| All applause is
performative and therefore a breaking of the fourth wall in
reverse — instead of actors addressing the audience
in a moment of “no for real” candor, the audience
performs for actors in a moment of pure artifice. The crossing
of the fourth wall, in either direction, is then an act of
currency conversion, in which the means of communicative exchange
are equalized so as to facilitate the free-flow of communication
as capital. An inverse analogy would be the trend toward thermal
equilibrium, in which heat transfer occurs continuously between
two systems until their temperatures coincide, as if the natural
state of all things is one of frictionless homogenization
— but in the case of fiction, when these breakings (or
transfers) are infrequent or else saved for the end, the natural
state of actor/audience is one of explicit demarcation.
So after Jodie Foster behaves like a total maniac
for like the dozenth time and is forced to once again return
to her seat instead of being kept in isolation or maybe locked
up in say one of the ten million closets available for storage
or psychos or psycho offspring, an odd disruption occurs in
the typical fourth wall exchange between actor and audience.
Because no one believes her missing kid really exists, the
ruckus she raises is to all appearances a drama manifested
out of nothing — and so the other passengers are relegated
against their will to the role of audience, a role they are
not just reluctant to take on but are pretty much annoyed
as all fuck by. As Sarsgaard puts it before the Panic
Room reprise begins, “You can’t just up and
walk out of the theater” when watching some bullshit
movie at 36,000 feet, meaning the passengers of Flightplan
are a captive audience in the most literal sense of the term.
So anyway as Sarsgaard walks Foster back to
her seat for like the dozenth time, the passengers disrupt
the typical fourth wall exchange by breaking out into ironic
applause, thanking Foster for her unsolicited improv crazy
person performance with all the earnestness of a plastic seat-pocket
safety card[1].
Although the applause, as applause, remains performative,
it’s now anti-communicative in spirit, since what they
desire is an end to not just the show but the parameters that
allowed the show to come into being; that is, like any passenger
on a trans-Atlantic flight, they desire an end to communication
itself and the right to endure a however-many-hour uncomfortable
plane ride in self-distracted peace, with an ipod, a book,
an in-flight movie, or plain old sleep, and without the vacant
concentration necessary to act like an attentive audience
for the person sitting next to you. Or the crazed fucking
lunatic now tackling the Arab one aisle over, as the case
may be.
So that even after her needless detonation of
an expensive-looking plane (not to mention her in-air fucking
up of the electrical system) is rendered meaningless (in cinematic
terms) by an external validation of her delusional behavior,
the passengers are still stuck someplace they never wanted
to be (Newfoundland), seething in resentment and residual
cabin-pressured headaches and the useless knowledge that Foster
is the most self-absorbed unhinged nutjob on the planet, with
or without her kid.
_________________________
[1]
I suppose they could be applauding Sarsgaard’s
act of air marshall heroism instead, or even the authority
and return to order he represents — though at this point,
with his repeated failures to keep Foster secure, any applause
for Sarsgaard would also be tinged with irony, since the passengers
are more or less cheering his momentary lapse into competence.
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