At the movies, I've always been a weeper. Anything can set it off. There are the obvious tearjerker clichés that I always capitulate to, of course. Any scene with a dog dying, not least in I Am Legend (RIP Sam); large chunks of Philadelphia, or just about any movie centring on a protagonist suffering through terminal illness; a heartbroken Timothée Chalamet sobbing his twink heart out at the end of Call Me by Your Name. (That scene, specifically, has been a go-to filmic tear stick since an older lady and I wept to it together at the London Film Festival in 2017. I'll never forget it, though we stopped short of swapping numbers.)
Over the last year, however, my heart has seemingly softened. The silliest, slightest things have begun to set me off, be it in the revealing light of a big movie screen or at home, tucked up in bed, laptop out. Looking at my Letterboxd diary, I've watched 27 feature-length movies and TV episodes since the beginning of June. I'd estimate that around a quarter of them made me at least a little teary. Some of the titles, nevertheless, you'd hardly associate with tear-swelling sadness. A belated watch of Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior left me surprisingly misty-eyed (I think it was the bit where Max's dog dies, so perhaps we can file that under crybaby clichés). Also on the list — The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Ira Sachs' new Ben Whishaw movie, Passages. I'm fairly certain I shed a tear to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, too.
We don't come to movies as blank slates, we bring ourselves and our emotions to them, so that I've recently ticked up on the moviegoing cry-o-meter might well be less owed to the films themselves so much as my own fragility. But the point of this isn't to psychoanalyse myself. It has led me to think on the embarrassment that still lingers around the very concept of crying at movies. The lion's share of people I know — more men, not to evoke a banal generalisation, but masculinity does cling — hide their feelings when they threaten to pour out in front of the screen. I know this because I do it; you know this because you probably do it, too. A sad scene comes on at the cinema, you feel the tears begin to well, the sniffles attacking your sinuses, and you take a quick look left and right. “Is it just me,” you think, recoiling in the darkness, “or is Val Kilmer doing this to everyone?”
When it comes to melancholic romances, sentimental indie dramas, or anything with Tom Hanks in it, the object is clearly catharsis, yet we hesitate before admitting how messily we sobbed. It's not just about the purging of our pent-up feelings, but the collective release of them, which is one of the great levellers. We hear the sniffles in the auditorium across the way, or the unsubtle rustling of tissues a few seats down from us, and we think: “Huh. We're all human here. Isn't that nice.” In my experience, people will wax eloquent about the movies that left them a puddle on the floor with a little soft prompting — a bit of reassurance that no, this isn't something to be shy about. It's the point.
Not to be all “crying is good, actually”, but it is. It seems to me so universal an experience that we should all start owning the outpour. That's also the trend I've begun noticing among my mates, within my film-going circles and online. Come to think of it, perhaps the two-punch of Covid and streaming has seen us realise that we were taking the communal experience — with all the guffaws, the screams, and the collective emotionality — of cinema-going for granted. Where once we might've been embarrassed to admit that Top Gun: Maverick had us wailing, it became a unifying principle; on the contrary, it was a little bit weird if you didn't sob. Next time you feel it coming on, then, embrace the emotion. Odds are you'll feel much better for it.