A Monologue in Disguise - “Fleabag”’s broken fourth wall

Fleabag (2016)

Fleabag, written and created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, follows Fleabag (also played by Waller-Bridge) - a woman in her thirties trying to cope with trauma amidst the unescapable realization that no matter one’s strongest pains, life simply moves on. To call the show a feminist exploration of the human soul would not be inaccurate, though such a definition is an oversimplification. Fleabag glides on the surface of comedy while revealing that the visible tip of the iceberg cannot ever substitute for the heartbreak below. Through her self-ironization, her compulsory and meaningless sexual encounters, and the incessant desire to distract herself from her obsessive reminiscence of the past, Fleabag becomes special precisely because there is nothing extraordinary about her - she is painfully relatable.

The principal storytelling tool through which the show operates is Fleabag’s ability to address us, the viewers, by breaking the imaginary fourth wall between fiction and reality, between performer and audience. None of the other characters can hear what she says to the audience - the space Fleabag creates when she looks towards the camera is one intended exclusively for those outside the realm of her existence. 

The general understanding of the ‘breaking the fourth wall’ technique is that it enhances the intimacy experienced by the audience in relation to the characters. That is, the viewer is no longer just a spectator, but they are being impelled to make themselves part of the narrative. Fleabag looks at and talks to the viewer, shares her feelings and thoughts in a way she shares with no one else, and inevitably makes herself a member of the everyday lives of those who watch her. The effect is that the viewer may be tempted to view Fleabag as their friend as well. Though I do not deny this view, I want to propose a different way of looking at this parasocial relationship - Fleabag’s direct address is not an offering of an authentic vulnerability; it is a deflection from her inability to face her life now that it has been changed by tragedy.

Fleabag uses the viewer not for the establishment of a relationship with them but as a reinforcement of her distorted self-image. That is, she wants others to perceive her the way she herself wants to believe she is - fun, energetic, unbothered by her past. She does not let others into her world because she herself cannot bear to inhabit it as it is. Instead, she crafts a version of it so ingenious that it serves her in her perpetual need to avoid confronting her reality. It is not Fleabag that distracts the viewer, it is the viewer who serves as a distraction to Fleabag.

Critic Emily Nusbaum calls Fleabag “a woman in control of her own story” (“‘Fleabag,’ an Original Bad-Girl Comedy”). I would argue that Fleabag appears to be in control only until one realizes that one sees not through the seemingly objective camera lens, but through the intricately manipulated lens of a woman who does not want to identify with her real world, thus she makes it look the way she would like it to be. It is not an objective gaze, but rather a highly filtered one. To make herself believe, she needs the perfect witnesses - the viewers who may only make assumptions based on what they see, and they see nothing but what Fleabag allows them to. For the viewer, this may be just the way the show is supposed to go, but every time Fleabag addresses them to make a statement, she is interrupting the natural flow of the narrative. That is probably why one never gets another character’s perspective - Fleabag controls the point of view.

Breaking the fourth wall is always deliberate. Gibbons and Whiteley recognize it as a “violation” of the conventions of the form (theatre, film, television):

The ‘fourth wall’ thus stands as a metaphor for the invisible stage boundary separating actors from audience in the theatre or for the spatiotemporal and technological gap, generated by the camera and television screen, between on-screen actors and viewers (“Do worlds have (fourth) walls? A Text World Theory approach to direct address in Fleabag” 107). 

The viewer must imagine that there is an invisible wall in front of them. But, if the wall is imaginary, is it truly broken - or merely pretended to be broken? Fleabag thrives within this ambiguity, gesturing towards authenticity while withholding it. Such a false sense of connection is achieved every time Fleabag turns towards the camera to deliver one of her memorable and catchy phrases, or to engage in a conspiratory smirk. She does not care about the viewer; she cannot care about them, because she cannot really ‘break’ the wall between her and them; she cares about the attention she receives from them, and only to the extent that it matches her view of herself. For example, in the opening scene of the first episode, the viewer is introduced to Fleabag by her apostrophe towards them: 

You know that feeling, when a guy you like sends you a text at two o’clock on a Tuesday night asking if he can come and find you and you’ve accidentally made it out like you’ve just got in yourself so you have to get out of bed, drink half a bottle of wine, get in the shower, shave everything, dig out some Agent Provocateur business, suspender belt, the whole bit – wait by the door ‘til the buzzer goes… (Waller-Bridge)

Though the very first word spoken (‘you’) in the series is an address to the viewer, it is not a genuine inquiry towards them. Fleabag is not asking a question expecting an answer. She is making a rhetorical remark expecting the attention to be placed fully on her. She is not engaging in a dialogue; if anything, it is a monologue disguised as a dialogue. Because the audience cannot answer back, there cannot be a meaningful relationship with her, one she attempts to convince them there is.

In his seminal work, Ways of Seeing, poet, critic, and painter John Berger, though mainly talking about images, underlines what is most essential when it comes to our interaction with the world: “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” (Berger 8, my emphasis). Perspective, he argues, centers everything on the eye of the beholder. In painting, for example, the viewer sees a whole image at once. But in moving images, such as television and film, meaning is built through the sequence, the arrangement of one image after another, not so much the images themselves. The viewer does not see the whole; they can only see what is shown to them. Thus, the meaning becomes the context of the images as opposed to their content. 

