Fourth wall

The fourth wall is an element of fiction. Originally, the term referred to the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a proscenium theater, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. The term now applies to the boundary between any fictional setting and its audience. When this boundary is broken (for example by an actor speaking to the audience directly through the camera in a television sitcom), it is called "breaking the fourth wall."

Origin and meaning

The term was made explicit by Denis Diderot and spread in nineteenth century theatre with the advent of theatrical realism. Critic Vincent Canby described it in 1987 as "that invisible screen that forever separates the audience from the stage." Another among early practitioners of this method (now referred to as the "Fourth Wall") is Thornton Wilder & his 1937 Play "Our Town".

The term "fourth wall" stems from the absence of a fourth wall on a three-walled set where the audience is viewing the production. The audience is supposed to assume there is a "fourth wall" present, even though it physically is not there. This is widely noticeable on various television programs, such as sitcoms, but the term originated in theatre, where conventional three-walled stage sets provide a more obvious "fourth wall".

The term "fourth wall" has been adapted to refer to the boundary between the fiction and the audience. "Fourth wall" is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience. The audience will accept the presence of the fourth wall without giving it any direct thought, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real events.

The presence of a fourth wall is one of the best established conventions of fiction and as such has led some artists to draw direct attention to it for dramatic or comedic effect. This is known as "breaking the fourth wall". For instance, in Puckoon, Spike talks to the author multiple times. Spike also at one stage in the book, looks to see what page the reader is on. Besides theatre and television, the term has been adopted by other media, such as cinema, comics, and more recently, video games. Though some table-top roleplaying games do allow for breaking the fourth wall, these are usually beer and pretzels type games.

Breaking the fourth wall

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Paul (Arno Frisch) smirks at the audience in the film Funny Games, which frequently breaks the fourth wall.

"Breaking the fourth wall" refers to a situation in which a character reveals his or her awareness of the audience. This can also be called metatheatre. The technique has been used for millennia: it was standard practice in Greek comedy. For instance, at one point in the Greek playwright Aristophanes' play Peace, the hero Trygaeus (who is being lifted into the air by a crane situated offstage) tells the crane-handler to be more careful. The fourth wall didn't actually exist in Greek theatre; even in tragedies many characters spoke directly to the audience, aware of their existence.

Most often, the fourth wall is broken by having a character directly address the audience (one example is the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town). A similar effect can be achieved by having characters interact with objects outside the context of the work (e.g., a character is handed a prop by a stage hand). Another, by Paul from Funny Games; looking at the audience while Anne, the protagonist of the film is searching for her dog.

Productions of William Shakespeare's plays, which frequently feature asides and soliloquies which the characters in question presumably speak only to themselves, sometimes present the dialogue as being delivered directly to the audience. In Sir Laurence Olivier's 1955 film adaptation of Richard III, Olivier addresses the audience directly, a ground breaking technique in film. A notable case of Shakespeare breaking the fourth wall is the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Puck suggests to the audience that they pretend, should they have disliked the play they just saw, that the entire production was only a dream.

Sometimes, an actor in a play may physically penetrate the fourth wall. For example, in plays that involve sword (or other melee) fights, such as Romeo and Juliet, fighters may go into the audience. The reasons for doing this are plentiful, but the most obvious reason is that it helps draw the audience into the play.

Various artists have used this jarring effect to make a point, as it forces an audience to see the fiction in a new light and to watch it less passively. Bertolt Brecht was known for deliberately breaking the fourth wall to encourage his audience to think more critically about what they were watching, referred to as Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect").

Breaking the fourth wall is often employed for comic effect, as a sort of visual non-sequitur; the unexpected departure from normal narrative conventions is often surprising and creates humor. A very early example of this occurs in Francis Beaumont's play The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which contains three characters who are purportedly part of the audience. They frequently interrupt the performance and demand to be consulted on the plot, ordering a number of sudden (and usually extremely awkward) changes throughout the play, with often comical results.

