Can art impose emotion on us?

The most common response to the last post will likely be something along the lines of, "I can't help it that [name your art form] makes me emotional. It just does." That may well be. The question is, should it? Are we to be ruled so much by our emotions that they can take control of us against our will, or are we to subjugate them to something much steadier and more stable? Emotions are infamously changeable. Should they rule us?

But, the objection may continue, you don't understand; I can't help my emotion. I don't read these kinds of books, or listen to that kind of music, because they make me feel like such and such. It's not my fault.

In most situations, such shirking of personal responsibility would be seen as a mere pretext, an excuse for behavior known to be wrong or inappropriate. Why do so many accept the same excuse when it's applied to art? How can we take seriously the idea of human culpability if we're going to say our free will can be undermined and even disarmed by outside influences, especially influences as changeable and ubiquitous as music or paintings?

There is only one logical response: we can, indeed, condition our own responses to art. This isn't meant in some Pavlovian sense, where a specific visceral reaction always results from a specific stimulus. Rather, it's meant in the sense that, responsible as I am for my own actions, I have the capacity to first analyze and then respond to art of any kind.

If I see a David Cronenberg film and am not able to control my emotional response, any number of horrible and meaningless things might result. Videodrome alone would be capable of driving me to isolationism, or sado-masochism, or consumerism, or any other number of anti-social evils. Art, then, would be a weapon more dangerous than anything religious fanatics might be able to get their bloodthirsty hands on. Some claim that it is.

On the other hand, if I first subject every work of art I encounter to rational thought, and only then permit an emotional response, the weapon is defused. I may end up disgusted or scared, but I will not end up accepting the worldview inherent in the artwork or its medium. Humans are rational and responsible beings (in the sense that we are responsible for our actions), and therefore we are also capable of this approach to art.

It's not always easy to master our emotions, but it's always necessary. The reason we shouldn't watch Videodrome continuously isn't that it might make us behave irrationally, but that its ideas are devious and pernicious, and (if unfiltered) are able to contaminate our reason and intellect, which in turn will affect our souls. Art can and does impose emotion, but it isn't necessary that it do so. What is necessary is that we govern our emotions with reason and filter art with reason before resolving the experience in an emotional response.