Weepies, Women, and The Fault In Our Stars

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You cry at the end of it. You cry with the characters and then you cry out of sync, when they are off-screen. There is talk of trying not to cry. ("You clench your teeth. You look up.")1 Elaborate internet taxonomies document the flavors of this crying, alongside the precise moment each type might occur, sometimes with animated pictures.2 There is the sniffle at the cancer story, the single-stream tear at the hospital, the trying-not-to-cry, the catching at the throat, the full-body spasm, the hiccup, the jerky breathing, the laugh-while-crying, the long term cry that affects your sinuses, the puddle of tears, the steady stream, the ugly cry, the waterfall, the total mess. Maybe you don't cry, and that is something to think about. Maybe, as some have suggested, this means you have a heart of stone. Or perhaps, as other have claimed, this not-crying is only because you are a man.

It is familiar enough to say, with some archness indeed, that all this crying over The Fault in Our Stars (2014) is mere manipulation, a cheap pulling at the heartstrings, not to be taken seriously. The dismissal is historically familiar for the ways that it connects the badness of a given art form to its popularity amongst female audiences. Women are sentimental and so is the art that they like, the well-worn story goes. What is not often mentioned is that way that such dismissals set The Fault in Our Stars into the cinematic lineage of the "women's film," often referred to as a "weepy," "tear-jerker," or, in one particularly damning summation, the stuff of "wet, wasted afternoons."3

Most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, the women's film, or "weepy," is an admittedly porous genre, overlapping with noir and melodrama, amongst other tendencies. These films take place in kitchens and parlors, with little reference to the world outside. The pathos comes from the suffering of the female victim-heroines, most often abused, dying, hysterical, neglected, mismatched, or star-crossed. The tears such films elicit signal the recognition of the audience's powerlessness in the face of fate or inevitability.4 There is a severing of lovers that can't be helped. Or we see that a character will die and would like the character not to die. This knowledge comes, for the audience, well in advance. After the revelation of the impending catastrophe, there emerges what Douglas Sirk called the "rhythm of plot": a perpetual delay of the outcome, elongating the suspense and suffering, us all the while knowing there is nothing to be done. And so we cry.

It would seem then that TFIOS is a latter-day weepy, given its Shakespearean title on the fixed nature of destiny—"the fault, dear Brutus, is in our stars." At Vulture, Amanda Dobbins writes what many others have suggested in more roundabout ways: "Should all else fail, try reminding yourself — out loud, at regular intervals — that you are being manipulated. They want you to cry; they made branded tissues for that purpose."5 Dobbins frames her review as somewhat tongue-in-cheek advice for avoiding tears entirely. She points out some of the  more implausible plot points, but also suggests that viewers just skip the last twenty-minutes if they want to remain dry-eyed. (The precise wording is "Run the fuck out of the theater and don't look back.") What is intriguing here is that even a declared enemy of the franchise will admit that the lure of tears is difficult to resist.

However, TFIOS is about the ways it makes you cry. This about is trickier than it might seem because, in many ways, the ways that we might identify with the suffering of others becomes extremely vexed over the course of the film. In a cast interview,6 the otherwise admirable Laura Dern claims that the script is not about cancer; it is about the universality of love and pain for everyone, everywhere:

The film is about love. The film is about the fearlessness it takes to love knowing that you might lose love. And losing love and grief come in so many different shapes for all of us, but it's inescapable for all of us. It's the fact that [director Josh Boone] captured a shared experience. The diagnosis isn't what the film is about, but the experience of how to have gratitude in a life with any diagnosis, with any trauma, with any pain.

Dern isn't totally off-point; she just fails to specify. True enough, the love story between Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Augustus (Ansel Elgort) is perpetually described in the language of everyone, everywhere, all of us. See Hazel's eulogy, delivered to Augustus while he is still alive: "Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears." The staginess of this speech works because Hazel is, in fact, on a stage, in a church, self-consciously reading from a piece of paper. On Youtube a number of fans have taken to recording themselves performing Hazel's monologue to tragic effect. The ease with which we might step into Hazel's shoes here occurs because, as in Dern's account, emphasis lies on the universality of lost love, rather than the specificity of cancer. It is something that might apply equally "for all of us" and to everyone, everywhere.

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And yet. As I noted earlier, the matter of identification is vexed. Note how the characters in TFIOS are so perpetually absorbed in other fictional stories. There are the America's Next Top Model marathons, watched with mom on the couch. There is An Imperial Affliction, Hazel's favorite novel, which she recommends to Augustus. In turn, Augustus loans Hazel a copy of the science-fiction series The Price of Dawn, featuring Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem. Then there are the Max Mayhem franchise video games, routinely played in Augustus' basement and narrated in the borderland between truth and fiction, as though we had momentarily crossed into the world of the Hunger Games: "Isaac fumbled for his controller and then started firing while the bullets rained down on Augustus, who was shot once and then twice but still ran."

