> The filmmaking was bad enough, but what really made it the nadir for me
> was the sight of the audience getting up and cheering because a dog
> outruns an explosion as the thousands of humans in the background are
> blown away.

Children get the same exemption.

I've made a bit of a study of this over the last 35 years or so.
Interestingly, when I ask people about this reaction, they always say the
same thing: "The dog is innocent." "The child is innocent." So I guess
the human being is presumptively guilty.

Of course, a storyteller can do work to turn a person into an
identification figure, which will make the audience sad at his or her
death. But, minus this work, it's open season.

One possible explanation for why people don't mind the deaths of human
beings on screen is that there's a kind of abstraction to art, whereby we
know that the people aren't real, and react to their fate in a different
way that is particular to art. But I think the child-dog phenomenon
effectively destroys this theory.

I am forced to conclude that human beings who aren't in our circle of
identification are seen as threatening, so that their deaths don't trouble
us. And also that this is a real-life phenomenon rather than a fiction
phenomenon. - Dan