Such exploitation of an audience's familiarity with the conventions of fiction is a key element in many works defined as post-modern, which dismantle established rules of fiction. Works which break or directly refer to the fourth wall often utilize other post-modern devices such as meta-reference or breaking character.

From the early days of sound motion pictures, stage-to-screen productions often broke this barrier, especially those of the Marx Brothers', most often by having a character look directly into the camera and speak to the audience. In their 1932 film Horse Feathers, for example, when Chico sits down at a piano to begin a musical interlude, Groucho turns to the camera and deadpans "I've got to stay here, but there's no reason why you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby until this thing blows over." Bob Hope, who also frequently addressed the audience, uses a similar gag in Road to Bali: just as Bing Crosby begins a number, Hope tells us, "He's gonna sing, folks. Now's the time to go out and get your popcorn." In the 1978 movie Animal House, John Belushi as Blutarsky, watches outside a coed's dorm window as she undresses. As he watches, he looks back over his shoulder at the camera and raises his eyebrows as if to say, "Can you believe this?" In the 1983 movie A Christmas Story, the fourth wall is broken just once when the character Ralphie, played by Peter Billingsley, is getting cleaned up by his mother after getting hit by a BB from his Red Ryder BB gun. During the scene, Ralphie looks directly at the camera and smiles to show the audience his pleasure that his mother believed the lie that he was actually hit by an icicle.

In is a 1986 comedy film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ferris breaks the fourth wall multiple times throughout the film. The 1988 film Casual Sex? begins with the main characters speaking to the audience, and breaks the fourth wall throughout the movie.

Many satirical comedy movies use the fourth wall by calling attention to how absurd or hackneyed certain elements of the plot are. Scary Movie involved a scene where the cast laughed at how the situation they found themselves in resembled a bad horror movie, and then joked that the producers would have hired people in their twenties to portray their teen characters. In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back the cast at several points asked who would watch a movie based on the titular characters before pausing to stare at the camera. The movies produced by Mel Brooks often involve a significant breaking of the fourth wall, from a brawl that spreads into the rest of the movie studio in Blazing Saddles to various characters referencing the movie script in Robin Hood: Men In Tights after an unexpected plot twist (specifically, when Robin misses during the archery contest Robin finds this strange, takes out a copy of the script and finds that he gets another shot; when Prince John and the Sheriff hear this they take out their own copies of the script and confirm Robin's assertion).

Films from Hal Roach regulars Laurel and Hardy often featured Oliver Hardy looking towards the camera to garner sympathy (albeit in the form of laughter) from the audience for either Stan Laurel's seemingly unbelievable, naive activities or for "another fine mess" he'd gotten them into, usually resulting in harm coming to "Ollie".

In Annie Hall, Diane Keaton's character mistakenly says "wife" instead of "life". Woody Allen's character points this out. She denies it and so he turns to the camera and says "You heard that!".

The technique was arguably first employed in the modern sense in the sensational 1921 premiere of Pirandello's play Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), wherein six ordinary people come to the rehearsal of a play to demand that their stories be told as part of the performance. This type of fourth wall breaking is also used in The Aliens Are Coming! The Aliens Are Coming! when it becomes impossible to tell what is 'real' and what is not in the play, as the aliens end up everywhere.

The fourth wall is sometimes included as part of the narrative, when a character discovers that they are part of a fiction and 'breaks the fourth wall' to make contact with "the real world", as in films like Tom Jones, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1963, Woody Allen's Annie Hall (with Marshall McLuhan) and The Purple Rose of Cairo, Last Action Hero and Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy novels. Both Peter Pan and Captain Hook break the fourth wall in the 1954 musical adaptation of Peter Pan. George Burns commonly addressed the audience in his 1950s TV comedy show, and sometimes even watched it on TV in another room. More recently The Truman Show depicted a man whose entire life was a TV show and how he broke through the fourth wall to discover the real world.

