Yes, that’s exactly what I don’t get: I don’t feel like I’m “spending time” with the “people” in the film when I’m watching it. They’re not people… they’re… characters. They don’t even know I exist.
One of those “two kinds of people in the world” kind of things I suppose…
Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon is a fun read, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a sympathetic character in it. (The Barry of Kubrick’s movie might have struck you as a right bastard, but he’s a sweetheart compared to the literary original.)
Sure, if they are well-written.
For example, I really liked Abercrombie’s First Law series, even though pretty well everyone in it is pretty unpleasant. One of the main characters is a professional torturer, and he’s more or less the good guy! 
I’ve been puzzling over this. I frequently don’t like fiction with no sympathetic characters, but I’ve come to suspect that this is more a symptom than a cause. The real cause, I think, is that I can’t enjoy fiction with no characters I can respect, at least in some small way; the fact that I have no respect for them often makes them unsympathetic.
I don’t require good guys. I can enjoy reading about a complete bastard, for example, as long as he’s a Magnificent Bastard–that is, he does his bastardly things with style. I can respect his flair; he’s fun to watch, even as I root against him. Similarly, an evil character who is simply rational and competent is watchable; I can respect his ability while deploring his goals.
Likewise, I can enjoy reading about a fairly incompetent character (or one who is simply out of his league), as long as he’s doing his best, and trying to learn. I can respect that kind of determination.
On the other hand, I don’t necessarily respect a powerful or capable character if everything comes too easily for them. To refer back to Skald’s initial plaint, I often have trouble respecting Superman enough to enjoy him. He’s a nuclear Swiss Army knife, with overwhelming power for almost every occasion, and never did anything special to earn that power. In most incarnations, though, he’s an idealist, earnestly dedicated to making the world a better place; that’s enough of a hook for me to work with. Make him whiny or selfish, though, and you lose me.
It really depends on the quality of the overall work. I love Graham Greene as an author – I’ve read eight of his novels – and I love his work despite the fact that all of his characters are prickly, weak-natured, despicable, or otherwise generally unsympathetic. I don’t think I’ve ever met a character of his whom I liked as a person. But Greene is a very shrewd chronicler of human behavior and spiritual yearning, and that’s what draws me to his work.
Likewise, Mad Men. I would pretty much hate to know any of those people, honestly (yes, even Peggy), but the show is so well-written in general (the structure alone of the episodes is remarkable) and the characters are believably constructed and very well-acted (yes, even January Jones) and the production design is impeccable, so that’s why I watch.
Then there are works that are flawed but have other draws, such as the unintentional hilarity of Matthew Lewis’ Gothic classic, The Monk. Everyone is heinous, but the novel is so over-the-top and lurid that it’s great fun to read. PG Wodehouse’s novels all pretty much have the same story, and Wooster’s an idiot and Jeeves a stuffy know-it-all, but the prose is so clever and laugh-out-loud funny that you have to keep reading. (Also, Wooster is an idiot, but a loveable one.)
On the other hand, if the general production (novel, tv show) is generally crap but there’s a character that I love, I might keep watching the show for a little while but that’s not really enough to hold me.
And if the production is crap and I don’t like anybody, then forget it.
As for what makes a character sympathetic, I ask that they resemble actual human beings and behave plausibly and consistently with the personality and history that we’ve seen. Does the work allow me to see into this character’s inner life and allow me to understand why he or she is behaving this way? If so, wonderful, you’ve succeeded. (This is why I love Dostoevsky so much – even his petty, shallow, venal, buffoonish, malicious characters are written in such a way that you understand why they are the way that they are. No one is a cartoon, everyone feels very real and life-like, so even if you don’t like them as human beings, you can’t help but appreciate them for being great characters.)
Also ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’.
I don’t require sympathetic characters, I just like characters to be believable and realistic. I love the Flashman books, so that gives an idea of how sympathetic I need to feel towards a protagonist.
Which one don’t you find sympathetic, Wally West?
(kidding)
:eek:
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
I don’t think Jones is at all a bad actress or even turning in bad performances. Betty is supposed to be vapid and sometimes repellent.
