Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Oh, Those Heart-Wrenching Movies!

The movies can provoke so many feelings, so many tears, but I think, for this, the actors are to blame to a large degree for their great performances that create such empathy in the cola-drunk and popcorn-fed audiences. To counteract the actors, I wish we could have Siri, the voice-command girl, whispering in our ears during a movie, "Get a hold of yourself. This story is not relevant to your life."

Are we so masochistic that we willingly subject ourselves to crushing dramas? A daughter who is secretly dying, the doggie that lost his life while saving a child, sinking ship, cancer, people in slavery or imprisonment...Just a few topics that inspire tears, and those tears we love in a matchlessly sick way.

Do we cry at the movies because we find the subject matter close to our hearts, or is it the opening of our feelings to the darkness inside the theater? It beats me, but I think darkness has something to do with it. Just think of the end of the movie when the reel stops and they turn on the bright lights. What an ambiance killer are those lights! Right away, everyone gathers their stuff and trudges out like zombies with a herd mentality, trying to hide red eyes and left-over sniffling.

I am not a crying person. Crying in front of everybody feels like emotional hemorrhaging to me. Even though I don't suffer from a tear-duct blockage disease, rarely- if ever, can I shed tears in serious, critical life situations. Yet, there have been times when I had tears at the movies.

Looking back all the way to my childhood, I can honestly say, Disney traumatized me. I feared Disney movies. Cinderella's ugly step-mother and sisters, Sleeping Beauty's biting the apple and those poor dwarfs' basketball-sized tears, Old Yeller's ending, Bambi searching frantically for his dead mother...What a shock for a kid!

Even in later years, when I was quite grown up--a woman with children high-school age, no less--Disney did it again with The Lion King. Just look, not only does Simba's dad get trampled to death by a herd of wildebeests, but Simba innocently blames himself for the tragedy. That movie finally did it for me. I swore out Disney.

I can't remember the title of the movie for which I felt emotion the most, however. I think it was a French movie with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, a tragic love story happening somewhere in Europe, a couple of centuries ago, in which Alain Delon dies at the end. Oh, that poor romance! Maybe excusable, since I was fourteen then, a bit off my rocker, and I saw the movie with my pretty cousin who was lovesick and romance-crazy, and in hindsight, maybe I imitated her. The two of us were bawling so hard even after we came home that the adult chaperon felt terribly guilty for taking us.

But it is not just the awkward adolescents who sob and blubber for failed romances. Most females I know stalk tearjerker chick-flicks the way black bears get drenched while trying to catch salmon.

Not me, I may be like a bear and mentally hibernate at times, but you won't see me drenched at the movies. I refuse to watch chick flicks with women friends alone. That day with my cousin did it.

Anyhow, I never got teary eyed or even had a lump in my throat watching Steel Magnolias, Terms of Endearment, or American Beauty. The English Patient annoyed me, and Life is Beautiful made me angry, not sad. I wanted a Hollywood ending for that one.

What I had a lump in the throat for, even a sniffle or two, is the last scene in Casablanca. My sadness, though, unlike other viewers, was not for Rick's sacrifice, but for Elsa's courage to go with a man she loved less. Among some movies that truly moved me are Schindler's List and Dead Poet's Society.

"Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones," said Oscar Wilde. Crying in front of everyone can be my worst nightmare, but I think I am not alone in this. I have a hunch that men who hate chick flicks are also afraid of their own sigh-filled crying and looking un-macho and un-pretty—okay, un-handsome—, as if having a breakdown.

Probably, those men--and women like me--may be afraid of facing our own drama-queen personalities, but I wonder more about those people who search tears in their movie experience. What makes them feel compelled to pursue such experiences? I don't know the exact answers, but I suspect those are the nicer people who like to watch and remember that compassion exists and empathy is alive and well on our otherwise conflicted planet.


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Prompt: What movie always makes you cry? (Or at least makes you emotional.)