Are You Crying? It’s Just A Movie.

I just saw Inside Out this past week and guess what happened to me? I had a few tears coming down my face, it was like a reminder of the time that I had gone to see Toy Story 3 with an ex of mine (those 3D glasses were a life saver), anyway, I sat in the theater just hoping that some of those emotional scenes would just hurry up and happen and be done with it. The only thing that probably stopped me from going all out with the tears was the guy sitting next to me who was really just letting them go, he was not holding back, he occasionally looked over at me to see if I was either crying too or just checking to make sure that I wasn’t watching him starting to curl up and cry like some kind of toddler. Little did he know that I was watching him out of the corner of my eye the whole time, and it was thanks to him that I wasn’t letting down a river of saltiness from my eyes. Today I decided that I was going to watch a movie on Netflix, and what did I pick? How To Train Your Dragon 2. I got emotional again (no tears down my face this time though).

Now these aren’t the first few times that this happens and it probably happens to others a lot more than it does to me, and if you’re pregnant watching movies in general could totally just stir up those emotions, it’s kind of like the perfect storm. After finishing How To Train Your Dragon 2 I began to think of all those times that I had gotten emotional and even just had a manly cry session while watching a movie, so I did some brief research and found a few interesting things. Before I let you in on what I discovered though I want you to watch this top 10 video from WatchMojo.com, tell me if you’ve seen any of these films and not produced one salty drop of a tear.

So now that you’ve checked out a list of some of the movies that have probably made you cry, and if none of those movies have ever made you cry then you’re just heartless…just kidding. In an interview with NBC’s TODAY, Jeffrey Zacks, a professor of psychology, director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, and author of the book “Flicker: Your Brain on Movies” was asked why people cry at movies and his answer was this:

“You’ve got this facial mirroring that causes your face to wind up in a sad pose, and that evokes a sad emotion. You’ve identified with the character and you’re reasoning about the fact that they would be sad and that produces empathetic sadness in you.

Music plays a big role in emotion and film. Often, sad movies have slow minor key music at the points that they’re trying to get you to cry.

We encounter minor key music in real life, we see people who cry and we watch bad things happen to other people — all these things make us feel sad. But in a movie, you can crank those things up to 11. You can put a big crying face that fills up your whole visual field so there’s no other place to look.

You can set up situations that are most upsetting and put three of them in a film and then you can play sad music. You put all those things together and it’s just taking the mechanisms that we encounter in real life and just really pushing all the buttons at once. “

There you go, that’s basically the gist of things. Fill up the screen with a bunch of sadness, add some slow music and voila! Of course the only reason we can even identify with any character at all is because we are immersed into the story. Movies are surely not going to get a huge emotional response if the audience doesn’t feel a connection to any character. Check out the screenshots and gif’s below, can you see how the camera comes in for a close up, that’s when they get us to react with our tears, the connection happens as the story is being told. I guess the big takeaway from all of this is that it’s cool if we cry during a movie, although I’m probably not going to be carrying a box of tissues with me to the movies anytime soon, but I will probably have them in handy when I’m watching movies alone from now on. Crying during a movie that we have some sort of connection to also means that we are capable of empathizing, the director has done something right, the actor has made us believe in his or her character, and the music composer has put the cherry on top.

Other than the tear jerking movies in the above video if you want to get more emotional (and you just might), you can check out WatchMojo.com’s top 10 saddest animal deaths in movies video that’s below the gif’s, and if you want to read more on the interview with Jeffrey Zacks you can do so here. What movie made you cry that you weren’t expecting to?