Letter of Recommendation: Crying at Movies

There’s a story that comes up often in my family, a moment that supposedly captures the essence of my childhood: When I was a kid, old enough for it to be notable but young enough for it to still be funny, I cried at the climax of “Pokémon: The First Movie.”

All through my childhood, I’d been prone to crying; I would cry at bruises, mistakes, confusing situations. But this particular showing of the Pokémon movie also happened to be part of my 10th-birthday party, and it was the first time I can remember being made aware, however obliquely or subconsciously, that my tears were crossing the line between the harmless behavior of a little boy and something more embarrassing.

Part of this awareness came from the ridiculousness of the thing I was crying at — which, O.K., fair — and part of it from the fact that I was crying in public, in front of friends and family and fellow moviegoers. But the message I was picking up was clear: Boys don’t cry, and on those rare occasions when they do cry, it is definitely not over Pokémon.

The whole thing represented a subtle but significant transition — not in how I cried but in how I thought about my crying. It had already become apparent to me that crying was not a thing men did, and with every birthday, I was coming closer to being a man. So why did I still cry so readily? Why couldn’t I stop it from happening? What, exactly, was the problem?

Whatever it was, I chose the simplest fix: Over the years, I learned to stop crying, without ever really understanding what the crying meant. This seemed to solve the problem, even if I sometimes suspected, in my late teens and early 20s, that I’d merely shoved it beneath some mental rock. I became the type of young man whom many American boys grow into: one who could perform confidence as if it were a card trick, but who found his actual emotions growing increasingly foreign and puzzling to him. Either they were inaccessible, buried out of reach, or they would come erupting out in wild bursts, surges of anger or sadness or frustration that felt like a geyser pushing against the top of my skull.

It was only after I graduated from college and moved to New York City that I took, without realizing it, a crucial step back toward the vulnerability of childhood. I started going to movies alone. At first the theater was just an escape from the city, which had begun to make me feel like a penny in an immense jar of loose change. Then I started writing about movies professionally, giving me full license to indulge in the strangely taboo practice of solo moviegoing — a habit that can be remarkably meditative and fortifying, almost like prayer. I don’t remember exactly which movie it was that did it, but eventually something revelatory happened: I remembered how to cry.

Since then, crying at movies has become, for me, a quasi-ritual act, an opportunity to let a piece of art disarm my defenses and remind me how to, well, feel — to sit with a moment and be empathetic and vulnerable, to react without an agenda.

The ability to experience and process feelings rather than shoving them down a deep, dark hole may strike a lot of people as an almost toddlerishly basic one — which, again, fair — but there really is something about male adolescence that thwarts this healthy instinct. If women seem better at it, that’s surely because women grow up being explicitly told that they are responsible for the feelings of others, whether it’s their parents, their partners or their eventual children, who will depend on that empathy to live. Men tend not to be burdened with this obligation. We often receive the opposite message: that to be a man is to act in spite of emotions, not because of or in tune with them. This imperative to contain feeling rather then express it creates a pressurized, self-collapsing psychology, devoid of outlets, leading to — well, you can imagine.

It seems to me that many men could benefit from some emotional bodybuilding — and that shedding tears at a movie can serve as the psychic equivalent of situps or bench presses. It forces you to reckon with two important things. First, you have to face, and participate in, the feelings of the men and women on the screen. Second, you have to get comfortable with the undeniable presence of your own tears, the look of your red-rimmed eyes in the bathroom mirror afterward. Both are excellent practice for comprehending your emotions and welcoming them back into your life, maybe for the first time since childhood.

I don’t mean to suggest that, after sobbing on a plane during “Before Sunset” or at the wheel of my car after “Moonlight,” I felt instantly improved; I mostly felt stuffy and gross. But each of these moments helped gently pry open the lid of my emotional self, giving me access to a vulnerability, empathy and honesty that has had a genuine impact on my engagement with the world. Therapy didn’t hurt, either, but the movie part is a lot cheaper. By relearning how to cry, I’ve relearned how to feel deeply, without all the embarrassment and false stoicism; when I get a little misty at the end of “Paddington 2,” it’s because I’ve allowed myself to be moved, instead of fending off the experience. And at the same time, I have fewer baffling geysers of feeling and more steady, readily comprehensible ones.

So I recommend going ahead and letting the tears flow. Just remember to bring your own tissues, because movie-theater napkins are basically steel wool.