“Let me take you back to 1997, and a conversation I had with Paul Schrader, author of Taxi Driver, director of Mishima and American Gigolo. He told me that after Pulp Fiction, we were leaving an existential age and entering an age of irony.
“‘The existential dilemma,’ he said, ‘is ‘should I live?’ And the ironic answer is ‘does it matter?’ Everything in the ironic world has quotation marks around it. You don’t actually kill somebody; you ‘kill’ them. It doesn’t really matter if you put the baby in front of the runaway car because it’s only a ‘baby’ and it’s only a ‘car’.”
“In other words, the scene isn’t about the baby. The scene is about scenes about babies.” — from Roger Ebert‘s 9.23 article that explains his 9.21 creationism piece, which I didn’t link to earlier because I didn’t think it was interesting or funny enough.