The Fourth Wall — Fake It Till You Break It
Written by Sabarish Padmakumar
It’s Friday night. You’re mindlessly stuffing your face with a big bag of popcorn, your third for the night. You’ve just put on that Wolf of Wall Street movie everyone’s been raving about. The movie cuts to a wide shot of someone walking through the bullpen. You don’t care much for it, inching deeper into the void of the popcorn bag as the movie drags on. Suddenly though, you stop — Leo’s piercing blue eyes are looking right at you in an almost accusatory manner. You can’t help but feel a little vulnerable. You now listen intently as he explains to you what an ‘IPO’ is. What just happened?
What good ol’ Lenny D pulled is one of the oldest tricks in the book — the fourth wall break. The fourth wall is an imaginary barrier separating the audience from the story. It essentially acknowledges a character’s fictionality and allows the audience to get invested in the story. The fourth wall is a concept that originated from the theater, where the sets were made up of three walls, and the fourth one was left out for the viewers to watch. Sometimes, the actors would appeal directly to the audience, thereby employing the first known fourth wall breaks in the history of entertainment.
The concept of breaking the fourth wall may seem bizarre to some. After all, isn’t the main goal of storytelling to get the audience immersed in the storyline and characters? Breaking the wall could serve the opposite purpose. It could break down the carefully woven fabric of a story into just actors and plain old Hollywood filmmaking. It could cause the audience to detach from the movie. So why do it?
Although breaching the sacred fourth wall is often looked down upon, there are quite a few exceptions to this rule. When done correctly, the fourth wall break serves to capture something priceless from the audience — their attention. When a character addresses the audience directly, it helps in building trust between the two parties. Deadpool utilizes this perfectly, where the Merc with a Mouth builds banter with the audience ever so often. Consequently, there is no other superhero that viewers know as intimately as Deadpool.
Fourth wall breaks evoke a strong response from the viewer. In horror, using them sparingly can up the creep factor considerably. This is owing to a little tidbit of psychology called the ‘dual function of gaze.’ Boiled down, it basically says that the way we view someone changes with the realization that we, too, are being viewed. In the context of a movie, it serves to allow us a look into the character’s psyche. This is why at the end of Psycho (1960), when Norman Bates looks right at you and eyes you up and down with that iconic, maniacal stare, all you want to do is curl up under your covers and never come back up again.
What’s the best way to explain the 2008 US stock market crash to your audience? Get Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to do it. The Big Short is a movie that uses some pretty hefty economic terms to explain the 2008 stock market crash. Safe to say, your average audience would never understand it and would eventually lose interest. However, by incorporating some comical yet informative fourth wall breaks to explain the economics, the filmmakers make sure the viewers would never have to exhaust their 9-second attention spans.
Don’t let the movie references mislead you into believing that the fourth wall break is just a TV trope. It is also a go-to choice for game developers who want to give their players the scare of their lives. Back in the day, the original Metal Gear Solid game was wildly popular. In it, Psycho Mantis, a character with telekinetic abilities, decides to show off his powers to the player.
He first scans the memory card of your Playstation and lists out all the popular games you own. He then proceeds to address you directly, asking you to put down the controller so that he can display the true extent of his abilities. If you abide, he uses the DualShock’s rumble feature to cause it to vibrate uncontrollably, sometimes causing it to fly in the air if you set it down at a height. If you weren’t already creeped out, once the battle begins, he seems to know your every move and dodges them effectively. The only way to beat him is to plug the controller into the second port, upon which he loses the ability to ‘read’ you and ultimately loses. This fourth wall breach was so impressive that it cemented the original Metal Gear Solid’s position as one of the best games ever.
The fourth wall enables us to interact with the characters in any way we like, knowing full well that they are just pixels on a screen. We judge and critique them as we see fit. It is important to us because we rarely get that freedom in real life. Real people have real feelings. This is why breaking the fourth wall makes us feel so vulnerable. Our perception of the characters changes — they aren’t just characters anymore.
What’s fascinating is how something as simple as the fourth wall provides such deep insight into the human mind and its inner workings. It shows us how someone acknowledging our presence can feel both comforting and threatening to us — depending on the setting. It shows us that no matter how evolved we are, we are primal beings and will give in to our primal fears. But hey, at the end of the day, we can at least revel in the fact that there exists a video of Margot Robbie, in a bubble bath, teaching us economics. Right?
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