Here's a story:

When Akira Kurosawa directed the film Yojimbo (on which A Fistful of Dollars was based, but Yojimbo is better), he had a point he wanted to make. The point was this: he'd had it up to here with yakuza. They were proliferating in Japan, and he hated them; they were ruining the country. To express this hatred, Yojimbo shows a lone hero fighting yakuza-like gamblers. The story follows a ronin going by the name of Sanjuro, who goes into a town being destroyed by two rival gangs, decides it would be better for everyone if all the gangsters were dead, and sets about achieving this with a combination of skilled swordplay and Machiavellian politics. Sanjuro (read: Kurosawa's dislike of yakuza) is a really hard bastard, as played by Toshiro Mifune, an actor who ranks with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood in his ability to play, not just a man, but an entire archetype of masculinity: weighty, cynical, tough, shrewd, wry, indestructible. The gangsters (read: yakuza) are ridiculous and horrible grotesques: stupid, cowardly, blustering, petty and vicious. They get their asses kicked seven ways from Sunday, and the world is left a better place without yakuza.

Unfortunately, yakuza loved this film. You see, they thought they were Sanjuro.

This is why I'm calling it the Sanjuro effect, but it can be defined more generally thus:

Audience misidentification with a character or characters, to the point where it entirely contradicts the message of the story.

There are lots of examples, and different manifestations:

Sanjuro himself is a case of people failing to recognise the actual portraits of themselves in a story, and instead identifying with someone who's set up as their opposite, which is to say, thinking you're the hero when you're actually the villain. This is a particular danger with violent films, as violent people don't usually imagine themselves as the losers. Sanjuro might not have been a yakuza, but hey, he won, right? He was cool, right? That's like us, then. (This is why the myth of redemptive violence is a sword with two points and no handle. Everyone thinks they're the redeemer.)

Another example of that style that comes to mind is the Trainspotting fashion. When I was an undergraduate, that was the fashionable poster to have on your wall if you were a boy - despite the fact that this was at Cambridge, where there was often a CD player right under the poster taking the piss out of people who owned them, and good health, cars and fixed interest mortgage repayments were exactly what these student lads were about to spend three years getting a degree in order to afford. Exactly who the boys thought this poster was having a go at if not them (or possibly the parents who were supporting them) was always unclear to me.

Some people, on the other hand, agree with characters who are supposed to be villains. I hear some Wall Street bankers thought that Gordon Gekko's 'Greed is good' speech was absolutely right; the fact that the film ended with his downfall, presenting his way of living as both morally corrupt and unsustainable, passed them by. I remember an argument in college with some guy who was convinced that Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep was the hero of A Few Good Men: 'He goes out in a blaze of glory, and he's right,' he said. (The guy was best known in college for getting his willy out and mooning people; he wasn't popular among women.) Now, I thought Jessep went out screaming insanely, having been proved to be an accessory to murder, a bad officer who let his men take the blame for his mistakes, and generally speaking a disgrace to his country. Maybe we were watching different movies. On at least one occasion, Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, a play written in the eighties that best translates as 'Please for the love of all things sacred don't vote for Thatcher again or these fucking psychopaths in the City will keep plundering the country', found itself with Thatcherite City traders, dressed up for the Opera, sitting in boxes at the theatre and cheering every time someone got screwed over. Sometimes people get the moral backwards. The Serious Money one may have been ironic, but my bare-buttocked friend at college was deadly serious. He said A Few Good Men was his favourite film, and he got quite angry when I suggested that Jessep wasn't supposed to be the hero.

Other people go for romanticising a character who vaguely reminds them of themselves, usually because they have the same failings you do, and then Mary Suing them up. I was going to use some examples of Harry Potter characters based on some inaccurately beautiful fan art portraits I stumbled on a while ago, but I decided against it because a) I can't find them and b) this is mostly done by children, and it would be mean of me. However, I'm sure many of you can think of examples.

That one, I think, is often done with villains: viewing them as misunderstood and wronged, and hence justifiably pissed off and entitled to assert themselves by means of villainy. Of course, sometimes a story will support that, especially if the writing hasn't done a good enough job of making the hero likeable and the villain detestable - but sometimes it only works if you ignore a fair proportion of the villain's actions. Which sometimes people do.

There's also the case of believing what a character says about themselves, and missing the point that they're kind of deluded. The phrase Are you talkin to me? comes to mind. Um, guys, this is a lonely, paranoid, traumatised war veteran having a psychological breakdown, not a cool hero strutting his stuff...

Have you run into this? I'd love to hear examples.