If you want to provoke Jane Austen purists and summon a heated Twitter debate, just have one of her heroines break the fourth wall. That was the fate that befell Netflix’s Persuasion, a semi-modern take on Austen’s last completed novel that has Dakota Johnson’s Anne Elliot staring down the barrel of a camera. She also calls sheet music from her former lover a “playlist,” Henry Golding’s character “a 10,” and herself “an empath”—creative choices that have inspired more agony than hope.
The fourth wall—and the temptation to puncture it—has existed since the beginning of storytelling. Often credited to philosopher Denis Diderot, the concept refers to the mythical partition between a fictional tale and the audience watching it unfold. Fourth walls have been shattered in everything from 17th-century soliloquies to notable 20th-century films like Annie Hall and Fight Club. They’ve also been broken in a whole bunch of unmemorable projects, proving why the rule existed in the first place. Fourth-wall-breaking is a little like the cilantro of storytelling devices—a tasty garnish for some, a soap-flavored nightmare for others.
How to accomplish the former rather than the latter? It helps to establish the narrative purpose of breaking the fourth wall, early and definitively. When Ferris Bueller breaks the fourth wall, it feels conspiratorial; the audience wants to experience the freewheeling day off he’s concocting, reveling in being privy to his plan. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort is a showman practically foaming at the mouth to share his daily drug regimen. Viewers feel complicit, if not entertained, when they get to peek behind the curtain of a 1-percenter with zero remorse.
When the device is used correctly, an audience craves this connective tissue with a character. Fostering that kind of familiarity is what inspired Abbott Elementary creator Quinta Brunson to emulate the mockumentary style of workplace sitcoms like The Office and Parks and Recreation. “I really wanted audience members to feel like they were in the school instead of looking at the school from the outside in,” she told Harper’s Bazaar this winter. “I think you can get away with a lot more comedy that way, if you feel like you also teach at Abbott or go to Abbott.” Then again, Brunson maintained that “mockumentary actually doesn’t break the fourth wall, because it never has a wall. Our whole premise has no walls—the audience is always invited in.”
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Persuasion director Carrie Cracknell has insisted that Anne’s direct-to-camera confessions are “a way for us to understand Anne’s interiority,” telling IndieWire, “So much of the book is about Anne observing her family and their bizarre behaviors and her frustration at that, and so to be able to just look at the audience and sort of connect over that frustration felt really compelling as a device.” But in the film, the device clashes with our understanding of who Anne is and how she interacts with her family.
While snarky asides about relatives would jibe with some of Austen’s more feisty leading ladies, like Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, they feel stilted here. Anne is a character consumed with regret, and—in the novel—she has no place to store it but within. When she’s given a method for purging some of that heartbreak, as she is in the adaptation, it fundamentally changes how we experience her narrative.
