Crying in the Movies

I admit it. I cry in films. My children are used to this, but it still worries them. When I start blubbing in the dark, I will feel a little hand reach over and give mine a reassuring squeeze. Because this is not just a discrete eye-watering but real choke-in-the-throat, lip-biting, painful weeping. I’ve cried in The Lion King, Lost in Space, Free Willy, probably in Toy Story and certainly in Dr Dolittle. The children, on the other hand, remain dry-eyed and stoical through the most heart-wrenching movie moments. This is a bit embarrassing, after all, I’m a 48-year-old grown-up male surrounded by kids, and I’m the one crying. But it’s OK because, after years of work, I can mostly cry silently with no wracking sobs escaping, only tears. Occasionally, though, my control goes, and a low lamentation escapes, ‘Ooooooh……..’ and rolls across a quiet part of the film. At this, a dozen small, screen lit faces turn towards me and my son digs me in the ribs and hisses “D-a-a-a-d!”

This is embarrassing behaviour because men don’t cry. Despite the many long slow adjustments to the notion of maleness and manhood since the Second World War, on the whole, men don’t weep easily. I know we’ve had to give up the deep sea fishing, coal mining, steel production, hedging and ditching in arctic conditions and all the other fun jobs we had that brought home the bacon and made us men. I know this has given us more free time to show our softer side, be with our families and challenge gender boundaries. In switching to less muscle-powered work or to no work at all, we may be more in touch with our emotions, but where tears are concerned, shipwreck rules still apply; women and children first.

I obviously haven’t got the hang of it because life's losses and petty defeats leave me dry-eyed. They can bring out the tears in my children, though. Outside of the pictures, they cry at life’s normal reverses after falling, losing a pet or when their ‘best friend’ switches sides. My wife cries too, sometimes for causes which are mysterious; like the desert coming into bloom, tears will sometimes well up out of nowhere. And even when I know the reason and can understand it, I’ve not got the hang of crying with her, as another woman will, in sympathy. No, I cry in cartoons. It shows I have a long way to go.

It really started with the Lion King. It seems a harmless enough piece of schmaltzy Disney sermonising. Not so. A young lion has been banished from his homeland after the death of his father. In exile, he has grown strong, and in one scene, he agonises about returning home and taking up his father’s mantle. As he wrestles with the problem, his father appears to him as a ghost.

Old lion and young are reconnected, and they discuss what the young lion should do. I could cope with all of the advice stuff, but at that moment when the ghostly father turns to leave, I was hit with a wave of grief that was so hard and heavy that it could only be cried away.

Over the years, the pattern is always the same – what gets me by the throat is something about the relationship between the father and the son. It’s always about estrangement or misunderstanding, about the distance which grows between the two. Now you may imagine the idea of separation generating so great a feeling that my father must be dead, but no, he is an alive 77-year-old; frail, but I still have him in my life. And yes, we are closer now than we have been for a very long time, and we

1 have talked about ‘stuff’, and I have told him I love him. He is not a stranger to me, but somehow I do not know him. My grief is about loss, the impossibility of recovery of a world of childhood connectedness and therefore, most sharply, about being alone.

I once fractured my shoulder and had to spend some weeks in a sling. A curious side effect of this was that I could barely lift my arm for a while and had to wash with a flannel. As far as I am concerned, flannels are one of the many Works of the Devil used by my mother with gusto in the 1950s. More primitive times, of course, people wore overcoats, sucked menthol eucalyptus sweets in the London smogs and relied on the buses. Attacking the face of a child with a damp rancid cloth, though, could only be as a result of a secret pact with Lucifer. But here I am, a grown man with a crooked arm, carefully wiping away sweat with the hated object and thinking of my father. We are linked by a smell. In the time of the flannel, we only had weekly baths, and between the Friday night rituals when the condensation ran on the walls and windows, it was the flannel. No roll-on deodorant either, and no perfumes for men. No, we all smelt a little more, or instead, we smelt differently.

The smell of my armpit is the smell of a man’s sweat. The smell of my father.

This is the father that I have lost, the man that, as a boy, I held and cuddled and fought. I remember him not in conversation or through episodes but as a sensual physical being in primary memory. He was a man who smelt of wood shavings, of wet concrete, of newly cut steel. He was a dad who made things, had a workshop, knocked down walls, built a conservatory, and with whom I was a boy. This is the dad who is gone, the one who wrestled me on the carpet, whose big strong brown arms I watched laying bricks or fixing the car. The dad of doing and being.

For a long time, I misunderstood my feeling of loss. When I looked back from the near distance of adolescence, I remembered him as a character in the long dreary wrangle my parents called family life. I recognised him as ‘dad-the-difficult’ or ‘dad-the angry’ in the endless saga of bettering ourselves. At some point, Dad the doer became Dad the parent, and it was this awkward, oversensitive, domineering man that I fled from. So, in my first cycle of thinking about this, in my adolescence, I did nothing but blame him; I couldn’t see him as anything other than the bullying patriarch who wilfully made a gap between us. This was the estrangement. I was innocent; he was guilty. The second time around, I could see myself as a difficult adolescent, destined to rebel, be obstinate and sure of his own rightness, and be desperate to prove how clever I was. I could just about see or pay lip service to the idea that they did the best they could, he and my mother. But I couldn’t see any more than that.

Part of this looking back in upset or anger was the feeling that it all could have been avoided. Could he not have protected me? Did he not know our relationship would change from a sensuous thing of making and doing into the battleground of ‘personality? Why did he let me run head-on into the wall and fall down? He saw the wall; he knew about fathers and sons, surely? He need not have abandoned me. Or at least he should have given us the chance to say goodbye to each other. But when? When would have been the right moment?

2 I know, of course, as I write this, that there was no ‘moment’ when I lost physical dad; he just faded away until we no longer wrestled on the carpet, and he started to complain that I was borrowing his razor. But a fictional moment in the dark of the film sharpens this until it triggers my tears. I am sad about an actual loss, about a transition to early adulthood that creeps upon us all, about being robbed of the sweet mucking-about mess of childhood. It is inexplicable to the children around me; they see the same film, watch the same scene, and are puzzled and embarrassed that a grown man is weeping.

***

I am small again, sitting by my father in a smoke-filled cinema and feeling the warmth of his arm. I am entirely happy and safe with his strong male presence, pleased with the texture of his suit and the feel of his overcoat after the rain. I look up and see the grey jet of cigarette smoke that has escaped his lips and join the smoke of many others above us. I see the fingers of projector light dancing in the grey fog of smoke, I sense his comforting bulk. We are watching a cartoon. He does not cry.

Cheshire, 1999