I Was Faking It to the Fourth Wall

[moon_custafer]

As usual, I’m too lazy to look through TV Tropes to see if they have this one, since they almost certainly would give it a different name than the one I came up with.



This is where there’s a plot twist in the final quarter of a story that reveals a character was faking symptoms, or their entire persona, all along; thing is, for this to come as a surprise to the audience, the character had to keep up the charade even in scenes where *no other character was present.* I guess it’s possible to argue they were method-acting, or being cautious in case someone was eavesdropping, but it always feels like a bit of a cheat to me; note that this quibble does not apply when you can re-watch those scenes and realize with hindsight that their actions, expressions, etc, have a different meaning than the one you originally thought they had; those are awesome.



Spoiler-y examples: there’s a Tintin story where a professor seems genuinely shocked as a trapdoor opens beneath Tintin, even though (I think) he’s already been replaced by his evil twin; possibly he wasn’t warned at what point his colleagues were going to try to kill the boy reporter.



An episode of House where he supposedly has cancer, only it turns out he’s faking it to get painkillers: I don’t recall the exact details, but there’s a scene where he’s checking lab results that no one in the hospital but himself is going to see, and gives no sign they’re not genuine.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Or the big final reveal with Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects, of course.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but IIRC, he’s under the eye of the police during the whole framing narrative – the visual reveal occurs once he’s out of sight of the station. What I’m talking about are scenes where the character is, say, alone in their own home, no one watching but the audience outside the story, and they’re still doing whatever it is they later claim to have been faking all along.