Knocking on the Fourth Wall

One of the comedic elements that I appreciated most about the great, recently late, 30 Rock was its willingness to break the fourth wall and acknowledge its audience.  This is by no means a new technique, although there were many ways that the writers had a new take on this approach.*  One of my more favorite ones was an obvious plug for Verzion, after which, Tina Fey’s character turned to the screen and asked, “Can we have our money now?”  Breaking the fourth wall allows the audience to become even more embroiled in the action.  Consider Matthew Broderick’s star turn in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  The film was amazing in and of itself, but by having the main character address the audience in a conspiratorial manner, it felt as though we were a part of this fantastic, impossible day.  Perhaps it is easier to believe, or at least accept as plausible, an unusual situation when you’re involved with it on level that you would not be normally.

An argument could be made that first-person narration starts to deconstruct the fourth wall, but in Wodehouse the style is more gentle than blatant.  In the later Jeeves and Wooster novels, when Bertie makes reference to the Scripture Knowledge prize or his article on What the Well-Dress Gentleman is Wearing that was published in his aunt’s magazine, he usually states that the reader probably knows all about them.  I was a little thrown, then, when I was reading Laughing Gas last month, and came across this quotation: “The Hitlers and Mussolinis of the picture world… What do they do?  They ship these assortments of New York playwrights and English novelists out here and leave it all to them.  Outside talent doesn’t get a chance.”**  It just so happens that Wodehouse was one of those English novelists in Hollywood.  My Wodehouse-man uncle told me that Plum was drummed out of Tinseltown for publicly acknowledging that he was earning a lot of money for almost no work.  This passage felt almost as though it was an apology to the native writers he must have met during his time there.  Like most of Wodehouse, though, nothing is blatant.  The fourth wall is merely being touched, not shattered.

Speaking of being shattered, anyone who is recovering from a wretched marriage or a cruel break-up should not touch Gone Girl with even a fifty-foot pole.  This novel annihilates the fourth wall, drawing the audience in to some extremely tawdry events that make you question the basic decency of humanity.  It is beautifully written and constructed, but its soul is black and I wonder at the wisdom of reading such things (for the record, I‘m pressing on because it is for a book club).  I am reminded of a Nietzche quotation that I came across last week: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”  Sometimes, there are very good reasons to have walls protecting people. 

*Now that I’m thinking about it though, I wonder when it began.  I was involved with a few Shakespearian productions when I was younger.  While my dim, addled memory does not recall a stage direction requiring the actor to address the audience, I do know that it happens all the time.  Perhaps it was a trick in live stage productions used to draw in an audience that became more formalized later on.  Who knows.  There is probably a doctoral thesis all about this moldering away in the bowels of a library somewhere. 

** For reference, this novel was written in 1936, I.e. before the start of WW II.  There is a lot of debate surrounding some controversial radio broadcasts he made during the conflict about whether Wodehouse was politically naïve.  Reading this casts massive shadows of doubt on this for me.