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> nobody ever has to go to the bathroom

My favorite movie of all time is called Stranger Than Paradise by a director named Jim Jarmusch, in part because of its original treatment of these issues. The film is peppered with subtle little moments where, for example, a kitchen cabinet doesn't close correctly, or someone doesn't hear the person they're talking to correctly and asks them to repeat themselves.

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Neat. Kind of like how there's a whole website tvtropes.com devoted to collecting examples of all the different shortcuts used to tell stories. After a while, the trends in the material become interesting in their own right. Someone who's seen a lot of movies will see that something went wrong and wonder if it's a joke intentionally poking fun at the movie structure itself. Someone who hasn't seen a lot of movies probably won't even notice. I read somewhere that when an isolated tribe in Africa was shown pictures and asked to comment on them it took the researchers a while to figure out that the people weren't interpreting the pictures as representations of other things, but as flat, abstract blobs of colors. They literally didn't have enough experience with photographs to use them correctly. Whereas someone with tons of experience can intentionally misuse photographs to communicate one a different level.

Bo Burnham's standup special has some meta jokes like this. I won't spoil them in case you haven't seen it yet.

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