Nested books In his 1895
historical novel Pharaoh,
Bolesław Prus introduces a number of stories within the story, ranging in length from
vignettes to full-blown stories, many of them drawn from
ancient Egyptian texts, that further the plot, illuminate
characters, and even inspire the fashioning of individual characters.
Jan Potocki's
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1797–1805) has an interlocking structure with stories-within-stories reaching several levels of depth. The
provenance of the story is sometimes explained internally, as in
The Lord of the Rings by
J. R. R. Tolkien, which depicts the
Red Book of Westmarch (a story-internal version of the book itself) as a history compiled by several of the characters. The
subtitle of
The Hobbit ("There and Back Again") is depicted as part of a rejected title of this book within a book, and
The Lord of the Rings is a part of the final title. for the 1880 edition.|alt=A book illustration showing two grown men and a boy in the fashion of 17th century gathered around books on a street. An example of an interconnected inner story is "The Mad Trist" in
Edgar Allan Poe's
Fall of the House of Usher, where through somewhat mystical means the narrator's reading of the story within a story influences the reality of the story he has been telling, so that what happens in "The Mad Trist" begins happening in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Also, in
Don Quixote by
Miguel de Cervantes, there are many stories within the story that influence the hero's actions (there are others that even the author himself admits are purely digressive). Most of the first part is presented as a translation of a
found manuscript by (fictional)
Cide Hamete Benengeli. A commonly independently
anthologised story is "
The Grand Inquisitor" by
Dostoevsky from his long
psychological novel The Brothers Karamazov, which is told by one brother to another to explain, in part, his view on religion and morality. It also, in a succinct way, dramatizes many of Dostoevsky's interior conflicts. An example of a "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in
Herman Melville's novel
Moby-Dick; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting
mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing
Moby-Dick—ideas originally intended to be used later in the novel—but as the writing progressed, these plot ideas eventually proved impossible to fit around the characters that Melville went on to
create and develop. Instead of discarding the ideas altogether, Melville wove them into a coherent short story and had the character Ishmael demonstrate his eloquence and intelligence by
telling the story to his impressed friends. One of the most complicated structures of a story within a story was used by
Vladimir Nabokov in his novel
The Gift. There, as inner stories, function both poems and short stories by the main character Fyodor Cherdyntsev as well as the whole Chapter IV, a critical biography of Nikolay
Chernyshevsky (also written by Fyodor). This novel is considered one of the first metanovels in literature. With the rise of
literary modernism, writers experimented with ways in which multiple narratives might nest imperfectly within each other. A particularly ingenious example of nested narratives is
James Merrill's 1974
modernist poem "
Lost in Translation". In
Rabih Alameddine's novel
The Hakawati, or
The Storyteller, the protagonist describes coming home to the funeral of his father, one of a long line of traditional Arabic storytellers. Throughout the narrative, the author becomes hakawati (an Arabic word for a teller of traditional tales) himself, weaving the tale of the story of his own life and that of his family with folkloric versions of tales from Qur'an, the Old Testament, Ovid, and One Thousand and One Nights. Both the tales he tells of his family (going back to his grandfather) and the embedded folk tales, themselves embed other tales, often 2 or more layers deep. In
Sue Townsend's
Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years,
Adrian writes the book
Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, in which the character Jake Westmorland writes a book called
Sparg of Kronk, where the character Sparg writes a book with no language. In
Anthony Horowitz's
Magpie Murders, a significant proportion of the book features a fictional but authentically formatted mystery novel by Alan Conway, titled 'Magpie Murders'. The secondary novel ends before its conclusion returning the narrative to the original, and primary, story where the protagonist and reviewer of the book attempts to find the final chapter. As this progresses characters and messages within the fictional
Magpie Murders manifest themselves within the primary narrative and the final chapter's content reveals the reason for its original absence. Dreams are a common way of including stories inside stories, and can sometimes go several levels deep. Both the book
The Arabian Nightmare and the curse of "eternal waking" from the
Neil Gaiman series
The Sandman feature an endless series of waking from one dream into another dream. In
Charles Maturin's novel
Melmoth the Wanderer, the use of vast stories-within-stories creates a sense of dream-like quality in the reader. The 2023 Christian fictional novel
Just Once by
Karen Kingsbury features a series of three nested stories, all centering around the main characters of Hank and Irvel Myers: • The outermost story (set in 2018) features their granddaughter, Audra, at a ceremony where the members of the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) will be recognized. Unknown to anyone in her family, Irvel served as a spy in OSS (she had told everyone she was a nurse), and the story would have been lost but for her father finding a set of forgotten videotapes while remodeling his childhood home. • The next story (set in 1989) features Irvel being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease; she and Hank decide to videotape their story before it is lost to Irvel's failing memory. • The innermost story (set between 1940 and 1945) tells of Hank and Irvel's relationship before and after World War II, and her work within OSS.
