It takes fifteen minutes for the emotions to play themselves out on the screen in slow motion. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but not because two of the people are so distressed. We know they are actors playing a part for the artist to film. The reason the film is discomforting is that you yearn for them to comfort each other. The man in religious ecstasy is so close behind the woman that at some points it’s almost as though he’s inhaling the smell of her hair and smiling in appreciation. They stand so close together that they are touching, but they never interact or even make eye contact. The man who is enjoying himself turns towards the distraught woman and puts his hand on her shoulder, but while you long for him to look into her eyes and show her that he’s there for her, he continues to smile instead. You find yourself wishing that if no one else is going to help the two tortured people, they could at least turn to each other and suffer together, but they are destined to suffer alone. The fact that it is so painful to watch these people standing so close and yet ignoring each other’s emotions shows us something fundamental about emotions – that they are an exceptionally strong form of communication. Crying in the presence of another is so powerful that it is unbearable to watch if that display of emotion is ignored.
If the purpose of tears is to communicate your sadness so that others will help, there is just one problem: people often cry on their own and report feeling better afterwards even though they have received no comfort from others. Moreover people often deliberately seek privacy if they want to cry. It has been suggested that even if you cry alone, you’re using yourself as an audience. You might give yourself comfort by sympathising with yourself, agreeing that you have the right to feel unhappy about your situation in the same way that a friend would.
It is possible that the opposing theories of Professor Frey and Randy Cornelius are in fact compatible. Perhaps we gain some relief from expelling the toxic by-products of stress in addition to communicating our distress and receiving comfort from others.
If crying can be beneficial, this raises the question of whether never crying, like the Professor of Tears himself, could be harmful. In the Western world there has long been an idea that if you suppress your tears you will do yourself physical damage. Back in 1847 Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in the poem ‘The Princess’,
Home they brought the warrior dead;
She nor swooned nor uttered cry. All her maids, watching said, ‘She must weep or she will die.’
It has been suggested that suppressing the emotions could increase a person’s chances of developing cancer, heart disease or high blood pressure. Related studies tend to focus on emotions in general and often anger in particular, rather than crying. However, in one study people were instructed to watch films while suppressing their tears and laughter. This was found to increase heart rate, so in theory if this behaviour pattern was repeated over many years a person’s health could be affected. Nevertheless, you are unlikely to be in situations where you are suppressing tears many times every day, so not crying probably only makes a difference to your health if you are suppressing all your emotions all of the time.
In eighteenth-century France collective tears were seen as enjoyable and compassion was expected from others, but by the nineteenth century suppressing tears was seen as evidence of self-control. A social dictionary of the time describes tears as ‘water too often ill-employed, for it remedies nothing’. When attitudes towards crying have been researched in more recent times, findings using questionnaires contrast sharply with the results of experiments held in the laboratory. In questionnaires women tend to say that they feel sympathetic when someone else cries, whereas men report feeling awkward or even manipulated. Women in particular seem to be accused of ‘turning on the waterworks’. Men report believing that it is inappropriate or a sign of weakness for a man to cry, but in laboratory experiments where people are actually crying the results are rather different. When a man cries after watching a sad film, both men and women consider him to be more likeable, while the weeping women are disliked for their tears. So although men may not like the idea of other men crying, when actually faced with it, they do not judge them. Perhaps men consider that if a man is crying his feelings must be profound and so he should taken seriously.
If crying succeeds in communicating our feelings then once again sadness is revealing that it does have a purpose. The family seeing off the woman with the linen jacket in my airport story, eyes wet with tears, would be signalling their sorrow. While that parting would be reflected in their brain chemistry, they would in fact be strengthening their bonds with the woman who was leaving. She would be able to see how much they cared, in a way they probably wouldn’t usually show her.
Although we don’t tend to think of it as a pleasant emotion, sadness is probably one that we are stuck with and although the value of sadness is hard to see, particularly when we are feeling sad, it might be an emotion with wisdom after all; an emotion which forces us to slow down, consider our plans and maybe change them. Sadness provides a light and shade in our emotional life. At the same time the outward signs of sadness like a down-turned mouth and that most potent but still mysterious communicator of sadness, tears, can bring us closer to those around us by signalling to them that we need them.
The audience sits in silence in a converted warehouse in East London. Although it’s a cold November night, waiters further up Brick Lane stand outside on the street, trying to persuade passers-by to choose their particular curry house. But in the warehouse eating is the last thing anyone would want to do. Out of 2,000 people who tried, these are the lucky 300 who succeeded in getting tickets. A few watch anxiously as a man comes onto the stage wearing the curious combination of a black Fedora hat and surgeon’s scrubs. His name is Professor Gunther von Hagens. After a short introduction his assistants wheel in a long, sheet-covered lump on a trolley. The professor draws back the white cover to reveal the dead body of a man with skin which looks as though it could be made from plastic. The professor walks over to a side-table on which is a silver tray lined up with implements, ranging in size from the smallest knife to a hacksaw. He selects a scalpel, turns back to the body, leans over the man’s breastbone and puts the blade into contact with the skin. He presses down firmly and slices down through the skin. The audience wince as one, imagining the knife cutting through their own flesh. Surprisingly there’s no blood, just a slow trickle of thick orange liquid, like the orange congealed fat left behind in a roasting tin. This is the first public autopsy to be held in Britain for 170 years and in addition to the live audience, millions are watching on television. Professor von Hagens explains that he’s making what’s known as a Y-cut, slicing across the chest and down the centre of the torso. The man died at the age of seventy-two after drinking two bottles of whisky a day and smoking heavily for years. As the chest is opened the skin is peeled back on either side of the cut to reveal layers of fat. The heart and lungs are extracted and carefully placed in silver dishes lined up on the side-table. Like waiters at a banquet, assistants stand in a line nearby, ready to pass a dish when required for the next body part. Eventually just one dish remains empty. It’s time for the brain.
An assistant holds the man’s head still,