Breaking the Fourth Wall
The fourth wall is an imaginary “wall”
dividing the audience from the action of the set. Breaking this wall occurs
either when the audience is directly addressed by someone within the set or
when someone within the set acknowledges that they are fictional.
This can have the effect of humour, as it
brings the characters out of the fictional story into the real world.
Examples of this are in The Emperor’s New
Groove as the llama will pause what is happening on the screen and directly
address the audience to try to explain what is happening in the film from his
perspective. He literally scribbles on the fourth wall. This has the intended
effect of humour for older audiences (parents, older siblings etc) who might be
watching the film with younger children. They are more likely to understand
this concept of humour than younger children.
In Two and a
Half Men, there is a scene that has three incidents of where the fourth
wall is broken. Watch
this clip bellow ↓
Firstly, Walden
breaks the fourth wall by hinting that they are in a TV drama by saying “Sort
of like a recap on a reality show?” This has the intended effect of humour, because
they are in fact on a TV show. He then says, “Shame we can’t let America vote
on it”, which again he is hinting at something which would be possible to do
and again breaking the fourth wall as he toys with the idea that they are on a
television program, rather than accepting the fact that they are fictional
characters. To these subtle breaking the fourth wall attempts more obvious,
Alan then goes and makes this very obvious by turning to face the camera,
looking directly at the audience and saying “or can we?” The fact that he looks
straight on at the camera alone is significant to breaking the fourth wall, as
in most TV dramas, the characters will address each other by facing each other,
not the audience. Also by saying “or can we?” he is questioning his own reality
and his place within that TV series. This, again, has the intended effect of
humour.
Another effects
of breaking the fourth wall could be to scare the audience. I could not find
any examples of this for films or TV, however there are many video games that
will use the breaking of the fourth wall to scare the player. For example,
Eternal Darkness, which has a sanity bar, will produce game like glitches on
purpose in order to cause the player to feel scared and uncomfortable, such as turning
the volume down to silent automatically during a tense fighting scene.
One final subtle
example of breaking the fourth wall is in Scrubs. Season 8 episode 1, at the
very beginning JD walks along the corridor towards the camera. He then turns to
the side and points down at the bottom right hand corner of the screen and
says, “That’s new”. His finger is pointing at the “abc” logo, but within the TV
drama it is implied that he is pointing at the janitors watch. The relevance of
this is that Scrubs, previously owned by NBC, was now being screened by abc. By
JD pointing out the watch being new, he also shows that the abc logo is new.
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