Religion and philosophy This structure is also found in classic religious and philosophical texts. The structure of
The Symposium and
Phaedo, attributed to
Plato, is of a story within a story within a story. In the Christian
Bible, the
gospels are accounts of the life and ministry of
Jesus. However, they also include within them the
parables that Jesus told. In more modern philosophical works,
Jostein Gaarder's books often feature this device. Examples are
The Solitaire Mystery, where the protagonist receives a small book from a baker, in which the baker tells the story of a sailor who tells the story of another sailor, and ''
Sophie's World'', about a girl who is actually a character in a book that is being read by Hilde, a girl in another dimension. Later on in the book Sophie questions this idea, and realizes that Hilde too could be a character in a story that in turn is being read by another.
Mahabharata, an Indian epic that is also the world's longest epic, has a nested structure.
Nested science fiction The experimental modernist works that incorporate multiple narratives into one story are quite often science fiction or science fiction influenced. These include most of the various novels written by the American author
Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut includes the recurring character
Kilgore Trout in many of his novels. Trout acts as the mysterious
science fiction writer who enhances the morals of the novels through plot descriptions of his stories. Books such as
Breakfast of Champions and
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater are sprinkled with these plot descriptions.
Stanisław Lem's
Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius from
The Cyberiad has several levels of storytelling. All levels tell stories of the same person, Trurl.
House of Leaves is the tale of a man who finds a manuscript telling the story of a documentary that may or may not have ever existed, contains multiple layers of plot. The book includes footnotes and letters that tell their own stories only vaguely related to the events in the main narrative of the book, and footnotes for fake books.
Robert A. Heinlein's later books (
The Number of the Beast,
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and
To Sail Beyond the Sunset) propose the idea that every real universe is a fiction in another universe. This
hypothesis enables many writers who are characters in the books to interact with their own creations.
Margaret Atwood's novel
The Blind Assassin is interspersed with excerpts from a novel written by one of the main characters; the novel-within-a-novel itself contains a
science fiction story written by one of
that novel's characters. In
Philip K. Dick's novel
The Man in the High Castle, each character comes into interaction with a book called
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which was written by the Man in the High Castle. As Dick's novel details a world in which the
Axis Powers of World War II had
succeeded in dominating the known world, the novel within the novel details an alternative to this history in which the Allies overcome the Axis and bring stability to the world – a victory which itself is quite different from real history. In ''
Red Orc's Rage by Philip José Farmer, a doubly recursive method is used to intertwine its fictional layers. This novel is part of a science fiction series, the World of Tiers. Farmer collaborated in the writing of this novel with an American psychiatrist, A. James Giannini, who had previously used the World of Tiers'' series in treating patients in group therapy. During these therapeutic sessions, the content and process of the text and novelist was discussed rather than the lives of the patients. In this way subconscious defenses could be circumvented. Farmer took the real life case-studies and melded these with adventures of his characters in the series. The
Quantum Leap novel
Knights of the Morningstar also features a character who writes a book by that name. In
Matthew Stover's
Star Wars novel
Shatterpoint, the protagonist
Mace Windu narrates the story within his journal, while the main story is being told from the
third-person limited point of view. Several
Star Trek tales are stories or events within stories, such as
Gene Roddenberry's
novelization of
Star Trek: The Motion Picture,
J. A. Lawrence's ''Mudd's Angels'',
John M. Ford's
The Final Reflection,
Margaret Wander Bonanno's
Strangers from the Sky (which adopts the conceit that it is a book from the future by an author called Gen Jaramet-Sauner), and J. R. Rasmussen's "Research" in the anthology
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II.
