Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The concept of narrative, within film and television, has traditionally been defined as something internal, or contained, in the medium itself. It would be unusual to refer to the narrative of an audiovisual medium and include viewers as part of that narrative. Viewers are commonly thought of as entities external to a story who experience audiovisual stories through the senses, their emotions, and their cognition in general. Consequently, the space of a narrative is also internal to the medium, it resides inside the device used to screen a film or a television show. This paper looks at the viewer’s participation in Fleabag’s story to argue that narrative space can be extended to viewer’s physical space (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, 2016-2019). This goes one step beyond arguing that the spacial narrative of an audiovisual medium finds embodied representation in the viewer’s mind. The underlying idea in this essay is that the actual, physical space of the spectator is an integral part of Fleabag’s narrative space. Recent uses of the dramaturgical device of breaking-the-fourth-wall in televised series have challenged the assumption that the narrative space exists only inside the medium. Specifically, Fleabag takes the use of breaking-the-fourth-wall to a level where the main character establishes and develops a relationship with the viewer so that the narrative space of the series transcends the medium and expands to the experiential space of the viewer. The goal is to argue that Fleabag represents a paradigm shift in the conception of narrative space in audiovisual media.