This week’s 3x3 – our favorite instances of movies that break the fourth wall – begins at the 48-minute mark of the podcast. Our picks:
Tom
3. Fight Club
2. Funny Games
Kelly Wand
3. Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
2. Persona
Dingus
3. Amelie
2. Love and Death
Blazing Saddles
Pretty in Pink
Peter Pan
So many choices:
I vividly remember the final shot of 4,3,2, and as Dingus said, it was indeed "
“breathtaking.” However, I’m not sure it’s an instance of breaking the fourth wall. The scene is shot through the restaurant window, and you can see the headlights of passing cars outside. When I watched the movie the first time, I thought the blonde was simply looking outside the restaurant, and we were catching a glimpse of her true emotions now that she was no longer trying to hide them from the other girl or herself. I didn’t get any sense she was looking specifically at the audience or camera. I rewatched the scene on Youtube, but it wasn’t high resolution enough to tell where she’s looking. Without any cue that she’s looking at the camera, I would say she’s just looking out the window.
JCVD. A not-great movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme playing himself. The movie is basically a heist-gone-wrong picture, with JC as one of the guys held hostage by the hapless robbers. Towards the end, there’s an astonishing monologue delivered directly to the camera by JC where he basically apologizes to his fan base for being such a fuck-up. It’s weird and strangely touching, and makes me wish that I liked the movie it was in a lot more.
Blazing Saddles - which doesn’t really break the fourth wall so much as gleefully pulverize it into dust. The climax of the movie has a massive brawl break out of the film itself into a nearby Busby Berkeley style musical next door on the same lot, and Bart and the Waco Kid leave the fight to go to a theatre playing Blazing Saddles to find out how the movie ends.
Any Marx Brothers movie, pretty much. There’s a great bit in Horse Feathers where Groucho tells the audience to go to the lobby until one of the musical numbers blows over.
3) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
I picked this one mainly because I couldn’t think of many others. But I still liked it, and I thought that Robert Downey’s characteristic insouciance played into it very well. I thought it was clever the way the actual plot was about a mystery playing out the way mystery novels always do – with mystery novels actually as part of the plot. But then the breaking of the fourth wall allowed them to kind of predict the cliches but also comment on them.
2) The Truman Show
This is kind of a cheat, but I would say that this movie is about breaking the fourth wall. There are numerous instances where we (the audience) are put in the shoes of the “show audience” by the camera choices, and then Truman or some other character looks at or addresses us directly. But the moment I’m thinking of is actually when his friend Marlon, played by Noah Emmerich, pops his head out of a hole in the ground, comes face-to-face with the camera. Christof, over the radio says, “Don’t look at the camera! Say something!”. Marlon breaks the fourth wall and says “What? He’s gone!” And that’s when they are forced to cut transmission, which sends shockwaves through the watching public. Great moment.
1) Trading Places
I could give an explanation for this, but why don’t I just give you a link? I’m not gonna spoil it or tell you why I love this one so much. Just watch the first 52 seconds.
Mike, you remember the scene because it breaks the fourth wall. Here’s a screen capture from the Netflix instant play version:
Part of what makes the scene so effective is that they are behind a window and Mingiu, the director, has let the scene play out long enough that you know they’re behind that window. You see the headlights moving across the window. You get a sense that the two women are behind glass, separated from you, much like they have been throughout the movie you’ve been watching. As Anamaria Marinca turns her head, it makes sense that she’s just going to look out the window.
But the reason the moment is so effective and shocking is that she looks directly at us. After the girls’ agreement never to talk about this again, she looks at us, she acknowledges us, almost as if to draw us into the agreement or to challenge us whether we’ll honor it. “We’re never going to talk about this again. What are you going to do?”
I don’t want to go into movie douche mode, but I maintain that this final shot – shocking and breathtaking and abruptly cut off – is a key to understanding what Christian Mingiu is getting at with his movie about Communism and abortion, about the legacy of his country and the plight of some women. Whereas most movie end with a period, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days end with a comma precisely because the fourth wall is broken.
-Tom
I’m going to give you a quote.
“There was an icicle…”
Also, I really wanted to bring up Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, but that movie entirely eluded me when I first saw it, and I haven’t been seen it again since I realized this. Plus, I don’t think Dingus or Kelly Wand has seen it.
But that’s another instance of the fourth wall not being broken, but arguably never having been there in the first place.
-TomAnnie Hall
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
One Wonderful Sunday
Oh, god, please don’t be talking about what I think you’re talking about. Is this an icicle that murders Stanley Tucci?
-Tom
“…you’re lucky it didn’t cut your eye! Those icicles have been known to kill people.”
“I had pulled it off!”
Awesome choice.
Haha! Thanks! I think that line you quoted is my favorite part of the whole thing. Paired with his face and then the way he quickly recomposes himself as his mother turns back around = awesome.
I think that besides The Muppet Movie, it’s my first fourth-wall break, and therefore special.
A runner-up to my list: JFK. At the end of Kevin Costner’s big emotional closing argument, he breaks the fourth wall for his final words of the speech. A tad preachy when you see it out of context, but the movie had won me over by that point and I thought it added power to the moment.
Hard to see on youtube, but you can view it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwoakFvvLIo
Ooooooooh, I just thought of another great one: the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The end of the movie has Kevin McCarthy flipping out on a highway as he sees the trucks full of pods going off to other towns and cities. It’s a great, downer, apocalyptic ending, but what pushes it into greatness is McCarthy staring directly into the camera as he screams “They’re here already! You’re next! YOU’RE NEXT!”
Ooh, that is a great one. I can see that scene in my mind, but he’s actually addressing the camera? Because that’s way cooler that Donald Sutherland making some weird mouth sound.
-Tom
Trading Places - That one look from Eddie Murphy, breaking the 4th wall and delivering a big laugh at the same time.
Fallen - “I wanna tell you about the time I almost died…”
And I’m pretty sure every Savage Steve Holland film in the 80s breaks the 4th wall at some point with a wink to the audience and I love every one of those movies.
I don’t recall a One Crazy Summer having a 4th wall moment.
I did love those films however.
It starts off with a wider (crane, maybe? it’s been a while) shot of him on the highway, and then closes in on him until he’s addressing the camera.