Politics & Power Quote by Gene Siskel

Siskel is naming a particular kind of betrayal: not that movies want to make you feel, but that they want your feelings without earning them. The target isn’t sentimentality; it’s laziness dressed up as sentimentality, the assembly-line swell of music, the telegraphed tragedy, the cutaway to the tear-streaked close-up that’s meant to bypass thought and go straight to the gland. His anger is moral as much as aesthetic. “Cynically manipulate” suggests a cold calculation on the filmmaker’s side: they don’t believe in what they’re selling, but they trust the audience will buy it anyway.

The sting comes from the phrase “without even trying.” It implies a double offense: the movie is not only controlling, it’s contemptuous. It assumes viewers are predictable, that craft is optional, that the machinery of genre can replace the risks of storytelling. That’s a sharp critique of a certain studio logic: test audiences, formulaic beats, and emotional cues engineered for maximum immediate reaction rather than lasting meaning.

Context matters. Siskel built his public persona in an era when blockbuster filmmaking was increasingly savvy about audience psychology, and when critics like him were one of the few visible counterweights to marketing. His standard isn’t “art” versus “commerce”; it’s competence and honesty. Give us the manipulation if you must - all narrative is a kind of manipulation - but don’t skip the part where characters become people and plots become choices. The subtext is a demand for respect: respect the audience enough to persuade, not merely to trigger.