Sceneception
English
Pronunciation transliterations
- Katakana: シーンセプション
- Hangul: 씬셉션
- Anglo-Saxon rune transliteration: ᛋᛁᚾᛋᛖᛈᛋᚳᚢᚾ
Noun
Definition variants
- Formal-styled definition
- A nested or recursive scene structure in which one scene contains, rehearses, auditions, simulates, pitches, or imagines another scene.
- Plain-language definition
- A scene inside a scene.
- Media-specific definition
- In film or television, Sceneception refers to a self-referential scene-within-a-scene, especially one where characters are acting, auditioning, rehearsing, or pretending to act inside the larger scene.
- Theatrical comparison
- A play-within-a-play is the classic theatrical cousin of Sceneception: one staged performance nested inside another. Sceneception, however, usually has a stronger film-and-video flavor.
Examples of Sceneception
- From the 1980 French comedy film The Umbrella Coup (French: Le Coup du parapluie) Grégoire Lecomte is an unsuccessful actor going to a casting because he wants to play a hitman in a comedy film. Through a wrong-room mix-up, he walks into a real mafia meeting instead of the audition. He thinks Don Barberini is a film producer and treats the meeting like part of the casting process; the mobsters, meanwhile, think Grégoire is an actual assassin.
- Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) offers a case of Sceneception when Harry, while fleeing the cops and worrying about his partner, enters an audition room. The audition material happens to echo his real situation, causing the casting room to mistake crisis for craft and panic for performance.
Etymology
A blend of scene & the meme-like suffix -ception, inspired by the nested-dream logic associated with Inception.
MorDictionary note
Not every scene-within-a-scene is Sceneception.
A normal play-within-a-play is only dramatic nesting. Sceneception requires a stronger sense of layered performance: a scene rehearsing, auditioning for, pitching, simulating, or accidentally spawning another scene.
Mini taxonomy
- Low Sceneception
- A rehearsal scene inside a movie.
- Moderate Sceneception
- A rehearsal scene where the characters act out a future scene.
- Severe Sceneception
- A scene inside a scene auditioning for a fictional production of a scene that mirrors the original scene.
- Terminal Sceneception
- The audience realizes they, too, may somehow be part of the scene.
Related terms
- metascene
- scenematryoshka
- dramatic recursion
- theater gremlin behavior
- narrative nesting-doll syndrome