TEARS OF ENDEARMENT

Why do we cry at the movies? Perhaps it’s better not to understand the mystical algebra that makes us weep

Why do we cry at the movies? Maybe it is the movie or the psychological baggage we schlepped in with us. Or is it empathy? Maybe genetics or cultural conditioning. Or were we simply bursting to spill that night because the boss refused to give us a week off for Christmas?

This much we do know: all of us do it in varying degrees of blubbitude. Some of us are waterfalls, soaking fellow moviegoers with our public displays of empathy (PDE). Others are Saharas for whom tears are about as rare as oases. Most of us fit somewhere in between.

The trigger may be the moral injustice in Schindler’s List, or the way Heath Ledger’s throat catches when he confesses those forbidden feelings in Brokeback Mountain. Or that cheesy Michael Keaton movie—you know, the one where he’s dying of cancer and he makes a videotape for his future son and … (we are too verklempt to continue).

Whatever. There we sit, teary-eyed, vulnerable and helpless. And we become as emotionally intertwined with the characters in the movie as we do with real people. We wrestle like Hallmark card creators for words to describe those feelings. The movie reached us. We related to it. It spoke to something inside us

And in our dinner or parking lot discussions, the cultural myths (and facts) tumble out: Women cry more than men. Women go out of their way to find “chick flick” cry-athons. Guys cry only if someone squirts Mace at their eyeballs.

It should come as no surprise that scientists and cultural thinkers have weighed in. Researching the psychophysiology of crying in the early 1980s, biochemist William Frey subjected approximately 150 subjects to various tear-jerkers. Frey and co-author Muriel Langseth concluded that boys and girls do equal amounts of crying until puberty. But as boys take the testosterone highway and women the estrogen bike path, their responses differ. Women do tend to cry more than men, four times as much, he found, and usually between 7 and 10 at night. (Which seems to be the precise time when husbands are home, hmmn.) He also discovered that crying (the emotional kind, as opposed to the onion-slicing variety) releases internal toxins.

Tom Lutz, a sociologist and author of 1999’s Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, dismisses Frey’s crying-as-auto-therapy as cultural myth.

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“If crying were therapy,” he says drily, “actors who cry onstage every night and twice on Sunday would be the most psychologically healthy people in our culture, and we know that’s not true.”

What really triggers the waterworks, Lutz says, is a combination of conflicted emotions. We choke up, essentially, at the fulfillment of social roles, such as a couple pledging a life together at a wedding or, the father dancing with his daughter. But we cry for bittersweet reasons, realizing we can never sustain, or measure up to, that iconic moment. In other words, we strum a mental guitar chord that combines positive, major feelings with sadder minor tones. And the tears flow before we know it.

So, we are empathising, we are strumming, and we are philosophising in the flickering chiaroscuro. But whatever we are really doing within the ineffable inner machinery we call the soul, and whatever the prolactin content in our tears, we are forging a personal bond with a particular movie that we’ll never lose. As with love, perhaps it’s better not to understand the mystical algebra that connects us to Beaches but to be grateful it adds up to moments like these.
-Desson Thomson (LAT-WP)