Art That Pushes Our Buttons

When watching a movie, have you ever got the feeling that the director (or producer, or screenwriter) is getting a cheap reaction from the movie audience with a scene, or a plot twist that is guaranteed to get a desired reaction?

Westerns, for instance, have been made for nearly a century, and movie buffs know really well how certain types of scenes get the audience cheering.  Chases, for example.  Even car chases work really well.  I was watching Conan the Barbarian, and in the first couple of minutes we see Conan's mother brutally killed.  In The Beastmaster, similarly, a woman brutally has her child extracted from her womb.

In these sorts of situations, I'm firmly convinced that the movie producers intentionally insert certain elements to provoke a desired reaction from the audience.  They are being manipulative.  It is a cheap technique, because they have a captive audience.  Instead of a story developing organically from the initial circumstances and the characters involved, it moves from engineered reaction to engineered reaction.

This sort of movie could be extremely successful, but at the cost of the audience manipulation being visible.  In Avatar, for instance, there are a couple of scenes that are very manipulative.  In Star Wars (A New Hope), there are many manipulative scenes; some of them intended to elicit a chuckle, others intended to make us mad.  The destruction of Alderaan was definitely intended to underscore the evil nature of the Empire.  Similarly the murder of Luke's uncle and aunt, though the latter made Like homeless, which was an important plot requirement.

Well, guess what.  I'm finding that, on the amateur art site I often report on: DeviantArt, artists are beginning to insert picture elements that have gotten favorable receptions, just to guarantee success.  This is pandering.  The girls have large, pneumatic breasts, very long hair, sometimes a girl is depicted nude, with the caption saying: ready to go exploring.  Give me a break.  I have already complained about girl fighters wearing platform slippers.  But girl fighters with long, flowing Rapunzel hair? I think not.  My problem is that I was partly trained as a scientist, and inconsistencies really grind my gears.