in a movie theater. It was at ‘‘E.T.,’’ after the gov-
ernment seizes Elliott’s house in order to con-
duct experiments on the alien who has become
a member of the family. Something about the
plastic and the tubing and the hazmat of it all
just wrecked me, something about how E.T. had
gone from brown to ashen, from vibrant to mor-
ibund, the way his precious potted geraniums
had wilted. I cried, hard enough that the sobbing
impaired my vision, hard enough that my poor
mother leaned over and asked if we should leave.
She thought I was unhappy, but I wasn’t. Not at
all. Once E.T. is fi nally rescued and Elliott, his
brother and their friends go sailing through the
sky, I kept crying. As high up as they were, I was
higher. The minute the movie was over, I wanted
to feel whatever that was again.
What I’d felt was the ancient power of art to
make a puddle of us. ‘‘E.T.’’ led me into a love
aff air with being made to cry among strangers in
the dark. I almost typed ‘‘being reduced to tears,’’
except where is the reduction? Crying for art is
an honor, an exaltation, a salute. It’s applause
with mucus and salt. I’m not the only person
who lost it at ‘‘E.T.’’ It was the No. 1 movie of 1982.
And what I presume we all experienced was a
willingness to give ourselves over to the ridicu-
lous beauty of a story about feeling everything.
Usually, my crying has warranted some expla-
nation — in the fi rst grade, as a movie critic. I’ve
had to clarify lots of tears. The ones shed for the
freeze-framed triumph that ends Quentin Taran-
tino’s ‘‘Death Proof’’; for the dissonant moment,
in ‘‘Avatar,’’ when James Cameron zooms us, for
the fi rst time, around his imperialist 3-D coloring
book. The hardest crying I’d done since ‘‘E.T.’’
was at the closing shot of Spike Lee’s ‘‘Clock-
ers.’’ It’s just Mekhi Phifer staring at the desert
through a picture window on a speeding train. I
was a junior in college; Phifer was about my age,
and I understood the stroke of profound fortune
that whisked his character from drug-dealing,
poverty and probable death in Brooklyn to parts
West. The wonder on his face, the circumstan-
tial auspiciousness of that imagery — its fruity
vividness — showed me to myself.
These many years of lachrymosity have
opened up an immense appreciation for pro-
fessional tears. Actors guide us away from any
shame we might harbor over our own weeping:
In the relative anonymity of a darkened theater,
their crying frees us to let go. Viola Davis, for
instance, cries the way I do: with everything she’s
got. But also with more than I have. And mostly
with her nose. The tears in a Viola Davis cry can
seem hazardously indistinguishable from snot.
Not a weep so much as a gush. When a dam
breaks on one of Davis’s characters, though, she
maintains a balance between poise and collapse.
The dam won’t break her. She knows what hap-
pens when she’s upset, and no amount of fl uid
shall derail a full expression of the heartbreak
whose delegate is facial discharge.
Anytime waterworks overtake Davis, I won-
der how she does it. Where did she go in order
to come back with this? Among the instruments
in an actor’s tool kit, none are more mysterious
than crying. It’s an expression of emotion that
only the body can certify. Although the body
needn’t always secrete. Julianne Moore excels
at a dry-heaving style that often settles between
an asthma attack and an engine that won’t turn
over. How is she able to work herself into com-
plete, sublingual devastation the minute some-
one shouts, ‘‘Action’’?
Tom Cruise muscles out his tears so it’s not
crying so much as a bench press. Angela Bassett’s
face becomes a furious scene of quaking, hazy
devastation; napalm in the mourning. Isabelle
Huppert is a melting ice cap; Penélope Cruz a
meadow at dawn. Will Smith can seem mad that
somebody got him out here looking like this —
all tenderized. Gwyneth Paltrow becomes an
elbow that’s just scraped concrete, while psy-
chosis seems to overtake Mel Gibson until his
tears appear to be crying him. The faucet you
forgot to turn off? Jessica Lange. And Anne
Hathaway? She brings out the Sir Mix-a-Lot in
me: I like big ducts and I cannot lie! Julia Roberts
is the divine ripsnorter of weeping. We’ve hailed
Meryl Streep as our greatest screen actor, but
she’s also the Chinese restaurant menu of cry-
ing, ‘‘The Hours’’ being Item No. 88 — under
‘‘soup’’; that movie has so many mighty criers
that it’s actually a pool party. Then there’s thelone tear that Denzel Washington releases as he
is whipped in ‘‘Glory’’: Two centuries of exploita-
tion in a rivulet of damnation.
‘‘Broadcast News’’ is the great American
movie about crying. Holly Hunter plays a daily
weeper in love with William Hurt until she fi nds
out he faked tears in an interview. His ginned-up
feelings are a breach of both journalistic ethics
and her sense of emotional hygiene. But perhaps
the movies’ most ferocious crier is Glenn Close.
No one appears to have given the act more cho-
reography and less shame. A Close cry refuses a
distinction between the physical and the emo-
tional. It’s something most performances leave
to the face, but Close can weep with her whole
body. People who dislike her wish she had more
decorum. They need to stop. Nobody turns to
this woman for decorousness. They’ve come to
watch her go to town.
In old Hollywood, it was enough for an actor
to imply crying — to act rather than inhabit it.
The details of a story provided a context for the
sorrow, rue, upset or delight a star then conjured
with a voice that quavered, brows that arched,
eyes that welled up enough to issue — perhaps
— a Single Tear. Actors could seem put through
the wringer without seeming wrung out. But in
the middle of the 20th century, Method acting
had become the dominant style. The Method’s
adherents were in pursuit of realism. Of truth.
Tears signal an achievement of honesty, proof
that an actor is fully in her role. Paroxysm over-
took pantomime, inviting charges of vanity and
excess. The production of tears seemed true,
nonetheless, and, for an audience, therapeutic.
The movie theater has always been a realm for
the therapy of sanctioned crying. We know where
we stand with art and its desired approximation
of life. But when life makes strangers cry, our
hearts can go cold — like, throw-a-rotten-tomato
cold. We can be harsher to civilians in apparent
distress than performers paid to imagine it.We Americans have rarely known what to do
with shows of emotion. Something about the
‘‘show.’’ It can feel like a tell — of insincerity, of
opportunism. Of politics. For some time, we’ve
existed in a cynical zone in which any public tears
bespeak performance. The weeping families and
classmates of massacred schoolchildren are ridi-
culed because some of them support legislation
that would change gun laws. Those mournersI WAS 6 THE FIRST TIME I CRIED24 2.13.22