Sad Movies: What Makes an Audience Cry at a Tearjerker?

A tearjerker is a movie that is defined as so sad that it causes an intense emotional reaction resulting in-what else-tears. But let’s not forget the jerker part of tearjerker. There is a difference between a tearjerker and an emotionally satisfying, if draining, cinema experience. It doesn’t take much talent to manipulate an audience into such a tactile emotional response as tears. And, generally, most movies that do leave us crying tend to be merely emotional responses to cinematic tricks of the trade. The easiest way to ensure that you get your audience to cry is through the use of music. Music is the hidden treasure of filmmakers. We usually tend not to even notice it, but if you ever get the chance to watch what you consider a deeply emotional scene without the musical accompaniment, chances are you will walk away wondering why you were crying.

Even movies that have a genuine emotional wallop to deliver benefit from the use of music. For instance, Schindler’s List is probably the saddest movie I’ve ever seen. I can remember being in the theatre and listening to the sniffles of weeping moviegoers almost from the time Amon Goeth arrived in Krakow. The story of Oscar Shindler saving 3000 Jews hardly needed John Williams’ stirring and emotional music played to perfection by Itzhak Perlman, but it definitely didn’t hurt. Liam Neeson’s breakdown at the end of the movie has often been attacked by Spielberg critics as unnecessarily sentimental, as an intrusion into the sincere emotional depth provided by the film up to them. I disagree; I feel that if for no other scene, Neeson was robbed of an Oscar that year. It’s not music that makes Liam Neeson’s performance burn through the celluloid. Schindler’s List is, truly, sad; deeply, hearwrenchingly sad. But would it be capable of jerking as many tears without John Williams score? Probably not, but it might be interesting to see.

Even with the value of John Williams’ music, Schindler’s List is still not an example of the Kuleshov Effect. Most sad movies engage in the Kuleshov Effect to bring about the tug at the heartstrings. What is the Kuleshov Effect? Russian director Lev Kuleshov shot a close-up of an actor. Using the exact same expression as a reaction shot, he gave the impression that the actor was looking at different things, such as a plate of food or a child’s coffin. When audiences saw this, they responded with applause for the depth of range of the actor and how he was able to show such varied emotions as grief or desire. In other words, audience members respond to manipulated images only in part based on what they are actually witnessing, but also in part based on the emotional investment they bring to the scene. The Kuleshov Effect is all too often used by filmmakers to bring out those tears.

Take, for instance, movies like Steel Magnolias or Ghost. The sad emotions engendered by movies such as these are not based so much on three-dimensional characters and intellectual engagement with the themes surrounding the loss of a loved one. What makes Julia Roberts’ death sad-apparently-is the juxtaposition of a lively young girl being dealt an unfair blow. The filmmakers make great use of Roberts’ smile and overall physical appearance; when death comes on it’s meant to shock us to the core. Although we know differently, we expect death to be old and ugly. Would Steel Magnolias be such a gold standard tearjerker if it were Shirley Maclaine or Olympia Dukakis who died? Probably not. Equally manipulative, though in a different way, is Ghost. Ghost manipulates the emotional investment that viewers bring to the theater by preying upon the subconscious desire for an afterlife rather than by treating the possibility of it in any serious way.

We all want there to be something after we die and most of us who do want that have a pretty solid idea of what that something is, put there by centuries of religious dogma and rather less dogmatic interpretation. A serious film with great emotional depth could be made about the fear of being caught in a limbo between this world and the next, unable to connect with our loved ones in the hereafter. Ghost isn’t that movie, however. Instead of examining the angst that Patrick Swayze’s character should and would be expected to feel under those circumstances, the filmmakers’ idea of emotional artistry is to subliminally connect eternal togetherness in the afterlife to, well, screwing after making a piece of pottery.

Of course, some really great tearjerking scenes can be created without even resorting to death and some movies with death that should be sad instead succeed in creating a different emotion. One of the saddest scenes of the past twenty years consisted of little more than Kevin Costner asking his dad to play catch. Then there’s those flowers coming back to life as E.T. is resurrected. Of course, music did play a part in both those scenes. But what about when death is all around and it’s not sadness you feel? Anyone watching United 93 and feeling mere sadness as the inevitable begins to take place seems to be missing something. Why would a movie based on a true story about the deaths of real people result in less tears than a completely fictional movie about a young college girl stricken with cancer?

Because the underlying emotional investment in United 93 isn’t manipulated by the filmmaker. Almost without exception, there isn’t a filmmaker in Hollywood who couldn’t have turned that movie into a real life Titanic-I’m being facetious here because I don’t consider James Cameron’s bloated epic to be based on anything even remotely factual-in which we felt an emotional investment in the lives of those people. But the emotion most people seemed to have come away with after watching United 93 isn’t sadness, but anger. And even that anger isn’t universal. Some people finish United 93 with another massive injection of hatred toward the hijackers, Osama Bin Laden and terrorists in general. Others come away feeling anger that the lives of those on United 93 are still waiting to be avenged; that thousand more lives have been lost in pursuit of the wrong enemies. It is anger and it is genuine, not fostered by a fabulous John Williams score or Kuleshov Effect type manipulation.

At the bottom end of the scale of tearjerkers are those movies whose sadness comes about as the result of sheer, unadulterated, inartistic calculation. The most egregous example in recent years is Titanic. After spending two and a half hours on the decidedly uninvolving romance of the poor little rich girl and the poor but honest guy determined to save her from marrying the devil, from out of nowhere director James Cameron-desperate to create some kind of emotional connection-starts introducing characters we haven’t seen before as they prepare to die. Movie manipulation sunk to a new low when James Cameron shot the scene showing that mother preparing her two small children to die in bed. Unfortunately, the saddest part of that scene was that he hadn’t spent the previous two and a half hours telling their story; it would surely have been far more interesting that the one he did tell.