I think it’s always very simple to ask for rooting interest. There’s no trick and anybody can do it. It’s almost mechanical in the writing, in the way one directs the opening scenes…We tell the audience you’ve got to be for this guy, and you’ve got to be against this man. If you do it skillfully enough, they’ll be happy to do it for you…But, right or wrong, I don’t like to do it (cited in Silke 1964, pp. 20-21).
So said Hollywood director Fred Zinnemann, whose vote against rooting can be seen to carry similar attitudes that the creation of this response is mechanical and manipulative. Despite his stance on the subject, Zinnemann offers no details about how filmmakers ‘tell the audience you’ve got to be for this guy’ to make them ‘happy to do it’. As he elaborates, we might presume that the director is referring to familiar notions of good guys and bad guys that early Hollywood took from nineteenth century stage melodrama.
23
Rooting interest is something we all learned in kindergarten, because in the old days every picture was really based on it to the point where when you had a chase on horseback, the heavy was riding a black horse and the hero was riding a white horse, so you could tell who was which (cited in Silke 1964, p. 20).
Though this information may be central to our subsequent predictions and predilections, it is still clearly notthe origin of our rooting response. If simple semiotics could guarantee rooting interest, a film such as Johnny Guitar (1954), which inverts this convention by placing the goody in black and the baddy in white, could not function.
The type of side-taking strategy to which Zinnemann might more likely refer is old Hollywood’s well-worn trick of making the villain ‘kick the dog’ upon entry into the drama, often contrasted with a hero who would ‘pet the dog’. Whilst initially a literal strategy (see Sargent 1934, p. 432), the device quickly turned into a cliché and the phrase became shorthand for dramatic advice to, as screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky explains, ‘[p]ut in a scene to show who’s the villain’ (cited in Von Hartz et al. 2002, p. 127). What was frowned upon in third-rate melodramas from The Hidden Spring (1917) to Campus Alley (1932) thus became a legitimate device believed to help encourage and control rooting when written in more subtle and indirect ways by a new breed of industry professionals such as Chayefsky. And this belief continues today, with the advice recently returning to popularity as Blake Snyder’s ‘Save the cat!’ mantra from his bestselling book of the same name urging screenwriters to include a scene where the hero does something kindly when first appearing onscreen (Snyder 2005).20 Nonetheless, even the self-proclaimed father of ‘rooting interest’, Daryl F. Zanuck, seemed less than certain as to how this process actually worked despite more or less adopting a ‘Save the Cat!’ strategy in one famous gangster film. As the Fox movie mogul confessed in a memo on February 10, 1947:
In Public Enemy [1931] I gave Cagney one redeeming trait. He was a no-good bastard but he loved his mother and somehow or other you felt a certain affection and rooting interest for him even though he was despicable (cited in Behlmer (ed.) & Zanuck 1993, pp. 118-119, emphasis added).
Quite aside from the question of exactly how such moments might manage to make us root, this trick can hardly be the whole story. If viewers were to root for characters based purely on ‘Kick the dog!’ or ‘Save the cat!’ scenes then we would struggle to explain moments when they change sides in their rooting. And if our explanation is simply to claim the sudden insertion of what amounts to a new ‘Kick the dog!’ or ‘Save the cat!’ scene –– where does this leave industry practitioners? Instead of the ongoing rooting interest Hollywood hopes to achieve, wouldn’t side-taking be a wholly fickle affair at the mercy of each and every scene that involved, deliberately or otherwise, an instance of dog-kicking
24
or cat-saving? And doesn’t that fly in the face of Zanuck’s entire achievement in Public Enemy (1931), where Cagney acted like a ‘no-good bastard’ yet somehow retained audience support?
