Often this can consist of conscious allusions — Bamman and his colleagues used computational methods to zero in on the places in "Paradise Lost" where John Milton is alluding to the Latin of Virgil's "Aeneid".
Passages in which she repeats words as if in a shaman's trance, and in which she alludes to some primal combat between man and woman, must be — one hopes so — conscious allusions to D. H. Lawrence: "She felt the thrill of her will in opposition to his.
Best appreciated for its sustained creepy vibe and sporadically arresting images, "Heartless" moves from one outré moment to another, from one self-conscious allusion to the next ("Donnie Darko" and "Taxi Driver").
"Heist," which was created by Doug Liman ("Mr. & Mrs. Smith"), makes knowing, self-conscious allusions to movie and television clichés, including that of whites and blacks assigned to the same black-and-white.
As he told the members of the Law Department, in between lawyer jokes and unself-conscious allusions to his wealth, no matter what happens two years from now, he'll still be way ahead of everybody else: "I always say that my Plan B is better than the other guy's Plan A".
Was that a conscious Woody Allen allusion?
The trend was already potential in an earlier modernism, with its delight in esoteric allusion and its self-conscious (part satirical, part participatory) obsession with pedantry.
Adam is Dr. Walsh's horrible masterpiece, an allusion to Frankenstein's monster, whose first conscious act is killing his creator.
While it would be a distortion to say that the rise of the movies as a parallel and competing art form has been the cause, the signature effects of postmodern fiction -- recursive language games; self-conscious, unreliable and multiple narrative voices; Mobius-strip skeins of allusion and parody, sincerity and irony -- seem almost flagrant in their defiance of cinematic appropriation.
