Weepers' paradise

An unpublished essay on art and tears from January 2022

First of all, I want to welcome the rash of new subscribers that arrived this week via a recommendation from Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s newsletter So It Goes. Coincidentally, Tom has just been laid off from his decades-long gig with the AllMusic Guide, owned by Xperi, where his knowledgeable and incisive writeups and reviews of countless thousands of artists and albums formed much of the backbone of music information and criticism on the Internet. I don’t know what Xperi’s thinking—it reminds me of when Glenn McDonald was let go from Spotify, and of course of the Pitchfork layoffs. But if you don’t already subscribe to the excellent So It Goes, now would be the time.

Secondly, it’s midsummer and I have been too sweaty to want to dive much into the Discourse. We could debate Songs of Summer, etc., but I felt like doing something completely different. So today I’m publishing an essay I wrote in 2021-22 for a series Slate was planning about grief and crying, to address the emotional landscape at the end of the pandemic. The series was cancelled when it turned out we were a long way from any clear ending. Arguably we still are.

But I was happy with the piece, and frustratingly never found the right place for it. It represented some of the work I’d been doing speculatively for a future book on art and crying—a project that’s dormant but may go back on the front burner someday. So today I share it with you. Some of the references are dated, and today I’d be even more critical about the role performative tears and trauma narratives play in online book and music culture particularly. I’d also write less about Bo Burnham. Still, I think it stands up generally, and I hope you’ll find it a worthwhile weekend read. Would love to hear what y’all think. - CW

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A plague of tears

Thoughts for a culture in need of a good cry (January, 2022)

There’s a song that’s been making me cry for 16 years. Maybe you have something like that too, a song or a film or a book or a show you return to as an emotional purgative. For me the feeling seems to intensify with each listen, especially this past year. The tears used to come only if I tried to sing along, the voice cracking and then the levees breaking. Now the salty sting is activated in seconds, not just by the song but by my sense memories of crying over the song. Teardrops gleam with reflections of past teardrops that in turn mirror earlier tears, back to my first hearing of it, around June of 2005, a month after my father’s death.

The piece is “Vertebrae” by Christine Fellows, a songwriter based in Manitoba, which happens to be where my dad grew up. Over a shivering keyboard pattern, Fellows’ kitchen-table voice identifies the song’s form in the first line: “A photo essay of a family in mourning.” What follows is a series of snapshots, of hospital rooms, parking lots, funeral processions, a doorstep littered with flowers, and walls that still bear the departed’s fingerprints even as the singer’s memories of him have already begun to fog. It’s as exact a description as I’ve heard of the excruciating scrape between grief and social necessity.

I listened to it more than usual after the pandemic hit North America in March of 2020. I sought it out as an exercise in feeling, and to help process the ways that grief became less private and more collective, and how much the associated rites were changing. My mother’s current partner was hospitalized repeatedly over this period, with a heart condition and then cancer. Often, she wasn’t allowed inside. Once, she sat out in her car most of a day, waiting on the results of an operation. He’s doing okay now (knock wood)¹, so we didn’t also have to forego a funeral in favor of a Zoom gathering, as many families have been forced to do.

These are the extra things reflected in my tears when I listen to “Vertebrae” now. Covid-19 emergency conditions in this part of the world may soon recede into memory (knock wood again), but their imprints will remain for me on this song, along with all the other traces for which it’s become a repository, a location I revisit like a cemetery stone.

Not so long ago, praising a work of art because it made one cry would have been considered aesthetically suspect. Through much of the 20th century, under the influence of modernism and in backlash against the Victorian sentimentalism of the 1800s, anything that aimed at bringing tears was liable to be called mawkish, melodramatic, and manipulative. Revealing biases more nakedly, weepy art would also be called cheap, womanish, and frivolous.

The boys-don’t-cry, keep-calm-and-carry-on emotional repression of at least the anglophone West labeled public shows of tender feelings weak and shameful in general. When Edmond Muskie in 1972 appeared to shed tears while defending his wife against criticisms during a press conference, it was enough to help demolish his presidential campaign—he claimed his face was just wet because it was snowing.

