British theater scholar Martin Banham writes, “Almost every culture offers an audience pleasure-paradoxically-through an art based on human suffering.” For 20th Century Americans, there’s nothing like the movies to turn on those waterworks. And, let’s face it, there’s nothing like a good cry-yes, these days, even real men can weep at the multiplex. Catch a screening anywhere of “Good Will Hunting.”
Curiously the sad movie isn’t included as a category along with film noir, Western, action, sci-fi or comedy in film encyclopedias.
Maybe that’s because the phrase sad movie refers not to a single genre at all, but to a mood, a feeling, often a single moment, in an astonishing variety of movies made over the years. There are three outstanding weepers in movie theaters right now: “Titanic,” wherein the love affair between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio combines with the mass tragedy of the doomed ship; “Good Will Hunting,” in which therapy and male bonding combine for a moving, manly hug; and “The Ice Storm,” in which a personal tragedy embodies the moral failure of two families whose material comfort and emotional discomfort seems emblematic of American mores of the past quarter -century (the movie is set in the early ’70s).
Weepers employ some basics: a person dies (“Little Women,” “Gone With the Wind”); an animal dies (“Old Yeller,” “The Yearling”); star-crossed lovers suffer insurmountable separation (“Now, Voyager,” “An Affair to Remember”); a parent figure and child suffer the same (“The Kid,” “Dumbo”).
But the most interesting tearjerking moments arise from more complicated, indefinable combinations of forces. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” for instance, George Bailey makes us cry not by dying but by choosing to live-and his embrace of life speaks to a universal hope and regeneration attainable by even the most cynical among us. An individual, such as George, who triumphs over corrupting social influences gives us some of our best weepers: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Places in the Heart” and “Rocky.”
That’s partly because of more paradox. Stories move us when their characters are so well developed that they resemble living human beings. But we’re also moved when their situations enable them to stand for something bigger than themselves-aspects that link them to everybody, be they third-rate Philadelphia boxer, Depression-era widow or small town savings-and-loan operator with ill-fated wanderlust.
The Greeks, who invented the Western tearjerker via tragedy, had a word for that leap from individual sadness to broader social impact: catharsis, a term Aristotle used to mean “purgation.” Such tears are indeed a purgative, regenerating baptism. We cry at sad movies, not for the sorry jerk up on the screen, but to cleanse our souls. We don’t really weep for George Bailey, whom we’ll never know, but, as a great poet once said, “It is ourselves we mourn for.”
