The Vanishing Act: What Happens When Direct Address Disappears by Monique Thomas

A typical opening scene from How I Met Your Mother, where Ted's future kids stare directly at his father, who's addressing them.

Television is very adept at simulating a connection with the audience through direct address— breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging the viewer’s presence by speaking, engaging, and often commanding him or her directly. The technique makes it easy for the audience to identify with the characters on screen and creates a sense of intimacy; as we become more comfortable, we gradually trust the “Addresser.” After a show has established direct address, the audience takes on the Addresser’s voice—its logic and reasoning—as its own, and the viewer eventually ceases to acknowledge it as a separate being reigning over the diegetic action of the show. But occasionally, the omniscient Addresser fails to guide us through a scene—disappearing, for whatever reason, from its established post. The Addresser quietly backs out of its guiding role without drawing any attention to itself, and we are left in a sort of limbo, wandering through the show with no more information than the characters.

The transition between knowing everything (via the Addresser) and knowing fragments (via the characters) is often so understated and subtle that the viewer doesn’t recognize the void that has suddenly appeared. Because the transition happens so quickly, the viewer falls to the on-screen characters for guidance without noticing any difference. He is left to identify with characters who are flawed, and he is obliged to adopt these flaws, too—legitimizing the characters as well as their problems. This becomes an issue when the characters are so absorbed in their own issues that they can’t properly assess the situation in full.

In this scene from How I Met Your Mother, Lily follows a woman (Chloe) she suspects of flirting with her boyfriend. In the process of disguising herself, Lily looks like a complete serial killer to the scared woman. The two characters create unnecessary problems for themselves because they misinterpret the world around them. This clip illustrates the embarrassing (but hilarious) results of not having the omniscient direct address to navigate the complex worlds of sitcoms. The text reveals spatial complexity (turning corners, unexpected pipes, things to hide behind, etc) which gives verisimilitude to the show and acts as an entryway to real-world physicality; their worlds are just as complex as ours, but we are at a distinct disadvantage because we don’t have that very convenient Addresser following us around every day. In recognizing this lack in our own lives, the audience further trusts the Addresser as an authority figure.

In this clip from Arrested Development, Charlize Theron plays mentally handicapped Rita Leeds whose disorder is mistaken as quirky charm by Michael Bluth. However, Rita’s condition, while hinted at heavily throughout the show, is not fully disclosed until the end of her story arch. Meanwhile, we are led to believe that she is a British spy. This clip is another example of what happens when the Addresser bows out, but it illustrates a higher-stakes situation than Lily the Hunchback, which happened in a matter of minutes, whereas the Rita Leeds story arch played out for a number of episodes.

This clip is an example of the “long con” form of the vanishing act. It places increased pressure on the viewer to figure things out, which leads to increased possibility for embarrassment upon its resolution, but the comedic return or reward is also much greater than shorter-term gags. The longer this deception occurs, the richer the misinterpreted world becomes, and it is more satisfying when that illusion is shattered and the truth revealed. Removal of the direct address is a marketing tool in a way: within the situation comedy, it advertises television itself. The moment the audience realizes the deception has occurred, they cease to identify with the character who misinterpreted things and “buy” the direct address’ marketing of television as a preventative tool of such misinterpretation. We find humor in the mistakes of others but forget that, not long before, they were our mistakes as well. As we shift our identification from character to Addresser, we laugh with people who were laughing at us.

Commercials, of course, are marketing tools for the products they advertise. In this commercial for a Swedish newspaper, we are led to believe that the gentleman on the left is blatantly "checking out" the gentleman on the right, when he is actually just interested in the newspaper on his lap. Commercials often take a visual spin on the idea of misguidance by transforming the Addresser into a visual entity rather than an audible one; by removing a crucial element of an image, the commercial allows for confusion by playing with the basic boundaries of what can and can’t be seen, which is more compatible with the fast-paced nature of commercials. Then the omniscient Addresser appears upon the resolution of the misunderstanding, and declares the product, service, or industry that will, one should assume, prevent such mistakes from ever happening again. Commercials are interesting because they have a gentle tone of discretion and worry for the viewer, projecting an air of concern for the consumer’s well-being. The comedic punch line soothes the sting of the displayed misfortune while also acting as a means of distancing from the perpetrator; luckily, the commercial assures us, this wasn’t you—this time.