Steven Barnes's novelization of the
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "
Far Beyond the Stars" partners with
Greg Cox's
The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (Volume Two) to tell us that the fictional story "Far Beyond the Stars" (whose setting and cast closely resemble
Deep Space Nine)—and, by extension, all of
Star Trek itself—is the creation of 1950s writer Benny Russell. The book
Cloud Atlas (later adapted into a film by
The Wachowskis and
Tom Tykwer) consisted of six interlinked stories nested inside each other in a Russian doll fashion. The first story (that of Adam Ewing in the 1850s befriending an escaped slave) is interrupted halfway through and revealed to be part of a journal being read by composer Robert Frobisher in 1930s Belgium. His own story of working for a more famous composer is told in a series of letters to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, which are interrupted halfway through and revealed to be in the possession of an investigative journalist named Luisa Rey and so on. Each of the first five tales are interrupted in the middle, with the sixth tale being told in full, before the preceding five tales are finished in reverse order. Each layer of the story either challenges the veracity of the previous layer, or is challenged by the succeeding layer. Presuming each layer to be a true telling within the overall story, a chain of events is created linking Adam Ewing's embrace of the abolitionist movement in the 1850s to the religious redemption of a post-apocalyptic tribal man over a century after the fall of modern civilization. The characters in each nested layer take inspiration or lessons from the stories of their predecessors in a manner that validates a belief stated in the sixth tale that "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present and by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future."
Play or film within a book The Crying of Lot 49 by
Thomas Pynchon has several characters seeing a play called ''The Courier's Tragedy
by the fictitious Jacobean playwright Richard Wharfinger. The events of the play broadly mirror those of the novel and give the character Oedipa Maas a greater context to consider her predicament; the play concerns a feud between two rival mail distribution companies, which appears to be ongoing to the present day, and in which, if this is the case, Oedipa has found herself involved. As in Hamlet'', the director makes changes to the original script; in this instance, a couplet that was added, possibly by religious zealots intent on giving the play extra moral gravity, are said only on the night that Oedipa sees the play. From what Pynchon relates, this is the only mention in the play of Thurn and Taxis' rivals' name—Trystero—and it is the seed for the conspiracy that unfurls. A significant portion of
Walter Moers'
Labyrinth of Dreaming Books is an
ekphrasis on the subject of an epic puppet theater presentation. Another example is found in
Samuel Delany's
Trouble on Triton, which features a theater company that produces elaborate staged spectacles for randomly selected single-person audiences. Plays produced by the "Caws of Art" theater company also feature in Russell Hoban's modern fable,
The Mouse and His Child.
Raina Telgemeier's best-selling
Drama is a graphic novel about a middle-school musical production, and the tentative romantic fumblings of its cast members. In
Manuel Puig's
Kiss of the Spider Woman, ekphrases on various old movies, some real, and some fictional, make up a substantial portion of the narrative. In
Paul Russell's
Boys of Life, descriptions of movies by director/antihero Carlos (loosely inspired by controversial director
Pier Paolo Pasolini) provide a narrative counterpoint and add a touch of surrealism to the main narrative. They additionally raise the question of whether works of artistic genius justify or atone for the sins and crimes of their creators. Auster's
The Book of Illusions (2002) and Theodore Roszak's
Flicker (1991) also rely heavily on fictional films within their respective narratives.
Nested plays This dramatic device was probably first used by
Thomas Kyd in
The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, where the play is presented before an audience of two of the characters, who comment upon the action. From references in other contemporary works, Kyd is also assumed to have been the writer of an early, lost version of
Hamlet (the so-called
Ur-Hamlet), with a play-within-a-play interlude.
William Shakespeare's
Hamlet retains this device by having Hamlet ask some strolling players to perform
The Murder of Gonzago. The action and characters in
The Murder mirror the murder of Hamlet's father in the main action, and Prince Hamlet writes additional material to emphasize this. Hamlet wishes to provoke the murderer, his uncle, and sums this up by saying "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hamlet calls this new play
The Mouse-trap (a title that
Agatha Christie later took for the long-running play
The Mousetrap). Christie's work was parodied in Tom Stoppard's
The Real Inspector Hound, in which two theater critics are drawn into the murder mystery they are watching. The audience is similarly absorbed into the action in Woody Allen's play
God, which is about two failed playwrights in Ancient Greece. The phrase "
The Conscience of the King" also became the title of a
Star Trek episode featuring a production of Hamlet which leads to the exposure of a murderer (although not a king). The play
I Hate Hamlet and the movie ''
A Midwinter's Tale are about a production of Hamlet
, which in turn includes a production of The Murder of Gonzago
, as does the Hamlet
-based play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and subsequent film adaptation; which explores and deconstructs narrative concepts, and even features a third-level puppet theatre version of Gonzago'' within the play inside the film, and a scene in which the title characters observe the Tragedians performing a staged
parody of their exploits in the ongoing story (including many that are yet to occur). Similarly, in
Anton Chekhov's
The Seagull there are specific allusions to
Hamlet: in the first act a son stages a play to impress his mother, a professional actress, and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother shows for her son's play. Shakespeare adopted the play-within-a-play device for many of his other plays as well, including ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labours Lost. Almost the whole of The Taming of the Shrew'' is a play-within-a-play, presented to convince
Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, that he is a nobleman watching a private performance, but the device has no relevance to the plot (unless Katharina's subservience to her "lord" in the last scene is intended to strengthen the deception against the tinker) and is often dropped in modern productions. The musical
Kiss Me, Kate is about the production of a fictitious musical,
The Taming of the Shrew, based on the comedy
The Taming of the Shrew by
William Shakespeare, and features several scenes from it.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre draws in part on the 14th-century
Confessio Amantis (itself a frame story) by
John Gower, and Shakespeare has the ghost of Gower "assume man's infirmities" to introduce his work to the contemporary audience and comment on the action of the play. In
Francis Beaumont's
Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1608) a supposed common citizen from the audience, actually a "planted" actor, condemns the play that has just started and "persuades" the players to present something about a shopkeeper. The citizen's "apprentice" then acts, pretending to extemporise, in the rest of the play. This is a satirical tilt at Beaumont's playwright contemporaries and their current fashion for offering plays about London life. The opera
Pagliacci is about a troupe of actors who perform a play about marital infidelity that mirrors their own lives, and composer
Richard Rodney Bennett and
playwright-
librettist Beverley Cross's
The Mines of Sulphur features a ghostly troupe of actors who perform a play about murder that similarly mirrors the lives of their hosts, from whom they depart, leaving them with the plague as nemesis.
John Adams'
Nixon in China (1985–1987) features a surreal version of
Madam Mao's
Red Detachment of Women, illuminating the ascendance of human values over the disillusionment of high politics in the meeting. In
Bertolt Brecht's
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a play is staged as a
parable to villagers in the
Soviet Union to justify the re-allocation of their farmland: the tale describes how a child is awarded to a servant-girl rather than its natural mother, an aristocrat, as the woman most likely to care for it well. This kind of play-within-a-play, which appears at the beginning of the main play and acts as a "frame" for it, is called an "
induction". Brecht's one-act play
The Elephant Calf (1926) is a play-within-a-play performed in the foyer of the theatre during his
Man Equals Man. In
Jean Giraudoux's play
Ondine, all of act two is a series of scenes within scenes, sometimes two levels deep. This increases the
dramatic tension and also makes more poignant the inevitable failure of the relationship between the
mortal Hans and
water sprite Ondine.
The Two-Character Play by
Tennessee Williams has a concurrent double plot with the convention of a play within a play. Felice and Clare are siblings and are both actor/producers touring
The Two-Character Play. They have supposedly been abandoned by their crew and have been left to put on the play by themselves. The characters in the play are also brother and sister and are also named Clare and Felice.
The Mysteries, a modern reworking of the medieval
mystery plays, remains faithful to its roots by having the modern actors play the sincere, naïve tradesmen and women as they take part in the original performances. Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include the performance of all or part of the play, as in
Noises Off,
A Chorus of Disapproval, or
Lilies. Similarly, the musical
Man of La Mancha presents the story of Don Quixote as an impromptu play staged in prison by
Quixotes author,
Miguel de Cervantes. In most stagings of the musical
Cats, which include the song "Growltiger's Last Stand" – a recollection of an old play by Gus the Theatre Cat – the character of Lady
Griddlebone sings "The Ballad of Billy McCaw". (However, many productions of the show omit "Growltiger's Last Stand", and "The Ballad of Billy McCaw" has at times been replaced with a mock aria, so this metastory is not always seen.) Depending on the production, there is another musical scene called "The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollices" where the Jellicles put on a show for their leader. In
Lestat: The Musical, there are three play within a plays. First, when Lestat visits his childhood friend, Nicolas, who works in a theater, where he discovers his love for theater; and two more when the Theater of the Vampires perform. One is used as a plot mechanism to explain the vampire god, Marius, which sparks an interest in Lestat to find him. A play within a play occurs in the musical
The King and I, where Princess Tuptim and the royal dancers give a performance of
Small House of Uncle Thomas (or ''
Uncle Tom's Cabin'') to their English guests. The play mirrors Tuptim's situation, as she wishes to run away from slavery to be with her lover, Lun Tha. In stagings of
Dina Rubina's play
Always the Same Dream, the story is about staging a school play based on a poem by
Pushkin. Joseph Heller's 1967 play
We Bombed in New Haven is about actors engaged in a play about military airmen; the actors themselves become at times unsure whether they are actors or actual airmen. The 1937 musical
Babes in Arms is about a group of kids putting on a musical to raise money. The central plot device was retained for the popular 1939 film version with
Judy Garland and
Mickey Rooney. A similar plot was recycled for the films
White Christmas and
The Blues Brothers.
Nested films The 1946 film noir
The Locket contains a nested
flashback structure, with a screenplay by
Sheridan Gibney based on the story "What Nancy Wanted" by Norma Barzman. The
François Truffaut film
Day for Night is about the making of a fictitious movie called
Meet Pamela () and shows the interactions of the actors as they are making this movie about a woman who falls for her husband's father. The story of
Pamela involves lust, betrayal, death, sorrow, and change, events that are mirrored in the experiences of the actors portrayed in
Day for Night. There are a wealth of other movies that revolve around the film industry itself, even if not centering exclusively on one nested film. These include the darkly satirical classic
Sunset Boulevard about an aging star and her parasitic victim, and the Coen Brothers' farce
Hail, Caesar! The script to
Karel Reisz's movie
''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' (1981), written by
Harold Pinter, is a film-within-a-film adaptation of
John Fowles's book. In addition to the Victorian love story of the book, Pinter creates a present-day background story that shows a love affair between the main actors.
The Muppet Movie begins with
the Muppets sitting down in a theater to watch the eponymous movie, which
Kermit the Frog claims to be a semi-biographical account of how they all met. In
Buster Keaton's
Sherlock Jr., Keaton's protagonist actually enters into a film while it is playing in a cinema, as does the main character in the
Arnold Schwarzenegger film
The Last Action Hero. A similar device is used in the music video for the song "
Take On Me" by
A-ha, which features a woman entering a pencil sketch. Conversely,
Woody Allen's
Purple Rose of Cairo is about a film character exiting the film to interact with the real world. Allen's earlier film
Play it Again, Sam featured liberal use of characters, dialogue and clips from the film classic
Casablanca as a central device. The 2002
Pedro Almodóvar film
Talk to Her () has the chief character Benigno tell a story called
The Shrinking Lover to Alicia, a long-term comatose patient whom Benigno, a male nurse, is assigned to care for. The film presents
The Shrinking Lover in the form of a black-and-white silent melodrama. To prove his love to a scientist girlfriend,
The Shrinking Lover protagonist drinks a potion that makes him progressively smaller. The resulting seven-minute scene, which is readily intelligible and enjoyable as a stand-alone short subject, is considerably more overtly comic than the rest of
Talk to Her—the protagonist climbs giant breasts as if they were rock formations and even ventures his way inside a (compared to him) gigantic vagina. Critics have noted that
The Shrinking Lover essentially is a sex metaphor. Later in
Talk to Her, the comatose Alicia is discovered to be pregnant and Benigno is sentenced to jail for rape.
The Shrinking Lover was named Best Scene of 2002 in the
Skandies, an annual survey of online cinephiles and critics invited each year by critic Mike D'Angelo.
