Why do we so rarely see male crying scenes in cinema? When is a hard-boiled hero allowed to shed tears without spoiling the box office revenues? How have filmmakers throughout history approached the problem of representing male emotions?

Sociologists tell us that the dominant setting in which men cry today is while watching a movie. If contemporary male crying behavior is closely tied to cinematic experience, then to speak of male tears in contemporary culture means to speak about cinema. Only with the diffusion of cinema in the twentieth century did the tearless hero emerge. In classic cinema, male heroes were mostly stoic and strong-spirited characters, shedding a single tear only in face of a dying comrade or traumatic loss of kin. If we actually witnessed strong male emotions on the silver screen, they usually took the shape of furious rage, or a face contorted with pain or madness, rather than sorrow. However, in producing male-oriented melodramas that tackled issues of male friendship and vulnerability, the seventies marked a turning point in how filmmakers portrayed men and manly tears.

Eventually, with the fall of the iron curtain, the cinematic hero was ultimately freed from the necessity of being an invulnerable, and therefore tearless, character. Now, even superheroes can shed tears over a failed romance. Especially in the last decade, we have witnessed a massive increase of male tears on the screen. From Hollýwood blockbusters to Art House and independent movies, male tears have become a growing economic factor. Could it be that the spaces of cinema are the last asylums of male emotions in today’s society, and cinematic tears counterbalance the pervasive effects of a disembodied way of life? Drawing upon a wide variety of sources, from movie excerpts to biological research, screen writer Martin Behnke and philosopher Stefan Höhne take a journey into the cultural history of sad movie scenes, to encounter the world of male tears on screen and in the cinema seats.