In Mike Myers’s classic proof spy comedy, Austin Powers – The spy who shagged me, we see ‘meta’ when zooming out from Austin’s nemesis Dr. Evil laughing in his secret volcano lair, to seeing Dr Evil as the mountain itself.
Meta, in this way, can be far more obvious when you know what to look for. Meta ‘flicks you up a level’, just as the character ‘Basil Exposition’, who is an ‘M’ like character (an intertextual reference from James Bond movies), but who’s name (‘Exposition’) is the name of a narration tool where information helping the background story is given.
We can also see, intertextual referencing in the opening scene where the audio set up is like the music in James Bond movie, but visually contrasts with Star Wars ‘scrolling type’, before we see referencing of the first Austin Powers movie with a ‘floating Big Boy’ statue, and then what I am guessing was ‘Mork and Mindy’ with an egg-like spaceship.
Whether or not it was intended, we also see Austin’s name on the cover of the kama sutra, as well as him in the drawing. This is very meta (if you can add ‘very’ in front of the word) but also connects it to his future movie ‘The Love Guru’, or at least, it does to me. That’s the thing, making a connect ‘on the same level’ is something that could be ‘right or wrong’ based on the intent of whoever produced the art. We can ‘read into something’ that may never have been intended, so the only real way to know would be to ask the person whether it was in fact intentional.
