Question: Maureen Dowd wrote a review on the recently released movie, “J.Edgar” directed by Clint Eastwood in New York Times November 12 issue under the title, “Dirty Harry meets dirtier Edgar.” Apart from the interest in weird relationship of the FBI’s ‘fearful enforcer’ Edgar Hoover and his protégé, Clyde Tolson, I was caught up with the short phrase, “*It’s sorta meta*,” in the following sentence:

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> Some F.B.I. agents who worked with Hoover have been grousing that portraying the feared first director of the F.B.I. as homosexual would “turn Dirty Harry into Dirty Harriet,” as William Branon, chairman of the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, put it.
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> *It’s sorta meta*: the star who played a fictional law enforcement officer breaking rules for what he sees as the good of society makes a movie about a real law enforcement officer breaking rules for what he sees as the good of society.
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Dowd’s articles are always ordeal to me because of inclusion of a lot of unfamiliar words to me and her own style of elocution.

I guess “sorta” means simply “a sort of,” but I don’t understand what “It’s sorta meta” means here. It’s a short phrase, but “meta” is an evasive word for me. I’m not even clear with what “meta user” shown on my page of EL&U page means. Would you explain me?

Answer: 
What it means in this instance is "it isn't *meta* at all." 

Meta in this fairly recent, casual context is supposed to mean self-referential, or recursive in some way. This is the sense in which my teenagers would use this term. It is not a term which can be applied formally, in the sense that meta can be applied as a prefix, as in "metadata" or "metaphysics". Dowd is trying to be hip by using a term that the youngsters would use. Unfortunately, she's getting it wrong. It is like when the kids use "literally" to mean "figuratively". 

What Dowd is actually trying to say is that there is a parallel between an actor and a character that this actor has played. Two things being similar to one another does not make them "meta".
In this case, meta is used to refer to the context and culture surrounding the movie, rather than anything directly portrayed in the movie itself. The director, Clint Eastwood, had previously portrayed a law enforcement officer in the movie Dirty Harry. Similar to J. Edgar Hoover, Clint Eastwood's character broke the law for what he saw as the good of society, only P.I. Harry Callahan was a fictional character.

One requires knowledge about the people involved in making the movie, explicitly from outside the context of the movie's plot, to understand this reference, and that's why it's called meta.

Whether or not this is proper usage of the term can be argued. As to this particular instance, I find the comparison a bit of a stretch (the secretive first director of the FBI compared to a practically vigilante PI).