Those codes have been breaking down for decades now, thankfully, perhaps foremost due to feminism and other challenges to sex and gender norms. Beyond that, the sixties counterculture, the self-help movement, the internet, multiculturalism and identity politics, as well as the post-industrial workplace’s emphasis (sincere or not) on “soft” interpersonal skills, all called upon more diverse modes of self-expression, bringing improved atmospheric conditions for a rain of tears.

Modernist critiques once argued persuasively that by tugging heartstrings tied to patriotism, family, and community, sentimentality abetted conservative, even fascistic techniques of social control. But by the turn of the century, capitalism by way of advertising and entertainment had just as happily co-opted the trappings of postmodern irony and subcultural subversion (just look at all the millionaires that People magazine recently claimed embodied “punk rock”). Poses of rebellion and detachment suit the “break stuff” attitude of neoliberal individualism, while sentimentalism at least has some link to social empathy.

As a lifelong crybaby who’s also a cultural critic, I’ve been monitoring and mulling these developments for a while. It seems healthier to accept that art and other cultural interventions are basically manipulative by definition. Media and creators arrange narratives, images, sounds, and other effects in order to elicit human responses—otherwise what would be the point?—and it’s arbitrary to draw a line between an internal sense of being moved and an external sign like tears. If it’s fine for a comedian to aim explicitly to make you laugh, why would it be inherently more corrupt for a dramatist to try to make you cry?

People are likely more reflexively defensive and embarrassed by appeals to the more tender emotions. But I think we have to attend case by case to what purpose any cultural manipulation serves—for example, the uses of belittling “humor” by the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh, or by Donald Trump.

In surveys that I’ve conducted of friends and acquaintances about crying over culture, the few scornful ones, who would claim only bad art makes you cry, have tended to be over 50, white, and usually male. Plenty of younger people may not even remember a time when tears were especially suspect, having grown up with and contributed to a much more open discourse around depression, anxiety, and mental health in general.

Talking about trauma has become not just destigmatized but culturally central: The #metoo movement, Black Lives Matter (a movement based not just in grievance, but in grieving), trans activists and others have demanded space to sound not only their rage but their closely related hurt—for their cries to be heard. While online and offline trolls certainly try to make a meal of those tears, emotional openness does a lot to help convey a message across a bridge of sighs.

After the 2016 election, I’d argue, this trend toward tearfulness turned into more of a tsunami. Not only did the Trump regime’s policies throw half of America into an ongoing state of anxiety, but its leader’s emotional style was riddled with a throwback machismo that made public shows of tenderness, including tearfulness, tantamount to protest in themselves.

It didn’t take long for that mood to surface culturally. Compared to the Obama era, for instance, pop music broadly got slower and sadder, with even the dance floor becoming a weepers’ paradise. Emo rappers followed in the tear-tracks of “sad Drake”, often using AutoTune and other voice filters that make rapper-singers sound rather like perpetually sobbing robots. There’s also been a neo-emo revival in guitar music, as well as the rise of “sad girl indie,” which among many others might include the works of Billie Eilish, Phoebe Bridgers, and Taylor Swift’s Folklore/Evermore diptych in 2020. That sound reached a kind of apotheosis this year with the tear-stained triumph of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License”—though it also provoked some justified criticism of how reductive and constricting that "sad girl" label can be.

Lists of favorite tearjerkers in any medium are now a staple of arts and entertainment websites and social-media threads. My Slate colleague Inoo Kang wrote in 2018 that on film Twitter, “This awards season, it’s all about tears.” Fandoms in general love to proclaim how loudly they are “crying” over their icons’ latest works, often with tweets that consist of that word alone. As Kang complained, some of that is likely down to the performative nature of social media, akin to typing “LOL” without actually laughing out loud. But given that social science research shows that most people do cry fairly frequently over arts and entertainment, plenty of it is likely literal too.

Celebrities take part themselves, for instance the millennial queen of crying songs, Adele, who posted vehemently last year on Instagram about how Michaela Coel’s BBC series I May Destroy You made her “cry for absolute hours,” among other extreme feelings. (I’m with Adele; I had to take Coel’s show in small doses to avoid getting overwhelmed.)

