A Very Short List Indeed

I've been puzzling over it, and I've come to the conclusion that women are much better suited to movie-going than men. While it's true that certain movies are indeed "guy" movies, and that no woman will ever know or understand the true joy of watching Die Hard (sorry, ladies, but you really need a Y-chromosome to really get that movie; also true of The Godfather, Animal House, and anything starring Clint Eastwood--with the exception of Paint Your Wagon--that you can have--), I think that movies are generally emotional experiences, designed to produce not thought or reflection, but catharsis. Which means, more often than not, crying. And men don't get to cry. We just don't. It's a stereotype because it's true, folks. A woman in tears is an object of sympathy and offered solace. A man in tears is an object of avoidance and derision. (The only men who apparently feel free to weep are, unsurprisingly, very 'out' homosexuals, and I wonder if it's that kind of behavior, rather than their bedroom shenanigans, that freaks out straight men so much.) Why this taboo exists is self-evident enough to those who pay attention to Darwin, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and others of that ilk. (See also: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Raymond Chandler. Philip Marlowe does not cry.) So women get to cry at movies, and men don't. Simple enough, and I seem to be reinventing the wheel here.



Except--



There are movies where men not only get to cry--they're supposed to. Where tears are utterly and completely required. Where one steps through the looking glass into a world where a man who doesn't cry is mocked and shunned. Let's take a look, shall we?



Brian's Song. Pretty much the Rosetta Stone of "You Are A Man And You Will Cry" movies. It retains all of its power to turn die-hard, tough-as-nails, spitting, swearing, beer-drinking, bar-fighting he-men into blubbering piles of sentiment so hapless that their pet dogs lose all respect for them. Watch this: "It's fourth and eight, and they won't let me punt." Every man who's seen this movie is now tearing up, and trying poorly to hide the fact. Poke him in the back and make fun of him, and watch him get angry and defensive. Something about the A.E. Houseman-esque athelete dying young manages to reach into our guts and twist 'em sharply.



And for many years, really, Brian's Song was it. You could cry at that, but not at anything else. Why? Well, first, because men can't cry at anything happy in a movie. Women can cry at the end of, say, Pride & Prejudice when Darcy finally breaks down and tells Elizabeth he still loves her. And men will turn to their snivelling dates and ask, "Why are you crying? It's good that this just happened!" So even moments when you'd think it'd be OK to cry--like when Rick decides he'd rather stay and fight the good fight rather than wheedling Ilsa into staying, you don't cry, because he's being a man about it. Which is a good thing. No crying. Ratso Rizzo dying on the bus? No crying. No, he didn't make it to Florida, but he died in hope. No crying. Maybe--maybe you could cry at Old Yeller getting whacked. A little. But because the kid himself volunteered to do it, you knew he was just nutting up and taking the final step into manhood. So not really able to cry openly, even there.

And then something remarkable happened to my generation. Field of Dreams. And I'll never forget the moment when, on the weekend after it opened, a few of my manlier friends and I were gathered for a smoke-and-joke and somebody mentioned that he'd seen the movie, and we all acknowledged that we'd seen it too--and then the bravest one of us (not I) said: "I don't know--something about that ending--something about a guy getting to play catch with his dad--I don't know what happened, but..." And he started to tear up. And normally that would've been the point at which we tar-and-feathered him. Only no. Because we all met each other's eyes, and just said variations on "Yeah...yeah, it was really...Yeah." Inarticulate, but dude, we'd wept--all of us, and it was OK that we had.

So I'm pondering about these two movies--the only two I can think of that men can cry at--both are about death, both are about the loss of a loved one, both are about the loss of a male loved one. And both are framed by the "manly" ethos of sports. Is it the athletics that make them permissably weepable? Perhaps. But I think it's more to do with the one kind of love that men are allowed to be sappy about--the love that we admit to when we're drunk and it's last call, and we swing our arms over the neck of the guy sitting next to us--"You and me, man--you and me." It's that dumb, instinctive passion that dull-witted writers call "bonding," but which is something far less structured, far more atavistic. It's not friendship--it's not brotherhood. It's love--the kind of love that Plato insisted could only exist between members of the same sex, who could genuinely understand each other on that primal, "I occupy the same biological structure as you." It's a love that we never talk about, or much think about. And it's something that matters more to us than--sorry, ladies--virtually the women in our lives. And so we instinctively know that when we weep at these movies, we're admitting to a secret that only we share--that love, and how much it means to us.

Something like that. It's late and I'm still tired from the move, and I still don't have furniture so my legs are cramping.

But something like that. Brian Piccolo dies, and too soon. A father returns from the grave in a form that his son can openly love. The connection is there.

I'm sincerely wracking my brains for other movies it's OK to cry at. Any help out there? I want to develop this theory further, as it seems to be a key to an important aspect of the male psyche...