604 – Breaking the Fourth Wall

As writers, we spend a lot of time crafting our narration to feel natural and immersive. But what happens to that immersion when we break that illusion to address the audience directly? This week, we’re discussing fourth wall breaks: what they are, how they’re used, and why some feel like endearing jokes while others are just awkward interruptions.

Show Notes

• The Tale of Genji
• Can Framing Devices Be Better Than Terrible?
• 409 – Monologues
• Why Realism Is Toxic to Fiction
• Who Wins on Engagement: Buffy, Supernatural, or Teen Wolf?
• 532 – Making Your Story Immersive
• Lampshading in Stories: What It Is and How to Do It
• How to Write Jokes
• The Ember Island Players
• The Princess Bride
• Interview with the Vampire
• Discworld
• Little Women
• She-Hulk
• House of Cards
• Too Many Storytellers Blame the Audience
• How to Avoid Writing a Bait-and-Switch Story
• Dungeon Crawler Carl Reveals the Ups and Downs of LitRPG

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.

Chris: And I’m Chris.

Oren: Did you know that we are actually recording a podcast for an audience? 

Chris: You mean we were inside the podcast the whole time?

Oren: Yeah, that’s why I often have to make jokes to break the tension. It’s not just a normal, natural thing I do. It’s part of a bit. 

Chris: Wow! I thought we were just talking.

Oren: Yeah, you would think that, but actually this whole thing is organized by the “Shadow Mage.”

Chris: [Laughter] Oh.

Oren: Yeah, don’t worry about it.

Chris: Don’t worry about it. Not gonna be a problem ever again.

Oren: So today we are talking about breaking the fourth wall, which is a kind of a hard topic to adjust to a podcast opening bit. Not really a narrative format.

Chris: Yeah. We tried, okay?

Oren: So now I’m going to read the whole text of “Why We Use the Fourth Wall and Why We Break It” by Chris Winkle, because, you know, that basically just has everything I was gonna say in it already.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, let me introduce what the fourth wall is. I do find the origin of the term to be very interesting and revealing.

So it comes from plays—which a lot of things do because that’s the oldest form of professional storytelling. It’s not that we didn’t have books around, but they were much rarer and people went and saw theater. So a lot of our, like, old storytelling terms all come from theater.

Oren: It’s certainly quite old and the theater predates the novel by quite some time. I don’t know if it’s the oldest professional form of storytelling, but it certainly has a venerable history.

Chris: And there might be some, like, really old novels, but they weren’t—they didn’t come into vogue until printing got cheaper.

Oren: Well, like, the first novel I think is generally considered to be The Tale of Genji. Tale of Genji is from 1021, and I’m sure that you can quibble about whether or not that is actually the first novel, but that’s 1021 CE, whereas theater exists in thousands of years BC. So theater definitely predates novels.

Chris: I mean, in the West it’s in ancient Greece, but not ancient Egypt. I’m sure in China it’s older.

So the fourth wall basically means that when the actors are acting on stage, instead of that there’s an audience there watching them, they pretend that that border of the stage between them and the audience has a solid wall. And so they cannot see that people are watching them. They just act as though the audience is not there.

This basically now is what we used for any convention, which is in most, almost all stories to some extent, where we’re pretending that the story is real instead of being fiction. Because if actors were to acknowledge the audience, they would also be, like, calling attention to the fact that this is a fictional story. Because you know, in like, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo thinks that Juliet is dead. He doesn’t also think that there’s people watching him mourn Juliet. To make that immersive we gotta cut that out.

Oren: There are various stages of it. Like, if a character in a story straight up says, “Wow, this chapter’s kind of boring, huh?” that’s probably a fourth wall break. Unless you’re doing some kind of story within a story, in which case they’re only breaking the inner story’s fourth wall. That gets confusing. But in most cases that would pretty unambiguously count.

But then you have things like characters having monologues, which is weird. Like, obviously that’s not something that a character would do just on their own, like they’re not soliloquying to themselves. But they also don’t directly acknowledge that they’re giving this to an audience, so, eh, gray area.

Chris: Breaking the fourth wall, of course, like literally in theater is when we do something other than pretend there’s a solid wall there. But like now when we’re thinking about it metaphorically, we mean something that just calls attention to the fact that the story isn’t real, and that reminds people of the fiction in a way that’s often disruptive. 

