Contrast “Breaking character” and “breaking 4th wall” and you’ll get why I am arguing character mask is the zeroth wall. Why you break it, you allow your performance to get entangled with your non-performance life.
Metamodernism often features a performer whose core theme is some extreme, lurid fear. Coupled with a Heisen-sincerity (you can’t tell whether the performance is ironic, and often they can’t either) and a demanding accessibility moat, it’s a way to manipulate high-IQ midwits
It’s weaponized nerdsniping at scale.
Step 1: Identify a deep, irrational fear to tap
Step 2: Build an obscurantist bullshit theology around it
Step 3: Craft a special language to gate access
Step 4: Present the fear as an ongoing performance
…
Step 5: Reward those who work to acquire literacy in it by validating their conclusions forcefully and creating a cult of weird certainty around it
Step 6: Claim oracular legitimacy in the entire territory appropriated by the performance (“this is the only source of truth”)
This is… not a good thing. I’m realizing now that I’ve mapped the pattern that metamodern performances are all over the place. They’re much more sophisticated than mere conspiracy theories because they don’t require a supposed hidden secret world to work with
Hmm. Maybe that’s the definition of metamodern fiction proper — fiction that manages to cage metamodern performances in a form they can be contemplated without inducing the derangement syndromes the wild versions tend to.
Yep, this is the (increasingly tiresome?) -- "look at what actor did to prepare for the role!" e.g. lose/gain weight or "act like a dick because the character"
If you get a sense of a “actor-director’s commentary” on dvd extras where the role is “messiah,” but it’s nominally part of wild reality rather than framed by a theatrical boundary…you’re watching an advanced kind of metamodern performance
A kind of stereo vision effect