Sympathy for Brendan aka Night Hawk

In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith discusses what he believes are the three components of sympathy: recognition, alignment, and allegiance. Smith seems to frame allegiance as the key to sympathizing with the character. As Smith puts it, “by engaging with the character on the level of allegiance, our responses… are sympathetic rather than empathetic”. In thinking about this I am reminded of the masterpiece movie Step Brothers. In Step Brothers we begin with recognition of and alignment with the character Brendan, also known as Night Hawk. Brendan is a forty year-old bachelor who lives with his mother, has no girlfriend, plays with toys, and pretends to be a ninja. The entire film is aligned with Brendan and the audience recognizes him as a human being with many, many problems. Throughout the film we experience Brendan’s life and emotions. We see his heartache and angst as his mother remarries and moves in with Robert Doback. We understand that even though Brendan moves with his mother he is threatened that Mr. Doback, as Brendan calls him, may steal his mother away. We empathize with Brendan’s fear of a male rival in his new equally aged and equally developmentally challenged stepbrother, Dale Doback. We see this fear turn to joy and love as Brendan discovers a kindred spirit in Dale and his immature antics. However, through all this our relationship with Brendan is restricted to intellectual empathy and cannot make the jump to emotionally supportive and approving sympathy. Despite Brendan’s problems, the audience is left with the nagging impulse to tell Brendan to get off the couch and get a job. However, Brendan’s life comes to a head when he ruins his mother’s marriage, tries to kill his step brother, and is forced to live on his own. Brendan gets a job at his brother’s company and embarks on a mission to save his mother’s marriage, reconcile with Dale, and get his family back together. Brendan willingly crushes his child-like free spirit to become a responsible adult and help others. It is at this point, where the audience recognizes that Brendan is capable of self-sacrifice and overcoming selfish behaviors to help others, that we form allegiance with Brendan and empathy becomes sympathy. Where before Brendan and his antics were an amusing curiosity and his suffering worthy only of empathy, now that Brendan has taken steps toward adulthood we become emotionally invested in him and our empathy changed to sympathy. The audience has an emotional desire to see Brendan succeed. So while recognition and alignment were a necessary foundation, allegiance was the key to inspiring the audience’s sympathy for Brendan, aka Night Hawk.