Long before Phoebe Waller-Bridge looked awkwardly into the camera and won the hearts of even the most stone-cold viewer and critics alike with her perpetually messy life as Fleabag, our article opens with a panning view of a house in the suburbs in the earlier years of this century. It is a rosy morning and our camera pans through the idyllic street gently littered with orange autumnal leaves, to the window that offers a glimpse into the life of a normal family, blissfully unaware of the voyeuristic eyes of hundreds of viewers picturing them in their heads through the screen of whatever device they are reading this article in.
Inside the house, a child sits in front of her TV set and claps her hands when a familiar figure in the now-iconic pink T-shirt, orange shorts, and a splashy purple backpack grins through the screen of the vintage television set. Her friend is an intelligent simian creature named after human footwear. “We had such an exciting trip today! What was your favourite part of the trip?” The valiant Dora the Explorer asks the little girl watching her adventures. “The lava mountain! The lava mountain!” The child shrieks in joy.
Her brother is a comic book aficionado and is sitting in the adjoining room reading The Sensational She-Hulk #1 which came out way back in 1989. He usually reads the adventures of Professor Charles Xaviers and his merry band of mutants, but he is partial to Jennifer Walters. The superheroine is flexing on her comic, flaunting her perfect hair while threatening the X-Men readers to finally give her story a shot. “Okay. This is your second chance. If you don’t buy my book this time, I’m gonna come to your house and rip up all your X-Men.” She grins. What can I say? She has a reputation for talking with her audiences.
Hey! See what I did there? I’m talking to you now. That’s cool, huh? Enough of being a peeping Tom to these poor kids. Let’s take a stroll in times of yonder. Yes, even before Matthew Broderick’s dashing turn in Ferris Bueller, or Mary Maclane’s 1918 movie ‘Men Who Made Love to Me’ where they address the audience directly. Roll the camera.
Let’s go all the way back to when stage plays and performing arts was the new cool. Let us imagine that stage, shall we? We know it has three walls, well sort of, as performers elicit the widest range of emotions ever conceivable in front of a live audience. There is a fourth wall too. It separates the performers from those watching them, completing a bubble of sorts, and in its entirety, completing the illusion that we buy into. Denis Diderot, a prominent figure in ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ is said to have conceived this wall, advocating its existence: With a fourth wall, performers can more closely imitate reality.
Every once in a while though, a character will address the audience directly, displaying a surprising sense of self-awareness. As if they know that the reality they are in is not real. That it exists for the purpose of entertainment or for creating meaningful art. It’s an illusion, suspension of disbelief, that the assemblage and the performers are collectively buying into. Media in general. So when a character chooses not to, we call that ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’. The simulacrum of the conceived barrier separating realities is shattered. It’s a tongue-in-cheek metaphor, I know, but the brilliance of this tool in the performing media, and now on celluloid and TVs exhibit exceptional savoir-faire.
It is not only a demarcator of the emergence of a renaissance in the naturalistic theatre, but it is also a break from dramatic conventions that dictate buying into the fake reality of the performance. While some may argue that the fourth wall did not even exist for the staging of the Bard of Avon’s plays, what with William Shakespeare’s love for soliloquies and monologues being directly spoken to the viewers, the art of breaking the fourth wall has expanded since and continues to do so. From comics to mockumentary-style television to video games to Ryan George’s hilarious Pitch Meetings on Youtube, it is a savvy tool used deftly by artists and creatives alike.
Some use it as a tool of comic effect, while some use it to make their characters more complex and dynamic. Some use it as a window into the world a character may inhabit, and to explain their motivation, while it has also been used to elicit sympathy or other emotions for a situation or a character. Alvy Singer, played with heart-breaking sincerity by Woody Allen in the brilliant movie ‘Annie Hall’ (1977) breaks the fourth wall several times. Allen said of that, “because I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them.” He managed to comfort us as well while at that.
My editor reminds me to mention that this technique exists in literature too! It’s called Metalepsis, the writer’s version of going meta. Be it John Fowles’ utterly brilliant “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Lemony Snicket’s well, everything (Dear Reader, there are people in the world who know no misery and woe…), or the deliciously ergodic and auto-referential, genre-hopping, paranoid masterpiece of Mark Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’, metalepsis itself, its influences in post-modern and experimental literature have been phenomenal.
Not to mention, ever since She-Hulk literally broke the fourth wall in her comics to have a word with her editor (something replicated unfortunately poorly in her MCU show), others started doing it too, most well-known among them being everyone’s favourite Merc-with-a-mouth, Deadpool. It is worth mentioning that characters like Dr. Fate, Squirrel Girl, Loki, and even Superman have been known to do the same in the comics on occasion.
Oh wait, I’m receiving some last-minute notes. Looks like that’s all the time we have today, folks! Imagine me winking through a loop of concentric circles, Looney Tunes style. Breaking the Fourth wall is a brilliant technique when used smartly, even sublime. So when the next time a character smiles at you through the camera, maybe smile back at them? Let them know you’re in on the secret.
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