Lack of originality is a threat to films

Conspiracy theorists, stop fretting about robots becoming self-aware. It’s only when art… Conspiracy theorists, stop fretting about robots becoming self-aware. It’s only when art follows suit that we should really worry.

In a short story entitled “Title,” postmodern writer John Barth glumly speculates that art follows a terminal trajectory: from invention and robustness, to crippling self-consciousness to, finally, blankness. When the possibilities of an art form have been exhausted, Barth suggests, the art falls back in on itself, re-imagining previous works until even this exercise grows stale and it fizzles into nothing.

As much as I hate to admit it, Barth may have been onto something.

In the past decade, music, books and movies have become increasingly self-aware, absorbed in an obligatory charade of irony and nods to pop culture. And lest you think this trend is waning, I defy you to watch two of this year’s most-buzzed about films, “Kick-Ass” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” both of which seem to contain enough references to fill an encyclopedia.

Believe it or not, these media-savvy movies have a name. They’re called metafilms, or “movies about movies.” In an article for the blog/film entitled, “The Rise of Self-Awareness in Cinema: Is Film Doomed to Become a Mockery of Itself?” blogger Adam Quigley gives the metafilm trend a fitting confirmation by citing, in addition to “Kick-Ass” and “Scott Pilgrim,” an absurdly long list of recent parodies or tributes to less self-conscious source material: “Zombieland,” “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “Tropic Thunder,” “Vampires Suck” and even this month’s “Machete.”

As the list demonstrates, today’s films are reflecting less and less on external human experience and more on the history and quirks of the medium itself, while the alternative — sincere stories without any winks to their cinematic predecessors — are becoming increasingly endangered.

Where the value of self-consciousness first arose is hard to say, but if there’s one director to praise/blame, it’s Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino, the so-called “pulp auteur,” makes movies that ripple across film history, knowingly emulating a multitude of previous cinematic landmarks. If there is a filmic equivalent to “sampling,” Tarantino has done it — he is the pioneer of pop-culture reference, the champion of reimagining. For instance, his double-feature collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, “Grindhouse,” seizes the aesthetic of the 1970s exploitation films for a tongue-and-cheek romp. Only a bit more subtly, “Pulp Fiction” is a brainy but bloody tribute to its title genre.

Whether this “sampling” is commendable, however, is almost beside the point. The larger, more terrifying question is, does this signal the beginning of the end? Can an art form be exhausted like a joke or a sun or, come to think of it, pretty much everything else? Will it inevitably retreat to blankness, a flatline on the filmic EKG?

That’s hard to say. There is no major art form I can think of that’s actually gone “blank” — a total absence of substance — though nearly every one of them has become more referential — see Jorge Luis Borges, LCD Soundsystem. In film, as in other mediums, it’s vexing to ponder what will come after the already diluted metafilm. Will there be metameta films? Movies about movies about movies? It’s the sort of hall-of-mirrors effect that makes your head hurt, and it’s not too hard to imagine that, instead of this layered oblivion, art could collapse into sheer nothingness, wholly spent.

I of course hope this doesn’t happen, and I have great faith in the boundlessness of human creativity, which will perhaps save vital art forms the way it saved us from imminent destruction in caveman times. But as the embarrassingly un-self-conscious prog rock band Asia once mused, “Only time will tell.”