Direct-address cinema closes the narratorial gap that autofiction merely narrows.

Evidence

Crucially, as in the flow of this conversation with the therapist, the direct address in Fleabag does not break the diegetic interaction; unlike Saved by the Bell’s signature “Time out!” sequences, the conversation proceeds and there are no freeze-frames or action pauses. The flow is continuous, the divulgences not retrospective but present tense. If first-person narrative in literature often involves the gap between the narrator “I” and the character “I” who experienced what is subsequently narrated (a gap, as we saw in “Writing,” that often shutters in the short time span and present tense of autofiction), the first-person forward-facing camera closes that gap, producing an identity or indistinction between the two. This gapless immanentism, momentariness, and enmeshment is immediacy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 223

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely names the key difference between autoreferential narrative (preserved gap) and immediacy’s gapless first-person camera. Central to the reader’s goal of defining immediacy.
• XREF: Explicitly recurses to the ‘Writing’ chapter on autofiction to define the collapsed gap — a cross-chapter through-line.
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between narrative gap (even in present-tense autofiction) and gapless camera identity is a precise, dense analytical tool for reading works.