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, or guilt? 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. 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. Whatever the external stimulus, it dislodges the sandbags of our inner levees. And as the darkness wraps us in a mantle of complete permission, we release. 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.
And 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 post-movie dinner-table 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 will cry only if someone squirts Mace directly at their eyeballs. But what about the women who guffawed derisively through “Steel Magnolias,” or the men who wailed like babies at Spock’s screen demise? We throw up our hands about those “exceptions” and the mystery deepens.
Genders studied
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, including the French movie “Sundays and Cybele,” the story of a friendship between an amnesiac veteran and a teenage orphan, and the manly sports weeper “Brian’s Song,” about a football player with terminal cancer.
In “Crying: The Mystery of Tears,” 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 girls the estrogen bike path, their responses begin to 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, hmm.) He also discovered that crying releases internal toxins, a sort of purgative action.
During his research, Frey also discovered a movie that was guaranteed to draw tears, a 1957 British drama called “All Mine to Give.” Set in the late 1800s in Wisconsin, it tells of a Scottish family that loses both parents, leaving the oldest, 12-year-old son to take care of five brothers and sisters. Audiences wept without fail, he recalls, at a scene in which that boy (Rex Thompson) goes door-to-door with his siblings, giving each one away to a new family.
After a few sittings, Frey couldn’t stand watching anymore.
“I’d give my opening talk, turn on the projector and run for the exit. As soon as I heard the music at the beginning it would start me crying.”
What made them cry, Frey says, was empathy. And it helped if the characters were emotional because “that says to the audience, this movie’s so sad even the characters are crying. So they conclude, ‘It’s OK for me to do it too.”‘
