![]() Obst’s eighteen-year-old son, Oly, is mortified by his mom’s sudden interest in the Houston Rockets after a lifetime of Los Angeles Lakers games. The Manhattanites are still waiting for her inevitable return to the world of literature, politics, and journalism that she occupied before becoming a big-time movie producer. But maybe I can cry over Bing Bong and get some feelings out.PEOPLE CLOSE TO LYNDA OBST REMAIN skeptical about the Texas thing. There are many, many things I can’t cry about right now. I can’t cry that my daughter’s doctor asked at her well-child visit the other day who her best friend is and she couldn’t answer because she doesn’t have one yet, as she’s still not able to spend time with other children. I can’t cry that so much of the world shut down and broke but we were still able to keep in place systems that oppress people and even kill them. I can’t cry at everything that’s lost in this year. We could all probably stand a good cry, just to knock some of those feelings loose. And more and more of us are simply feeling numb. Everything is on hold except the things that are terrible. (Our district is doing hybrid learning, which parents are allowed to opt out of and keep our kids in distance learning Simon is home and Irene simply isn’t enrolled in preschool this year because what would be the point?) A friend, as of this writing, was about to lose his second parent to the disease. We are nearly a year from my plaint on this site that our schools would be out for six weeks, and I’m not expecting to send my kids to a physical school until September. Right now, I think crying at movies is more important than it’s ever been before. It can be repressed by a culture, but it’s still what your body wants to do. I don’t know the biological mechanism behind crying, but it’s a species-level reaction. My son has never been told by us in his life that boys don’t cry my daughter is never told that big girls don’t cry. ![]() If you cry too much, it can hurt your own body-your eyes, just for starters-but weeping on someone isn’t as harmful as hitting them, but we’re basically encouraged to be out of practice at crying. Unlike hitting, crying doesn’t hurt anyone. Similarly, by letting yourself cry when you’re feeling sadness, you’re teaching yourself that it’s okay to cry. You’re teaching your body a physical reaction to the feeling, and your body will expect that response to that stimulus in the future. ![]() Sure, you’re hitting a pillow and not, say, your partner or your coworker, but you’re not turning those feelings in healthy directions or processing them. You are teaching yourself that the reaction to being angry should be to lash out in some way. Our society believes that it’s healthy to release rage-how many times have you heard the advice that you should yell or hit a pillow or something rather than keep those feelings bottled up? Yet that’s terrible advice, because what you are doing is practicing how to be angry. I believe you are modeling healthy behaviour for yourself by expressing feelings often considered negative. That does bother me, because again, it’s not that I merely think there’s anything wrong with it but because I believe it’s legitimately healthy. It’s more mocking the idea that we would cry. Still, there is a certain amount of mockery in that Sleepless in Seattle scene, and not just because these guys are incapable at crying at gentle emotional moments but start sobbing over an action movie. The plot may not be real the feelings are. But even when you’re watching a movie for the story, you get to use the movie to work on expressing feelings. Not consciously, necessarily, but the most obvious example is when you need to laugh and therefore watch a comedy. Roger Ebert, of course, coined the term “empathy machine” for film, and it’s definitely true that we use movies in part as a way to feel things. I think it’s a valuable exercise of our emotional muscles. More to the point, I firmly believe that crying at movies is healthy. I was part of a large group of people who teared up when David Bowie started playing during The Martian, which we were all watching in the theatre shortly after his death. (My failure to cry at Soul probably stems from COVID-fatigue, not any failing in the movie, and the fact that I saw it at home and not in the theatre, for example.) The funniest scene in Sleepless in Seattle, possibly the funniest scene Tom Hanks has ever done, is the “I cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen” scene. I cry every time I watch my favourite movie ( Roman Holiday), and I can probably count on one hand the number of Pixar movies I’ve watched without crying when I saw them the first time.
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