Daily writing exercise, 750words.com
fiction by Jason Edwards
I have yet to locate my chagrin, but I have been assured that much to it the follies of men continue unabated. To wit, this new Deadpool film, which I feel more than qualified to review despite my not having seen it yet. Nor have I viewed any of the trailers. Did you know they call them trailers because they used to come at the end of movies, not the beginning? Seems people are too eager to leave. And “coming attractions,” frankly, is vulgar.
No, I have not seen the movie or seen the coming attractions, but I have seen movies featuring Ryan Reynolds, and I have also seen movies with comic book characters in them. Furthermore, when I was a young teenager, I had the idea for a coffee-table book called “The Missing Wall,” which was to be artists’ conceptions of the walls you never see in sit-coms, since that’s where the cameras are. “Three’s Company,” “The Cosby Show,” “Friends.” You’ll call me prescient, since I was well into my twenties and no longer a young teenager when Friends first aired, but I give those as example of what the book would be, not an example of what my thinking was.
The point is, nowadays people reference the so-called “fourth wall,” especially when fictional characters break it, which is to say, when they say or do something indicating that they know they exist in a fictional universe. Which is, of course, impossible. I’m no philosopher, and as far as I know epistemology is not something to be trifled with, but it seems obvious that a fictional character can’t “know” anything. It is more precise to say that a fictional character’s creator is the one who breaks the so-called “fourth wall,” by using his character to remind the reader or viewer that what he or she is reading or viewing is, indeed, fictional.
My understanding is that this Mr. Pool breaks the fourth wall all the time, and since I more or less invented the concept of creating a fictional fourth wall, I have probably not only the best but the only point of view when it comes to how a fictional character can break a wall that only exists in a fictional universe. The reader or viewer is unnecessary. That closes the loop on the epistemology of fictional characters knowing things. One doesn’t have to read or view something to review it- indeed, it is exactly those who have not seen something who can best review how it’s fictional fourth wall is broken.
Furthermore I have seen The Dead Pool, a Dirty Harry film from 1988, featuring a then little-known Liam Neeson and the late great Jim Carrey, who isn’t dead, but who’s greatness is a bit tardy. Who better than Ryan Reynolds to play Deadpool than the Jim Carrey that Jim Carrey could have been if instead of playing a punk rock heroin overdose victim he had instead played to the camera and broken the fourth wall in the scene on the houseboat where he dies? What would make this remarkable is that the scene itself was probably shot on an actual houseboat and therefore it’s fourth wall was probably not fictional at all.
Elle MacPherson, some people in Hollywood would say, is a bit past her prime, but I think that’s a bunch of nonsense. I don’t know if she’s in the movie; I just wanted to say that.
But think of it. Jim Carey, a kind of 80’s Ryan Reynolds, (or, if you like, Ryan Reynolds, a kind of “now” Jim Carey in the sense that we tend to cartoonalize the past and have more respect for the future than we should) looks at the real wall, which is fake, and breaks it, making it fake by virtue of it’s being real in a fake world. So it’s fake and real and real and fake all at the same time. And all of this is only happening in our heads because in The Dead Pool, he didn’t do that. This adds a negative co-efficient to everything so now the broken wall is whole again, and real and fake and real and fake.
This unbroken wall, rebroken in our heads, and therefore neverbroken, both real and unreal, reminds us that what we are seeing is made up, which is to say, reminds us that what we are seeing is made up in our own heads. It reminds us we’re us. This is what Deadpool does. And this is why you shouldn’t go see the movie, unless you’re not going to, in which case you already have. And if you have seen the movie, I’m afraid you haven’t seen the one you weren’t going to see yet, but don’t worry- there’s a sequel promised, so you can decide now not to see that one, and write your own review of it right now.