You could object that crying in the Trump era, like everything else, became a channel of political polarization. Republicans bought coffee mugs branded to contain the “liberal tears” of Democrat snowflakes. Feminists likewise joked about drinking “male tears.” And anti-racist critics pointed out how the panicked tears of “Karens” helped mobilize police violence against Black men (as purported threats to white women always have in America). It’s certainly true that wrathful schadenfreude has skyrocketed on the emotional charts.

But these disputes actually reinforce my impression that the vale of tears is now considered a legitimate arena of power struggle. It’s about who has the authentic claim on sympathy, whose emotions are earned and whose are hollow, but it’s not about emotion being trivial. While your lot’s tears might be phony and privileged, my side has an inalienable right to a “good cry,” emphasis on the goodness.

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Weeping can now trend almost as powerfully as dancing on platforms like TikTok, where for instance teens and young adults can influence publishers by talking about the books that made them cry. Last fall, many TikTokkers took up the “Caretaker challenge,” which involved listening to a six-hour avant-garde composition about dementia, Everywhere at the end of time, by UK electronic composer The Caretaker. One marathoner called it “literally the definition of pain.”

I admired that these young online peers were willing to unite, even wallow, in the aesthetics of sadness. It seemed like a communal version of the deliberate emotional workouts I’ve sometimes put myself through during lockdown, whether by listening to “Vertebrae” or returning to old films or TV series that I knew would provide some catharsis.

Still, while I’m confident in my thesis about the post-2016 lachrymose turn, I’m less sure what became of it over the past year. Our emotions were often literally walled in, and when they spilled over into the public eye, the results ranged from the mourning and solidarity of the George Floyd protests to the delusional giddiness of anti-mask marches and the January capital attack.

Early in the pandemic, there was certainly an uptick in public tears, with politicians, newscasters, and celebrities breaking down to the point that The New York Times speculated in May, 2020, that perhaps “the old rules of who is allowed to cry in public are changing." The Sydney Morning Herald noted a similar pattern with Australian politicans, as well as among the general public.

Before long, though, a lot of people became impatient with the sight of teary stars webcasting from the safety of their mansions, and with leaders whose performances of fellow feeling did not lead to serious action on behalf of the people most at risk.

Along with anthems of anger, last summer’s Black Lives Matter uprising brought many public shows of sorrow. Usher released the song “I Cry,” which begins, “I can't keep it together/ I usually don't show my emotions/ But it ain’t getting better.” The official video shows Usher himself welling up and eventually weeping in tight, eye-level closeup (the angle film researchers have found most conducive to inducing viewers’ sympathetic tears), over a background montage of racialized injustice, prisons, and protest. In an online statement, Usher said the song was initially “inspired by wanting to teach my sons that it is ok for a man to feel emotions deeply and to cry,” and then with the lockdown and George Floyd’s death, it became connected to a “wider universal feeling of hopelessness.”

Musically, “sad bangers” certainly maintained their popularity during the pandemic, and anecdotally I heard people talking about taking pleasure in gentle cries over comfort-food TV shows like the final season of Schitt’s Creek or the first one of Ted Lasso—including a scene in which the titular transplanted U.S.-to-U.K. football coach engineers some team unity by showing his players the 1999 animated film The Iron Giant, saying, “around the 75 minute mark, there’s gonna be a room full of grown men crying.”

More recently, I sighed with recognition when I read an essay by Vogue culture editor Janelle Okwodu about the short-lived AMC series Lodge 49, which unexpectedly broke through her “pandemic fog.” She writes that she’s not a crier, having been raised by a Nigerian father who dismissed emotional displays “an American habit.” But watching Lodge 49 under Covid, Okwodu found her face suddenly “leaking” as its ensemble of economically dispossed n’er-do-wells—kind of the absurdist flipside of Mare of Easttown—gradually discovered in one another a “quiet camaraderie so real it permits me to cry.” (I was similarly moved, though the show’s emotional undertow takes awhile to take hold.)

