I watched Citizen Kane (for the umpteenth time) the other day and was again struck by how it is a movie about itself. Kane is William Randolph Hearst, but he’s also Orson Welles, boy wonder, and the movie Citizen Kane is self-consciously a masterpiece.
Some other examples of movies that are about themselves are La La Land, Primer (a low-budget experiment about a low-budget experiment), and Titanic (the biggest movie ever made, about the biggest boat ever made).
I want to call this, Objects of the Class X, but I’m not sure what X is.