Metafiction, as you po-mo 21st-century kids likely already know, is art that comments directly on its own fictive nature. I don’t know why we need a fancy-sounding name for a device that was more common on Moonlighting than it ever will be on a National Book Award shortlist, but I have to admit I’ve always had a soft spot for fictional works that indulge in a little paradoxical frame-jumping. It started with my adolescent fascination with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and some of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, and Borges not too long after that, but it never really went away.

The great metatextual novels cover a wide array of genres, from historical romance (Atonement) to mystery novels (City of Glass) to science fiction (VALIS). But not all the “meta” classics are novels. This week I’m going to blog about some of my favorite achievements in metafiction in less respectable genres: movies, TV, pop music, comic books, etc.

Best Metamovie. Abbas Kiarastomi is an Iranian director whose movies may be best-known in the West for putting viewers to sleep. (Mindy, like most audience members, still has no idea what happens in the last hour of A Taste of Cherry.) But not his audacious 1990 film Close-Up! Kiarastomi read about a real-life case where a movie buff decided to impersonate Mohsen Makhmalbaf (a real-life Iranian director, and friend of Kiarastomi’s) and moved in with a wealthy Tehran family, misleading them into thinking he was going to use their home and family as subjects for an upcoming film. So dig this: Kiarastomi re-enacted the whole odd affair, using the actual con man and family as actors, playing themselves, from the initial con right up through the subsequent trial! So the family did make it into a movie after all! Close-Up was hard to see in this country for a long time, but there’s a DVD now, and Criterion is supposed to re-issue it this year.

Another Iranian runner-up: Jafar Panahi’s charming 1997 film The Mirror, in which the little girl playing the lead decides, halfway through the movie, eff it, she’s just going home. The second half of the movie follows the actress home, documentary-style, mirroring her journey in the first (fictional) part of the film. Did I just blow your mind?!? Too bad Iran’s politics aren’t as sophisticated as its post-modern filmmaking.