What’s the saddest movie ever? Bambi? Old Yeller? Transformers: Dark of the Moon?
Pish. Don’t make the science guy over there in the corner laugh. Oh, sure, those movies might be sad. They might even make some folks shed a tear or two. But if you want to see something that’ll reliably make you bawl like Ricky Schroder in The Champ, you gotta see … well, Ricky Schroder in The Champ.
OK, so The Champ might not be the best saddest movie ever made. The 1979 remake only has a 38% rating on rottentomatoes.com. It might not even be the saddest whole movie ever made. But according to science, it’s got the most reliably sad scene ever made. And you know, science doesn’t like being called a liar.
According to smithsonian.com, scientists have used the final scene in The Champ—where Ricky Schroder cries his eyes out beside his dead father—in more than 300 studies designed to make people sad. Researchers say the scene’s weepy gold, almost guaranteed to make even hardened mafia henchmen break down in blubbering masses. If scientists wanted to find out whether sad people spent more money than happy people (and they do), they turned to The Champ. If they wanted to find out if sad people ate more (they don’t), The Champ was there. If they wanted to find out whether the smell of women’s tears made men’s testosterone levels sink (they do), they came to The Champ to elicit those tears. The Champ always comes through.
“It’s wonderful for our purposes,” says UC-Berkeley psychology professor Robert Levenson to smithsonian.com, who started looking for a reliable film to turn on the tear ducts in 1988. “The theme of irrevocable loss, it’s all compressed into that two or three minutes.”
Turns out, scientists have a whole catalog of movies they use to make their subjects feel a certain way. If they want to make a volunteer angry, they pop My Bodyguard or Cry Freedom into the DVD player. Fear? The Shining or Silence of the Lambs does the trick.
“In the old days, we used to be able to induce fear by giving people electric shocks,” Levenson says, who I now picture having wild hair, a syringe in his hand and a slightly maniacal look in his eyes. You can’t just shock people in these more enlightened times, so they try to elicit strong emotions in other ways. As the article’s author Richard Chin writes:
Ethical concerns now put more constraints on how scientists can elicit negative emotions. Sadness is especially difficult. How do you induce a feeling of loss or failure in the laboratory without resorting to deception or making a test subject feel miserable?
"You can't tell them something horrible has happened to their family, or tell them they have some terrible disease," says William Frey II, a University of Minnesota neuroscientist who has studied the composition of tears.
But as [Stanford professor James] Gross says, "films have this really unusual status." People willingly pay money to see tearjerkers—and walk out of the theater with no apparent ill effect. As a result, "there's an ethical exemption" to making someone emotional with a film, Gross says.
Now, I have a couple of thoughts about this:
While forcing a test subject to watch The Champ is probably far more ethical than telling her that her dog died, we know that movies can have a lasting affect on people. There are still people who won’t dip their toes in the ocean thanks to Jaws. Films impact us. If they didn’t, scientists would have no use for them.
But it also makes me think about my own reaction to film … how I’m far more prone to tear up during a movie than I am in real life. Listen, I’m not proud to admit it, but I got a little emotional watching the final 15 minutes of a Sylvester Stallone movie about arm wrestling (Over the Top). Sylvester Stallone! Arm wrestling! Is there something wrong with me?
After watching The Champ’s final few minutes, I gotta say it’s a pretty sad scene. But I don’t know if I’d call it the weepiest scene ever.
Have these scientists even watched the first 15 minutes of Up?
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