Meta This

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005; d. Michael Winterbottom; s. Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Kelly MacDonald, and Jeremy Northam). The trouble with meta-stuff is, it’s all frontal lobe.

(Admittedly, this is an ironic sort of comment for this blog.)

Meta-anything bridges similarities between concepts or cognitions or physicals; therefore, it’s all application of knowledge as opposed to feeling. Among my dearly adored Charlie Kaufman movies, I feel like I only truly love Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because only that film feels truly emotion-driven, as opposed to high concept driven.

Edit: I take that back. Charlie Kaufman films are emotional—it’s just a novel emotional experience. He actually evokes (or maybe invents) a new emotion in me, something blending admiration and fondness and jealousy and anxiety. Is meta-emotional a word?

Anyway, if you’re sitting back and gathering your thoughts, it’s hard to actually have a direct emotional response. You're thinking instead of having an experience—it’s the age-old distinction between criticizing and doing.

And part of the reason movie critics hate as many movies as they do—because it’s hard to shake yourself out of a distanced response to something, unless it’s new or interesting or resonant or ego-feeding. Particularly when you think how much easier it is to pun out 500 versions of ‘it sucked’ than denote your unique experience of Pulse.

I’ve actually read Tristram Shandy the book, back in a Beginnings of the British Novel class in college. It was a great class—it finished with the Jane Austen books (where most of us begin and end when it comes to early British literature), and you can see the great drunken staggering of the beginning of an art form. For instance, there’s The Monk, which presages the Great Trash Novel, but does it so much better, because there’s no context to know when you’ve gone too far over the top—there is no Top yet.

And then there’s Tristram Shandy, the purely commerce-driven art form, where the hero takes an age to be born, simply because the author was determined to make this book his steady source of income. Imagine that—he set out to write one book, for the rest of his life. And to make sure that happens, he barely ever gets born. And thus, postmodernism, and all its winding plots that become snakes eating their own tails and their deconstruction of social forms, is born of the most linear and primitive of social structures, the token economy.

And dick jokes. Lots of dick jokes.

The movie is, in its own way, a good adaptation. It introduces the characters faithfully, before breaking set and showing the architecture of the medium (the novel within the novel in Tristram Shandy, the movie within…well, you get the idea). Like the author, the movie keeps going not through action or plot, but giving people the room to talk and behave in a somewhat formless fashion, and then having other people come along and talk about what’s going on—the production assistant who lectures on the authenticity of the endeavor, the star who suggests plot changes based on what best serves his ego (mistakenly, because of his ignorance of what happens), the professor discussing the Major Themes of the Work, and the director, screenwriter, and crew arguing about what will happen next strictly because of what it will cost. None of whom actually explain anything. Instead, all their attempts to explain it all generate further distance between their desires to create something, and the actual behaviors. Kind of like the way friends, lovers, bosses, and our own theories about how life works and our secret desires about how we wished it worked, make living the chaotic negotiation of an ever-growing gap between what everybody wants and what it all means, ultimately resulting in a product that mystifies everybody and satisfies few.

Which, as Stephen Fry says, is exactly the point.

Problem is, the movie does its job too well, and like life, is at its most scintillating when people are just talking instead of thinking. I’ve never enjoyed a metanovel half as much as a novel, just because it always seems like a joke too clever by half. Watching Coogan and Rob Brydon riff on the color of Brydon's teeth or do dueling Pacinos? That’s direct experience, and that’s funny. And it casts the rest of the film in a pallid light.

So, yeah, I got the point. But the movie itself is kind of like granola—a little bit of flavor every now and then, and probably good for me, but it sure as hell doesn’t beat the sweet kick of a bowl of Lucky Charms.

Next Time: Leprechaun in the Hood