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Saturday, May 30, 2009

What’s Up with Tears?

Posted by Bill Benzon on 05/30/09 at 03:28 PM

I went to see Pixar’s Up and was unimpressed, posting this reaction at Cartoon Brew:

I thought the opening was fine, superior movie-making. The rest struck me as a whole bunch of stuff in search of a coherent film. Some of that stuff was good, some not so good, but it didn’t really hang together. Did it have moments? Oh yeah! It had moments. But moments do not a movie make.

But this post isn’t about Up or my overall assessment of it. Up‘s just a case in point.

It’s about being moved to tears or crying,* which figure in a number of reponses to the film that have been posted at the Brew (10 out of 55). And many who don’t mention tears do talk about being moved. I don’t say much myself, but I was moved almost to tears at least two times, in the beginning (where we get an incredible 4 or 5 minute recap of a couple’s lifetime together) and at the very end, where a young scout gets an unexpected badge.

What I’m wondering is about how being moved, even to tears, affects one’s judgement of the quality of a film. Most of those posting at the Brew thought well of the film, some even thought it The Best. And I suspect that being moved factors in such judgments. But I’m skeptical about the relevance of tear-jerking moments to aesthetic quality simply because such moments are relatively easy to produce (at least by pros) and fairly common.

I would, however, like to know how many people are (almost) moved to tears by this or that film, novel, play, poem, etc. and exactly where. Some empirical work has been done on this in music,** but I’m not aware of any being done for novels or films, though I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has done some work.

* An older post on the subject.

** e.g. Alf Gabrielsson, Emotions in Strong Experiences with Music, in Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda, eds. Music and Emotion, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 431-449.

Comments

Funny you should ask...not that I have any empirical work to offer.

By Rohan Maitzen on 05/30/09 at 10:23 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Rohan, “One Hand, One Heart” is where I live. I made the Carreras/Te Kanewa version the centerpiece of a lecture I gave at Auburn a year and a half ago.

By Bill Benzon on 05/30/09 at 10:49 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I think the question of how far our judgment is affected by becoming tearful at a movie is a very good one. As you say, movie makers know how to get us to start dabbing the eyes with the back of our hand. Disney, for instance, does it by invoking an attachment theme, with a reunion after separation. Ed Tan and Nico Frijda (1999) have written a good review article on the subject of why we shed tears at the movies, but I don’t remember that it had empirical work on how often and when tears are invoked. Certainly empirical work has been done on emotions that occur when reading short stories (e.g. Oatley, 2002), but I don’t know of any study of reading fiction that focused particularly on tears.

Oatley, K. (2002). Emotions and the story worlds of fiction. In M. C. Green, J. J. Strange & T. C. Brock (Eds.), Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations (pp. 39-69). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Tan, E., & Frijda, N. H. (1999). Sentiment in film viewing. In C. Plantinga & G. M. Smith (Eds.), Passionate views: Film, cognition, and emotion (pp. 48-64). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

By Keith Oatley on 05/31/09 at 10:38 AM | Permanent link to this comment

On this subject, Franco Moretti’s essay “Kindergarten” is worth a look. In Signs Taken For Wonders, back before the maps-and-graphs phase.

By on 06/01/09 at 09:01 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Some spots that always get me: when the messenger arrives in Act Two of CM’s L’Orfeo; for some odd reason when the count curses Rigoletto at the end of the first scene; the end of Tosca; the first “queen of the night aria” in The Magic Flute.

I find this happens *more often* with straight musical recordings than with film versions on DVD. Something about actually watching the action happen up close can be sort of distracting(especially if the acting is terrible, like in the Jeanne-Pierre Ponell Rigoletto.

By on 06/02/09 at 10:46 AM | Permanent link to this comment

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Saturday, May 30, 2009

What’s Up with Tears?

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