Here we are, with my first proper post here in literal years, the first of many carried over from my Tumblr in some attempt towards legitimacy. This will be the most recent of those carried over from tumblr, originally written in March of 2021, so not long ago at all.
Let's get into it. Let’s talk about breaking the fourth wall and extrapolation of meta information in fictional multiverse universes–say, the Marvel cinematic vs the xmen films vs the comics. Let’s talk specifically about the Marvel multiverse.
As a general rule, the suspension of disbelief works better on paper than it does on video. The show Heroes was an excellent example of this problem. Remember Heroes? Like many pop culture greats, it was a critical darling until it flew itself directly into the sea. Heroes was the first notable time a TV show was made directly based on a comic book format, trying to emulate a comic book format. To keep the metaphor going, the plane took a nose dive when they tried to keep comic book pace, and to play by similar rules, i.e. the serial impermanence of death as a serious consequence. There is a reason why this didn't work. Long story short, the way that our brains consume literature and comics is different from how we consume photographic media like movies or tv. Video, like photography, convinces the brain that it’s depicting reality even when we logically know that it isn’t. Therefore, unless the rules of the video/TV world are well established as being different from our own, we apply to it our own real-world understandings of what is possible. If we see real, human people on the screen, our brains will apply real, human laws to the world. We are able to follow the fantastic more willingly when we’re imagining it (because we’re reading it) instead of seeing it with our senses.
Breaking the fourth wall and/or being self-referential is extremely tricky on video media because you’re forcing the audience’s brain to acknowledge that this is fiction, which can cause some cognitive dissonance if the goal of your show/movie is to create second world immersion. Second world immersion is, to roughly paraphrase the man who invented the concept as well as the majory of what we consider Fantasy Standard, the understanding that a fictional (secondary) world is fully self-actualized as separate and unique from our own world, has it's own clearly defined rules of reality, and can therefore be fully inhabited as if it is itself real. (Tolkien, the man is Tolkien.) Sitcoms are good at breaking the fourth wall because, with laugh tracks, live studio audiences, and a general lack of real-world consequences, our brains understand that it isn’t real. There is no clearly defined and self-sustaining Second World to be immersed in. Generally, they’re not trying to fool us into believing that they’re real. Still, if Chandler Bing suddenly turned around and made eye contact with the camera, that would be weird. It’s not established in that particular sitcom world that they understand that they’re fictional. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on the other hand, did that all the time.
But we’ll get back to Sitcoms, because WandaVision. As opposed to most sitcoms, most serious dramas and adventure-thrillers are trying to create a very different vibe. In order to function, you have to be fully engaged, and have to completely believe the second world you are currently in. Otherwise, the emotional experience falls short. Tonality must be consistent, whereas sitcoms can get away with having the odd emotional moment surrounded by a laugh track.
Marvel is very weird when it comes to second worlds and believable experiences, because Marvel films, tv, and comics all exist in the same multiverse (not to be confused with the same universe) but with wildly different tones. If you try to wrap your head around all of it as one body, it can give you a headache. Which is why I find it so interesting whenever they try to be meta.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe as we understand it is presented as a realistic second world. Yes, it’s fun action-adventure with magic and superheroes, but it is presented in a way that intends to feel real, and rationalizes its reality. In Tolkien's terms, it defines the rules of it's reality (again, a paraphrase, sorry JRR). It explains with technobabble and sciencebabble everything that it’s doing. It wants to feel real. There are a few examples of comedy in the MCU (AntMan, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor Ragnorok), but their silliness can for the most part be explained away. With the latter two, they take place in space with a cast of alien characters, and are painted with a flourescent paintbrush, so our brains allow that as an explanation of wackiness outside our own reality. For Ant-Man, I think it was a brilliant idea to make it a comedy because there was no way that film would have succeeded if they tried to make the audience take Ant-Man seriously on screen.
I love Ant-Man, there's going to be a whole post about Ant-Man, I promise. But I digress.
Importantly, even though these three films are funny and camp, they never lose their sense of realism, with emotional anchor points to keep them grounded. When these characters are in an ensemble, they lose their high camp aesthetic and become part of the realism whole.
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| Honestly, who was ever going to take this movie seriously without intentional comedy? |
Even when they say in the MCU, Oh look at this I'm an action figure, I’m in comic books, it’s presented as in-world realistic. These people are famous now, and they’re real life superheroes, so obviously action figures and comic books are being produced about them. It all makes sense. Even the X-Men films, as camp as they are, do this in their own realism bubble. I would argue the X-Men films actually have an advantage because you don’t have to suspend as much disbelief to believe mutation as you do to believe in a super suit that shrinks people (I love you Small Rudd).
Things get weird when the fourth wall is broken, and the multiverse is acknowledged, because the Marvel Cinematics have done an excellent job of creating stable, self-contained second worlds. The Deadpool films, the prime example of fourth-wall breaking in Marvel films/tv, are as good as they are at what they do because they go whole hog into breaking the fourth-wall and acknowledging how ridiculous it all is. We can break down why it works with three points:
1. Deadpool is the only person in the entire movie that acknowledges the fourth wall (I am pretty sure, it’s been a while since I’ve watched them, and when I do rewatch them I may come back and correct this). Because he alone is aware that he’s a fictional character in a wider fictional universe, it’s not weird when he references his actor being the Green Lantern or talks directly to the camera. It’s exactly what we expect from him. With Deadpool, we’re in on the joke but no one else is. And that’s funny.
2. The tone of the Deadpool films is intentionally absurd, funny, and sometimes downright stupid. Even when it gets serious, that becomes the joke. There is no cognitive dissonance because it’s consistent. See: Sitcom Logic. If the tone is light, breaking the fourth wall doesn’t jarr quite so much.
