Metalepsis

If it’s used in the right way, I love it, of course! I mean, I used to joke that the goal of a filmmaker is to be Fellini-esque, you know, when your name means something in that way? We often say something was a very Fellini-esque experience. So if you say a film is Cronenbergian… I like that. The thing that does bother me a little bit is “body horror,” because I never use that term! It was a young journalist who invented that term and it stuck, it’s out of my hands. But I would never have thought that what I did was body horror.

~ Patrick Heidmann from, David Cronenberg – The Talks

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I recently managed to get caught up on The Hansel and Gretel Code, a podcast from my friend Curtis Cates. (I started years behind, so that I had 42 hour+ episodes to listen to.) It was so worth it. First off, great podcast on a very interesting to me topic. Also, I learned about the concept of metalepsis.

Reading the Wikipedia page doesn’t really do it justice. But listening to Curtis talk about metalepsis, and in particular unpacking all the context around some innocent seeming word or phrase really made it clear. For example, in certain centuries and in certain circles of well read people, “planing the planks of our coffins” isn’t just an interesting phrase… for those certain people it brought to mind a whole other complex social and political issue complete with its own colorful players.

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Please be kind: Rewind

[We] didn’t discover his work in the theater, much less at Cannes. Rather, we found it at the video store, ideally one that devoted a section specifically to his work—or at least to his signature genre of “body horror,” which his films would in any case have dominated.

~ Colin Marshall from, David Cronenberg Visits a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

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Do you remember video stores? …I mean the individual stores, from before Blockbuster came along? Sections. You had to walk to the section in the store. New releases. Maybe there was a staple employee who knew every movie. Maybe you—like me—wondered if working there meant watching each movie before putting it out… what a job that would be!! Maybe there was a hand-written sign whose perennial message stands atop this missive. Maybe family movie nights? The lottery that was the occassional “doesn’t play” tape. “Tracking”—and then the magic of “Auto Tracking”. And all of that from two words: video store.

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