Tropic Thunder (2008) is a
comedy film revolving around a group of
prima donna actors making a
Vietnam War film (itself also named
Tropic Thunder) when their fed-up writer and director decide to abandon them in the middle of the jungle, forcing them to fight their way out. The concept was perhaps inspired by the 1986 comedy
Three Amigos, where three washed-up silent film stars are expected to live out a real-life version of their old hit movies. The same idea of life being forced to imitate art is also reprised in the
Star Trek parody
Galaxy Quest. The first episode of the
anime series
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya consists almost entirely of a poorly made film that the protagonists created, complete with
Kyon's typical, sarcastic commentary.
Chuck Jones's 1953
cartoon Duck Amuck shows
Daffy Duck trapped in a cartoon that an unseen animator repeatedly manipulates. At the end, it is revealed that the whole cartoon was being controlled by
Bugs Bunny. The
Duck Amuck plot was essentially replicated in one of Jones' later cartoons,
Rabbit Rampage (1955), in which Bugs Bunny turns out to be the victim of the sadistic animator (
Elmer Fudd). A similar plot was also included in an episode of
New Looney Tunes, in which Bugs is the victim, Daffy is the animator, and it was made on a computer instead of a pencil and paper. In 2007, the
Duck Amuck sequence was parodied on
Drawn Together ("Nipple Ring-Ring Goes to Foster Care"). All feature-length films by
Jörg Buttgereit except feature a film within the film. In , the protagonist goes to the cinema to see the fictional slasher film
Vera. In , one of the character watches a video of the fictional Nazi exploitation film and in , the characters go to see a film called , which is a parody of
Louis Malle's
My Dinner with André.
Quentin Tarantino's
Inglourious Basterds depicts a
Nazi propaganda film called ''
Nation's Pride, which glorifies a soldier in the German army. Nation's Pride'' is directed by
Eli Roth.
Joe Dante's
Matinee depicts
Mant, an early-1960s sci-fi/horror movie about a man who turns into an
ant. In one scene, the protagonists see a
Disney-style family movie called
The Shook-Up Shopping Cart.
Story within a film The 2002 martial arts epic
Hero presented the same narrative several different times, as recounted by different storytellers, but with both factual and aesthetic differences. Similarly, in the whimsical 1988
Terry Gilliam film
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and the 2003
Tim Burton film
Big Fish, the bulk of the film is a series of stories told by an (extremely) unreliable narrator. In the 2006 Tarsem film
The Fall, an injured silent-movie stuntman tells
heroic fantasy stories to a little girl with a broken arm to pass time in the hospital, which the film visualizes and presents with the stuntman's voice becoming voiceover narration. The fantasy tale bleeds back into and comments on the film's "present-tense" story. There are often incongruities based on the fact that the stuntman is an American and the girl Persian—the stuntman's voiceover refers to "Indians", "a squaw" and "a teepee", but the visuals show a Bollywood-style devi and a Taj Mahal-like castle. The same conceit of an unreliable narrator was used to very different effect in the 1995 crime drama
The Usual Suspects (which garnered an Oscar for
Kevin Spacey's performance).
Walt Disney's 1946 live-action drama film
Song of the South has three animated sequences, all based on the
Br'er Rabbit stories, told as moral fables by
Uncle Remus (
James Baskett) to seven-year-old Johnny (
Bobby Driscoll) and his friends Ginny (
Luana Patten) and Toby (Glenn Leedy). The seminal 1950 Japanese film
Rashomon, based on the Japanese short story "
In a Grove" (1921), utilizes the
flashback-within-a-flashback technique. The story unfolds in flashback as the four witnesses in the story—the bandit, the murdered
samurai, his wife, and the nameless woodcutter—recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. But it is also a flashback within a flashback, because the accounts of the witnesses are being retold by a woodcutter and a priest to a ribald commoner as they wait out a rainstorm in a ruined gatehouse. The film
Inception has a deeply nested structure that is itself part of the setting, as the characters travel deeper and deeper into layers of dreams within dreams. Similarly, in the beginning of the music video for the
Michael Jackson song "
Thriller", the heroine is terrorized by her monster boyfriend in what turns out to be a film within a dream. The film
The Grand Budapest Hotel has four layers of narration: starting with a young girl at the author's memorial reading his book, it cuts to the old author in 1985 telling of an incident in 1968 when he, as a young author, stayed at the hotel and met the owner, old Zero. He was then told the story of young Zero and M. Gustave, from 1932, which makes up most of the narrative. Then in 2025, The film
Dog Man is a film in a comic for the
Dog Man series.
