indeed consuming a fictional story.

Take the last shot of The Quiet Earth. Some of the adjectives I would use to describe the scene include transcendental and meditative. The film is then able to communicate with the audience without using a single word and even left some audiences in shock when they first witnessed it in theater in 1985.

Sitting through Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne dielman, 23 commerce quay, 1080 brussels for the first time was daunting yet remains one of my most meditative film experiences ever. It is without  a single doubt up there with La Jatee, the last 30 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey or the last half of Possession in terms of intensity, sheer amount of effort put into each shot which seems to communicate with the viewers on a meta level, and of course, the underlying social and political commentary which is necessary for a work to be widely regarded.

By the end of Jeanne dielman, about three and a half hours of a housewife doing chores have passed. Audience had grown tired of the film due to its pace by then. Suddenly, at the end of the film, a strange twist occurs, which I will not specifically state here. Yet it is so powerful that I personally think can be compared to a transcendental feeling of nirvana, “the climax”, with everything leading up to it needing attention (meditation) from the viewers.

Granted, if we were to follow along the line of Rob Ager’s analysis on the film (which is one of my favorite analyses of all time, the last thirty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey can be counted as breaking the fourth wall and should be a prominent example in this essay when it contains not only the interstice (meditative side) and breaking the fourth wall, but also acts as a clear combination between the two.

When the Starchild stares directly into the camera, every single barrier is broken down between the viewers (who, by the time the scene starts, perhaps completely in awe with what they had just witnessed) and the movie (or, in a way, Stanley Kubrick himself is staring at the audience, by filming the Starchild through the movie lens and the audience is then seen by the Starchild).

It has every element that made Kubrick so highly regarded that we can ever imagine being in the same scene. From a technological and philosophical standpoint, 2001 is Kubrick being playful with doing what he does best, jumping away ahead into the future and then looks at the viewers acting as a highly advanced person years from now - a Starchild.

 This section of the essay brings us back to The Stanley Parable - as we go on further investigating one of the game’s most influential parts when it sort of ignited the “liminal space” aesthetic that is so common and widespread late 2010s - early 2020s internet. For example, “The Backroom” or “Superliminal" which came out 9 years later and also took cue from The Stanley Parable, played along with the laid out idea and even expanded upon it.

Why “The Stanley Parable” broke the fourth wall so well was due to the fact that the visual aesthetics of the game fits perfectly into what it tries to convey to the players. The rooms are purposefully empty, as if for us to contemplate and reflect on our lives while we are playing and immersing ourselves in the game.

To conclude this write-up, I hereby introduce the viewers to some examples that I find to be the most representative of metafiction in modern films that will help you understand further.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Shot and presented in the style of a cinéma vérité documentary, attempting to capture and examine pure reality unhindered by the presence of the cameras all around. It is notable for the inherent layers of metatextual storytelling, with a documentary inside a documentary inside a documentary.

What if they made a revolution and nobody saw it? That’s what happened in 1968, when William Greaves filmed one of the most daring and original movies of the time, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.” 

He completed it in 1971, but it wasn’t shown publicly until 1991, when it became a new entry in the history books but wasn’t the rewriting of them that it should have been.

Godard’s Weekend: Hard to write about cinema without mentioning Godard at some point of writing.

To say that Weekend is self aware would be to say that a mirror is shiny. Weekend is so intensely refractive that one cannot easily tell where the movie ends and its effects begin. It comments on itself, reorders its principles, and oozes through the fourth wall. It soaks its foundations, loosens its plastering, and exposes the weaknesses in all similar structures. Even the sound is painstakingly chipped off with a pick and axe, brought tumbling downward by a diegetic chokehold that forces us to reconsider everything we’ve seen and heard once again. “This isn’t a novel, this is a film,” it proclaims. “Film is life.”

Further readings:

The Postmodern Condition and the Postmodern Sublime Ma, Mu and the Interstice: Meditative Form in the Cinema of Jim Jarmusch 20 Great Documentaries That Blur The Lines Between Reality And Fiction “Kubrick: and beyond the cinema frame” An in-depth analysis of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Metafiction - The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction