If we contemplate all of the possible failings a story can have, it becomes clear that nearly every one of them is some permutation of “losing the audience.” Naturally, the surest way to lose them is to never have had them in the first place. Since the spine of most narratives entails a protagonist on a mission with some goal in mind, it’s often said that we have precious few pages to get the reader on board with our hero. If we don’t, then nothing – not the coolest action-packed scenes with the wittiest dialog, the sexiest character dynamics, or the trickiest twists and reversals – will save it from the deep clutching quagmire of audience disinterest. It’s not enough to give them pretty things to look at, they must be along for the ride, with some kind of emotional investment in where it’s all going. That’s what keeps them reading and watching.

So how do we accomplish this? What’s the “right” way to set up the protagonist to get the audience involved? There’s an entire school of screenwriting named after the idea of having your hero “save a cat” as an introduction, to get the reader on their side, but of course, there’s a lot more to this issue than that (which is duly acknowledged in the Save the Cat literature). We’re often told “he/she doesn’t have to be likable, just interesting,” but what does that really mean?

One important component is curiosity. The audience is sitting down to watch the movie after having a great deal of the plot leaked to them through the promotional materials, in addition to their general cinematic expertise of all the genre conventions and tropes. So in those first few minutes (pages), you must fight against this foreknowledge and create some questions in their minds as to how things will turn out for our hero. And their desire for answers should be emotional, not purely intellectual.

Again, how? Well, the good news is – it’s not a rigid rule, but a spectrum of emotional engagement. Your protag just has to be somewhere on it.

The Emotional Engagement Spectrum

This range of interest, to the best of my estimation, runs as follows. At one end is total sympathy, in which we genuinely feel for the protag and want them to beat the odds (another necessary ingredient) and achieve their goal. Toward the middle would be empathetic support, in which we have a fairly shady and corrupt anti-hero who is surrounded by much worse specimens who make him shine by comparison, and we want to see him defeat those whose wickedness outdoes his own and possibly achieve some kind of redemption in the process. At the “low” end would be morbid curiosity. Here we follow a despicable individual with no redeeming moral qualities, but there’s something intriguing about his/ her character in relation to the goal that makes us stick with them to see if they achieve it.

Let’s have a look at some examples:

Andy Dufresne

Why does The Shawshank Redemption – a prison movie with no gunfights, no car chases, and no romance; that was a box office failure – have such enduring appeal? There are many virtues here, not the least of which is Andy Dufresne. Has there ever been a more likable and sympathetic protagonist? Remember how he was set up? When we first lay eyes on Andy, he’s sitting in his car, on the verge of tears, swigging whiskey from the bottle, with a gun. Though an armed man clearly stalking someone, he has the look of prey more than predator. Through a purely visual presentation, we already get that he’s an underdog, pushed to desperate extremes, experiencing what is probably the worst night of his life. All of this is confirmed When we start intercutting with his wife and her lover, and his testimony as he’s tried for murdering them. Here he also shows great poise, earnestness, and even some cleverness as he professes his innocence to the prosecutor. Then he’s condemned to two life sentences. So we have an innocent man, sentenced to a literal lifetime (two!) of undeserved suffering, victimized by a ruthless system in a cruel and unfair world. In less than seven minutes of screentime, we’re on Andy’s side and want to see him get out of this.

Léon

In The Professional (entitled Léon outside the US), the titular assassin is set up with an oft-used (for good reason) technique of giving one impression of the protag, and then spinning it in a new direction to subvert the audience’s budding notions and add texture to the character. Léon is briefed on his next job by his employer Tony. A few seeds are dropped here that Léon isn’t your garden-variety scumbag hitman. While Tony has a bottle of hard stuff in front of him, Léon’s drinking milk, and being told that he’s to give an unreasonable gangster a talking-to on behalf of a more reasonable one. He delivers the message, with a blade to the guy’s throat, after unceremoniously wiping out his entire entourage of bodyguards. Afterward, this certified killing machine goes shopping for more milk, then home where he has an unexpected encounter. He meets his twelve-year-old neighbor Matilda, shows genuine concern for the bruises on her face that obviously came from her abusive father, then subtly agrees to keep her smoking a secret. So we have this fierce and able warrior with a soft spot for his weak, innocent, defenseless acquaintance, whose family, we soon find out, has mounting trouble with some very dangerous characters. Who wouldn’t want to stick around to see how this shakes out?

Louis Bloom

As we creep to the lower end of the spectrum, we come to Lou Bloom of Nightcrawler. His opening few minutes consist of him stealing materials from a construction site, trying to lie his way out of it when he’s caught by a security guard, and then assaulting and robbing the guard. For all we know at this point, we’re meeting the antagonist (which isn’t entirely untrue, I suppose, but that’s for another post). But, once again, things take a turn. When Lou sells his stolen goods to another construction company, he doesn’t just take the money and run. Lou applies for a job. He asks to be taken on as a construction worker right there on the spot, and he pitches himself pretty hard. He even offers to start as an unpaid intern! Of course, his sociopathic tendencies precluded him from spotting the imprudence of offering to work for someone you just sold stolen goods to, and Lou is turned out to seek employment elsewhere. But here we have an unstable criminal, but with a sincere desire to get a legitimate job and earn his keep. We may not particularly like the guy, but anyone can identify with the hopeless feeling that no one will give us a chance to show what we can do (aspiring screenwriters, anyone?), and from here we’re left wondering if Lew will get his chance, and what else he’s willing to do along the way.

Patrick Bateman

And now we come to the bottom of the barrel. How can you get any lower than a narcissistic, psychopathic, Wall Street executive serial killer? I give you Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. After a series of atmosphere shots around a trendy hipster restaurant to set up the world and introduce the theme of runaway shallow materialism, we settle on Patrick and his “friends” gossiping about colleagues, ribbing each other about their personal lives, and generally wallowing in their frivolity. But then we get the first hint of who this story is about when Patrick goes on a sarcastic rant about world social issues that’s ironically intriguing. It shows that he’s completely cognizant of mainstream moral values and willfully rejects them. His only goal seems to be “to fit in” (as he expresses later). Then he truly distinguishes himself among his superficial, borderline sociopathic cohorts when he goes to the bar and issues an extremely graphic death threat to the bartender for refusing his drink voucher and making him pay cash. Here it goes from a question of stability to one of self-control, and we hang with him out of pure morbid curiosity to see how long he can maintain it, what’ll happen when he loses it, and what the ramifications will be in this fairytale world of delusional excess.

Now let’s have a look at a few films that fail at this:

Patience Phillips

Who can forget that 2004 masterpiece known as Catwoman? Sure, it’s easy to scoff in hindsight, but this movie had quite a bit going for it when it was announced; One of the hottest actresses in Hollywood at the time, who had already proven she could blend sexy with badass, would be playing a beloved character from the Batman mythology with a built-in fanbase. What could go wrong? Let me count the ways. We first see Patience floating face-down in a stream, presumably dead. Not a bad opening image, but simultaneously the awfulness starts. We’re treated to a clunky, expository voiceover telling us how unremarkable, monotonous, lonely, and unfulfilled her life was to this point. And this voiceover follows us like a persistent mosquito as we cut back a few days, and Halle’s been outfitted with a painfully unconvincing costume of stringy hair and baggy clashing clothes to show us she’s “nerdy.” Her boss reprimands and nearly fires her, then issues her a tight deadline in a confusingly heavy-handed and unnatural exchange. From here, things really go off the rails. She fails to quiet her noisy neighbors (gee, I wonder if this is a setup for later), then there’s an extremely awkward scene where she climbs out her window to save a stray cat (must’ve read that book) and gets rescued by a handsome cop who thinks she’s a jumper. Then, as she races to meet her deadline, she stumbles into her boss’s secret shady meeting with criminals and “hears too much.” From here, she gets chased and shot at by guards and falls into the chemical waste-filled stream, and we’re back where we started. So, what can we make of this mess? Well, the character did encounter several hardships and misfortunes that put her in a precarious position, but the situations are so oddly illogical and unbelievable that they invoke the wrong kinds of questions from the audience, those dreaded ones that start with “Why would…?” It’s really difficult to develop an emotional connection to a character whose plight 1) is explained rather than shown, and 2) entails a stream of occurrences that defy all logic and aren’t in any way believable, even within the fantasy-based story world.

What? Bad example? Too easy a target? Okay, let’s look at a “film” that succeeded at the box office, but failed at engaging the audience with its protagonist…

Sam Witwicky

Once we finally meet Transformers‘s protagonist, after some prerequisite explosions, Sam is introduced as the quintessential high school geek whose classmates include the jock bully who’s inexplicably fixated on harassing Sam, and who’s dating the hottest girl in the class, who inexplicably can’t take her eyes off Sam. Yawn. Sam’s getting his first car and is upset that his dad’s about to buy him a used one instead of a new Porche. (His dad drives him past the Porsche dealership first as a joke that he totally falls for. Hilarious, right?) Then he “gets chosen” by the 1977 Camaro Transformer Bumblebee, which he drives to a lake party where he runs into Jock Bully and Hot Girl, who inexplicably breaks up with Jock Bully at a really convenient time and Sam is able to give her a ride home. Bumblebee tries to get him laid by breaking down and playing sexy music, Hot Girl offers to fix it, then just bails. That night Bumblebee starts and drives himself, and Sam chases after him, thinking his car’s being stolen, and we’re pretty much off to the races. Here we have a clear-cut case of failure to arouse any curiosity whatsoever. We may enjoy watching Sam’s adventures for the visual spectacle they deliver, but is there anything the least bit intriguing about him that we haven’t seen in a hundred other “high school geek” characters? Not only do we not wonder if he’ll get the girl and save the day, but we can confidently predict an awful lot about how he’ll go about it. So what’s there to care about?

By looking at these examples of failed protagonist setups, a few things become apparent. It’s obvious that these filmmakers understood the necessity and even the conventions of setting up the protagonist, as both of them “went through the motions” of endearing their main characters to the audience, but it takes more than a few cookie-cutter “good deeds” or “underdog” scenes to evoke any kind of emotional concern. We have to ride the line between enough uniqueness to make them feel like a person rather than a plot delivery device and enough relatability and logic to root them in our universal understanding of the human condition. Too easy, right?

So, hopefully, you gleaned something from this take on engaging the audience with the protagonist. As we can see from how these pros pulled it off, there are many ways to skin (or save) this cat. You can go about it by a variety of methods, but two things you can’t do are is skip it, or gloss over it! If you do, you have a dud on your hands (at least from a storytelling standpoint). So what do you think? Got any insights about how to get the reader hooked into the protag’s journey? Let us know below!