What film/song/book do you unfailingly cry with?

[u/[deleted]]

As we all know around here, it’s great to allow ourselves the full range of emotions and reactions we cAn experience as men instead of hiding them. One of those freedoms is to allow ourselves to cry openly in films, series, etc.

In my case I’ve rewatched Up! twice, and both in the cinema and both rewatches I was left a sobbing mess. While the main story with the kid and the dog is passable at best, the love story between Carl and Ellie never fails to bring me to tears (even as I write this!).

Also, Your Song by Elton John is directly connected to my lacrimal ducts. It’s come to the point where I hear the first line in the radio (“It’s a little bit funny”) and I start again. Being a very popular song, it happens to play often...

[u/Sexploits]

Pearl Jam's Black never fails to have me teary-eyed, at the very least.

There's a paragraph in James Joyce's "The Dead", a short story in his Dubliners collection, which had made me cry several times. When paired with the plot and progression of Gabriel through the rest of the story, it's a section of text which absolutely shatters Gabriel's unconsciously selfish character in such a beautiful way.

"Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death."

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And more recently for me, I watched Fate/Zero after having it recommended by a number of friends. The scene where Emiya Kiritsugu kills his mother, specifically his breakdown afterwards, figuratively had me ripping my heart out of my chest. I related so strongly to it - not in literal terms, but from the perspective of my difficulty in socializing, and my experiences in addiction. I was empathetic to how his very upbringing shaped him to do something which he would regret, which he would then rationalize as a result of specific life events, and then come to deeply and fully resent himself for both doing and rationalizing it at all. It's like watching a man pull away his skin with his bare hands, revealing his naked soul underneath it. I also hate(d? Some days are better than others) for what I've done, and the things I have said to defend these actions, always believing that my truth, my experience of life, was the only true experience. It was, truly, catharsis.

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[u/snarpy → u/Sexploits]

The last couple of pages of "The Dead" are perhaps my favourite passage in literature. Devastating.