Headcanon: it was Margaret Bourke-White taking the shot from the Chrysler Building. (Photo credit Oscar Graubner, which saves us from an infinite regress situation)

I mean imo _something_ related to kayfabe is going on, but unfortunately it's the "mediated vice signalling as fan service" part, not the "they are actors and none of this is really happening" part.

Yeah, pretty sure in the final Twin Peaks he was ridiculing the whole idea of fans demanding this kind of high-school-literature-class answer from the artist. He reconned a previous throwaway reference to "Judy" into the true name of the malevolent god behind the curtain, 叫得 / Jiào Dé, "the Answer"

Afaik it comes from a popular misunderstanding of what used to be (pre-2022) a reasonably objective term of art--"hallucination" was when an ML system produced data that wasn't in the training corpus. Not inherently right or wrong, but requiring external verification. Sort of useless now though

Second the Galaxy Quest solution. Truly the Rogue One of the other franchise