When you think about it, the concept of a fourth
wall is pretty interesting. An invisible barrier that separates the canon of a story from the
world of the audience, maintained predominantly by the consensus agreement among the actors to
pretend that the audience doesn’t exist. Back in ye olde greek tragedy days, stories were almost
exclusively plays performed for live audiences on a stage where the chorus played a liminal role
and would actively address the audience directly, but the actors maintained the fourth wall and
would pretend like they weren’t standing on a stage in front of hundreds of people all
judging their every move. Stage plays have always had this slightly weird relationship with
the fourth wall, because when you’re up on stage, even if you’re immersed in the story
and really committed to the bit, you know the audience is there. You can see them,
hear them - and they’re the entire reason you’re performing in the first place. And ironically,
one of the only ways the audience can get fully invested in the story is if the performers don’t
acknowledge that they’re there. The world on stage is at its most immersive when it truly feels like
its own world, and if the actors turn out to look straight at a member of the audience and say “man,
this is a pretty crazy story, right?” it jars the audience into acknowledging that this is a story,
and, more importantly, one that they are excluded from. It might seem a bit contradictory, but an
audience can immerse themselves more fully in a story if the story maintains the fourth wall and
never admits they’re there. In a sense that gives the audience the freedom to choose how they want
to immerse themself in the story. Are they gonna relate strongly to one of the characters, are they
going to imagine they're an invisible observer moving among the crowd, are they gonna stay firmly
planted behind the fourth wall watching from a fully externalized view? As soon as the story does
point out the audience exists, it also reminds them of where they are - firmly on the outside
looking in. It tells the audience what role they have in this story, and that means if the
audience was getting invested in some other way, that can actually jar them. Of course this can be
used for interesting effect, but for the most part the story needs to stay separate from its audience
or the impact is diminished. The Fourth Wall was a vital narrative conceit to maintain because for
a very long time it was the only thing separating the world of the story from the audience.
In the grand scheme of things, for the vast majority of human history, storytellers and
performers have by necessity existed in the same space as their audiences. Without the ability
to transmit, record or replay performances, the only way to experience performance art was
to sit in front of a stage and watch people do it live. It wasn’t until we got the moving picture
followed by the radio and later the television that storytellers became physically walled off
from their audiences - performers in this new paradigm would initially act to an audience that
consisted only of their tech crew and an optional studio audience, and the actual audience would
see their art long after the fact, cut together, edited and scored for cinema or TV. The fourth
wall was no longer an invisible barrier maintained by the performers - it was a physical screen that
literally separated the story from the audience. For the first time in history, actors and their
audiences had no way of directly communicating. And this took some getting used to! In the last
few years a lot of aspects of modern communication have gone from in-person to virtual, and plenty
of people will tell you how jarring it is to go from a crowded classroom or a meeting full of
people to just you and a screen, even if there are people on that screen. Speaking as someone
who performs to a microphone for a living, it is a learned skill to get yourself in that
headspace where you can talk like you’re talking to someone even if there’s nobody there. The
Fourth Wall is no longer something actors have to actively enforce - it just passively exists as a
byproduct of the medium. If it’s not a live stage performance, the fourth wall is now built into it.
And that means, when stories wanna get cute with it, they need to be a little creative. In
a stage show if you wanna break the fourth wall you just pick an audience member to make
eye contact with and address directly. But if it’s just you and the camera, things can get a
little complicated. Obviously you can’t address your actual audience directly, because… they
aren’t there. Instead you have to cold-read an imaginary audience figure and address that
hypothetical being like you’re talking to a person. And that means your personal assumptions
about your audience can kind of… leak through. And I know what you’re thinking. “Gosh, Red, I
just love those dulcet tones of yours! I could listen to you meander around the point forever!