Fig.1: When Fleabag turns towards us, the world around her becomes blurred - she stops paying attention to who and what is around her. (S2 E4)

In Fleabag, context is built not only on the sequence of shots but also on the technique used while filming. For example, whenever Fleabag turns towards the audience, the camera blurs everything that happens around her. Most importantly, it also blurs the characters she is interacting with (Fig.1). Though she is using this moment to analyze the other characters’ words, thoughts, and actions, to do it, she inevitably stops paying attention to them. Thus, she cannot possibly hold the omnipotent gaze she pretends to have. Fleabag’s turn towards us is “a literal manifestation of her cognitive act of losing focus on the people she is interacting with and retreating in her own private disclosures” (Van De Ven 462). She disappears from her own world, thus perpetuating her isolation, both narratively and emotionally.

Scholar Sarrah Atfield says that “television is never neutral” (“Working Class on the Small Screen” 181), and Fleabag exemplifies this truth. The aesthetic choices of the show do not serve as a window to Fleabag’s soul but they serve to masquerade her avoidance as confession. The more Fleabag engages with her ‘friends’ on the other side of the screen, the more subjective her story becomes, the less she sees of her surroundings, the more she is delayed from facing her trauma.

Just like in a reality TV show, Fleabag is the commentator of her own experience. This may make her character appear more trustworthy, similarly to the illusion viewers may get from watching actual reality television, which only appears to be unscripted and to be showing things as they were. In this sense, Fleabag is intertextual - it borrows techniques from other television genres in “a deliberate textual strategy, seeking to detect meaning rather than to disperse it” (Lavik 56). Interestingly, the meaning of Fleabag comes through the realization of the act of deliberate distraction. Like a reality show contestant, Fleabag presents herself as open while carefully keeping the narrative under control.

Because the audience cannot communicate with Fleabag, it takes someone from her own world to help her liberate herself and manage to move on from her hardships. This is the role of the Priest (Andrew Scott). The Priest is the only character who becomes aware of Fleabag’s conversations with the other world (Fig.2) - it would not be wrong to say that he also breaks the fourth wall, though he does not know he is doing it.

Fig.2: The Priest, though he does not know it, also breaks the fourth wall. (S2, E4)

Because the audience cannot communicate with Fleabag, it takes someone from her own world to help her liberate herself and manage to move on from her hardships. This is the role of the Priest (Andrew Scott). The Priest is the only character who becomes aware of Fleabag’s conversations with the other world (Fig.2) - it would not be wrong to say that he also breaks the fourth wall, though he does not know he is doing it.

Thus, Fleabag can no longer hide her vulnerability - she has to either accept it (as she finally does in the last episode) or keep pretending she is fine when she is not.

This is what happens within the story. Outside, in the world of the viewer and the critic, Fleabag reinforces Paddy Scannell’s statement that “television makes history” (“Television and History” 51) - not only is the show an ingenious reinterpretation of the function of the breaking of the fourth wall technique, it also revives the audience ability to assess screen authenticity, gauge emotional intimacy, and actively choose whether to trust the narrative or not. I believe this play with perception, with seeing and being seen, is at the core of the reason why, in the last episode, Fleabag chooses to continue alone, without the audience. Once she has felt seen by someone within her world, she no longer needs the imaginary gaze of the audience. Thus, she gains the courage to move on and reintegrate herself into her world. The last scene, though one of a farewell, is a happy ending - Fleabag can finally heal. 

Works Cited

Attfield, Sarah. “Working Class on the Small Screen.” Working-Class Rhetorics : Contemporary Memoirs and Analyses, 2021, pp.     181–93. brill.com/display/title/54583.

Berger, John. Ways of seeing. Penguin Classics, 2008.

Gibbons, A., & Whiteley, S. “Do worlds have (fourth) walls? A Text World Theory approach to direct address in Fleabag.” Language and Literature, vol.30, no. 2, 2021, pp. 105-126. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020983202 

Lavik, Erlend. “The Poetics and Rhetoric of the Wire’s Intertextuality:” Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, Mar. 2011, pp. 52–71, https://doi.org/10.7227/CST.6.1.6.

Nussbaum, Emily. “‘Fleabag,’ an Original Bad-Girl Comedy.” The New Yorker, 19 Sept. 2016,www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/fleabag-an-original-bad-girl-comedy.

Scannell, Paddy. “Television and History.” Television Production: Who Makes American TV?, 2007, pp. 51–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470997130.ch8. 

Van De Ven, Inge. “Intimate Distractions: Fleabag’s Manipulations of Audience Attention.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, June 2021, pp. 455–67. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.libproxy.aubg.bg/10.1080/10304312.2021.1889465.

Waller-Bridge, Phoebe, creator. Fleabag. Two Brothers Pictures, 2016. Amazon Prime, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Fleabag/0OB9NDUVQKFRSYRSCHT2A784TI

“Fleabag (2016).” IMDb, www.imdb.com/title/tt5687612/mediaviewer/rm1985897984/?ref_=ttmi_mi_5.