me + the fourth wall, or: Richard Armitage (and his PR) are (still) not in the audience for this blog

Dear the person who wrote me the message today,

Thanks for reading the blog and taking the time to write. It might help you to be aware of my recent exposition of why I write. The answer to your question is that I’m very serious about the fourth wall.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, fan audiences use the theatrical term, “fourth wall,” to refer to the separation between themselves and the things they are observing or enjoying. Audiences see through the fourth wall, while performers do not. It’s not that simple, of course. There are different understandings of this term, and of course some modern theater attempts to break down the fourth wall, but the term in general serves to define the demarcation of a boundary between performer and audience, wherever that occurs.

A major breach in the fourth wall occurred recently and caused a huge eruption last weekend in the Sherlock fandom. A new episode of Sherlock was screened at the BFI and both Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were present for the viewing and a question and answer session afterwards. The host of the session came with an explicit slash fanfic she had found on the Internet, and maneuvered the actors into reading parts of it out loud to the audience (without the knowledge or permission of the author of the fiction). Someone present described the host’s intentions as clearly malicious (wanting to “to take the piss out of the fans, the show and the whole phenomenon in general”) and the actors as “uncomfortable.”

The author, oblivious to this stunt until after it happened, responded on her tumblr with statements for the actors, the host, and a clarification of her own position on what she was doing, what it does for her, and who the audience is. These are the parts I found most poignant and personally relevant to me:

To [the host:] Thank you for spoiling something I found joy in. Thank you for humiliating me, taking my writing out of context without permission, belittling it and using it to embarrass actors who I deeply admire. Thank you for tainting the one thing [that] sometimes that gets me through the day when I have two screaming kids, someone’s drawn on the walls in their own poo, and I have to drive through peak hour traffic yet again because my husband’s forgotten his glasses for work.

[…]

What gets me is that this is probably the only interaction I will ever have with those two actors. I’m not going to go to a premiere, I’m not going to go watch the filming, I probably won’t ever go to a convention, I’m not going to send fan mail […] I certainly don’t send them links to my fics and ask them read them.  I just want to sit here at home enjoying the show, buy the DVDs, pay to see their movies and share my love of it all with other fans, minding my own business. So that’s it, the one bit of contact I have with them, and it’s about humiliation and mockery.

The version of the “fourth wall” I observe is called the “bubble rule,” and it’s been in place since about the first year of the blog. It was explained to me by a fellow blogger and it’s the main thing that allows me to keep writing here. The bubble rule conceives of the real Richard Armitage and me as enclosed in separate, mostly opaque, fully sound-proof bubbles that move through the same universe but never collide and never become fully transparent or sound-capable. At times the bubbles may be closer in space or more transparent and we may be able to “see” each other, but we never speak to each other directly or are in any kind of contact at all. And, most importantly for me, I write and publish on the assumption that while I look to see what’s going on in the Armitage bubble when it slides into view, Armitage is not looking for the Servetus bubble. Servetus is a fan of Armitage; Armitage is not a fan of Servetus. Indeed, the Servetus bubble continues to exist because Armitage is not looking for it.

Of course, other people might be. I make the bubble transparent to fans because I find it useful to work on my self-development project in this way, and because I suspect that some of what I experience has resonance for fellow fans. Before you object that I sometimes write Armitage letters here — yeah, dude, that’s because I don’t send him actual letters and because I assume the audience for whom those thoughts have greater meaning is potentially one of fellow fans.

I really love how Jazzy put this: “I am not in community with Richard Armitage … I am, however, in community with you.” I’d add to the list of people I’m not in community with both journalists and marketers. I don’t expect anything at all from journalists — as I’ve noted before, they have us coming and going and while they may occasionally make the bubbles more transparent and provide interesting information, on the whole, they are not on my side or, I would say, the side of fans generally. While some marketing truly takes fan desires into account (Peter Jackson’s vlogs are a good example), most of it is all about the marketer (Sarah Dunn’s recent “I’ll give you another picture if you like my page a little more” campaign springs to mind). I am writing for me and the like-minded — observers who wish to think their own thoughts and draw their own conclusions about what’s happening.

My position reflects just that: my position. Plenty of Armitage bloggers feel differently. They are friendlier about disruptions of the fourth wall than I am, or would even like to tear it down. You might enjoy their writing more and I encourage you to seek them out.

Best wishes,

Serv

~ by Servetus on December 20, 2013.