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An Alternative Guide to Breaking the Fourth Wall

Or: How To Be in a Less Well-Known Film and Act like You're Ferris Bueller

By Paddy GarriganPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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Well, would you?

What do we need more of in the troubling times of 2017? That's right! More meta in our media! But you can forget [Thor: Ragnarok spoilers] and concentrate on characters treating you like you're their very best bud. You lucky so-and-so.

JCVD

He who.. smelt it?

If you’ve never seen, heard about, glimpsed a frame of, or been anywhere near an .mp4 of JCVD, then let's lay it out for you.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is part of a hostage situation in a Post Office near Brussels. So far, so Van. But throw in an existential crisis, the fact that he's playing himself, and the lack of any real explosions and we're moving away from Kickboxer just a tad.

It’s safe to say a traditional encounter with the Muscles from Brussels this is not. And so, around halfway through the film something so strange happens it’s hard to be sure you didn’t fall asleep and dream it. Mr. Van Dammage sits on a chair that rises magically above the set and delivers an uninterrupted, 6 minute, unsurprisingly oblique monologue on his life.

It comes more-or-less out of nowhere, but feels entirely right given the situation Jean-Claude finds himself in. Entirely baffling. And completely brilliant.

(Also it's definitely not on point but absolutely important to note that the cinematographer of JCVD is called Pierre-Yves Bastard. You're welcome.)

A Cock and Bull Story

Cook a cat.

Five minutes in and this film is already so meta it hardly seems worth mentioning the moments that Tristram Shandy addresses us directly. Fourth wall broken. Tick. Move on. But...

Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of arguably the first post-modern novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, is not a straight retelling of the prose. It’s a film about making the film itself, and any further explanation would really only serve to complicate matters entirely. So just know that there is a moment in the movie when the actor Steve Coogan, who is playing a character named Steve Coogan, is playing Tristram Shandy, who is present at his own birth. And falls out of a giant womb. It's hysterical, but it's not historical.

Funny Games

Terry Christian's let himself go.

Whilst not addressing us as viewers directly, a character in both the original and remake of Michael Haneke’s bleak, grim thriller does something so startling that the division of people considering it genius, and those denouncing it as nonsense, falls right down the middle.

A hostage situation (is anyone else sensing a theme?) goes a little awry when one of the captives grabs a gun and manages to shoot one of the two hostage takers. The non-injured captor frantically searches around the living room they’re in, finds the television remote control, and simply rewinds the film we’re watching. We literally see the gunshot un-happen, the captive un-grasp the weapon and finally, when the movie resumes, the home invader gets to the gun first.

A moment so disturbing that it really works... in getting people all seriously pissed off about the movie, one way or the other.

Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back

Hold it. Hoooold it.

Think whatever you're going to about Kevin Smith. You do you. But he was getting some shit right in the 90s. (And, 2001, which is when.. shut up.)

Pretty straight forward one this, given that the whole film is just screaming about how much it wants you to know how clever it is (in a good way!). Jay and Bob are standing around (with Ben Affleck, natch), and our heroes are coming to a realisation that they need to stop a film about themselves being made for reasons relating to, well, otherwise this film wouldn't exist. It's left up to Ben Affleck to muse...

I mean, I don't think I'm alone in the world in imagining this flick may be the worst idea since Greedo shooting first. You know it, but... a Jay and Silent Bob movie? Feature length? Who'd pay to see that?

Cue knowing look to camera from all three performers and CUT! PRINT IT!

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

"I sure hope I get a longer run than that Scottish one!"

This is included not because it’s a great moment in film history but because a Bond film, just once, tells us that it knows exactly what it is. George Lazenby’s one and only foray into the world of 007 begins almost immediately with a fourth-wall breaking moment so startling that it could give you whiplash.

Mr. Bond saves future Mrs. James Bond (Diana Rigg) from a host of various attackers, before she rebuffs him and leaves in his car, causing Bond to sit back on his most trusted weapon; wit. Nothing wrong with that in a Bond film, you say? Well, how about the fact that the chosen line is “This never happened to the other fellow” followed by the tiniest of glances into the camera. It’s both a nod to Connery’s success at being Bond and the single bravest attempt at giving the franchise new boy a different introduction. They haven’t done it since, mind you.

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About the Creator

Paddy Garrigan

A film maker, writer and motion designer from the UK. Unhealthy obsessions include 90's films, British sitcoms, and batter.

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