The fourth wall has also been broken in literature such as The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote by Jorge Luis Borges, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, Travelling People by B.S. Johnson, Double or Nothing by Raymond Federman, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, which has the author inserting himself into the story and discussing the possible endings he was considering, thus causing the reader to wonder which ending he would choose. It can be intentional; some television series involve a character telling the audience important facts, such as citing statistics on gun violence in schools, helping people with certain kinds of diseases, coping with death in the immediate family, and so on.

The fourth wall is frequently broken in cartoons, often in ways difficult or impossible with live actors. Perhaps one of the most humorous is to "fight the iris": right before the picture ends and while the image is diminished by a contracting circle, a character forces the "eye" open to interject a wry comment or complaint. The character may appear onscreen after the iris is closed, walking or running over a solid black background. The award-winning cartoon Duck Amuck breaks the fourth-wall for the entire running-time, with Daffy Duck arguing with the off-screen animator (Bugs Bunny) throughout the cartoon. In a similar vein, characters can occasionally be seen in other episodes, running right off the "edge" of the display, leaving them standing in a blank white space, accompanied by a stretch of movie film rolling by along one edge of the screen. In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello decodes a villain's clue as written in latitude and longitude, Raphael makes an aside comment, "And they say cartoons aren't educational."

In traditional British pantomime, the audience is encouraged and expected to break the fourth wall by interacting with the cast--booing the villains, who will often respond, cheering the heroes, who will often thank the audience, and by providing hints to the characters as to what to do next, e.g. shouting 'he's behind you' when the villain is sneaking up on the hero, or 'She's in the cellar' when Prince Charming is searching for Cinderella who has been locked in the basement by the Ugly Sisters.

Comics can occasionally break the fourth wall, as Marvel Comics characters Deadpool, Spider-Man and She-Hulk are aware that they are comic book characters. The Joker often addresses the comic reader and has even at times forced his way out of the comic frames to do things such as help turn the page. The comic character Opus is also aware that he is a comic character, and usually consults with the "Creator" character (Berkeley Breathed, the artist). Also in a Peanuts comic that can be found in the book Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schlutz shows Schroeder playing piano and he gets a perfect pitch. When he tells Charlie Brown he tells Schroeder that he must mean "A perfect pitch" and that baseball season is over besides. Schroeder then responds as he walks off, "Sometimes I should put for a transfer to a new comic strip!" In the Marvel Comics of the 1960s, Stan Lee's style of writing regularly broke the fourth wall when writing captions and narration.

Another way of breaking the fourth wall is when a character changes a part of the scene; for example, in Chowder, Schnitzel is often instructed by Mung Daal to change the scene when they are running low on time. In another episode, Chowder starts practicing his writing on the screen, until Gazpacho wipes it off. Chowder asks "about that [drawing]", and points to the Cartoon Network watermark. Gazpacho responds that "It doesn't come off. I know. I've tried." In the February 12, 2009 episode of Chowder, after all the kitchens money is spent, the characters announce there is no money for animators, at which time the actual real-life voice actors are shown and have to wash cars until they earn enough money for animation once again. One SpongeBob SquarePants episode has a similar method, as SpongeBob is nervous about painting Mr. Krabs' walls and tells himself he will start to work, but it takes about three hours before Patrick says "Can you move it along? I'm running out of time cards."

In reality shows such as The Real World, breaking the fourth wall can refer to a direct interaction between the cast and crew.

In the video game Paper Mario:The Thousand-Year Door, an poorly disguised villain speaks to the player, saying, "You there! In front of the TV. Don't tell the red guy who I am!"

The fourth wall can also be broken when a celebrity reveals an intense interaction with fans. This recently happened when bassist of Fall Out Boy, Pete Wentz, submitted a Twitter that let the Livejournal community 'icecreamhdaches' know that he reads their comments.

"Fifth wall"

Main article: Fifth wall

See also

• Corpsing
• Gaze
• Kayfabe, a similar concept in professional wrestling
• Descartes' philosophy - The concept of reality itself being illusory.
• Alternate reality game
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off