The bad guys are nameless, faceless characters who you know goddamn well are just going to get killed by Handsome Actor X. It's not important who they are or where they came from, so as a result you're not afraid of the bad guy, and the feeling you get from the commercial movie is not profound.
But if you see a mobster in a movie sitting down to dinner with his family, playing with his son, giving him a toy- a little rabbit or some shit- talking to his wife about how the power's gone out in the garage, all of a sudden you got a real guy. If you got three scenes of a real guy playing with his kids, fixing the garage door opener, watching Lucy and Desi on TV, and laughing at it because Lucy got into another mess and Ricky ain't going to let her sing, and then getting in his Cadillac to drive across town where he goes to a building and waits around the corner for a woman in a red dress who comes walking out and he comes up behind her and puts a .22 caliber hollow-point in the back of her head, then fixes his briefcase and gets back into his car, you're scared of that motherfucker- all because he gave the kid the rabbit. If you never saw him give the kid the rabbit, you're not afraid of him because he ain't real.
