10 Movie Characters Destroyed By The Fourth Wall

1. The Wheelchair Guy - Rubber

Quentin Dupieux's 2010 film Rubber is one of the most creative and downright insane movies of the last decade. The plot follows a sentient tire, Robert, which stalks the Californian desert and murders people by exploding them with its psychic abilities.

The movie has a meta frame narrative where a group of people in the desert watch the film's events, effectively acting as audience members, and Dupieux repeatedly cuts back to the crowd throughout the film as they pass comment on recent scenes.

This leads to a fantastic payoff at the end of Rubber, then, when Robert's tire form is destroyed and he's reincarnated as a tricycle.

One of the few remaining audience members is a man in a wheelchair (Wings Hauser), who is confronted by Robert and insists that he's not a character in the movie but simply a spectator, and therefore can't be killed.

Moments later, Robert defies this by exploding his body into meaty chunks, before amassing an army of tires and heading to Hollywood, presumably to continue his rampage.

As the ultimate statement on audience complicity and an hilariously gnarly gag on its own merits, this was terrifically satisfying. The wheelchair guy thought he was safe behind the veneer of "the movie," but alas, the fourth wall gladly offered him up for the slaughter.