An idea within an idea. We experience this all the time, in nearly every artistic medium. It could be a passage in a book about a scene in a film, a stanza in a poem about a lyric in a song, or, most commonly, it could be a short dialogue spliced into an album, mixing with the music.

We tend to like ideas wrapped inside other ideas. Nested concepts. They enrich our experience of whatever we’re absorbing. They offer a kind of fourth dimensional depth and realism to the constructed world.

There’s a paradoxical ontology to it. These embedded works don’t simply serve as exposition or plot devices, they function as complete artistic statements that provoke meta-commentary on the medium itself.

When we watch characters watching a film, we experience a kind of recursive awareness that makes us conscious of ourselves as viewers, creating layers of meaning that mirror the very act of consuming ideas.

This self-reflexivity doesn’t break the fictional illusion, rather, it deepens it by suggesting a world complete enough to generate its own art, propaganda, and meaning-making systems.

The recruitment test in Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 film, The Parallax View is an open displaying of film’s manipulative techniques. It makes us question whether the film we’re actually watching might be employing similar methods, guiding our subconscious towards a certain way of being.

After all, this is the nature of nested concepts, ideas within ideas. They wake us up to our own experience of absorption. And I often feel like this is the goal; to create ideas that can jolt us awake and make us dream, all at the same time.