Play within a film The 2001 film
Moulin Rouge! features a fictitious musical within a film, called "Spectacular Spectacular". The 1942
Ernst Lubitsch comedy
To Be or Not to Be confuses the audience in the opening scenes with a play, "The Naughty Nazis", about Adolf Hitler which appears to be taking place within the actual plot of the film. Thereafter, the acting company players serve as the protagonists of the film and frequently use acting/costumes to deceive various characters in the film.
Hamlet also serves as an important throughline in the film, as suggested by the title.
Laurence Olivier sets the opening scene of his 1944 film of
Henry V in the
tiring room of the old
Globe Theatre as the actors prepare for their roles on stage. The early part of the film follows the actors in these "stage" performances and only later does the action almost imperceptibly expand to the full realism of the
Battle of Agincourt. By way of increasingly more artificial sets (based on mediaeval paintings) the film finally returns to The Globe.
Mel Brooks' film
The Producers revolves around a scheme to make money by producing a disastrously bad Broadway musical,
Springtime for Hitler. Ironically the film itself was later made into its own Broadway musical (although a more intentionally successful one). The
Outkast music video for the song "Roses" is a short film about a high school musical. In
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the middle-schoolers put on a play of
The Wizard of Oz, while
High School Musical is a romantic comedy about the eponymous musical itself. A high school production is also featured in the gay teen romantic comedy
Love, Simon. A 2012 Italian film,
Caesar Must Die, stars real-life Italian prisoners who rehearse Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar in
Rebibbia prison playing
fictional Italian prisoners rehearsing the same play in the same prison. In addition, the film itself becomes a
Julius Caesar adaption of sorts as the scenes are frequently acted all around the prison, outside of rehearsals, and the prison life becomes indistinguishable from the play. The main plot device in
Repo! The Genetic Opera is an opera which is going to be held the night of the events of the film. All of the principal characters of the film play a role in the opera, though the audience watching the opera is unaware that some of the events portrayed are more than drama. The 1990 biopic
Korczak, about the last days of a Jewish children's orphanage in Nazi occupied Poland, features an amateur production of
Rabindranath Tagore's
The Post Office, which was selected by the orphanage's visionary leader as a way of preparing his charges for their own impending death. That same production is also featured in the stage play ''Korczak's Children,'' also inspired by the same historical events.
TV show within a film The 1973 film
The National Health, an adaptation of the 1969 play
The National Health by
Peter Nichols, features a send-up of a typical American hospital
soap opera being shown on a television situated in an underfunded, unmistakably British
NHS hospital. The
Jim Carrey film
The Truman Show is about a person who grows to adulthood without ever realizing that he is the unwitting hero of the immersive eponymous television show. In
Toy Story 2, the lead character
Woody learns that he is based on the lead character of the same name of a 1950s
Western show known as ''Woody's Roundup'', which was seemingly cancelled due to the rise of
science fiction, though this is eventually debunked after the final episode of the show can be seen playing.
Nested video games The first example of a video game within a video game is almost certainly
Tim Stryker's 1980s era text-only game
Fazuul (also the world's first online multiplayer game), in which one of the objects that the player can create is a minigame. Another early use of this trope was in
Cliff Johnson's 1987 hit ''
The Fool's Errand'', a thematically linked narrative puzzle game, in which several of the puzzles were semi-independent games played against NPCs.
Power Factor has been cited as a rare example of a video game in which the entire concept is a video game within a video game: The player takes on the role of a character who is playing a "Virtual Reality Simulator", in which he in turn takes on the role of the hero Redd Ace. The
.hack franchise also gives the concept a central role. It features a narrative in which internet advancements have created an MMORPG franchise called The World. Protagonists Kite and
Haseo try to uncover the mysteries of the events surrounding The World. Characters in
.hack are aware that they are video game characters. More commonly, however, the video game within a video game device takes the form of mini-games that are non-plot-oriented, and optional to the completion of the game. For example, in the
Yakuza and
Shenmue franchises, there are playable arcade machines featuring other Sega games that are scattered throughout the game world. In
Final Fantasy VII there are several video games that can be played in an arcade in the Gold Saucer theme park. In
Animal Crossing, the player can acquire individual NES emulations through various means and place them within their house, where they are playable in their entirety. When placed in the house, the games take the form of a
Nintendo Entertainment System. In
Fallout 4 and
Fallout 76, the protagonist can find several cartridges throughout the wasteland that can be played on their pip-boy (an electronic device that exists only in the world of the game) or any terminal computer. In
Celeste, there is a hidden room in which the protagonist can play the original
PICO-8 prototype of the game.
