Don’t fear the weeper: Emotional art vs. sentimentality
There really is nothing worse than having someone tell you how you are supposed to feel, except maybe having someone blow an emotion right down your throat like a horse pill. This is probably why sentimentality in art has become, over the years, such an offensive sin. But the shame of it is, it seems that some artists have confused sentimentality with the mere presence of emotion in art. These people have allowed the fear of being sentimental to sterilize their work.
For me, the most important thing about a work of art is how it makes me feel. I want to be moved, and this can only happen if the elements of emotion and intellect fall into place in my perception of the work. It all has to have feeling, but the feeling has to make sense.
Wikipedia has a decent explanation of sentimentality, but I like this definition from Pickering and Hoeper’s book, Literature (Macmillan; 1986):
Sentimentality: The presence of emotion or feeling that seems excessive or unjustified in terms of circumstances.
So, here’s the thing, modern artists: it isn’t emotion that’s the sin in your work; it is the phony conjuring of emotion that is not supported by logic and “circumstances.”
Sentimentality thrives in pop songs when the forlorn lover says he wants to die when she’s away. (What if she’s just in the bathroom?) It haunts movies when poorly-rendered outcasts weep about their exclusion from the world. It surfs on every brush stroke of a painting of a pink dog with eyes the size of pizzas. The problem is not the emotion, it is emotion without intellectual or circumstantial justification. Oscar Wilde said:
“A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”
To many, who know the definition, this is obvious. But even those who understand might be so scared of serving up sentimentality that they may decide to completely avoid emotion in their work, even when the time for it is right. The leads to sterility; to art without a soul. Stillbirth.
We can’t let ourselves get bullied into that. We can’t equate work with a heart to work with unjustified, phony emotion. And we can’t de-emotionalize our work for fear that the emotionally repressed will unjustly accuse us of sentimentality.
I think I saw this fear at work in the film Inception. (Spoiler alert: I’m about to give away the ending.) I loved the film. Thought it was one of the most gripping and visually interesting sci-fi films I have ever seen. I even think it had some real originality and I read a lot of sci-fi — even teach a class on it. Yet, I walked out angry. Why? To me, fear of sentimentality ruined the final scene and led to the evasion of Dom (DiCaprio) Cobb’s much deserved emotional payoff after his harrowing completion of a super-Odyssean quest to return home to his kids.
The parameters of the movie establish that spinning a top is Cobb’s test for reality — so that he doesn’t become confused between the reality and dreams between which he travels. If the top spins without stopping, it exists in a dream; if it falls, it exists in reality. In the last shot of the film, Cobb spins the top and walks out to join his kids. We focus on the top which spins on the kitchen table. It wobbles, slightly, and the screen goes black.
In the theater I was in, the audience laughed. To me, the possible emotional warmth of the ending was destroyed. I question why we could not have seen two things: 1) the falling of the top and 2) Cobb embracing his kids.
Given the time we invested in this character and given the successful establishment of his sincere paternal desire to reunite with his kids (and theirs to see him), and given the deep, sci-fi enhanced level of his pain regarding the loss of his wife, this much of an emotional payoff certainly would have been justified. Even more, I would argue that it is required by the construction of the movie’s plot. In short, we could have used some hugs and happy tears, here. This was not a hard sci-fi story; it was a human-centered story. It needed a human ending, not a conceptual, paradoxical or a tongue-in-cheek ending. It needed emotion.
(Here is where people tell me the top was going to fall because it wobbled. Yes, maybe. But seeing it fall would have meant so much more . . . besides, in a dream, might it not have been able to right itself and keep spinning, in the same way, say, monkeys can smoke calabashes and recite Spenser? Well, they do in my dreams, anyway.)
This cop-out style ending is common in movies. Why can’t we ever, for instance, leave happy from a horror film? Can’t the hero succeed and not have his success bloodily ripped away, along with his entrails, in the last six seconds? To me, fear of sentimentality turned Inception into an extremely original movie that ended in cliche — a writing flaw that is even more feared than sentimentality itself, last time I checked.
In a way, it comes down to something I have alluded to before: we still want to fit in with the cool kids. Sentimentality is not cool, so we avoid anything connected with it, even if we are not crossing the line, because, by association, emotion in art has become uncool.
Uncool as this is to admit, I liked Little House on the Prairie when it was on TV (not in small part because of David Rose’s flawless scores). That show was very emotional, but was it sentimental? I do remember Michael Landon crying a lot. No, I can’t just say that a weeping dad is okay because I’m a father and being a father has made me cry a few times. But I can tell you that the times I cried, I had a damned good reason. Were those reasons established for “Pa” in the particular episode? Well, that’s the hard part — that’s subjective; note the use of the word “seems” in Pickering’s definition above. But that just means we have to be careful, not paranoid.
People can show strong emotion in paintings, stories and songs; emotional things can happen. We just need to create a damned good reason for it and then depict is realistically. That’s all. It comes down to craft again, doesn’t it? It comes down to taking the work where it needs to go, not to a place safe from the poo-slinging of the emotionally confused and paralyzed. They’re out there and they all have blogs, you know.
Chris Matarazzo’s ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS appears every Tuesday
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I couldn’t agree more with your analysis. Today, showing any sentiment is as out of style as bell bottom pants. And it often ruins the film experience. They take you almost there and fade out. I think it’s because they don’t have a good, whiz bang finish and so fall back on a fashionably cool ending. No third act. Close in New Haven.
I think you’d enjoy “The King’s Speech”, I has a really powerful climax. I loved it.
I always enjoy your columns. Loved the one about football practice and play practice.
After Michael Landon did the “Highway to Heaven” series, in LA he was jokingly referred to as ‘Jesus of Malibu’.
Thanks very much, Marcy. Glad you like the column!
Great points. You used a very important word there: “style.” I think that’s just it. If we shoot for what’s in-style, how can we be creating what is really needed for the story? We’re shoe-horning things, in that case.
I have The King’s Speech on my list, now. Thanks for the recommendation and thanks for reading.
I agree about sentimentality vs. real emotion in art. There’s a truism in acting that it’s much less emotionally affecting to watch someone cry than to watch someone (especially a man) try NOT to cry.
Regarding “LIttle House…” — it put me in mind of what I used to think about “The Waltons” versus “The Andy Griffith Show”, both shows about rural Southerners (in different decades, granted). But it always seemed to me “The Waltons” went for the emotional jugular while “Andy Griffith”, which was often very poignant, made its points simply and without manipulation. (And I’ll always remember the episode of “The Carol Burnett Show” where they parodied “The Waltons”, with Carol as John-Girl, with the family turning down a ton of money for the purchase of their mountain, preferring instead to remain poor and noble.)
Fred — I remember that Carol Brunett spoof. Hilarious, and, as was often true with her work on that show, so spot-on in its silent commentary.
What’s interesting about your example of watching someone try not to cry is that, implicit in that situation, there is a really tightly woven justification for the demonstrated feeling: a palpable struggle. It occurs to me, after your comments, that actors must be the true experts when it comes to sensing sentimentality. If the scene doesn’t give their emotions the necessary fuel for the portrayal, it must feel so unbelievably dishonest.
*Burnett*