Fourth wall

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Frank breaks the fourth wall (and maybe a third as well) in this 2005 Liberty Meadows comic strip.

The fourth wall is the imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. The concept is generally presumed to have originated in nineteenth century theatre with the advent of theatrical realism.

Origin and meaning

Although it originated in theatre, where conventional three-walled stage sets provide a more literal "fourth wall", the term has been adopted by other media, such as cinema, television, and literature, to more generally refer to the boundary between the fiction and the audience.

The fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience. The audience will usually passively 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 effect. For instance, in A.R. Gurney's The Fourth Wall, a quartet of characters deal with housewife Peggy's obsession with a blank wall in her house, slowly being drawn into a series of theatre clichés as the furniture and action on the stage become more and more directed to the supposed fourth wall.

Breaking the fourth wall

The term "breaking the fourth wall" is used in film, theatre, television, and literary works when a character or other device makes the audience explicitly aware that they are viewing a work of fiction. The term originated from Bertolt Brecht's theory of "epic theatre" that he developed from (and in contrast to) Konstantin Stanislavski's drama theory. Most often, the fourth wall is broken through a character directly addressing the audience, although the same effect can be achieved by breaking character, through dialogue, or by the characters interacting with objects outside the context of the work (e.g. a character is handed a prop by a stage hand).

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 (often translated to "alienation effect").

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Breaking of the fourth wall in the video game, Final Fantasy V.

The sudden breaking of the fourth wall is often employed for comical effect, as a sort of visual non-sequitur; the unexpected breaking from normal conventions of narrative fiction can surprise the audience and create humour. A very early example of this occurs in Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which contains three characters who are purportedly part of the audience. They interrupt the prologue and demand to be consulted on the plot, ordering a number of sudden (and usually extremely awkward) changes throughout the play, with perhaps-hilarious 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.

A compromise to the concept often occurs in improvisational theater, in which the audience is asked to interact with the players to some extent, such as by voting on a resolution to a mystery. In that case, the audience members are treated as if they were witnesses to the action in the play, effectively becoming "actors" rather than being a true "fourth wall." This is a major tenet of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.

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 their audience, as seen in films such as the Last Action Hero or The Purple Rose of Cairo. In these situations however, the 'fourth wall' that the character breaks remains part of the overall narrative and the wall between the real audience and the fiction remains intact. These sorts of stories do not actually break the fourth wall in the strictest sense, but are more properly referred to as metafiction, or fiction that refers to the conventions of fiction.

It is arguable that this technique was first employed in the modern sense, (i.e. not in which an actor merely makes a clarifying aside to the audience, or clever implied self-references are made, but rather when the fourth wall is demolished to the point that there no longer remains any significant division between performance and audience, with drama joining reality or the exact opposite depending on one's perspective), 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.

Many children's shows (such as Dora the Explorer) have no fourth wall and the viewer is made a "character".

Examples of breaking the fourth wall in popular culture

The Stage Manager in Our Town breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience.
Groucho Marx directly addresses the audience, to humourous effect, in the first Marx Brothers film, The Cocoanuts.
In the finale to Blazing Saddles, the fight scene literally breaks down walls as the fight spills over into other movies being filmed on the movie lot, as well as into the commissary.

Origin and meaning

Breaking the fourth wall

Examples of breaking the fourth wall in popular culture

See also