Lee Maguire graded snobberies, bawdiness, hypocrisy

Diegetic Winks

Every work of fiction exists in its own fictive world, its own diegesis. Not just the science fiction worlds with their technological advances, or the comic book worlds in which New York’s skyline includes the Baxter Building, flying cars, flying men. Even the everyday, ordinary, real-world stuff.

Even if the movie never shows you a US President that doesn’t match the one you saw on the news, there are still two things that usually separate that world from reality:

• The fiction and characters you’re witnessing don’t exist as fiction within the reality . No character on EastEnders watches EastEnders.
• The actors portraying the characters also don’t exist in the fictive reality. Jason Bourne would find it hard to keep a low profile if people kept mistaking him for the actor Matt Damon.

It’s what  TV Tropes calls the “Celebrity Paradox“.

Sometimes it’s amusing to break these rules: The Last Action Hero contains a diegesis-within-a-diegesis in which a character attempts to convince another character  that he’s fictional character being portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. He takes Arnie to a video store in order to convince him, and sees an advertisement for Terminator 2 starring… Sylvester Stallone.

Sometimes it’s cheap and stupid, such as the plotline of Ocean’s 12, which involves a character played by Julia Roberts actually posing as Juila Roberts due to her uncanny resemblance.

But most of the time they’re not plot points, but little jokes dropped in for the benefit of anyone paying attention. I call these diegetic winks.

A lovely example was in the first episode of Sherlock, “A Study in Pink” (about 50 minutes in).  This is a 21st Century update of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but set in a modern London in which, obviously, the Victorian-era Holmes tales never existed.

In order to observe an address on Northumberland Street, Holmes and Watson take up a position at the window of a restaurant at the corner.  The street seems an odd choice for the scene;  it’s clearly not filmed there and the geography of the later scenes would call for something closer to Soho.

But in the real world that Northumberland Street restaurant doesn’t exist. I’ll save you from looking it up: there’s just a pub. The Sherlock Holmes.

Very interesting observation! It’s cool that there’s a term for such things.

In a recent episode of 30 Rock, Matt Damon appeared as an airline pilot. But given that stars have appeared as themselves on that show, I was confused when it became clear that he was just playing a pilot, and not himself.

That is wonderful – thank you! Watching the show, I was surprised to discover that, although I can imagine a world where no-one’s heard of Tom Hanks and George Clooney passes unrecognised on the street, I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief enough to accept a world where no-one says “Elementary, my dear” whoever, or “once you have eliminated the probable, all that remains…” and so on. A world where magnifying glasses and deerstalkers don’t stand for “detective”. Hadn’t realised how ingrained I assume the stories to be. Very odd not to see the blue plaque either, though I suppose it’s not at street level.

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by August C. Bourré, Star Wars Modern and Shannon, The Daily Notebook. The Daily Notebook said: "'Diegetic winks' are film moments when jokes use the 'celebrity paradox.'" http://bit.ly/9t1dwt Via @TheMorningNews [...]

Lovely, well written article, and duly blogged.

Perhaps Tom Hanks will eventually play a character in a film where people keep mistaking him for Clay Shirky…