What I found most interesting about The Purple Rose of Cairo, in terms of our audiences class, was the exact moment when I felt the film and my role as an audience member shift.  For the first 15-20 minutes of the film I was a normal audience member, taken in by the story and characters of the film, letting myself be passive in the on-screen world. As soon as the Jeff Daniels character breaks the fourth wall (both in the fictional film, and in part the actual film) it was like I was snapped out of a trance and became very aware that I was in an audience, watching a film, and that this film had a meta message that I was supposed to be paying attention to.  In this sense I thought the film did a very good job of making me think about the act of moviegoing and the act of being a member of an audience.  Much like the Cecillia in the film who gets engulfed in the world of cinema until a character steps off the screen and turns her life upside down, I too was engulfed in the movie world until his departure from the screen.
While this was the way in which I felt the film addressed me as an audience member individually, I also thought the film provided some commentary on audiences collectively.  The response of the fictional audience in the film to the missing character (some outraged, some very interested) to me represented the spectrum of audiences, some of which do not like to deviate from the structure of classic cinema, while other are very interested in the alternative.  I also thought that the character Cecillia represented our culture as one that intently follows all of the stars and films of today.  In the end she finds that the real world and the actual actors/characters are way more complicated than the illusions of cinema which is something I think resonates in our media/celebrity fascinated society.