THE SENTIMENTAL ANIMAL
There is something poignant– and, I must confess, satisfying– about the sight of a so-called „intellectual“ weeping at a sentimental movie. Last night, for example, sitting beside a friend of mine– a well-known and widely respected American scholar– I suddenly heard what I was sure was the susurrus of barely-contained laughter on my right at an embarrassingly (even to one as „sentimental“ as myself) sentimental moment in the film, where a small boy is reunited with his parents.
Turning to make some sort of joke, I suddenly realized that– rather than laughter– what I had heard was the sound of my friend’s unrestrained sobbing, a fact which (whether out of embarrassment before me, or before himself) he immediately tried to cover up with some emotion-distancing remark about how badly the movie was „done.“
Another friend– a prominent poet, scholar and essayist who (on paper at least) has not a sentimental bone in his body– recently told me of spending two hours in an airport parking lot weeping after dropping off his adolescent son to leave for college in Vermont. Hitler (hardly a scholar, and with whom I wish to make no further comparison with either of my friends), it is well documented, wept unabashedly at sentimental films and the deaths of domestic animals, while sending millions off to the gas chambers to fulfill his conception of the ideal state.
But man, gratefully, is precisely this: the sentimental animal… a quality which, howsoever often it may attract the disdain and condescension of pure thinking types (for whom virtually all traces of genuine feeling are panic-strickenly dismissed as „sentimental“), is no doubt accountable for whatever small vestiges of civilization and mercy we are still capable of. If one really wants to see what becomes of an entirely „unsentimental“ species, one might do well to watch a batallion of red ants enter a termite mound… or a true „intellectual“ come home to his wife.
It was Wallace Stevens, of course, who described sentimentality as „failed feeling,“ which well it may be… though he might have been more intellectually rigorous to include compulsive thinking in that definition as well. For if you really want to see the revenge of the repressed in action, you might do well to watch Jacques Derrida at a showing of The Sound of Music… or possibly Harold Bloom at Bambi… provided, of course, that either had the courage to go.
Personally, I remember– at a time when I was rather „unsentimentally“ mistreating virtually everyone in my actual life– weeping for hours after watching The Heart is a Lonely Hunter… a movie which, gratefully, I was able to laugh my way right through just the other day.
The moral of the story is that– if you’re looking for a sadist or a wife-beater– just stand outside the theatre next time Old Yeller comes to town. You’re almost certain to find a pair of bruised knuckles– or else a „true“ scholar–behind every teardrop, dabbing a handkerchief right beneath his unsentimental eyes.
We might do well, I’d suggest, to weep for them all.