From Irony to Postmodern Cruelty: Unreliable Narration and Breaking the Fourth Wall in I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)

Abstract

This article proposes an ethical reflection on postmodern irony and its drift toward a form of cruelty through a narratological analysis of I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017), focusing specifically on two fundamental procedures of its cinematic writing: unreliable narration and the breaking of the fourth wall. Through these textual strategies, the film immerses itself in a frenetic conflagration of perspectives and, at the same time, under the guise of black humor, hyperbolizes the most sordid and unpleasant traits of its characters. All of this culminates in an exercise in cruelty and, more broadly, in a renunciation of articulating a discourse grounded in the psychological, sociological, and cultural frameworks offered by the source material.