Through the Looking-Glass: Postmodern Metafiction and the Hyperreal in Shahram Mokri's Black Rabbit, White Rabbit

Articles in Press

Document Type : Review Paper

Authors
Behnam Ameri 1
Fatemeh Pourjafari 2
1 Department of English Language, Ke.C., Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
2 Assistant Professor,Department of English Language, Ke.C., Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran
10.22034/jes.2026.588511.1011
Abstract
Shahram Mokri's Black Rabbit, White Rabbit (2025) is a radical postmodern experiment that stages a crisis of representation itself. This article argues that the film weaponizes narrative convention through its literalization of Chekhov's Gun, transforms the Möbius strip into a narrative and ontological structure, and refuses the audience the stability of a single "real" reality. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Jean Baudrillard, Linda Hutcheon, and Jean-François Lyotard, the analysis demonstrates how Mokri's reconstruction of a foundational Iranian cinematic text (Hezardastan), his use of the Alice in Wonderland motif, and the film's unique location in Tajikistan together create a labyrinthine meditation on historiography, hyperreality, and the death of the author. The film exposes cinema as a machine that produces meaning through deliberate, self-aware illusion and then deconstructs that machinery in real time. Ultimately, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit stands as a challenge to the viewer: to watch it is to enter a labyrinth, to confront the machinery of narrative, and to realize that there is no exit.
Keywords
Postmodernism, Metafiction, Hyperreality, Historiographic Metafiction, Chekhov's Gun, Mö
bius Strip
Subjects
Journal of Edulingual Studies (JES)

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 03 August 2026