Why Is She Crying?

IT’S PROBABLY NOT WHY YOU THINK – AND YOUR REACTION MIGHT BE MAKING IT WORSE. HERE’S WHAT LAUREN LARSON WANTS YOU TO DO INSTEAD.

I went to a nostalgic showing of the noted tearjerker Beasts of the Southern Wild recently. In one of the film’s many emotional climaxes, a father tells his daughter, with his dying breaths, “No crying.” From the back of the movie house, a woman issued a single brazen wail. The proverbial floodgates had been opened. The woman’s crying started a chain reaction in the theatre – much as when someone throws up on a plane – and within seconds, every woman in the house was weeping. I have seen the footage of mourners in North Korea after Kim Jong Il died, falling to their knees and sobbing over Dear Leader departed; but that was nothing. The women in the movie house dissolved. The men there sat quietly.