Looking Too Deep, or: The Film Theorist in All of Us

Megan and I watch movies very differently.

That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably for the best. If everyone watched movies the same way and got the same reaction out of them, there’d never be any discourse and no larger conversation about cinematic themes. And, obviously, I wouldn’t have this website as there’d be no reason for me to write a reviews because everyone have the same opinions.

Megan is very happy to let a movie be a movie. Whatever is on-screen is it; no larger story, no background to dig into, and Easter eggs are just little extra things to see or hear while you watch.
I, on the other hand, can’t not pick something apart. If it’s in the movie, it’s clearly relevant to the larger world of the story, right? Why would a creator (director, script writer, artist, etc.) include something if it wasn’t intended to be relevant to their created world at-large?

Sometimes those little things can simply fit into the world without meaning anything to that world.
For example, in “Toy Story 3” (2010), Barbie and Ken were shuffling through a closet; a blue letterman jacket with a golden “K” was on screen for a split second. Blue and Gold, and the K, happen to be the colors and initial of my alma matter, Kent State University. When I saw the movie at the campus theater, everyone went wild - it’s always nice to see your school get recognized in some tiny random way.
Because the entire “Toy Story” universe exists approximately in our world, with toys we recognize and landmarks we’ve been to, it’s not impossible to believe that that particular animator’s nod to their alma matter made it in as a cannon item, and Barbie has so many accessories that you could reasonably assume that she has a letterman jacket available in every campus bookstore across the country.
Similarly, the string “A113” appears somewhere in every Pixar movie. While it’s been clarified that A113 was apparently the number of a classroom that most of the animators went to in college, as an internal component of any Pixar movie, it’s just an alphanumeric string and thus meaningless. It could change to any other letter/number combo and it wouldn’t change anything about the story, and it’s only relevant to the audience as a meta-fact about the movie universe we’re observing.

But! Sometimes Easter eggs mean everything to the world being built. When Roman numerals and a reference to “a Dutch author” appeared in “Frozen II” (2019), it told us that the entirely fictional kingdom of Arrendelle actually exists on our Earth, somewhere in our own history.

“Aladdin” (1992/2019) was a story we were being told. The salesman/mariner were actively telling the tall tale of Aladdin and the Genie to an audience, which means that they could include any fanciful details they wanted and it fit without question.
The “Frozen” duology, on the other hand, was a series event we watched unfold. It’s not a tale being relayed well after it happened; we were flies on the wall of the adventure happening in real time, which means the “irrelevant” Easter eggs and throw-away lines weren’t quirky details added as flair - they’re part of the world as it exists, which means they world-built ‘reality’ instead of irrelevant details.

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Easter eggs get really weird when they reference real people and not just objects.
In “BayWatch” (2017), Dwayne Johnson called Zach Effron “Highschool Musical” as an insult, but that meant that the universe of “BayWatch” had “Highschool Musical” air with the same popularity as our universe did, and that life-guard Effron looked similar enough to musical Effron to draw a comparison, but a no point did anyone ask why the star of a three-peat musical success was somehow also an Olympic-failure.
And to simply plagiarize from my own review of “Always Be My Maybe” (2019):

Surely in a world that has Reeves commenting on his role as John Wick also has Wong’s “Baby Cobra” (2016) on Netflix, or Park’s “The Interview” (2014) stolen and leaked to the world, yet Wong and Park weren’t recognized for who they really were.

Maybe there’s some secret about these people references I’m supposed to be aware of as a movie goer, that somehow I’m supposed to simply take these things as a nudge nudge wink wink type thing, as if the director is trying to share a secret with me and my closest million other audience member friends.
Maybe.
I feel like that’s a cop-out answer though, and doesn’t actually explain such a glaring hole in their world-building.

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Some “Easter eggs” aren’t really Easter eggs though:
I’ve seen interviews and heard podcasts where various developers of movies tossed out “facts” about the world of a movie that just came out as they toured the press junket, which is fun, but those simply don’t count as they weren’t actually in the medium. J.K. Rowling decided that Professor Albus Dumbledore was gay well after all of her books were written and the Harry-centric movies were released, which means that, canonically, Dumbledore is still very much straight. Even the “Fantastic Beasts” series hasn’t bothered to dig into that amendment yet, so Rowling’s spontaneous retcon doesn’t actually affect the Wizarding World in a serious or meaningful way.
Similarly, one of the creators of “Wreck It Ralph 2” noted that the little girl at the very end, sitting in a minivan and using an iPad, is “Moana as a little girl.” While they might have used the body render file from the Disney content creation server, it would be stupid to believe that it’s actually Moana, as she’s a Pacific Islander princess from, presumably, hundreds (thousands) of years ago.

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Now, to bring this all back around and to my point: Connecting the dots on Easter eggs in a movie is not conspiracy hunting. I’m not waiting for a film to give me the answers to the Flat Earth (we all know it’s round… and hollow) or the Illuminati (Lizard people elite, obviously), or the ‘Deep State’ (who are, apparently, impossibly stupid). But a specific item, label, call-out, title, etc., means that there’s more to the world-building than we’re being explicitly told. World-building is crucial to a movie, the setting, how the characters treat each other, and so much more. Properly constructed ambivalence isn’t bad (see “I Am Mother”), nor is setting up the world as something we already inherently recognize (anything set in NYC).

There’s a reason there are ‘fan theories’ for TV shows, or YouTube channels dedicated entirely to film theories (I’m specifically thinking of the “Film Theory” channel by MatPat) - we see those patterns or items and are hungry to find out more. We always want to know more about the story we’re reading. There are entire Wikis that simply focus on the clearly identified things in movies, like a list of every cannon starship in “Star Trek” simply because people like to know.
Now add in a “throw away” line and suddenly there’s an exciting new thread to pull and the story isn’t quite over yet…