I was thinking about this again recently, and thought I'd figured it out. Then I re-read the first post and saw that I had the exact same thoughts six months ago.

At any rate, I've been listening to the Creative Screenwriting Podcast a lot recently (highly recommended) and several screenwriters shared a similar experience. They wrote a scene in their movie that they dearly loved. They then realized that the scene "wasn't necessary" and so it was cut. It made me wonder when "necessity" was the rule of law by which screenplays were written? I think screenplays, or movies for that matter, are an excuse to get emotional thoughts in our heads. If a scene is doing a good job at getting to our emotions, who cares if it is 'necessary' to the plot of the movie? The emotion is good, the plot is what is needed to get to the emotion, but if you can arrive at the emotion any other way, is it not equally valid?

But still, I wonder if they don't know what they are talking about... It makes me think of the editing Ridley Scott did on the Director's Cut of Alien. For the most part, it's not scenes, and it might not even be seconds that are added or cut... it's frames. Not anything that would affect your logical/rational response to the movie, but something that might very much affect your emotional response to it. But who can tell?

And can you logically plan how people will respond to something emotionally? Of course you can, but don't people see through that and call it shallow or cheap? Calculating, instead of feeling?

How much does sound quality, invisible music, video quality, video resolution, colour, screen size, etc... all play into our emotional response to things? It probably doesn't affect our rational response, right? But it can totally change our emotional response.