The Fifth Wall: Meta Meet Her

A delightful, significant little short - 12 mins - on Amazon Prime: The Fifth Wall (2016), about a character with no name who has a conversation with her creator.  Interestingly, the writer is Scott Meridew and the director is Sinisa Radosavljevic aka Sin Radot, but the creator's voice in The Fifth Wall sounds the same as the actress, Tina Vrbnjak, who plays the character.

I say "interesting," because I'm not quite sure of the import of that move, other than making it seem as if the character is talking to herself, which I guess means that "she" exists both in the heads of the writer and directors, as well on the screen, in the apartment we're looking at.

It's a pretty philosophic, meta conversation, as far as these kinds of things go.  As some of you may know, there's a long tradition of fictional characters aware of their own existence, and usually contesting that, or otherwise complaining about it.  See the entry "Metafiction" for examples - ok, here it is.  I've always liked the genre - not usually science fiction, but philosophy fiction, or, to be more precise, ontology fiction, since ontology is the branch of philosophy that probes the nature of existence - not physical existence per se, but the deeper existence of everything in the universe, including ideas.

But back to The Fifth Wall, it takes off from the fourth wall, which is the space or "wall" between the performer and audience.   The fifth does one better, because it's the space between the character and the creator - the creator having created the character, in contrast to the performer and audience, in which both exist almost independently - "almost," because one could argue that a performer without an audience is not really a performer, and so the audience therein creates the performer.  One could argue that, but I'm not sure I would, since I once heard a guest speaker at a conference giving a lecture in a stentorian voice, and when I walked into the room I found he was talking to no one.  Though, one could also argue in that case that his talking to no one created an audience - at least, an audience of one - because it got me to walk into the room, and then I felt so bad for this speaker with no audience that I couldn't bring myself to leave.

But back to The Fifth Wall one final time - what the character wants is to continue to exist, after the short film concludes.  Her creator tells her (and us) that she has a chance to live again, any time anyone wants to see this film again.  I'll likely do that - but you can and should do that, too!  Help this nameless character played by someone named Tina live - watch her movie!

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