"It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film"
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Boorman’s jab lands because it indicts everyone at once: the filmmaker who pulls the strings, and the viewer who pretends not to see them. He admits manipulation is “easy” not as a flex, but as a quiet warning about how crude the tools can be. Cinema is built to steer attention - the swelling score, the hero framing, the tear-timed close-up - yet he insists the con is rarely invisible. The real scandal isn’t that movies engineer feeling; it’s that they often do it with a winkingly obvious cynicism and still get away with it.
The line “nearly always clear” flips a comforting assumption. We like to imagine we’re duped because filmmakers are geniuses; Boorman suggests we’re complicit because the machinery is loud and familiar. That’s a director speaking from the editing room, where meaning is manufactured shot-by-shot, and also from an era when audiences became increasingly media-literate: post-TV, post-advertising saturation, post-blockbuster. By the time marketing and franchises began pre-selling emotions, “cynical manipulation” wasn’t just an artistic sin, it was a business model.
His final move - even the non-critically attuned can sense it - is the sting. Boorman isn’t flattering audiences as savvy; he’s diagnosing a cultural reflex: people feel the push, resent it, and still surrender because surrender is part of the bargain. The subtext is a challenge to filmmakers: if your audience can see the strings, why are you still tugging so lazily?
The line “nearly always clear” flips a comforting assumption. We like to imagine we’re duped because filmmakers are geniuses; Boorman suggests we’re complicit because the machinery is loud and familiar. That’s a director speaking from the editing room, where meaning is manufactured shot-by-shot, and also from an era when audiences became increasingly media-literate: post-TV, post-advertising saturation, post-blockbuster. By the time marketing and franchises began pre-selling emotions, “cynical manipulation” wasn’t just an artistic sin, it was a business model.
His final move - even the non-critically attuned can sense it - is the sting. Boorman isn’t flattering audiences as savvy; he’s diagnosing a cultural reflex: people feel the push, resent it, and still surrender because surrender is part of the bargain. The subtext is a challenge to filmmakers: if your audience can see the strings, why are you still tugging so lazily?
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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