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Which Movies Always Get to You?
Here’s a thesis I’ve held for a long time: we tend to use movies as narcotics. Sure, you might take intellectual content away from certain films, but the point is more often to have a synthetic emotional experience. Comedies are a laughter drug. Romantic films are a love drug. Horror movies are a terror drug — an impulse I don’t really understand, but one that sustains a pretty robust market.
Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of efforts that fail to yield the intended effect. Comedies that fall flat. Romances devoid of chemistry. Horror films that elicit more laughter than fear. So how exactly do filmmakers find that emotional pressure point that makes a film resonate? Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Don Steinberg looks at this question in one specific application: how do movies make us cry? The answer depends in large part on who’s watching:
Researchers are applying science to answer questions about movie-induced weeping. Princeton University psychologist Uri Hasson, who coined the term “neurocinematics,” led a 2008 study that used a type of magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity while watching a film. The researchers used “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”—hardly a tearjerker—in their project. Mr. Hasson and his colleagues identified similar brain activity among people watching the same film, and suggested such research might be useful for the movie industry.
In emotion-research labs, one clip that has become standard is the death scene in the 1979 boxing film “The Champ,” a remake of the 1931 movie. A young Ricky Schroder weeps inconsolably over the body of his father Jon Voight, wailing “Wake up, Champ!” Viewers cry, too. The film has been cited in hundreds of scientific papers.
Scholars also have studied why some scenes strike a chord with women and others affect men more. In “Sleepless in Seattle,” Rita Wilson gets misty describing “An Affair to Remember,” while Tom Hanks counters that he cried at the end of “The Dirty Dozen.” Mary Beth Oliver, a Penn State professor who has studied tearjerkers, asked students to propose movie ideas designed to make men cry. “There were a lot of father-son kind of things,” she says. “There were a lot of athletes. There were a lot of war films.”
When asked which films choke them up, many men cite depictions of against-the-odds valor or understated affection, like “Rudy,” “Brian’s Song” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Women name relationship dramas like “Steel Magnolias” or “Beaches” or “When a Man Loves a Woman,” in which Andy Garcia tries to preserve his marriage to an alcoholic Meg Ryan.
Guilty as charged. I can’t think of many scenes that will still get to me after repeated viewings, but one is surely the elderly Private Ryan in the eponymous film (the younger version of whom is played by Matt Damon) standing in the cemetery at Normandy and asking his wife to assure him that he had lived a life worthy of the sacrifice that was made for him:
How about you? Which movies are guaranteed to get you every time?
Published in General
Fields of Dreams
Shawshank Redemption (the moment when the tunnel is revealed is just glorious, every time)
Braveheart. It’s the manliest one can feel while being wholly unmanned.
There is much to be said for this notion, I suspect it has more truth than we would like to think. Along the same line I find this nature of “research” disturbing.
I think I can explain it. Historically, humans lived in terror-filed environments and were designed to deal with it. Absent terror, we (some of us, the more sensitive ones) need to invent horror to stay sane.
You want to drive out the craving for horror in our fiction? Let the country be attacked by homicidal fascists. You’ll get Oklahoma instead. Lots and lots and lots of Oklahoma.
Platoon. Until I saw Naked Gun.
I’m a sucker for an honest redemption story. My Favorite is a James Cagney classic, The Fighting 69th. But more modern options include Gran Torino, the already mentioned Field of Dreams, Schindler’s List, Unforgiven, The Mission, to name a few.
Of course, it helps if the story is accompanied by a killer soundtrack.
I’m a big softie and start getting verklempt easily.
How Green Was My Valley. Why I get all lumpy just thinking about it.
The end of Mr. Roberts.
It’s A Wonderful Life…several scenes.
The ending of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (the film with Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney)
Neverland, the final scene on the park bench.
Sometimes a Great Notion when Paul Newman fails to save his brother.
One a side note, my Autistic son when he was younger had an interesting reaction to a Beatrix Potter video, The Tailor of Gloucester. For some reason, he used to get all weepy when he watched it. We couldn’t quite figure out what it was about the video that got him all upset and why he put it in his VCR so often. When we asked his psychiatrist about it she laughed and said, “Well, don’t you put on a sad movie from time to time to have a good cry?” We were humbled.
Speaking of Shindler’s List, was I the only person left completely cold by that movie? Everything Steven Spielberg touches turns to plastic.
My husband gets misty if a fairly touching dog food commercial comes on. It’s gotten to be almost a joke in our family, so that if we’re watching practically anything and he sniffs for whatever reason, we automatically hand him the tissue box. It’s not that he’s so uber-sensitive (hey, he’s a guy!) it just seems that as he ages the tears come much more often.
Groundhog’s Day. Not even kidding.
-E
This is a common affliction in my family. The strangest things touch us sometimes, but almost all have some element of truth, loyalty, and “realness” that is not easily explained. Fake garners no emotion. But a touch of real, a touch of truth, these have a way of cutting like nothing else can.
I totally agree. I’ve seen it in my own father, as well as my father-in-law.
Me too. For example, the end of Unstoppable, when Captain Kirk’s estranged wife goes out to meet him.
