The audience plays an important role in cinema, and should not be forgotten amidst all the theory. Prince [1996b] notes that theorists often do not test their theories on an audience, suggesting that their theories are flawed due to the significant role of the audience. When experiencing cinema, each individual viewer perceives what they are watching differently, as Prince [1996b] mentions ”viewers are behaving quite rationally in using interpersonal cues derived from personal experience to evaluate the behavior of characters on screen. In an important sense, viewers are not being ’positioned’ by films. Rather, they are positioning film events and characters according to socially derived, extra- filmic knowledge of appropriate and inappropriate real-world behavior.”[Prince, 1996b, p. 82]. This view is backed up by Charles Musser [2006] who analyzes the effects of early films on the audience
”Early films often elicited much more than astonishment - They mobilized the sophisticated viewing habits of spectators who already possessed a fluency in the realms of visual, literary and theatrical culture.”[Musser, 2006, (p. 176]. As such theory should be grounded in an audience based approach that can establish a norm for viewers with a certain similar culture.