Move You to Tears

story by Anastasia Sims photo by Jane Pham

Andrew Plummer cries at everything. Not a sporting event goes by that his girlfriend doesn’t look over and see him silently shed a tear during the national anthem — but only when it’s sung live. called oxytocin, acts like neurotransmitters and tricks the brain into making us care for one another — even if, Zak explains, they’re strangers or fictional characters.

Anna Blakley loves to cry. On her way home from a family vacation to London, she couldn’t fall asleep on the plane. So, as the rest of her family slept around her, she watched “Happy Feet Two.” The waterworks began shortly after the main character died. It makes her feel more human when she cries. Entertainment has advanced so much that it’s learned to take advantage of our brain, says Dr. Jeffrey Zacks, a professor of psychological and brain science at Washington University. The “mirror rule,” as Zacks named it, describes how we subconsciously copy the expressions or feelings of the characters we read or watch.

This might be why people love when things make them “feel” something. If you’ve found yourself becoming obsessed or in love with a certain character or movie, this explains it. Perhaps it's one of the reasons we have cult classics like “Donnie Darko” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”

Rebekah Malpass thinks crying is a part of life. While she was studying abroad in Ireland, she wept over “Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee on a public bus to Belfast. She’s not embarrassed that a dozen or so foreign strangers watched her cry over one of her favorite books.

One quick Google search and it’s easy to see there’s an abundance of movies, books and other types of entertainment that feel like they were made to make people cry. But why do we cry? Why is it that when we see, read or even hear something, the floodgates open, and we sometimes ugly cry until we can’t breathe?

Paul Zak is the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics and a self-proclaimed movie crier. After crying while watching Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” with his wife, he searched for why we cry during movies. His answer lies in lots of complicated scientific jargon that can be boiled down to one word: empathy. A hormone, It’s nearly 2 a.m. on an October day in 2018, and Malpass and her friends walk out of a movie theater quietly after seeing the midnight premiere of Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born.” They are all wearing jackets and pajama pants even though it’s too warm for either. Later, Malpass recalls that even though no one was talking, there was a palpable feeling of sadness.

“It’s weird that we let things like a movie have so much control over us,” she says. “But I guess it makes sense. Sometimes our own lives can be so mundane that we start to crave something that can actually move us [to tears].” O&B