If this process were truly as mechanical and straightforward as Kawin, Zinnemann, and Snyder suggest, it is strange that so many storytellers have failed to create it. ‘If you don’t have a rooting interest and you’re not for somebody then you haven’t got a picture’, director Howard Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich, lamenting that his film he liked the least, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), suffered from this problem (cited in 1962, p. 34). Either we take Hawks for an idiot in knowing this rule and still producing the huge, expensive Hollywood epic in spite of it, or we consider that creating rooting interest is much harder in practice than in theory
Even Hitchcock, with his explicit intent and supposed expertise in audience involvement, produced more indifference than interest in later output such as Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), and Family Plot (1976). Hence whilst the bomb-under-the-table anecdote highlights the existence of rooting, it simultaneously raises a mystery. Although Hitchcock confidently claims an audience will automatically desire that the metaphorical bomb blast be averted, this ideal response frequently fails to eventuate in movies that explicitly attempt to induce it – including his very own. Despite the presence of stars, production value, or pedigree, at times the only bomb an audience hopes to see stopped onscreen is the film itself. Nevertheless, successful television writer/producer and long-time UCLA professor, William Froug, appears to insist that rooting is a simple trick that ought to be distinguished from deeper aesthetic effects.
‘Creating rooting interest for the good guys is a no-brainer; creating empathy for the bad guys is good writing’, advises Froug (2000, p. 204). This questionable distinction between what he labels ‘superficial rooting interest’ and the ‘deeper connection of empathy’ (p. 203) is built upon the assumption that the creation of each involves differing technical and/or psychological mechanisms, and that one outcome is worthy, the other frivolous. But one might ask how Froug’s shining example, the creation of empathy for the ‘conniving hunchback who murders his nephews in order to be crowned king’ in Shakespeare’s Richard III (p. 199), is any different from Zanuck’s achievement inducing rooting interest for a ‘no-good bastard’ gangster in Public Enemy? Any distinction appears to rest on the belief that audiences emotionally embrace the goals of one (the ‘pop culture’ character), whilst intellectually assessing the goals of another (the ‘high art’ character). But Zanuck’s description of the audience’s less than whole-hearted connection as ‘a certain affection and rooting interest for him even though he was despicable’ (cited in Behlmer (ed.) & Zanuck 1993, p. 119, emphasis added) is at odds
25
with this assumption, highlighting that viewers may not lose sight of his gangster hero’s immorality any more than they do the murderous scheming of Shakespeare’s discontented hunchback.
The black and white distinction many make between empathy and rooting is questionable on other grounds, as these reactions are by no means mutually exclusive. Audiences are able to remain ambivalent about a character at the same time as they can root for or against her or him. Jinhee Choi (2003) points to the way Joseph Cotton’s portrayal of ‘both a murderer and a loveable brother and uncle’ in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) means that ‘[w]e do not want Uncle Charlie to run away from his crime, but at the same time we hope that his true nature is not revealed to the rest of his sister’s family’’ (pp. 318-319). Although Hitchcock has been celebrated for producing instances of moral ambiguity and viewer guilt, we could also list any number of other actor/character combinations that achieve this same ‘Shakespearean’ ambivalence, from Robert De Niro’s roles in Mean Streets (1973) and Cape Fear (1991), Mel Gibson’s questionable protagonists in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and What Women Want (2000), or Matt Dillon’s characters in Crash (2005) and There’s Something About Mary (1998). ‘I don’t even know if you’re entirely for Marlon Brando in [On the] Waterfront [(1954)]’, says director Elia Kazan of one of the most celebrated character journeys this side of Casablanca (1942). ‘You follow him emotionally, but I never intended to say, “God, he’s right”’ (Kazan 1999, p. 307). This points once more to the audience’s ability to be ambivalent simultaneously to their side-taking. Kazan sounds as if he believes his film achieved something out of the ordinary, but barring the most black and white portrayal of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ – which is arguably far rarer than often claimed – even ‘mass entertainment’ such as Star Wars (1977) and Dumb and Dumber (1994) has most viewers not entirely endorsing Han Solo’s selfishness or Harry and Lloyd’s mutual sabotage of one another as they compete for the same girl. Clint Eastwood, one of the most consistently successful stars of the last half century, has built an entire career out of playing characters that push the limits of our loyalty, suggesting any moral and aesthetic distinction between empathy and rooting is shaky at best. And this raises the further possibility that rather than resting on a valid difference in experience, the distinction might be born out of a common desire to distinguish Art from entertainment; to separate what we safely enjoy from what Others unsafely indulge in. Works that we are convinced may lead weak minds to various moral and aesthetic maladies.
26