Eddie the Eagle – the story of a chunky, unsuccessful ski jumper in the late 1980s – is the most successful British film since Spectre. So far it’s made £6m in the UK, double that in the US, and has been released in 30 other countries, including Ecuador and Bahrain.

It has pulled this off by means of an advertising campaign that reveals little of the plot or the opinions of the critics. Rather, the posters choose to offer us a preview of the feeling we will enjoy should we go to the cinema and see it. This is suggested via the big grins of the stars – cheerily clad, looking to a happy future – and spelt out explicitly through a couple of quotes: “A feel-good, crowd-pleasing triumph!”, promises one. “It will make your heart soar!” says the other. A guaranteed hit of happiness, you say? Yum! Yes, please!

This is self-help-style marketing, understandably popular among publicists. Movies such as Suffragette and The Danish Girl courted the crowd by riding the coat-tails of modish opinions. Identify yourself as a feminist outraged that there was ever a time women didn’t have the right to vote? Better see this, then. Keen to sensitively engage with the transgender debate? Here’s Eddie Redmayne flip-flopping in a frock. The message of these films is carefully allied to trending sentiment. Feel this way? Take this! Want to feel that way? Watch that! It will make you feel better because it will reassure you you’re right.

Such an approach has been appropriated by society at large, as well as those with something to sell. Earlier this week saw the launch of a new initiative licensing doctors to prescribe novels such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Perks of Being a Wallflower to teenagers with mental-health issues. Sage minds ape Plato by suggesting we could all benefit from such an approach.

Alain de Botton repeatedly instructs us that different works of art should be prescribed for different daily problems. Art is needed for life’s sake, he wrote in this newspaper. And the provision of such consolation is key to its continued existence. Museums can save themselves if they abandon earlier aims and instead serve our inner needs.

This whatever-pays-the-rent philosophy is perhaps keenest at the most commercial end of our culture: cinema. There, if appetites are identified suppliers will sell their grandmothers for the chance to cater for them. That’s why we have mainstream movies that trade mostly in placation, reassurance and the careful coaxing of standardised emotions. Audiences kowtow accordingly, on platforms whose templates further funnel their responses.

So, fresh from a screening of Eddie the Eagle, Eamonn Holmes dutifully tweeted: “Inspiring, Emotional, Sad, Nostalgic, Funny, Nail biting but overall a brilliant Feelgood Factor!” The conversation beneath is a mob of emojis, with Holmes and followers employing smiley faces, sobby faces and winking faces to capture their reaction to the film. Gifs give us something similar, in fleetingly moving glory. They pre-empt our emotion, even before we’ve clocked what it is we’re meant to be rolling our eyes at.

The sensation that something elicits in us is now the primary organising principle of culture. It’s not just how we report on our experience; it’s how we access it too. We curate through moods. We choose our evening’s entertainment by browsing films on Netflix tagged “Feel-good Foreign Comedies for Hopeless Romantics”. It makes sense: the challenge we face is how to sift through all this stuff. So why not start with us, with the hole we want filled, and progress from there?

The reason is because it’s boring, self-defeating, and completely topsy-turvy. For a society that apparently prides itself on its open-mindedness, it seems strange we are now unwilling to submit ourselves to a work of art without knowing how it will affect us. We prefer to treat art instead as an amusements, to consume it like pills, tonics, packaged meals and snacks.

This doesn’t just denigrate the work; it reduces us, too. We endanger our ability to process unfamiliar feelings. We also run the risk of feeling fundamentally fraudulent. If we over-prune our range of emotions, we flail in the face of anything for which glibber responses don’t quite cut it.

Out in the UK in a fortnight is Son of Saul, an Oscar-winning Hungarian film set in Auschwitz in 1944. Saul is a Sonderkommando: a Jewish prisoner given minor privileges (mainly deferred murder) for compulsory shifts in the gas chamber. We see him ushering in new arrivals with promises of soup after their shower, shutting the doors, listening to their screams, sifting their belongings, scrubbing down the room, stacking the bodies, loading them into the ovens, and shovelling coal and ashes, again and again and again.

With its close focus and long tracking shots, the film acts as a virtual-reality visit to the concentration camps. If that wasn’t demanding enough, it also forces you to grapple with the moral horror of being a cog in the killing machine: the Sonderkommando were not just victims of the Holocaust but burdened with the guilt of their part in it. This presents quite the challenge to the viewer – and, especially, to the emoji-maker.

Yet Son of Saul also offers a strange commentary on our own current insularity. Saul embarks on a quest to give a young boy a proper burial, in secret, in the ground, with a rabbi’s blessing. It’s hard for us to rationalise his mission: it seems completely impossible, borderline pointless – and the efforts to pull it off put Saul and his friends at yet greater peril. But, as he says to one of them, “We are all dead already.” Not just true because they’re facing imminent slaughter, but because they live in hell.

This explains Saul’s aim: to live again by feeling something, connecting with his previous humanity. For almost all of the film Saul – whose head is in every frame – is absolutely numb, recognisable feelings obliterated, face registering nothing.

Then, late on, there comes a moment in the movie when that is not the case. How it feels to see that transformation would be almost impossible to explain, regardless of the depth of your emotional lexicon or your palette of smiley faces. But at a time when our own responses are so rigid and conditioned, it becomes overwhelming.