Imagine a movie comes out where a supporting character keeps mentioning that – well, that he’s in fact just a fictional character in a movie. Maybe he reassures the imperiled hero by pointing out that c’mon, man, relax; you got top billing in the opening credits; there’s no way they’d kill you off this soon. Maybe a tearful woman works herself into a frenzy when screaming at the guy to save her daughter, at which point he derails all the tension by saying, whoa, hey, dial it down; remember, I’m just an actor playing a paramedic; we’re both just movie stars, reading lines from the screenplay.
Or whatever. Imagine, even, that lots of folks hereabouts of course say they truly enjoyed the character’s matter-of-fact displays of medium awareness.
And imagine too that, in the novel that got adapted into this movie, said character comes across as simply and obviously delusional. I mean, he believes he’s a character in a movie! Opening credits? Movie stars? What the heck is he talking about?
But by dint of faithfully adapting it – indeed, simply transplanting all his best lines unchanged – the character suddenly seems like he’s savvily observing reality and making sly asides to the audience about it. In one work of fiction, he’s crazy; in the other, he’s sane; but the story remains exactly the same both times!
Has this ever played out? Is there a name for it? My google-fu is coming up empty on TV Tropes…
Ambush Bug did it repeatedly in DC Comics, and in the couple of times he’s been on a TV cartoon.
George Burns did it occasionally on his very old TV sitcom: just stop the action, and then talk to the audience. In The Last Action Hero a kid enters a movie world occupied by his favorite action hero (played by Schwarzenegger), and he’s aware of the movie tropes and tries to get the other characters to understand as well. I’ve always just heard it called “breaking the fourth wall”.
To clarify, what I have in mind would be something like Ambush Bug being a self-aware comic-book character in the comics – talking about pages and word balloons and the readers and so on – and, when showing up in a TV cartoon, still only ever talking about pages and word balloons and the readers: delivering the exact same lines, except they no longer make any sense.
So in one medium, he’d seem to know what he was talking about – to be perfectly aware of the truth – while in the other, he’d seem incorrect and insane.
Not quite the same situation, but I’ve noticed that the webcomics Goblins: Life Through Their Eyes and Order of the Stick both break the fourth wall, but different fourth walls. Both comics are based (to some degree) on D&D. The characters in OotS are aware that they’re in a comic, but are not (to their knowledge) being played by anyone. The characters in Goblins, however, are aware that they’re in a game and being played by players, but are mostly unaware that they’re in a comic (except for occasionally Tempts Fate, who’s really just a fundraising device unconnected to the main comic).
I think I get what the OP means although I can’t think of an example. Best if you play upon the difference in media.
In the comic: “You can’t die yet, the author loves you! Man, this artwork is great! Is that a cut-away panel? How dramatic!” – Makes sense in a ha-ha he knows it’s a comic book sort of way.
In the movie: “You can’t die yet, the author loves you! Man, this artwork is great! Is that a cut-away panel? How dramatic!” – Now he’s a lunatic who thinks he’s in a comic book.
Now imagine a live-action film adaptation of OotS with Roy complaining about how his feet are drawn.
I get what the OP is asking. John Smith is a character in a novel who thinks he’s living in a TV show. When you read the novel and read about John talking about his viewers and doing things during the commercial break and wishing they would cast a better looking actress as his girlfriend, John seems crazy. But when the book gets turned into TV series, John is saying the same things but now he doesn’t seem crazy because what he’s saying is now an accurate reflection of the medium he’s in.
It’s an interesting idea but I can’t think of an example of it being used.
I wonder if Who Framed Roger Rabbit? sort of counts? The characters are toons and display an awareness (in a sort of fourth-wall-breaking way) of being cartoon characters and following cartoon rules, but no awareness that they’re in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
(And I know the movie was adapted from a book, but I don’t think that’s relevant to the point I’m trying to make.)
Oh, yeah, I understood what you meant. But since I couldn’t think of any examples of it, I gave an example of something vaguely related that I could think of.
Bob Hope would often do this sort of thing in the old “Road” pictures. He would even drag Bing Crosby into it sometimes. It was a good part of the fun of the series. My favorite example of this was one time the duo were doing their “Peas porriage hot,” routine and are about to slug the bad guy, when instead he drops them with a conk on the heads just before their swing. as they drop to the floor, Hope says, “He must have seen our last picture.”
I can’t think of any examples. I really doubt that there are any. If you’re trying to faithfully adapt a story from one medium to another, you’d want to preserve the tone. So if the point of a character is that he’s legitimately breaking the fourth wall, you’d try to carry that over into the other medium. I can’t imagine a writer deliberately rewriting such a character as an actual lunatic, though it’s an interesting idea.
Some people aren’t quite getting it. Let me try to rephrase the OP:
In Marvel Comics, Deadpool acknowledges that he’s a comic book character and constantly breaks the fourth wall. Now, suppose a Deadpool movie is made, and it’s a literal adaptation of the source material. In the movie, Deadpool is a man who believes that he’s a comic book character. But he’s not. He’s a movie character. Therefore, he comes across to the audience as being insane, rather than being “in the know.”
Get it? Can you think of any actual examples of this being done?
I did think of one interesting example that’s related to this: Jay and Silent Bob. The characters appeared in three different media: movies, a TV cartoon, and comic books. In each of these the characters would occasionally break the fourth wall. But it was an aversion of what the OP described because they would always break the fourth wall in a manner that was appropriate to the medium they were in. So in a movie, they’d refer to the theme music but in the comic book they’d refer to a six month delay between issues.
Yeah, I agree with Cartoonacy. It’s probably not been done, because usually the person doing the adaptation would recognize that it’s actually a more faithful adaptation if you adjust the breaking-the-fourth-wall for the medium, instead of just copying the lines exactly. Much like translators will sometimes make changes to preserve the fact that something is a pun, for example.
Well, there’s The Tick comic book, where the titular Tick talks to the reader but is more or less regarded as delusional-to-crazy by everyone else. They don’t think he’s crazy because he breaks the fourth wall or because he thinks he super-powered (he actually has some powers), they think he’s crazy because he basically is crazy. It’s not what you’re asking for but flirts with the same tropes in a slightly different pattern.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a book in which the characters come to the realization that they’re in a book. According to Wikipedia, it was adapted into a play. I have no idea whether they changed how that works in the play or not, but it’s at least a possibility that it’s an example of this.