But it’s notable that the weepy moments in all these dramedies derive mainly from moments of reconciliation and redemption, not of harrowing tragedy and loss. Under the heightened stress of the pandemic, I’ve often found myself putting off encounters with works I knew would confront me with really hard stuff—despite my best intentions, for example, I’ve yet to watch Barry Jenkins’ Amazon Prime adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. This left me wondering whether other people found themselves more tearful in the past year-plus, and what culture they sought out or avoided.

So I reached out to a couple of dozen friends, and posted the question on social media, assuring people their answers would be cited only anonymously. It was far from a scientifically sound survey, but still, what I found surprised me: A small majority said they’d found themselves somewhat or even dramatically less likely to cry over songs, films, books, etc., since the onset of the pandemic. In some cases, it was because the news itself had them feeling cried out. For others, the change felt more mysterious, maybe a sign of background numbness or exhaustion.

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Many of those who were crying more said they found it hard to separate what was pandemic-related and what had to do with other life events, such as the deaths of relatives or friends or pets, or being new parents, or pressures at work. Intriguingly, two people also said they’d seen dramatic changes in their tear production under hormone treatment during gender transitions, the one on estrogen becoming more prone to crying, the one on testosterone less so.

Whether their reservoirs of tears were dammed or overflowing, many acknowledged having steered away from viewing or listening that they feared would be triggering. One respondent said that she’d found herself unable to listen to music altogether: “I make myself so vulnerable to it, I open myself so completely to it, that… when all emotions are already raw and in constant shock from the pain and horror around the world—[it] would make me confront things I’m not ready to face.”

Others talked about reaching back to songs or films from their past, allowing them the warmth of nostalgic tears as an alternative to focusing on the wreckage of the present day.

Still others found that their capacities and reactions varied over time, “which is all to say that maybe some of us aren't either-or, but monitoring our tolerances, with the occasional uncontrolled slip-ups towards one way or the other.” As another of my correspondents perceptively wrote, “I suspect that the range of emotion is so broad (grief, rage, fear, apprehension, much more) and the ability to manage it so all over the place (keeping it together, self-medication, repression, much more) … that it is going to be hard for folks to name it as tears.”

I received only one email from someone truly on the front lines, a paramedic who works in critical care and emergency rooms. She wrote:

I have been quick to cry at a lot of things since the pandemic began, which is very uncommon for me. I found myself crying a lot more on my way to, and from work, while I listened to classical music. I also tend to cry, now, when I look at photojournalism (not quite “art,” but yet they are), and at a lot of ballads…. I try to avoid them, as I tend to identify as more stoic in nature, but I have learned over the years that without emotional release my mental health suffers drastically.

An example from the pandemic: in one week, I pronounced 20 people dead. I don't think I had pronounced that many people dead in the preceding year. These weren't just Covid cases; they included overdoses, suicides, wrecks, and presumed Covid cases. I felt like I aged two decades in that week alone. I drove home listening to Ben Folds’ The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner and sobbed.

Her statement about needing this kind of emotional release is interesting, as the research on crying is undecided about how that works, or if it works at all. One popular theory is that emotional tears (which are differ in chemical composition from tears caused by physical pain, for example) help flush toxins produced by stress from the body, but the evidence for that is thin. The more obvious proposal is the common notion of emotional catharsis, but the data is actually ambiguous about whether crying usually makes people feel better, worse, or about the same as they did before.

From my reading, the most solid suggestion seems to be that crying originates as a form of social signaling—first as the means for an infant to tell their caregivers that something’s wrong, an impulse that tends to continue through childhood and even in adult conflicts. My guess would be that it just goes on to diversify its purposes as our psyches become more complex—social signaling doesn’t immediately seem to explain why people do so much solitary crying, for instance, but perhaps we do it to communicate from one part of ourselves to an internalized other, so it serves as a form of self-soothing.

The social-signaling part of crying, the way that tears from the very beginning of life are used to implore attention, might help explain why people continue to associate it with manipulation. I think again of the parallels and contrast with laughter, which surely is also a social signal, a means of bonding or sometimes of rejection.