‘Field of Dreams’ gets me twice. When Moonlight Graham steps off the field to become the Doctor, and when Ray says to his father “Hey Dad? You wanna have a catch?” Another bad one for me is in ‘Somewhere in Time’ when Christopher Reeve sees the reminder about time, and slips away from a pleading Jane Seymour.
Hero’s journey stories almost always resonate with me. Reflecting on my favorite films and games, almost all of them follow this structure.
Sticking with the WWII theme, anyone who can’t get through this scene from the Best Years Of Our Lives with a dry face is a psychopath. I mean, clinically, a psychopath.
Darn it, I just teared-up again.
The first 10 minutes of Up. Kills. Me.
This really annoys me because it’s animation and, because I’m Finnish, emotions are a sin.
I lost my father when I was 16. Many of the things that I did with him I now do with the three grandsons he never knew.
Nothing is more gratifying in many ways than a simple game of catch. The smell of an old leather glove, the sting of a well delivered throw, they have been one of the great constants in my life.
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”
Cue the handkerchiefs.
John Kinsella: Well, good night Ray.
Ray Kinsella: Good night, John.
[They shake hands and John begins to walk away]
Ray Kinsella: Hey… Dad?
[John turns]
Ray Kinsella: [choked up] You wanna have a catch?
John Kinsella: I’d like that.
I’d like that, too.
Brilliant.
And Troy, your terror drug is politics. Your tank is full.
Snoopy Come Home made me a wreck when I was 5.
The first 10 minutes of Up are better and say more through imagery than some entire movies full of dialogue.
I was surprised by how strongly The Mambo Kings affected me years ago. It made me consider for the first time losing my older brother, whom I respect beyond words.
The end of Schindler’s List is probably the most reliable tear-jerker for me, when Oscar Schindler considers all the people he might have saved had he been more generous. Parts of The Mission as well. I think it affects me so strongly because, along the lines of Jim’s comment in #11, it strikes as something deeply true and beautiful.
I think the reason we cry when we are most joyful is because that kind of unrestrained joy invokes the sad realization of how far we are from the perfect beauty and happiness toward which our souls naturally reach. To witness God yet remain separated from that incomparable destiny is a tragic experience, full of both pleasure and pain.
Why do men and women respond differently? Because, in addition to our shared experiences, we yearn for different things. Mothers are made for compassion. Fathers are made for justice.
Brian’s Song has to be the gold standard for this, right? I was devastated the first time I saw it, and I knew the real-life story. It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas are very affecting although you can become desensitized to them with too many viewings each year. I can recall only two movies where the audience was completely silent at the end and slowly filed out in ones and twos without talking: The Passion and We Were Soldiers.
Men crying when they get older is usually caused by lower testosterone (not kidding). At 47 I find the more often I do resistance training, the less susceptible I am to feeling emotional watching movies or shows because lifting weights raises the testosterone level. Odd that.
Must confess, though, that when Saving Private Ryan came out, my wife and I had been married for about five years. She had never seen me cry (she was too far out of it when our first daughter was born… God bless her). We saw Saving Private Ryan at the theater and I lasted until we got to the car, but just wept. She was a bit freaked out.
On a related note, though I don’t often weep, I enjoy a good chick flick, as I think many men probably do. Steel Magnolias & Moonstruck are good chick flicks (basing the Moonstruck score around La Boheme was just genius). I was just recently subjected to Beaches. Never again. Just terrible.
Recent good chick flicks: About Time and Silver Linings Playbook.
Game developers have been struggling to identify ways of evoking cinema-like emotional gravity through interactive experiences. Some consider sadness to be the holy grail of interactive drama, because to make players cry requires forming a deep attachment between players and the characters. That attachment cannot rely on carefully scripted dialogue, as it does in Hollywood films, because the player — the primary agent in the interactive experience — will act and react dynamically, unpredictably, leaving any simulated conversation terribly lopsided.
It’s difficult. Consequently, game developers continue to punctuate interactive experiences with scripted in-game cinematics for dramatic effect. But they are gradually learning to employ environmental design and emotional challenges (leaving conclusions to the player) to evoke emotions.
In the meantime, check out this artful use of a non-verbal cinematic to deepen the setting of a game:
Chariots of Fire. First this:
http://youtu.be/OlRfyjPWAMc
then this:
That’s a gorgeous and haunting movie.
When Mary had the flashback to Jesus tripping and skinning his knee as a little boy, I completely lost it. I’d just sat through hours of torture, but one moment of a mother’s care for her child just tore me up.
Mel Gibson may be crazy, but he’s an impressive artist.
Watching baseball is about as exciting as doing math homework for me. Playing baseball is only slightly more energizing. But even I enjoyed that movie.
I’ll echo those citing the devastating, wordless marriage montage in Up, It’s a Wonderful Life (there’s not a more sympathetic screen presence than Jimmy Stewart for me), and Finding Neverland.
Multiple bits of The Fiddler on the Roof get me, but especially the Little Chavala sequence and “No, there is no other hand!” Sam’s “Sure you are, and I’m coming with you!” and “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!” from the Lord of the Rings films. The ending of the Hugh Jackman Les Miserables, when Jean Val Jean is greeted by the Bishop as he walks to heaven. Tom Hanks losing Wilson in Cast Away (yes, it’s a volleyball, but that just shows you the genius of the movie).