Breaking the Fourth Wall

In her TedTalks lecture called The Politics of Fiction, Elif Shafek discussed how literature allows readers to embrace different experiences and understand and connect with the lives of others. Stories in literature and film have the ability to make an audience completely immersed and invested in the story of a person who is often fictional, but some actually have the ability to make the viewer feel as if they had been picked up and dropped right beside the character in the story, or even become the character in the story. The same effect is possible in other forms of visual art as well. Such an effect can be created in film by capturing scenes in POV shots, making the characters look or speak directly to the camera (what is referred to as breaking the fourth wall) altering sound so that it seems as though the audience is hearing it in person themselves as they have heard it in real life situations (for example, when a character dives underwater and the only sounds are the muffled splashing noises one would hear if they were swimming) as well as many other techniques.

In Jean Pierre Jeunet's film Amelie, Amelie often breaks the fourth wall. It is something that allows the audience to get to know her and become attached to her character, as she rarely speaks throughout the film. In this scene, Amelie is introduced again to the audience as an adult in the present after they have learned about her childhood and family.

In literature, the "fourth wall" is broken by switching to second person perspective. It seems that second person is used in pivotal moments, often to evoke a sense of urgency or seriousness. In Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore, the third person perspective of Nakata's suddenly but smoothly transitions into second person when Nakata kills "Johnny Walker." What happens in reading this part of the novel is the reader is so immersed in the urgency and suspense of what Nakata is doing that he or she does not realize at first that each action is now beginning with "you." Then, when he or she does realize, he or she feels more taken aback by the gory scenes being described, and are caused to be even more confused as to why Nakata is doing it. The reader is taken with the thought of "me? I'm not doing this!" and then "why is he doing this?" It is then that, at this point about halfway through the novel and now familiar with and attached to Nakata's character, that it dawns on the reader that there is something wrong with the situation, and suddenly becomes unreal and nightmarish.

Breaking the fourth wall in film is also used to heighten the entertainment value of a film, often by making a character do so in the beginning of a film, in which they introduce what the audience is about to see. In the preview for Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window, the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by explaining what happens to him in the movie in retrospect from after it had apparently already occurred, which can be thought of as a spoiler. The moment that he speaks to the camera this way is actually not in the movie but only in the preview. Here breaking the fourth wall is used for advertisement of the film. Instead of drawing the viewer as the events of the film unfold or as an introduction to the film before the story even begins, the audience is spoken to directly by one of the characters even before they see the film.