You WILL Cry

I’m such a curmudgeon that a bunch of movie reviews and ads telling me that YOU WILL CRY are enough to ensure that if I ever saw The Fault in Our Stars, I would not squeeze out a single tear.

Don’t manipulate me because then I won’t feel the emotion that you’re expecting me to feel. I’ll see it coming a mile away and I will rebel. Judging from what I know about the movie, hell yes am I being manipulated. This is about two cancer teens in love. The girl is carrying an oxygen tank as they tour Amsterdam. Something about one of the kids having a living wake so everyone can eulogize the living person.

Stop it. Just stop.

It’s not necessarily the movie but really more the endless reviewers telling how much they cried buckets of tears and telling me how much I will cry that are putting me off. I’m not scoffing at the subject matter but honestly, I’m not always in the mood to see people dying of cancer on screen. This is the same reason I will never see that Cameron Diaz movie My Sister’s Keeper about having a second child to donate organs to the ill older child. Ain’t no way. I saw a bald child in the ads and ran in the other direction.

As I peruse the Internet, there seems to be some kind of critical mass when I just get sick of hearing about something and told what to feel. When Adele’s “Someone Like You” came out I had read a bunch of stuff about how everyone cries torrents when they hear it. There was even a scientific investigation into exactly what about the music makes people cry. It was all written in this obnoxious “Why We All Cry” tone, which I can’t stand, where one person anoints himself America’s spokesperson, like “Why We Love (Celebrity’s Name).”

The only emotion I ever felt during “Someone Like You” was vague annoyance. It would come on the radio when I woke up and at 6 a.m., the crack in Adele’s voice on the lines “Don’t forget me/ I beg” was painful to listen to. Not tearfully painful; annoyingly painful. Adele is quite talented but in this song and album, she really laid it on with a trowel. Plus the lyrics in this song are alarming: Adele shows up at her ex’s house to remind him that “this isn’t over” and I can see the ensuing police report and that kills any notion of tears for me.

But hey, I’m not some robot who stares quizzically at the crying humans. I can be moved when I’m not being manipulated and when I don’t see it coming. I’m not going to ugly cry except when someone dies but I will get choked up at stuff.

What moves me in art? When Kate Winslet says that loaded little word “OK” at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, saying volumes about why we will endure pain to attain love; Claire Fisher: 1983-2085; when Rocky loses the fight and starts calling for Adrian and the music swells; when Madonna confronts her father in the “Oh Father” video, with the shadow of her childhood self on the wall; the striking beauty in the poem “somewhere I have never traveled gladly beyond” by ee cummings; when Robin discovers on How I Met Your Mother that she can’t have kids and Ted narrates that “She was never alone”; the death at the end of The Road, which Cormac McCarthy writes like a candle being snuffed out; Prince’s wails of emotion in “The Beautiful Ones” and “Purple Rain”; the release at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life after the terrifying darkness of George Bailey’s breakdown; and of course anytime Sarah McLaughlin gets near an abused animal.