Yes, I cry on planes. Not a non-stop bawling from take off to landing or anything, but if I’m in the air long enough a general melancholy tends to envelop my being and I’ll usually shed a tear at some point through whatever film I’m watching.
And I really mean ‘whatever’ film.
The last film to trigger these tears was ‘Trainwreck’.
Yep, I’ll admit it: I cried in a relatively formulaic Amy Schumer romantic comedy. And it doesn’t just have to be the rom-com heartfelt stuff. A documentary with a particularly vulnerable penguin in it? I’m a mess. A wry joke delivered towards the end of a film? Face leaks like a sieve. Almost any scene in Frozen? Dead.
Some of you reading this might think I’m just overly sensitive, but others will get it: My plane-crying brethren. My fellow Melancholy Flyers. The mile-cry club. There’s enough of us out there (or up there) for it to be a thing.
It gets called different things and hasn’t so much been documented as it has noticed, or at least considered; Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo from Wittertainment have unofficially named it AALS: Altitude Adjusted Lachrymosity Syndrome, and while a podcast on film isn’t quite a peer reviewed medical journal, we’ll take it.
We cry on planes and we’re agreed : It’s a thing.