And by the way I loved ReBoot, I totally watched the whole thing except for season four, you got
any more media recommendations I’d like?” And I appreciate that, viewer, but now is hardly
the time. This is all just a lengthy preamble to contextualize today’s actual point,
which is the practice of lampshading. Lampshading, or “Lampshade Hanging”, is a specific
kind of fourth-wall-break where a writer or creator actively draws attention to some quirk
of their storytelling for the benefit of their audience - frequently a cliche, trope or plot
device that they think threatens their audience’s immersion or suspension of disbelief. Like, if a
boom mic is visible in a shot, a character might take a lampshade and hang it on the boom mic
to show the audience that they know it’s there. This reframes the presence of the microphone in
the shot from looking like a mistake to being a cute in-joke. In a sense it’s an intentional
disruption of the fourth wall to soften the blow of something that might otherwise damage the
audience’s immersion behind the fourth wall. But this is where the cold-reading starts
factoring in - and can start causing problems. When a writer chooses to lampshade something,
in the most basic terms, it’s usually because they don’t think their audience is going to like
that thing. Hanging a lampshade on it to prove they’re in on the joke is the artist’s way of
reducing that impact so the audience knows to just laugh and move on. But this means the artist
has to make some assumptions about what their audience is potentially going to dislike about
their story, and that can get a little weird. Now there’s a bit of a scale here. At its most
minor, lampshading is barely more than a wink and a nudge. Characters will briefly acknowledge some
story contrivance or silliness and then quickly move on. A character might wonder where some
conveniently-timed dramatic wind came from or how a character quick-changed into a new outfit
so fast - basically the cast shows a degree of self-awareness in recognizing some of the
pretenses of their fictional world without ever directly implying that they’re aware of a fourth
wall beyond that world. This doesn’t so much break immersion as jostle it lightly for comedic effect.
But the more we slide up the scale, the more disruptive lampshading can become. Sometimes
characters will actively call out plot points they’re experiencing, pointing out that they’re
implausible or even cliched. A character might bemoan that the setting they’re in is totally
stereotypical, or that a villain is indulging in a classic evil monologue, or that they have to
go rescue a damsel in distress how original. This is where lampshading can start causing problems by
highlighting authorial insecurity. As mentioned, most authors lampshade things they don’t like or
feel that they can’t justify in-story. When those are fun little quirks that’s one thing, but when
they escalate to plot points it kinda provokes a question: if the writer wasn’t happy with this
story beat, why did they still choose to write it that way? If the writer is calling themself out on
being unoriginal, that implies they have a problem with that. And the thing is, it’s completely fine
to be unoriginal. It doesn’t need to be justified or mocked or turned into a little knowing
wink-and-a-nudge. Many tropes are popular because they work, and using things that work doesn’t
make a writer bad. But apologizing for your art preemptively is always a bad idea. Most artists
are their own worst critics and will almost always be able to rattle off at least three things they’d
change about anything they do - but telling people that before they’ve even got a chance to see it
themselves will prime them to be disappointed. This is actually a concept that Julia Child,
of all people, brought up at one point, saying “I don’t believe in twisting yourself into
knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. Usually one’s cooking is better than
one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile… then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear
it with a smile — and learn from her mistakes.” Basically, don’t apologize for the meal you’re
about to serve and don’t lead by pointing out your own mess-ups - it’s better for everyone to
let the audience come to their own conclusions about it. If you let the art speak for itself, the
audience will get to draw their own conclusions with a clean slate, without being predisposed to
notice and dislike the things you personally don't like about it. But if you apologize for your
work or demean it, it kinda looks like you’re trying to salvage your reputation as a creator
by distancing yourself from the thing you made, which, again, begs the question why you made it
in the first place if you aren’t proud of it. And this can be a serious problem when
lampshading becomes large-scale or chronic. This is at its most visible when stories actively
undercut emotional moments by lampshading that boy, an emotional moment sure just happened! How
embarrassing! You know the trope. The soundtrack swells more bombastic than ever, a character
makes an anguished declaration of love or steels themself for a heroic sacrifice or gazes,
teary-eyed, at a moment of crushing emotional impact - and then the soundtrack abruptly cuts out
as we snap to a wide shot and the whole thing just looks silly. Characters will shuffle around
with embarrassment that they had the audacity to nearly experience sincere investment in the
plot, and then move on. This is called Bathos, and you might recognize it from every
marvel movie. It isn’t just lampshading a costume choice or a bit of weird timing, it’s
lampshading the concept of emotion. Now I might just be old-fashioned about this, but I don’t
think that’s the kind of story element you want your audience to stop being invested in.
The primary benefit of lampshading is it signals to the audience what it’s okay for them to
ignore. You hang a lampshade on something to tell the audience “hey man, it’s just a show, you can
really just relax”. How’d the characters get from point A to point B so fast? Even they’re not sure!
