Hello and welcome back to the rapid fire series titled “Sean Catches Up.” Joking aside, I was sidelined by an unexpected medical challenge recently, so I’m catching up on the posts I didn’t write the last couple of weeks.
However, because I’ve been sidelined, I actually don’t have an update on any WIP, which is one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with medical issues. But even issues with my eyes can’t stop me from thinking about stories. So I’m going to talk about an aspect of storytelling in a visual medium that I’ve always found somewhat creepy, but isn’t utilized in the horror genre very much: the 4th wall break.
This is often used for comedic effect, as Abed put it in a late series episode of “Community,” “Jim-ing the camera.” Other examples that leap to mind are Ferris Bueller and, more recently, Deadpool, whose 4th breaks are canonically understood to be an aspect of his psychosis that makes him believe he’s a comic book character. But 4th wall breaks have a longer and more nuanced history.
Humanity started telling stories around the campfire before there was any system to write them down. Therefore, the story and the storyteller were inseparable. With the advent of writing systems, we started writing our stories down, pretty much the same way we would tell them aloud. The written form evolved to focus on dialogue and action rather than narration under the directive “show, don’t tell.”
In the visual media of storytelling, one person became many, acting out the story rather than just telling it. Even so, there was and still is, an aspect to theatrical performance called the “aside.” This is less of a character talking to the audience, but more a character thinking out loud for the audience’s benefit. Narration in the visual media, in other words. As theatrical performance tended more and more toward realism, the 4th wall slowly became understood to separate the audience from a story’s tellers. Almost immediately after it was established, however, storytellers were breaking the fourth wall. Like I said, mostly for comedic effect, but not always.
My first experience with a fourth wall break came as a young lad watching the Peter Pan (1954 Musical) on VHS. At one point, Hook poisons Peter’s milk but, to save Peter, Tinkerbell drinks it instead. Filled with regret as the fairy lay dying, Peter suddenly turns to the camera and exhorts the audience to clap if they believe in fairies, to save Tinkerbell’s life. This may have played great in a packed theatre, but to a kid watching a movie alone in his house, it was pretty unnerving.
I randomly thought of this experience the other day, how I reacted to this first 4th wall break, and I started thinking about other examples that aren’t played for comedic effect. For example, on the last page of Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, Deadpool breaks the fourth wall to say to the reader, “I’ll find you soon enough.” The opening line of Slender Man is “Don’t take this personally, but I don’t like you very much.”
So the idea I had was to write a horror story that used 4th wall breaks as its central leitmotif. But what I had was an idea, not necessarily a story idea. I didn’t have a character or a plot, just an aspect of a story. I tinkered around with it a little bit, seeing if I could develop a character or story to give the idea a vehicle, but I (so far) haven’t come up with anything.
This is an example of my adaptation of the saying “Nothing you learn is useless,” which is to say “Every idea is worth something.” Just because I don’t have a story for this aspect of story that I want to explore, doesn’t mean that I never will. I could probably come up with something if I continued poking around the edges to try to find a way into the story. But I’ve got enough story ideas and WIPs that have a more solid foundation that I’m able to let this one continue to marinate.
So there it is: just a little inside look at how I evaluate and develop ideas.
The Chimerical Dark 