TV show within a video game In the
Remedy video game titled
Max Payne, players can chance upon a number of ongoing television shows when activating or happening upon various television sets within the game environs, depending on where they are within the unfolding game narrative. Among them are
Lords & Ladies,
Captain Baseball Bat Boy,
Dick Justice and the pinnacle television serial
Address Unknown – heavily inspired by
David Lynch-style film narrative, particularly
Twin Peaks,
Address Unknown sometimes prophesies events or character motives yet to occur in the Max Payne narrative. In
Grand Theft Auto IV, the player can watch several TV channels which include many programs: reality shows, cartoons, and even game shows.
Nested TV shows Terrance & Phillip from
South Park comments on the levels of violence and acceptable behaviour in the media and allow criticism of the outer cartoon to be addressed in the cartoon itself. Similarly, on the long running animated sitcom
The Simpsons, Bart's favorite cartoon,
Itchy and Scratchy (based on the series
Herman and Katnip, a parody of
Tom & Jerry), often echoes the plotlines of the main show.
The Simpsons also parodied this structure with numerous 'layers' of sub-stories in the Season 17 episode "
The Seemingly Never-Ending Story". The animated series
SpongeBob SquarePants features numerous fictional shows, most notably,
The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, which stars the titular elderly superheroes
Mermaid Man (
Ernest Borgnine) and
Barnacle Boy (
Tim Conway). On the show
Dear White People, the
Scandal parody
Defamation offers an ironic commentary on the main show's theme of interracial relationships. Similarly, each season of the
HBO show
Insecure has featured a different fictional show, including the slavery-era soap opera
Due North, the rebooted black 1990s sitcom ''Kev'yn,
and the investigative documentary series Looking for LaToya''. The
Irish television series
Father Ted features a television show,
Father Ben, which has characters and storylines almost identical to that of
Father Ted. The television shows
30 Rock,
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,
Sonny with a Chance, and
Kappa Mikey feature a sketch show within the TV show. An extended plotline on the semi-autobiographical sitcom
Seinfeld dealt with the main characters developing a sitcom about their lives. The gag was reprised on
Curb Your Enthusiasm, another semi-autobiographical show by and about
Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, when the long-anticipated
Seinfeld reunion was staged entirely inside the new show. The "
USS Callister" episode of the
Black Mirror anthology television series is about a man who is obsessed with a
Star Trek-like show and recreates it as part of a virtual reality game. The concept of a film within a television series is employed in the
Macross universe.
The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? (1984) was originally intended as an alternative theatrical re-telling of the television series
The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982), but was later "
retconned" into the Macross
canon as a popular film within the television series
Macross 7 (1994). The
Stargate SG-1 episode "
Wormhole X-Treme!" features a fictional TV show with an almost identical premise to
Stargate SG-1. A later episode, "
200", depicts ideas for a possible reboot of
Wormhole X-Treme!, including using a "younger and edgier" cast, or even
Thunderbirds-style puppets. The
Glee episode "
Extraordinary Merry Christmas" features the members of New Directions starring in a black-and-white Christmas television special that is presented within the episode itself. The special is a homage to both
Star Wars Holiday Special and the "
Judy Garland Christmas Special". The British TV series
''Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, based on the
web series Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, is notable for being a puppet show that includes a fictional claymation TV series within the show: Grolton & Hovris
, a parody of Wallace and Gromit''.
Film within a TV show Seinfeld had a number of reoccurring fictional films, including a sci-fi film called
The Flaming Globes of Sigmund and, most notably,
Rochelle, Rochelle, a parody of artsy but exploitative foreign films. The trippy, metaphysically loopy thriller
Death Castle is a central element of the
Master of None episode "New York, I Love You". The
series finale of
Barry features a biopic of the titular character which was called
The Mask Collector, and its production served as the catalyst for the last 4 episodes of Barry's final season. == Fantasy within realism ==