10 Weirdest Times Films Broke The Fourth Wall
When not even the screen can hold these guys back.
Just when you thought you were comfortable watching a movie, the people inside it suddenly have something to say. And no, it's not to each other, but to you, dearest watcher, breaking the very foundations of our normal voyeuristic cinema-watching with one foul piece of eye contact straight down the lens.
Breaking the fourth wall isn't a new concept, but it's always a jarring addition to a movie: reminding us that we are not in fact in the middle of a high-stakes car chase in apocalyptic New York or inhabiting an alien planet lightyears away, but in our pants in our own living rooms drenched in shame whilst this plays out on screen.
In any case, getting trapped inside the walls of a movie can't be that fun of a time, so you can't blame the characters for wanting someone new to talk to really.
10. Fight Club - Cigarette Burns
The political, violent, and nihilistic brilliance of Fight Club is realised entirely in The Narrator's consistent breaking of the fourth wall to address the audience, with the best example coming part and parcel with the cigarette burns scene.
Taking an almost infomercial style break to relay all the intricacies of how to splice porn into children's films to bring us into the joke, Tyler shows us his technique for scarring children for life in the name of giant dicks the world over. Is there any cause more just?
The best part of this scene is the repeated references back to it. Tyler's own image is spliced throughout Fight Club as if he's added him in personally, and as the film finishes, we see the very 'nice big c*ck' that he added in earlier to the reels we saw on screen.
Everything is one big construct to remind us that nothing we see can be believed, especially with someone as untrustworthy as The Narrator as our filmy guide.