6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy

[Brian G Turner]

This article is so spot-on in so many ways - and goes well beyond the simple symbolism of "Save the Cat".

6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy | Cracked.com

A few classic lines on how audience sympathy is generated in film:

For instance, what if the movie is set in a time or place that's radically different from what the audience is familiar with? Worse, what if that time or place had attitudes that modern audiences might consider sexist, racist or otherwise repugnant? Easy: Just transfer an entirely modern person into a historical setting, slap some funny clothes on them and, hey, you've got your protagonist.

In Kingdom of Heaven, which is set during the Crusades, Orlando Bloom takes time to repeatedly preach peace and religious tolerance, despite the fact that he's, you know, in the goddamned Crusades. The Patriot (set in South Carolina in 1776) and Australia (Australia in the 1930s) go out of their way to show their main characters' oddly enlightened views on race relations -- i.e., Mel Gibson plays a South Carolina plantation owner ... who is anti-slavery.

Any females, of course, must be portrayed as forward-thinking feminists, regardless of the time period or their cultural background.

and this:

Humans tend to see the world through something called the actor/observer bias: The more we know a person, the less we blame their actions on their personality and the more we blame outside circumstances. So for the stranger, it's, "He just shot the TV, what a psycho!" But for a friend, it's, "He just shot the TV. It must have been Cake Boss."

This is important when it comes to movies, because it means that a film can show two people doing the exact same thing, and still have one of them come off as the good guy and the other as the villain. The difference is that the audience is given reasons for the good guy's actions.