Iwent to the bathroom after a film screening the other week. It was carnage: the noise, the tears, the tissues. Everyone present – in the queue, in the stalls – was sobbing, and had been doing so for some time. We’d all seen a movie called The Light Between Oceans, which has just premiered at the Venice film festival and is being billed, a bit conservatively if you ask me, as a hundred-tissue weepie.
Certainly, I’ve never snivelled so much in a cinema. Gulped testimony from fellow loo-goers suggested they too had hit peak-weep. It’s about a couple, played by Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, who marry and move to a remote lighthouse. She miscarries twice and is grief-stricken. But then, as luck would have it, a cute blonde tot washes up in a rowboat. They raise her as their own, yet trouble looms after they return to the mainland and the child’s real identity emerges.
It is, ultimately, slush: tarted-up Nicholas Sparks – a lush, mid-budget button-pusher. The main trigger for tears is as basic and universal as that in Bambi: mothers. Rare is the person who does not, to some extent, fear or mourn their loss.
Yet before I saw it, the appeal of the weepie had long eluded me. Why pay to be miserable? Why submit yourself to blatant manipulation every bit as shameless as the jump cut in a horror movie guaranteed to make you shake? What kind of sucker forks out just to have someone else fiddle with their animal conditioning?
But perhaps I’d just had bad experiences. The Light Between Oceans has class and darkness; most don’t. And the second anything aiming for earnestness doesn’t ring true, the whole thing crumbles and cynicism wins. Million Dollar Baby – in which Clint Eastwood must switch off the life-support of beloved boxing protege Hilary Swank – is often cited as a masterpiece of the genre. I found it repulsive junk, but then I did see it the same week I watched a loved one die. Arthouse can seem just as absurd. Once you’ve made a subliminal connection between Colin Firth’s suicidal professor in A Single Man and Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, it’s harder to be moved by his moping.
But the secret to the weepie, it seems to me, is not just catharsis. It’s more insidious than that. There is also the relief that, well, things aren’t that bad.
Maybe you’re having difficulty conceiving? At least you’re not miscarrying, alone, locked out of a lighthouse, miles and miles from anywhere, in a hurricane so bad you can’t sit up. Maybe you’re struggling with your own daughter? At least you don’t have to hear her wailing to be returned to her real mother. Perhaps you and your partner are having relationship difficulties. Thank goodness you don’t have to decide whether or not your sense of betrayal is so great you’ll condemn them to death row.
This is the same sense of consolation you can feel sitting in A&E: a strange mix of pity and self-interest. Yes, you’ve almost certainly broken your elbow, but you’d probably take that over his chest pains, or her ominous rash.
This uncomfortable feeling could be one reason the weepie is held in such low regard. The other is simply snobbery – snobbery that probably masks anxiety. I used to think such films had as little link with real-life empathy as crab sticks do with actual crabs. But I was wrong. And I was wrong in part because that’s what we’re encouraged to think.
Nineteen years since Princess Diana’s death unlocked the nation’s floodgates, we have seen a resurgence of disdain for such vulgar outpourings. Among some, perhaps, greater emotional openness did begin that week.
But among others it has helped condition the opposite: a stiff-upper-lip commitment to Andrew Marvell’s wisdom that “happy they whom grief doth bless / That weep the more, and see the less”. Countless male sages reinforce the idea that damp cheeks – particularly when exiting the cinema – mean a wonky backbone. To me, now, they indicate the opposite: evidence you faced up to the primal horrors that are the meat and potatoes of the weepie.
Boasting about your bawling is never pleasant, of course. I remember hearing one friend tell another that they had cried for 45 minutes on hearing of their parents’ divorce. (Forty-five! It’s like they actually set a timer.) But saying that you blubbed during a melodrama designed to elicit that response is not something to be ashamed of.
So next time someone does, I will bite my lip and doff my cap. They were prepared to venture into terrain others fear to tread. Women’s flicks, it seems, are for those with balls.