More to the point, I don’t think most of the characters on Mad Men are unsympathetic; I can even somewhat forgive Pete.
No, that’s not true. He’s a rapist and needs to be beaten with a stick. Also Joan’s husband.
Anyway … Don, Peggy, Joan, Roger, and Betty aren’t unsympathetic at all to me; they are merely complex. There is much bad about all of them, but also much good.
I love American Psycho, even though there are no sympathetic characters to be found. The protagonist is a complete sociopath devoid of human feeling, but he’s just so fun to watch! Not many people can pull off funny sociopathy, but I really enjoyed the movie because of Christian Bale’s portrayal. I guess it depends on other factors; if the characters are unsympathetic in an annoying way, I probably won’t enjoy it (that concept is, of course, subject to what the viewer finds “annoying”).
I don’t need a sympathetic character or “someone to root for” in order to enjoy fiction. I am satisfied with well-written characters and a compelling story.
Sticking with television, since a lot of the posts here are addressing TV shows, I enjoyed Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Sex and the City all without any main characters I either sympathized with or wished well for. I triumphed in their failures and begrudged them their victories. With SATC, even in re-runs, I cheer out loud when any of those horrible, horrible women are humiliated or disappointed in any way. By the end of The Sopranos, I was actively wishing violent death on Tony, Carmella, Meadow, and A.J., and, by gum, I think I got my wish.
Yeah, what of it? 
For the first couple of seasons, she was like an alien. I don’t know if it was the writing or the acting, but she did not behave like any human being I had ever encountered in real life or in fiction, and I just couldn’t follow her (for lack of a better word) at all. WTF, Peggy, WTF.
At one point (right before the end of the second season), I hated everyone on the damn show, Don most of all. I HATED him. And then came the episode where we met Anna, and we saw Don be himself, be Dick Whitman. And I liked that man, and I liked Anna, and everything that allowed me to understand who he truly is fell into place. That’s when I understood that the show had purposely pushed me to the edge before giving me that consolation. That’s the point where I really sat up and started paying attention to the writing of the show, not just in terms of dialogue, but in the way that each episode was constructed and how each one tied into the larger seasonal arc. No television show I have ever watched is as carefully and elegantly written as this one.
So at this point, it doesn’t matter that I don’t like Don, and think Pete needs to be crushed, and Roger needs a second heart attack. I love the show and will watch until it ends.
I love American Psycho too. I don’t think people know how funny it is.
This is the reason I did not enjoy “Six Feet Under” more, even though I know I am in the vast, vast minority. All of the main characters on that show were pretty horrible.
This is the whole point to Picaresque novels, and dramatic forms deriving from them. Plenty of people like this sort of thing, or it wouldn’t have its own subgenre:
And that’s one of the main reasons I did enjoy it. Without the horribleness of the characters, there was really nothing to see there.
I may have low standards. I genuinely like the characters on Seinfeld - I was horrified when the husband said he’d rather be with Jill Taylor than Elaine Benes, because Elaine is so very clearly superior to Jill in every way - and I am also pretty fond of the SATC characters (with the exception of Carrie, of course). On the other hand, I enjoyed Harry Potter, but would have liked it better if Harry weren’t so irritating.
I’ve never been able to enjoy any of the Law and Order type shows, largely because I always dislike everyone involved. The police, in particular, I find so reprehensible that I want the “bad guys” to get away with whatever they’ve done.
I watched one episode and I didn’t want to see anything more out of those characters. I was just annoyed.
But does Joan’s husband deserve to be used as an improvised weapon? If not, someone will escape justice!
–
Barring some manner of super-villian-esqe technology, of course.
In books, I definitely need a character I can root for. It’s my biggest problem with Jane Austen’s books: I find I really don’t give a flip about, say, the Dashwoods and their heroic struggle to survive without having to actually work.
In movies, I can sometimes, but not always, get by without such a character, but it needs to be a very well-done movie in every other respect, and it helps if things move pretty fast. Body Heat is a good for-instance.