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One piece of pandemical culture that swirled laughter and tears together is Bo Burnham’s much-praised Netflix “comedy” special Inside, released at the end of May. About an hour into the 30-year-old comic’s series of monologues, songs, and other self-filmed clips depicting his lockdown year, he says into the camera, “I am … not … um, well,” and then buries his face in his hands sobbing, as the sound of canned applause fades in. Many viewers found that Burnham had captured their own pandemic-year grief, but Slate’s Lili Loufbourow took issue. In reality, Loufbourow notes, Burnham was not stuck alone through lockdown in the confined space we see on screen, but in a comfortable adjacent house with his long-term partner.

Loufbourow felt that this made the special deceptive, at a time when many people were in genuinely dire straits. Her piece is carefully considered (and Inside didn’t entirely land with me, either) but I wonder if she’d have been so irked without those scenes of breakdown; her tone very much echoes the long history of suspicion of manipulative tears. To me, that part of the special felt tied to Burnham’s overall self-interrogation about whether cultural “content making,” comic or solemn, contributes anything of substance in a social emergency. But even watching such an explicitly self-conscious piece of performance art, it seems, an intelligent observer can still bristle and feel blackmailed by unauthenticated tears.

And maybe that’s not entirely misguided. While I instinctively want to see tears as a medium of empathy, as opposed to the stiff-upper-lip culture of the past or the entrepreneurial-bulldozer-selfhood of contemporary capitalism, maybe the reason many people unpredictably became less tearful in 2020-21 was that crying felt too solitary and self-gratifying, by contrast with real-world acts of social solidarity.

In October, Glamor writer Jenny Singer asked whether it was still possible for pandemic-hardened audiences to indulge in the “perverse … beautifully lit tragedy” of teen-cancer weepers like Disney’s new Clouds, compared to the days of, say, the 2014 hit The Fault in Our Stars: “[While] movies about cancer exercise our emotions,” Singer wrote, “we don’t tend to take those feelings to the point of wondering how the bereaved family is paying for years of treatment, or feel moved to push for safety nets for them.”

The University of Chicago-based writer and cultural scholar Lauren Berlant, who sadly did die of cancer in June, at only 63, was one of the leading thinkers in what’s been called the “affective turn” in cultural theory (which coincided with the change in attitudes towards sentimentalism around the turn of the century). Berlant argued that all politics are emotional, but often not in the ways it seems. Trump in 2016, for instance, may have seemed to be selling anger, but really he was giving people permission to enjoy their resentments.

Likewise, crying in popular culture—whether over narratives of injustice and trauma, or over scenes of reconciliation as wishfully improbable as Joe Biden’s bipartisan fantasies—can easily be a substitute for heartfelt concern instead of a guarantee of affinity or commitment. Nevertheless, it might open up possibilities.

As Berlant said in a 2008 interview, “Emotion doesn’t produce clarity but destabilizes you, messes you up, and makes you epistemologically incoherent—you don’t know what you think, you think a lot of different kinds of things, you feel a lot of different kinds of things, and you make the sense of it all that you can. The pressure on emotion to reveal truth produces all sorts of misrecognition of what one’s own motives are, and the world’s.” (At its best, Burnham’s Inside is practically a dramatic enactment of that state.)

Berlant then added: “It’s part of my queer optimism to say that people are affectively and emotionally incoherent. This suggests that we can produce new ways of imagining what it means to be attached and to build lives and worlds from what there already is…. We are just at the beginning of understanding emotion politically.”

Perhaps someday we’ll be able to look back on the pandemic period and map a decisive change in the climate of emotion—a bend the swelling 21st-century river of tears went around and onto a new course, for better or worse. Or perhaps it will be like the aftermath of the 1918-19 flu epidemic, when the cultural mood shifted so radically and rapidly that the whole experience was all but eclipsed. As Christine Fellows sings near the close of “Vertebrae”:

Through the hush of debts
and the roar of engines,
We’ll struggle to recall:
This is how it ended.
This is how it ends.

1. Sadly, Jim died this year (2024) in February, at the age of 85.