Spurred on by TM’s comment and a little thought I would like to present: “Untitled”, a work in progress. Now, this is just an outline; you’ll have fill in the details yourselves.
We start in 19th century England. Jane Austen storyline. Acting somewhat over the top. Very Victorian and melodramatic.
Abruptly the action stops and we’re in an turn-of-the-century boudoir where a young girl lies in bed holding a book. It is clear that the Jane Austen stuff was just a visualization of the novel she is reading. She doesn’t speak, but a narrator’s voice tells us that she has heard a noice. Narrator talks about a serial killer on the loose in Paris, targeting young women. (Horror/thriller style throughout. Tense music.) She gets up and goes over to the window to investigate. The narrator is still speaking, describing her apprehension. Somehow the action fades to black but the narrator is still talking.
We fade in to a 1920′s family sitting around the radio. Yes, they have just been listening to a teleplay about the young girl reading the Jane Austen. Cut to outside, tornado approaching. This is in fact a disaster movie and the family’s farmstead is about to be hit! (Oblique reference to Wizard of Oz.) Will they make it out in time? The twister is coming closer and closer as they debate the merits of the radio play.
Suddenly the frame jumps in, the picture is slightly grainier. We have really been watching the twister movie on the giant screen of a drive-in theatre. All from the backseat perspective of a 1956 Ford Thunderbird. In the front is a young couple, his arm around her neck. (Date movie. Witty, 50′s-style banter, James Stewart / Doris Day.)
Black electric flash as the television screen switches off. We zoom out and pan to a 1980 apartment of a young lawyer who has just switched off her set so she can concentrate on preparing a closing statement for tomorrow’s big show-off in the court. (Courtroom drama.)
Ugh. You get the picture. I’m too tired now to add the year 2000-internet movie and the 2094-whatever jump outs. Not really precisely recursive but definitely nested function calls. Should we somehow rewind to HG Wells making a cameo in the Jane Austen and imaging all this? He’s too late: it’ll have to be Jules Verne. No. Guess you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the recursion.
It has a similar vein to what I was thinking. The recursion in my idea went the other way round.
The abstract idea is that the plotline has a point where the protagonist cannot overcome a problem he has unless he watches a movie/reads a book/whatever. And the idea is that this artefact then contains a plotline that is similar but where the protagonist has a “smaller” problem.
Like: We have a protagonist who starts his day. He ecounters some bad guys through some events and pretty soon ends up in a situation where he needs to save the world and he needs a formula of some sort to insert into a computer or some doomsday gadget. So what he does is he finds a book/movie/whatever, but he needs to see what happens all the way through and then the “nested movie” starts.
The nested movie starts out in a similar manner, but somehow on a “smaller scale”. The protagonist is perhaps younger, lives in a smaller apartment, the bad guys he meets are perhaps less professional etc. He ends up in a situation where he needs to read a book / watch a movie etc.
At every layer downwards the protagonist is “diminished” a little but not much. But the bad guys are diminished significantly until at the very bottom the protagonist is able to solve the problem himself. Perhaps he just catches a shoplifter or something and then “returns” something somewhere.
The recursion “call” does not even have to be a book or a movie. The person may even be somehow vaguely aware of what is going on and the setting may be in the tone of “Groundhog day”. Or it may be something akin to the “Matrix”.