Beyond post-irony: Heretic and Slow Horses

What does it mean when you're watching a movie or reading a book, and you suddenly start thinking about questions that the story is raising, and then the story answers those exact questions, and kinda makes fun of you for your simple queries.

I've felt like this with some stories for a while - the Buffy TV show used to do this all the time. Especially when I'd watch it stoned with my mate Geoff, and we'd have all sorts of deep philosophical insights about the nature of slaying vampires and the questions it would raise, and then the show would answer those questions straight away, like it had heard our complaints and was putting us in our place.

More recently, I felt it with the movie Heretic, which I thought was a lot of fun, but had Hugh Grant spouting some absolute bullshit. Because he's Hugh fucking Grant, it sounds refined and charming, but you're sitting there wanting one of the characters to refute his obvious bullshit, and then somebody does just that, and points out with great eloquence and passion how fucked up his reasoning is.

The Slow Horses books - which I carved through in a few short months last year - also do it all the time, with author Mick Herron constantly toying with expectations, and then blatantly violating them, and acting surprised that you thought it would be anything different. Sometimes it's the use of a jacket, belonging to a corpse at the start of one book, which then features some very blatant mentions of wearing coats; or even the way that each book ends with a member of Slough House dying in some unfortunate manner, and then in one of the latest ones, it's obviously happened again, only it turns out the character just wants to eat all the fucking chicken in the room.

It's all so clever, and is extremely hard to pull off. But it also feels like a direct conversation between author and audience, an unspoken correspondence of anticipation. It's so far beyond literary irony that we're somewhere new.  I really thought we slipped into a post-ironic age very early on in the 21st century, but where are we now? 

You may feel manipulated as the consumer of this story, but you also know you are in on the game. It  definitely makes everything feel a bit meta, seeing the man behind the curtain like that, but in an entertainment world of dumb-arse retreads and the general same old shit, this kind of post-post-post-irony is always a welcome sack of smart.