3. Deadpool is never in the other films, and for the most part the characters in Deadpool (beyond the odd brief cameo) aren’t in the greater universe (I say for the most part because of Colossus, but he was in one movie ages ago for like ten minutes it’s not the biggest deal, it's not in our present memory). It’s consistent, and it doesn’t become confusing because it’s contained in itself as a weird fourth-wall bubble on the side of the greater universe. Anything that happens to characters in the Deadpool films will not carry over to the more serious timeline.
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| Rest in Peace Shatterstar, we are never going to see you ever again. |
There is one place in which I would say that the Deadpool films miss the mark, and make a mess of things. By making that one joke where young 90s X-Men from the newest films are behind a door and quickly shut it before Deadpool sees them, a wrench is thrown in. The weirdness of the Deadpool films suddenly becomes an issue because the question is asked: Where do the Deadpool films sit in the timeline? The answer is that the Deadpool films don’t fit anywhere in the established X-Men Cinematic Timeline, and the mistake was having a group of characters from an X-Men film on screen at the same time even as a gag. In this moment, the Deadpool films are very suddenly part of the greater universe, rather than a sidecar referencing what’s going on inside. By doing this, Deadpool is not the only character breaking the fourth wall. Now the physical world is breaking the fourth wall, and our brains will try to make sense where they cannot make sense.
This one error aside, Deadpool does an excellent job of being a weird little fourth-wall meta bubble on the fringe of existence.
But let's talk fourth-wall breaker number two, WandaVision. WandaVision gets weird in a different but also very fun way.
WandaVision works in terms of meta referencing and occasional fourth-wall breaking in a very unique way for the first 3/4ths of the show, before it crumbles back into the main Marvel Cinematic Secondary Universe. The reasons for this are as follows:
1. Genre and tone. The show sets up from the beginning that this is a sitcom world, not gritty realism world. We as viewers understand a sitcom world, we know what to expect from a sitcom world. There was no surprise, all the advertising told us what we would be starting with, and it dives right in without any presense of not being a sitcom. We can laugh along with the laugh track when something odd, silly or referential happens and accept it as truth, because a sitcom generally does not pretend to be reality.
2. Whenever the fourth-wall breaks in a way that doesn’t make sense, it’s intentional. Wanda reacts accordingly. Something goes weird, she fixes it. When something goes weird for someone other than Wanda (Say, the Vision), the integrity of this sitcom world is called into question in an intentional way that tracks with what is actually going on in the gritty-realism world (acknowledging that we’re in a bubble within a bubble). This camp sitcom world breaks the fourth-wall within itself, not to us. Billy talking to the screen isn’t talking to us, he’s talking to the imagined viewer in-world.
3. Most of the meta-references are either subtle enough to be Easter eggs (like the Kick-Ass reference) or exist solely as fun gaffs that have no consequences and are never acknowledged as being meta (the Halloween costumes). I say most, because there is one big meta-reference that I think was a mistake, and where it kind of starts to fall apart in my eyes.
As much as I adore Evan Peters’ Pietro, as extremely happy as I was to see him on this show, this particular meta-reference was done in a way that breaks the second world illusion, because they pointed a big red sign at a meta reference and then tried to explain it without breaking into the multiverse.
The thing about breaking the fourth-wall and meta-referencing is that it has to be toungue-in-cheek to be sustainable. Our brains are accepting that this reference is for us, but to make it a serious part of the story requires an answer to the question: Why? By explaining that actually, this fake Pietro was Ralph the whole time, a real person who exists in this gritty realism universe, the illusion of tongue-in-cheek is gone. Suddenly, there is a person who brings into question the entire structure of the second world. Because this second world does not have access to the multiverse (Into the Spiderverse is wholly its own thing), it doesn’t make sense that this random guy who happened to be used by Agatha to play Pietro in Wanda's fantasy world looks exactly like Pietro from elsewhere in the multiverse. The joke becomes confusing, and we start trying to find answers where there are none.
In my opinion, there are two ways they could have solved that problem. 1. Never explain it. If you never explain it, it’s just a weird meta reference for us that also exists in Wanda’s fake-world that is in itself accessing the multiverse (see: the costumes), without touching the realism world outside the bubble.
2. What I’m now calling the Taika Waititi method. Give a nonsense explanation told with a straight face as a brush-off. Say, Wanda asks Agatha who this guy is, and she says something along the lines of, oh I don’t know I just pulled some random Pietro out of the universe, I never met the guy I had to improvise.
That all being said, there is an important point to Ralph!Pietro's existence, and that is to define the limits of creation. Ralph!Pietro tells us that Agatha was incapable of creating people from scratch. She couldn't just make a new Pietro, she had to find a substitute. This is in direct opposition to something that Wanda does: create people. Wanda creates Billy and Tommy out of nothing. Billy and Tommy are not just props, but develop genuine autonomy, distinct personalities, are able to manipulate the illusion while being conscious of it, and to some extent seem concious of their own irreality. This not only shows us that Wanda is much stronger than Agatha, but also sets us up wonderfully for the Young Avengers show that Marvel is most definitely working towards. Wanda created actual people, who are going to have to exist in some way whether she intended it or not. So I suppose, for the sake of the twins, we can break the second world just a little.
WandaVision really is impressive. Pulling off multiple tones and multiple second worlds simultaneously without even explaining it away with the multiverse is hard, and they did a pretty good job all things considered.
If anyone is interested in what the hell I’m talking about in regards to second worlds, I highly recommend Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories which pretty much defines how fantastic fiction works. Definitely worth a read, and I hope you enjoyed this one!
