Breaking the Fourth Wall: Engaging with Audience and Art

In this episode of Talk Gnosis, we welcome Why Theory’s Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley to read pop culture with a critical eye. We dig into how psychoanalysis and continental philosophy can change the way you watch: why form often says more than content, how constraints (think the classic Production Code of Old Hollywood) seeded subversion, and what it means to treat every film as a “garbled message” you’re free to interpret. From Barbarella’s accidental feminism to the fourth‑wall’s cynical wink, from superheroes and the meaning of failure to why “kindness is punk,” we trade easy nostalgia and knee‑jerk cynicism for practical tools: submit to the text, read the form, look for rifts where unintended meanings break through, and let art actually move you. Listen to the podcast Talk Gnosis on whatever program or platform you usualy use (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) or check it out at https://pod.link/1299863834 Todd mentions his new book The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, check it out at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-introduction-to-jacques-lacan/8A8D3C7E67375B173684A3DC916A648D

 [https://ia600506.us.archive.org/20/items/audio-final-why-theory/audio%20final%20why%20theory.mp3] 

—————–

Become a patron: http://patreon.com/gnostic​​