So don’t worry about it. Where’s that dramatic wind coming from? No idea! So we can move on. Is
this character being fully played by a new actor with no explanation? Yup! Anyway! Lampshading
acknowledges a narrative pretense just enough to tell the audience “don’t worry about it, it’s
fine” so they don’t get hung up on it. But that means if we hang a lampshade on something really
important, we basically tell the audience “hey, that emotional arc or intense fight scene or
entire premise of the third act - it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.” And
if we tell the audience “you don’t need to care about this part of the story,” they won’t.
There’s nothing wrong with sprinkling in the occasional nod to the fourth wall - letting
characters acknowledge the pretenses of their fictional universe is frequently good for a quick
laugh and it can make them feel more relatable, if they react the way we’d react to something
unlikely or ridiculous. But the problem is, lampshading is kind of the enemy of sincerity
- of committing to the bit. Even just elbowing the fourth wall a little makes the characters seem
less invested in their fictional universe. If they do it too much it can be difficult to accept that
they’re invested in the story at all. Lampshading by its nature erodes the integrity of the fourth
wall, and if it’s done too much or too frequently, the audience learns to accept that the characters
aren’t taking this seriously. And then if we want the audience to take something seriously, we
kind of can’t convince them that this time we’re staying in the confines of the fictional universe
- this time it’s for real. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. If we’ve learned the story will break
its own barriers for more than a quick laugh, we’ll have trouble believing that a genuinely
sincere moment isn’t about to be undercut by a cheeky “well that happened” that relegates
whatever impact that plot point could’ve had to… it happened, let’s move on, don’t worry about it.
Lampshading, despite being a comedic trope, is a powerful tool, and it needs to be used
sparingly or it risks undercutting the sincere parts of the story. But it can also be utilized
creatively in ways that integrate with the tone rather than diminishing it - and one of the
easiest ways to do this is with a story within the story. When you’re telling a story with another
story nested inside it, then that larger story contains both an audience and a fourth wall while
still being firmly located behind the real fourth wall separating the nested stories from the real
actual audience. Thus, characters in the story can comment on events in the story within a story
and lampshade the narrative choices or silly moments without breaching the real fourth
wall. It doesn’t diminish our investment because these characters are not commenting on a
story they’re in, they’re commenting on a story they’re experiencing. If anything, this can make
them seem more invested. This is like 90% of the appeal of The Princess Bride, where the framing
sequence of the adventure is absolutely full of commentary and snark about what’s happening in
the story within the story, but as the boy gets more invested in that story we see his commentary
shift from complaining and dismissing the whole thing to asking actual probing questions,
rooting against the villains and getting visibly upset when the story-within-a-story
hits its darkest hour. This is a case where a framing sequence chock full of lampshade-hanging
increases the impact of the purposefully very tropey and basic story-within-a-story, which
wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining if it was just played straight. The sincerity
of the book is more impactful because we see it actively changing the cynical kid
spectator to become more sincere himself. There are also comedic stories that use this
in interesting ways, like Emperor’s New Groove, of all movies, which technically opens in medias
res with Kuzko narrating an explanation over how he wound up as a crying llama in the jungle.
This movie has a complicated on-and-off-again relationship with the fourth wall, but for the
first part of the movie it is technically a story within a story. Narrator Kuzko will occasionally
pop in to loudly remind the audience that he’s the hero, remember? He’s the one we should be
sympathizing with! The story we’re watching play out is behind two layers of fourth wall, and
Narrator Kuzko regularly breaks the first fourth wall to comment on the proceedings or complain
directly to the audience. But then by the time the story catches up to that in medias res moment,
story kuzko actually breaks his fourth wall for the first time and directly addresses narrator
Kuzko to tell him to knock it off and stop trying to spin his general shittiness for the audience.
