That's it's manipulable emotions, manufactured emotion does not mean it's not real emotion. When most of the people (at least the guys) went down to Civic Center Plaza to be extra's in the movie Milk (as we called it, being gay for pay for a day) we're all standing around, having a great time pigging out at Craft Services, and smoking pot when Sean Penn gets up, and doing his best Milk (like he was channeling him, because I heard the real deal more than once) starts to talk to all of us to set the mood he was going on about stuff near and dear to him, like helping New Orleans and ending the wars, but he was doing it as Harvey Milk. So he goes on for about 20 minutes before the director gets up on the bull horn and calls 'places' and 'rolling' and Penn does the real Harvey Milk speech from that day - though you only get a snippit of it in the move, he did the entire deal, But from the beginning of that speech (which you do see) the famous line "Hello, I'm Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you," that outpouring of emotion from the crowd was genuine. Manufactured, yeah sure - at a huge cost by the way, just filling all the parking at the Civic Center with period cars is a very expensive undertaking, not to mention paying all of us $90 to just be there, and at that we all ate about $20 easy from Craft Services* - and we all know it's being manipulated (which is why a huge number of the people there were from the arts/acting community in the bay area, the gay community, and just about every member of my union who was not working that shoot was there as an extra, which is just a union bonus in some ways), but it's still very real when it comes down to it. I saw a lot of people there who were in absolute tears because they HAD been there back in the day and our re-creation of it was every bit as 'real' as the original event in some ways, at least in the emotional sense for all of us there. It's called in theater terms 'suspension of disbelief.' And, when it's good - when it reaches something approaching art, it's just not the audience who has suspended that, it's pretty much everyone involved in the shooting.
Don't feel bad because your emotions are being manipulated for the sake of entertainment/commerce/art, indeed be happy they can be.
* - That little re-creation of Gay Liberation Day, what, about 5 minutes of the movie, cost them upwards of $350,000. Easy. I bet $80K just for the food that day.
