Such a preference obviously cannot be claimed for many of today’s action-oriented movies. You’ve heard of in media res, the narratological strategy of beginning a novel or play right in the middle of the action? Well, David Ellis’s Cellular (2004) takes this device to a new extreme. Within the film's first five minutes, a peripheral character is murdered, a protagonist kidnapped, and the primary bad guy introduced—all before we know enough about any of the players to care for them one jot. The plot as it unfolds doesn’t help us either: we learn virtually nothing about the characters’ personalities. One pitiful victim is a high school science teacher with some pretty handy knowledge of electronics, another is a young boy with a Lord of the Rings backpack, and the third is a real estate agent with the makings of a conscience. Greed provides the crude primum mobile for all the villains’ actions, and the hero is a self-absorbed young man who steps outside of himself long enough to help some folk in need.

That’s basically it. Neither personal histories nor personal demons raise their heads to complicate or provide impetus for any of the characters’ decisions. In other words, the thriller unabashedly employs ciphers instead of fully rendered individuals, and relies on the action itself to involve us.

Which is kinda bold, really, because Ellis and the screenwriters have presumed that humans are instinctively altruistic enough to sympathize with someone merely because s/he is in crisis, with no knowledge of his/her character or past. Theirs is actually a pretty optimistic view of human nature. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if simply knowing others were in trouble provided reason enough to stretch out our hand to them?

Robert Browning thinks so, and suggests that our awareness of pain and distress in others is a key component in building community. As his Arabian dervish remonstrates in the poem “Mihrab Shah” (1884), “Tell me, now! / What were the bond 'twixt man and man, dost judge, / Pain once abolished? Come, be true!”