I have just finished watching a terrific Scottish movie Dear Frankie on TV and it stimulated 3 threads. This is one of them.
I used to sneer at sentimentality in movies when young.
Then I started to feel the odd tug at the heartstrings.
At one point I began to get misty eyed, but I could hide it even from the people sitting next to me.
For a while I cried discreetly, but used the credits to let my face dry and chuck on the magnetic sunglasses clipons before I left.
Now I don’t give a shit. Hell, if I tell people about a touching movie I have seen my voice starts to quiver. Even that is an understatement, I get blubbery about real life events - like that autistic basketball kid with the string of 3 pointers. I watched the inferior version of Brian’s Song recently and thought that it was me dying, not Piccolo.
And the strangest thing is I feel all the better for it.
Yes, it’s our dirty little secret that you have now exposed to the world. I get choked up over the dumbest goddamn things and it makes me crazy. I remember my father doing that over TV shows and thinking, “what a chump”. Well, look who’s the chump now…
It’s not just you. My dad used to get misty-eyed at movies, and as teenagers we mocked him, accusing him of crying over Tom & Jerry and TV commercials (he didn’t, clearly). But then I started to do it in my 20s, and it’s only getting worse now I’m 40. I cry at movies and books more than my wife does.
Ah, so it isn’t just me, then. In my case, not so much movies as books: I read deliberately tearjerking passages in things like Atonement or Love in the Time of Cholera and discover—with Spocklike astonishment—curious fluids form in the corners of my eyes. “It’s nothing, just got something in my eye,” I tell the empty room gruffly. Has anyone been exiled from Oprah’s Book Club for being too much of a pussy?
What’s really embarrassing is when you’re doing something mundane like telling your employee that he/she is doing a great job and start tearing up. FUCK!
The song Danny Boy reduces me to a sobbing wreck. Some of Edna St. Vincent Milay’s poems utterly destroy me. My Darling Marcie told me last night how much I mean to her and I cried for a solid hour.
But I’m still a tough guy, so don’t mess with me. Or I’ll drown you in tears.
I’ve certainly gotten worse. I just bought Mariah Carey’s Christmas album, and I found myself weeping while watching the video of her version of “Miss You Most at Christmastime”.
Which is ridiculous, because I used to NEVER cry for ANY reason. These days, just watching certain things is an almost-guarantee (“Fly, you fools!” from Fellowship of the Ring is one. “Maybe God is Trying to Tell You Something” from The Color Purple is another one.)
I thought this was going to be about us getting fat, which is definitely happening to me after losing most of my excess to begin with.
I’m not getting more emotional, though. I actually used to get misty over the dumbest things as a kid, teen, and young adult but now that I’m finally entering full adulthood, I can’t remember the last time I cried about anything, though I will say I’m getting more sentimental overall and appreciate the little things that people do for me that I never really got the point of as a child, like cards and so on.
I’m 33… and i’ve turned into a blubbery mess. I can tell you the exact point that I realized this.
July of 2006.
I was watching Alias (yes- Alias!)
I’d never seen them, and was watching the series on DVD. Well, there’s a scene in one of the episodes where Sydney Bristow’s dad is sick and delirious… but he may be the only person who knows the name & location of the doctor who can helped him (He had helped to hide as witness protection.). So they decide to trick him into thinking the year is 1974 or whatever… they have Sydney dress as her mom and get a girl to play Sydney. (The plot sounds so typing it out :S) Anyway… the scene ends up being pretty emotional, Sydney realizes in watching her Dad interact with the girl thinking it was her, and realizing her Dad hated the time away from his family, etc… and I start blubbering up… what the? I get myself together and watch the rest of the episode and figure it was just a one off type of thing.
A week later, I’m watching a movie on HBO… This is a movie I’ve seen at least a few times, and never once did I come close to emotional. Water works again. This was another movie about fatherhood and I realized what the deal was. My wife was clearly making me soft with her “baby.”
<sigh>
Since then I’ve faced the truth. I’m just more emotional now that I’m older. I didn’t realize it was a common occurance.
Although an odd sidenote. Real life, still, very rarely makes me cry. My grandmother died recently, both of my wife’s grandparents died within a few weeks of each other, my son was born, training at my work (which is so frustrating nearly everybody breaks down at some point… some frequently)… never once did I cry during any of it.
But put on Armageddon (Yes Armageddon- you gotta problem with that?) and if I’m not in tears when Ben Affleck is yelling to Bruce Willis “I Love You!” and Bruce is telling him to take care of his daughter then I’m just not paying attention.
Does late teens/early twenties count? (I’m 21). I first realized that I cry at everything when I spent an entire episode of Grey’s Anatomy bawling (the one with the train (apparently “Into You Like a Train”. Thanks wikipedia!) where the two people are impaled together on that whatever it was.) Next was spending half of Brokeback Mountain crying (made worse by the fact that I had read the short story and knew what was coming.) Then I cried the entire time during the bf’s graduation. Even silly kiddie movies make me cry sometimes. I’m watching The Incredibles for the first time right now and I’ll probably cry too.
This is why I love this message board. Where else could you learn this stuff? I thought it was just me too. I figured it was changes in my brain due to MS, turns out I’m just getting old. I’m not sure if this makes me feel better or not.
Reminds me of the thread about having the fantasy of escorting historical figures around modern times. Never would have thought it was so common.