What we’re doing when we suspend disbelief we’re pretending the story is real, is we’re engaging in compartmentalized thinking on purpose so that we can hold two facts in our mind simultaneously, where we have the real world where we know that there are actors on stage, or if we’re reading a book, we know that this book has an author.

But then we can also hold it to be true that the characters are real, and they’re in a real fantastical place. Even though those facts are contradictory, we can play along with both of them, and so that’s compartmentalized thinking. But we keep them separate. We don’t want to think about, like, Romeo and Juliet usually within the context of having an audience, so we have to compartmentalize them.

But if we were to break the fourth wall in that moment, we would have to reconcile all of these scenes of, you know, Romeo and Juliet having their, like, private love affair that’s like secret with the fact that they’re being watched by an audience. That mix of reality and story can, like, create cognitive dissonance that we would then have to, like, reconcile.

Oren: It kills immersion. It makes it harder for you to immerse yourself in the story and to, you know, let the events carry you away. Because once you start thinking, “No, none of this is real, none of this matters,” it’s like, that’s not good most of the time. Usually, that’s not how you approach fiction. That doesn’t mean that you should never do it, it’s just why it isn’t the norm.

The most obvious use for it is when you want to make a joke. That’s probably the most common, at least in speculative fiction. You see it a lot on TV. If something is supposed to be funny, there’s gonna be lines like, “I’ve lived in Sunnydale for a long time, and you know what I’ve never seen? A big honking castle.” That’s kind of a fourth wall break. That’s calling attention to the fact that this thing is not real.

Chris: So a fourth wall break, as we said, it’s gonna break immersion typically, and it’s going to lower the sense of realism in the story. Events just have less impact when they feel less real and credible. You know, realism is really restrictive, so you don’t necessarily want super high realism in your story, but you also usually want as much realism as fits what you’re doing.

If we’re coming up with a joke that breaks the fourth wall, the question is, why are we not worried about breaking immersion and, like, lowering the realism level? Now with something like Buffy, where we’re making that joke, it’s already really campy. The realism level’s not very high, so not really worried about putting in a joke right there.

That one is also a “lampshade,” where the expectation is viewers of that episode seeing a castle and knowing this is just a small town, what are the chances in a small town in the United States that there would be a castle? There’s a good chance their immersion is already gonna break with this very contrived thing that’s just showed up.

Oren: It’s a silly episode.

Chris: And so there’s already something unbelievable that’s likely to break their immersion. So by lampshading it, we’re able to smooth it over and just have a laugh over it and then move on. Yes, we acknowledged a castle’s not realistic. And so that’s why breaking immersion to make this joke in particular pays off. There’s already not very much realism, and there’s already not very much immersion.

Oren: And you can compartmentalize it too. Like Avatar is famous for doing “The Ember Island Players” episode, which is self-contained, and in that one they make a bunch of fourth wall breaking jokes like, “Did Jet just die? It was kind of unclear.” That sort of thing. And that’s a weird thing for them to say. Like in context, they would probably not say that about Jet’s death considering that it was pretty upsetting. But the point is to make a joke about the production. 

Korra actually ends up doing the same thing in the last season because they had an episode that they didn’t have the budget to make. So they had to use a clip show, which would normally be terrible but it’s full of hilarious jokes. Or at least it was in like 2014 when I watched it. We’re in a re-watch right now, so we’ll see if I still like it when we get to it. 

Chris: Breaking the fourth wall is great for jokes because it is usually surprising. Maybe it wouldn’t be surprising if you have a story that is just constantly breaking the fourth wall. Then it would probably lose some of its surprise value and not be as funny.

We don’t normally break the fourth wall. Usually that’s the exception, not the rule. So then when you break it you get the surprise, which is required for jokes. It’s easier to create humor that way and so we can get some very funny jokes. Like the Buffy, you know, “Dawn’s in trouble again. It must be Tuesday.”

Oren: Which is an interesting example of breaking the fourth wall without making it kind of absurdist. I think partly because when she says, “Must be Tuesday,” I didn’t even realize until you wrote that in your article that that was a reference to the fact that the show airs on Tuesday—or at least it used to. I had no idea. I thought that was just like the character making a dark joke about how Dawn is always in trouble. It’s interesting. That one worked on several levels.

Chris: Because it’s very similar to “for him it was Tuesday,” which is another way of saying, yeah, it happens all the time. I always saw that as a fourth wall break.

