The Faculty (1998) is meta-fictional. Its characters know they're in an alien invasion story, and they refer to other such stories that have appeared in print and on film. It is from other alien invasion stories that they know that if they can neutralize the alien queen they can have all of their friends back and the threat will be ended.
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If I remember right, there aren't any meta-references in The Breakfast Club (1985). Times changed in the fourteen years that separated the release of these two films. More than fourteen years separated their respective creators. John Hughes, who wrote and directed The Breakfast Club, was an early Baby Boomer. Kevin Williamson who wrote and Robert Rodriguez who directed The Faculty came from Generation X. I don't know if that explains anything exactly, but it's clear that there were some pretty big changes in our culture between the 1980s and the 1990s and early 2000s. You could write a book or a dozen about those changes and what they might mean.
There have been bigger changes since the early 2000s. People still make teenager movies and high school movies, also alien invasion movies, but I feel certain that these are vastly different from similar movies from the past. And why wouldn't they be? Everything changes. Nonetheless, nostalgia seems to prevail. For example, Shoplifters of the World, released in 2021, is about teenagers living in Colorado in 1987 and lamenting the breakup of The Smiths. (The writer and director of the film, Stephen Kijak, is Gen X.) Last time I wrote I mentioned the film Super 8, which was released in 2011. Super 8 is meta in that it's a movie about a movie, made by teenagers in a small city or town in western Ohio. More importantly, it's meta in that it's self-consciously about the past, being set in 1979, the same year, incidentally, in which Alien was released. Remember that The Smashing Pumpkins' biggest and probably best-loved song is called "1979," the video of which is an exercise in nostalgia in which the singer--the storyteller--sits in the backseat of a car, a 1972 Dodge Charger, as his friends from the past go about their night's activities, like a four-and-a-half-minute American Graffiti (released in 1973, set in 1962). He's not really there. He has placed his current self into the seat he occupied in the past, at the outset of his adolescence. (Billy Corgan is Gen X, too.) He's like a ghost from the future, seeing but unseen in that haunted past. The song "1979," by the way, was released in 1996.
Things may be gained but others are always lost. We try to go back, but it proves impossible. We try to recapture the past and must always fail. We will forever find ourselves thrown upon the shores of today, forever marooned in the present.
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This blog entry is meta-fictional. It's a blog entry about my blog. I noticed this past summer that the number of daily visits jumped by a lot. There were nearly 100,000 visits last month and now about 10,000 per day. I can't say why that is. I have suspected that a large number of those visits are actually made by the engines of artificial intelligence (AI). I have a feeling that I'm being ripped off by a lot of machines which are, to be fair to them, even though they don't need it, prompted to do the ripping off by a lot of lazy, stupid, impatient, and ethically challenged people. You know who you are. Or maybe you don't. I have thought about bringing this blog to an end because of AI. I don't do what I do for the benefit of machines and the machine-like people behind the machines. I do what I do for the benefit of people--real human beings of real human feeling, people questing for knowledge of the past and present and of the human culture of that same past and present. I might sound like Jeremiah, but AI might prove the ruination of the Internet, if it isn't already ruined.
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I promised to cover a couple of real-world developments that I found out about during my five-weeks-and-a-day. I found out about one of those while sitting, in late October, at a computer in a university library . . .
On October 27, 2025, Elon Musk launched an online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. I had a feeling that this new website is AI-generated, and it is. I stay away from AI as much as possible. Remember that a vampire cannot enter your house unless you invite him in, but once he's in, you can never get him to go away again. Anyway, I thought I would have a look, and so I searched for the term "Weird Tales." There is a long entry on Weird Tales in Grokipedia. On the day that I looked, there were 110 footnotes in that entry. Eleven of those are in reference to my blog. I don't take any pride in that. Rewards, accolades, and recognition bestowed by machines are meaningless and worthless. But this makes me think that, yes, many of the visits to my blog are from machines. I would like to tell them: Stay away. You're not invited. You're not welcome here. This blog is for human beings only.
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Like Clea DuVall's character in The Faculty, Elon Musk in his new venture refers to the works of Robert A. Heinlein, specifically in his case to Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and the Martian word grok. Heinlein may have died nearly four decades ago, but his works and influence live on.
Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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