Descartes’ characterization of God as infinite provides a fitting answer to the question of how or why the audience tends to idolize the television text. If you as a human are flawed, it is only logical to trust in that which must be perfect because it is infinite and everything. There is literally no room for error. When we follow the flawed characters on a sitcom or commercial, we are subjected to their poor choices and the poor results—even if the embarrassment of these results is swathed in comedy to soften the blow.

Television’s continuity and endlessness via flow create an air of infinitude that television aims to preserve in each of its genres—a feat it usually accomplishes easily, as with commercials and sitcoms. But a problem emerges with the news, as it is so preoccupied with the future—something beyond even television’s omniscient knowledge. News is an interesting instance of the absent direct address. As Ellis says in “Working Through: Television in the Age of Uncertainty,” television is obligated to take on the role of speculator on top of its normal role as informant to compensate for this hiccup in its power. In so doing, the news takes on a job the viewer is perfectly capable of doing himself. It is both on our level and above us. But even in this instance when television appears so similar to us, television supersedes our abilities with a quantity of information rather than quality—providing us with more facts, figures, eye witnesses, etc., than we could ever hope to need.

The Weather Channel is a good example of news at work; it is an entire station whose main purpose is to predict the future, peppered with stories about current conditions that are always foreseeable to some degree (i.e., it isn’t really a surprise that it will snow in winter). This clip is an example of a typical local forecast featured on The Weather Channel, with information on that city as well as the surrounding areas, providing you with more details about the weather than can possibly be useful as you can only be in one place at once. An omniscient voice consistently reasserts that this is, in fact, "The Weather Channel," and that it is "your forecast," though such a voice is wholly frivolous.

This clip is especially interesting because of a moment at 0:32, when we see that there is "No Report Available" for Meridian NAS. But no attention is drawn to this and the forecast continues without missing a beat. Why draw attention to a flaw in your abilities?

If television series sell us television, and commercials sell us things, the news sells us certainty. But the temporality of weather (and all news for that matter) puts a very strict “sell-by” date on that certainty; it is obsolete almost as soon as it is consumed. This is another reason why news provides its viewers with more information than they can take in; the ephemerality is lost in the sheer excess of information, and it all appears as an ever-present mass of facts and guesses—nothing created or destroyed, but constantly disappearing and reappearing in a pattern of predictable difference.

Ellis says that the news helps us navigate these options, but I’d like to take it a step further by saying it creates these problems first. Thus the direct address returns to its original mode of operation, closing the gap in its complete knowledge: after creating or making us aware of a problem (an overwhelming number of possibilities), the direct address guides us through it.

Television creates images and stories that reinforce what it is but never truly satisfy the viewer’s desire to know himself—a desire that television itself perpetuated. Houston discusses how television is both the cause and solution to our problems. Television confuses us on a basic level by promising infinity in its continuous "flow" and delivering a series of interruptions. To console this confusion, we watch TV continually as well as buy the products advertised therein in hopes of attaining what is unattainable. Similarly, we look to TV for guidance—some clue to who we are—through the “variety of forms of address” that TV offers, but these ultimately betray us as they offer us no idea of who we are, but only of what they represent. But the viewer finds solace in the (unending) possibility of discovering himself through television, so he willingly denies the fact that the only thing television can really comment on is itself.

When art imitates life, the only truth within the art that one can be absolutely sure of is that which relies within the boundaries of that art. The world television creates is so seamless and so complete (in all appearances) that we lose ourselves in it, willingly or not, and can’t recognize television’s self-reflexive nature. Television invites the viewer to discover a personality flaw in himself while also providing him with the solution: more television.

But it should be stressed that this relationship is not purely a wicked scheme of television to control the viewers’ minds; the power dynamic is complicated by the fact that the viewer willingly comes back to these shows again and again, reinforcing ideas of what is funny in situation comedies and commercials, as well as ideas of what is noteworthy in the news.