Word: meta
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...about scholarship. I looked up what the rabbis said about learning Torah. I read Ruskin on reading. I read Samuel Johnson's essay "On Scholarship." I found these to be real pick-me-ups, my version of chugging espressos and popping Vivarin. The whole thesis process tends to be "meta" as it is, focusing as much attention on the experience of research and writing as on the actual subject of the project...
...quick, all-in-one fix. It's something that--we are led to believe by yet another media hooey-machine--plugs directly into our generational needs. Wes Craven doesn't seem satisfied with such commentary and fright-nighting; in Scream 2, he insists on going that one step more meta on our collective ass. Craven should move on; he's made his point. But look for Scream 3 in theaters next year, and don't come running when the cinema is engineered with a live-video hook-up of the audience occurring in an inset box on the screen...
Mostly, though, he continues to fret about Intel's future. The firm faces dozens of challenges--from cheap PCs to antitrust investigations--and Grove is engaged in the meta-movements of the technology world more deeply than ever. Says David Wu, an analyst at ABN AMRO Chicago: "I used to have a lot of problems with Intel, but every time I asked them a question, they had already thought about...
Like jaded cynicism applied to every-thing in the world 24-7, though, such meta-ness isn't really sustainable for long without wearing thin: expectations grow higher and higher, we're the rats at the cocaine drop bottle with the tap key, etc. Scream 2 can't go much beyond its first virtuoso scene, in which a woman is stabbed by a movie's fan(atic) in a movie theater raucous over the violence on the screen. We ourselves in the theater feel real fear that the same could happen...
After that, it'd be hard to deny that the strong points in Scream 2--a movie so meant to engage the audience's memory, expectations and self-reflexive reactions--are not the meta ones, but standard horror applied in ever more surprising ways (but not too surprising; things peter out quickly). For example, a man accompanied by two others in a wide open campus field in front of several buildings is stalked and killed by man. Trying to outwit his assailant as he speaks with him on a cell phone, the man is pied-pipered to his own doom...