Heartstrings

I couldn't help but notice that my favourite films I've watched recently - Aftersun, The Quiet Girl and Living - are the three by which I've been emotionally affected. That seems an obvious correlation, but it isn't always. 

By "emotionally affected", I guess I mean "brought to, or close to, tears". Top Gun: Maverick, watched at the cinema, also affects the emotions, in that it is gripping and exciting. Any decent film affects the emotions in some way.

But what I mean here is poignancy, empathy, some sense of real loss on the character's behalf, something like that.

Quite often, the emotions of artworks pass me by a little. I say that ... maybe I'm selling myself short, or flattering myself. Sometimes I'm more affected than is proportionate. For example, in the early 2000s, I used to quite often well up while watching Home and Away - this is a good opportunity to say, though, that in my opinion, early-2000s Home and Away is the ungarlanded apotheosis of soap opera, an unlikely coming together of genuinely good writing and acting which surpassed all that had gone before.

Right, I've said the important bit ... what about emotions? Notwithstanding Home and Away, I probably belong to the class of gent who would imagine that for them to be emotionally affected it would take a high level of artistic of excellence, that they are not subject to the kind of sly, or clunky, manipulation that does the trick on the average joe or jolene.

Rubbish, of course, or slightly rubbish. We can all be manipulated, we can all take a cheap shot. Or, we can all be caught unawares by our own emotions when we're not expecting it, and give more credit to the corresponding work than it strictly deserves.

I am not usually moved, truly moved, by reading a novel, but that's no bad thing. In fact, when I think of books that have pulled on my heartstrings, I do not often think of them as books I eventually judged to be excellent. An example would be 'Queenie' by Candice Carty-Williams. There are a couple of scenes which I found very moving, but there was, imo, far too much work to get there.

Compared to TV, film, novels, poetry, art, it is songs that I am most often carried away by, whether they're songs I've heard many times before, or for the first time. I can't imagine not being moved by Danny Callahan by Conor Oberst, Song for our Daughter, by Laura Marling, or Fourth of July by Sufjan Stevens. I suppose I get myself involved in songs. I am, so to speak, there for the taking. Usually, my engagement with everything else is more passive.

I think I'm a very typical case, but I may not be - the first time I cried in the cinema was, after all, when the Emperor died in 'Return of the Jedi'.