Miami

This weekend was amazing, as it always is. I just arrived home from Miami after a long road trip. A good portion of my weekend consisted of shopping, sight seeing, and spending time with some of the people I love the most. The malls I visited reminded me very much of what was learned in class.

After learning about the fourth wall, I have begun to notice the significance of it. Niketown, for example, had a lot of displays of trophies and other types of sports memorabilia that are meant to be viewed and recognized by visitors in the store. The displays proved to be, in my opinion, just one of the many examples a fourth wall would be.

Although the fourth wall is usually looked at as the side of the room where a performance is held, the displays in the malls in Miami were very much similar. For one, the displays were meant to be viewed, such as a play. Despite the fact there was no performance being held on that fourth wall, it was still being observed, and respected. Boundaries would be crossed if one tried to meddle with the display. This is parallel to a member of an audience attempting to participate in a performance being held in the frames of the fourth wall. The reasoning to this, is because anything shown in the frame is what is being presented.

On a different aspect, whoever is doing the actual framing has power. As the camera man picks and chooses what is filmed and what will be presented on the fourth wall, the manager of a store, for example, decides what would be displayed and presented to the audience. The fourth wall shows all that is meant to be noticed, and the observers subconsciously recognize this.