That was, in fact, the first episode of Buffy I ever saw! I just happened to be at a con and there was a sing-along with that episode. And so to me that’s always been a fourth wall break, but yeah, that one can kind of disguise itself as maybe not a fourth wall break.

Oren: Some people use fourth wall breaks to introduce commentary.

Chris: This one is interesting because usually there are better ways to do commentary. Obviously, there’s lots of ways of sending messages in the story itself through character opinions or what people are struggling against and all that. But like, if you want to comment on storytelling itself, what most writers do is they use a fictional fourth wall break instead of a real one.

Funny to think about whether breaking the fourth wall itself is real or fictional! But basically, if you put a story in your story, then you can have your main character engaging with the characters that are in their book they’re reading. That’s how you create that sort of meta commentary about storytelling.

If you’ve ever seen The Princess Bride and we open with the kid and his grandpa, and they’re reading The Princess Bride, the story’s always stopping so then they can discuss the book some more. That would be like a fictional fourth wall break. It doesn’t really risk jarring the actual viewers—the real world viewers too much because we already know the story within a story is fictional. We’re not… In The Princess Bride maybe there’s a little exception because we spend so much time with the inner-story characters, then it’s more like a framing device—the kid and his grandpa. We’re really fully immersed in the whole Westley and Buttercup story. But again, if you bring the fourth wall break often enough. So maybe that could be considered a true fourth wall break because of how much time we spend in that inner story. But if you bring it back often enough people get used to it and it’s not jarring anymore.

Oren: That’s the technique used by common friend of the show, Interview with the Vampire; season one to greatest effect and then season two to a certain degree. It is an actual interview. The guy doing the interview is asking questions and probing and poking at inconsistencies, which is super cool and an interesting use of commentary.

But we know that the outer level story containment is intact. They don’t turn to the camera to be like, “I wonder if this interview is also an interview with somebody else,” looking at camera, right? They don’t do something like that.

Chris: [Laughs] That one is almost a bit like the equivalent of unreliable narration. Because it’s not purely fictional, the story that’s being told in Interview with the Vampire, right? It’s supposed to be the character’s actual history. It’s almost like we don’t really have a fourth wall there because we’re both in the same world, but then we’re pointing out about the unreliability of the character speaking his own history. So I almost think that’s a little bit more analogous to unreliable narration.

Oren: And you can also have something like Discworld, which has things that kind of look like fourth wall breaks, but in the context of Discworld are not necessarily. You know, Discworld has characters talking about how if you have a one in a million shot it will always hit. But if you have like, a one in a 999,000 shot that’s gonna miss ’cause those odds are impossible.

Chris: So I would definitely classify that as a fourth wall break that is both joke and commentary. ‘Cause we’re calling attention to the fictionality of the work, but we’re also making a joke about stories in general. So we’re making some commentary on storytelling, and it’s just a good joke. 

Oren: Discworld is also just a place where that sort of thing is sort of literally true, at least sometimes.

Pratchett will sometimes turn that off when he doesn’t wanna deal with it, but often that’s just literally how the world works. Over time it kind of stops feeling like a fourth wall break. It just becomes a thing the characters do ’cause you get used to it.

Chris: The nice thing about that, of course, is when Terry Pratchett is doing that he’s commenting on stories in general. He’s not commenting on his own story. Because storytellers who comment on their own stories are often kind of obnoxious! 

Honestly, when we saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, that was actually one of the lesser where she actually had something to say about the story and about the author who wrote it. For anybody who’s not familiar, the character Jo in Little Women, who is often called the main character but honestly in the book she doesn’t really seem more important than the other sisters in my opinion. But she’s based on the author of the book. So in the Little Women she writes in the original book—but in the movie they always have her write the book in the movie, so she writes Little Women in the movie Little Women. Not a thing that is done in the book. And it’s a little recursive, but not necessarily a fourth wall break, ’cause you could tell the story of how you wrote a novel in your novel if you want to.

Oren: It’s a little meta, but it’s not quite a fourth wall break.

Chris: But then she has the character Jo meet with the publisher to talk about the ending. And then after they make an agreement about the ending, then we move to the actual ending in the movie. The intent there was to make the end of the movie seem fictional because the author wanted a different ending and the publisher forced a particular ending on her. But we also are not willing to actually take that ending away because now it’s classic.

<st