From this point forward the story only has one layer of fourth wall and no in-universe narrator -
but lampshading still happens, mostly from Kronk, who’s willing to cheerfully admit when the things
they do don’t make sense at all. This story is a rare one that commits to the bit so hard that
the audience becomes invested even though the characters seem on some level aware that they
live in a farcical comedy. This movie doesn’t have an insecure bone in its body, and when it
points out a gag to hang a lampshade on, it’s because knowing the characters know their world
doesn’t make sense makes the joke twice as funny. Which brings us to a useful question
to contemplate: why do we lampshade? It’s not a structurally vital trope in any
story. It’s not a character arc, a plot beat or worldbuilding trope, it’s a specific way to
disrupt the fourth wall without fully breaking it that turns an otherwise sincere moment into a
self-referential gag. So why do people do that? Well, there are a few reasons. As mentioned,
sometimes in stories things end up happening that the writer isn’t 100% happy with - usually
a contrivance that’s necessary to make the plot play out a certain way, or a moment they’re not
sure the audience will like if they fully commit to playing it straight. In these cases, the writer
might want to drop a lampshade on it to signal to the audience that they know this bit is a little
weird but hey, let’s all move on anyway. It lets the writer smooth over little moments without
having to give them too much attention. Just having a character note that some event was
unlikely or raise an eyebrow at something silly can do a lot to make a potentially
skeptical audience accept it and move on. Of course, the problem is if the creator
is too insecure about their own work, they might assume their audience will
be incredibly skeptical about everything and correspondingly overcompensate, making the
protagonists snarky and self-referential about anything and everything that could conceivably
be poked fun at by some redditor somewhere, which - like all deliberate attempts to look cool
- backfires into making the thing look less cool, because it makes it look insecure. Audiences
are actually really perceptive about picking up on what assumptions a creator is making about
them, and in a way it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because audiences that don’t fit that
assumption can start to feel unwelcome and drift away from the work, while audiences that fit
the image the creator has for them will feel perfectly at home. But this means if a creator is
expecting their audience to harshly judge them, their corresponding defensive attitude can
essentially select for an audience that will do that. This is a big part of why preemptively
apologizing for your art is a bad idea. It’ll alienate the people who were looking forward
to just enjoying it at face value and now feel awkward and weird about how tense you’re being. If
a creator thinks their audience is going to laugh at them and thus must preempt them by laughing
at themselves first, they’re gonna select for an audience willing to laugh at them, because it
feels weird being the only person in the room who doesn’t think the joke is funny! Telling a story
sincerely can feel scary and vulnerable, but some stories have to be sincere or they lose their
impact, and when those stories get undercut with jokes it kinda… punchlines itself into oblivion.
But on the flipside, some stories are at their best when they’re silly, and sometimes
it’s just fun to draw attention to that. Jostling the fourth wall kind of highlights the
absurdity inherent in most forms of performance art. Anyone who’s taken an acting class will
tell you lesson 1 is exposure-therapying your way out of feeling any shame or embarrassment about
acting “weird” in public, because in order to act you kinda have to completely disregard social
norms about how people are supposed to behave around each other. The mere act of maintaining
a fourth wall on stage requires the actors to pointedly ignore a huge crowd staring intently
at them. How wild is that? And then you need to set aside who you and your fellow actors are as
people, what you know about each other, how you actually interact - and instead act as a part of
a story, whatever that entails. And the fact is, that means you gotta do stuff that would be
incredibly weird in any other context, like loudly weeping in front of strangers or kissing
someone you are absolutely not involved with. A really good, sincere, effective performance will
immerse you so much in the story that it makes you forget how many social norms it’s breaking to make
that happen. A goofy, silly performance with a loose on-and-off relationship with the fourth wall
might instead highlight that weirdness for comedy. Because at the end of the day, the fourth wall is
a tool. When it’s perfectly smooth and undisrupted it’s easy to forget it’s there, and you can
instead lose yourself focusing on what’s happening on the other side of it. A smooth, flawless fourth
wall lets the audience see the story play out like it’s its own perfect universe, a completely
closed system with its own internal logic unaffected by audience opinions or metanarrative
commentary. But when the fourth wall is broken, distorted, scribbled on or otherwise changed,
it reminds us of three important things: there is a barrier there, the story is behind the
barrier, and we are separated from the story by that barrier. Clear glass is hard to see and thus
doesn’t disrupt our immersion in whatever’s beyond it; warped glass changes how we see everything.
Ultimately what it boils down to is that some stories work best when they internally
acknowledge that they are stories, but a lot of stories don’t. And even within the
space of a single story, some plot beats work best when they’re played completely straight
and unpacked as though they were real events, typically serious emotional moments where we
want the audience’s immersion to be at its highest - while other plot beats are improved by
a little metacommentary humor that recognizes that they’re happening in a story and that’s kinda
silly. The art of the lampshade really is just deciding where to hang it for the best effect.
So… yeah!
