Break the Fourth Wall
“I’d like us not to be resigned, but to be rebellious.”
There are two primary reasons I write a newsletter talking about the intersections of media, science, religion, and art:
I see these strangely entangled concepts as storytelling methods—different ways that humans make sense of being here. As stories go, they help us ground ourselves and our experiences, they help us define what's important (and who is important), and they help us determine how we should live our lives.
And, I actually like to think of these storytelling methods as languages—different ways we speak about similar concepts. As languages go, though, we must cross the invisible barriers that stand between them through careful translation, allowing us to see and understand each other a bit better. However, barriers often tend to be reinforced by folks who have vested interests in keeping some people in and other people out.
In media, the "fourth wall" is the invisible, imagined barrier that exists between actors and their audience. Invisible. Imagined. In other words, fake. The barrier is an illusion or a collectively agreed-to ruse we allow for the sake of the story.
This is why it is so profoundly refreshing when the wall is broken. We are let in, invited into the secret, allowed to play around in what was once off-limits. And this is what I want to help us do. I want to invite us to play across boundaries so that we might destroy the wall—so that we might all be allowed in.