As we watch these characters reading and watching, there is a particular mirroring effect—an absorption in someone else's narrative absorption, you might say. Perhaps aware of these somewhat uncanny doublings, the cinematic adaptation edits out Augustus's Vertigo-like dating history. In the novel it is revealed that Augustus's former girlfriend was also diagnosed with terminal cancer. She dies and then, shortly thereafter, is replaced by her physical double, Hazel, who is also terminally ill. Taking up Hitchcock from a different angle, the cinematic version of TFIOS perpetually returns to border states that cannot quite be controlled: dizziness, yes, but also sleeping, waking, losing consciousness, the odd twilight of sedatives, and, most often and most literally, absorption in a narrative sequence, be it novel, television, or video game. Significantly, it is while Augustus is reading to Hazel that she allows herself the backwards realization, "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." Notice how this key scene of reading/sleeping/falling, like so much else in the voiceover, is peppered with the second person—that you, you, you. Hazel is always talking to you, it seems. The you is an index to feelings shared between audience and character, often while watching or reading together. But, in many ways, this you becomes somewhat vertiginous, in part for the ways that it does not fit.

During the first half of the film the plot moves quickly, no scene longer than a minute or two, all the while Hazel's voiceover pulling us in with all those you, you, yous. Part of what makes TFIOS so absorbing is the way that Hazel's obsession with her favorite novel, the aforementioned Imperial Affliction, supplies something of a quest narrative—a reclusive Dutch author must be found and questioned, so that what happens after the end of the novel, which frustratingly ends mid-sentence, can be known before Hazel herself dies. A well-wrought caricature of the sneering intellectual, Peter Van Houten (Christopher Walken) refuses to imagine a future for his characters after the novel's end. He calls such notions childish, but might as well have said childish and female. In Van Houten's Amsterdam apartment, Hazel and the author enact a familiar argument about the female spectator: her sympathy is too much, too excessive, escapist, and fanciful. She herself is too much, too feeling, because she confuses fictional characters with real life. In any variation, this dismissal is condescending because it relies upon the unreflective, naive identification of a female spectator who, the argument goes, has too many feelings because she cannot make a distinction between reality and its representations on screen.

What I have been leading up is the opposite point: TFIOS is not a well of narrative absorption into which we dive, blindly, erasing the difference between real and fictional lives, thus moving into identification with a seamlessly universal everyone, everywhere. The movie is not about inhabiting those states of absorption, lost to worldly cares—it is about being jerked out of them. By this I mean those particular moments of disenchantment that arise when a film or series is over. There is that strange flash of disequilibrium, a kind of unsteadiness, after all those hours of living in a fictional world. We feel unmoored, perhaps, suddenly detached from a story world that punctuated our own evenings or afternoons, day after day. This is a moment of loss, of course, of futures and persons that seemed so solid that you could bump into them. It is jarring, that ending, or maybe sad, regardless of the fates of characters. But this sort of ending is, too, a moment of demarcation, between what is fantasy and what is not. Total absorption allows for fantasy to take root, often through identification with a fictional character. These are the moments that make your pain feel like my pain. As a number of critics have pointed out, this sort of fellow-feeling remains entirely passive.7 It allows us to bask in the gloriousness of our own empathetic suffering, imagined as universal, all the while papering over the material differences between a you and an I.

TFIOS shakes us out of this kind of empathetic identification quite early in the story, then at intervals, through the punctual solicitation of the audience's tears. Here I mean to describe a physical reaction so perpetual that it calls attention to itself. In the critical response to TFIOS, the fact of the audience's tears has been subject to a disproportionate amount of attention. More than a dozen recent reviews focus on the ways that crying goes along with the experience of watching the movie. There are different takes on this phenomenon. In "A Guide to Crying," Cosmopolitan enumerates the key emotional scenes, beginning with the voice over in the opening scene and then continuing to minute 14 (flashback of Hazel almost dying), then minute 22 (Monica dumps Isaac, Isaac cries) and so on.8 From NPR, Ella Taylor claims immunity but notes the general tendency, impossible to ignore: "all around me people broke out sobbing."9 A.O. Scott offers up his own categorization: "the film sets out to make you weep -not just a sniffle or choke up a little, but sob until your nose runs and your face turns blotchy."10 Whether it is you crying or the persons around you, this crying does not happen at the sad ending, with the credits rolling, but as a starting and stopping throughout much of the film. This crying, as all the internet taxonomies notate, with down to the minute lists and animated GIFs, happens over and over, at different moments, from the initial voice-over to the credits. Hence one title, "26 Times You Were a Puddle of Tears During The Fault in Our Stars."11 Whether you cry or not, there are all those branded tissues—this is a film that expects its audience to be tearful. All this crying is hard work, blotchy-making and snotty, as the normally austere A.O. Scott suggests. What is significant about the excessiveness of these tears is not the fact of crying, but the way that the punctual nature of these tears begins to interfere with our ability to watch the movie.

TFIOS is so bent on making the audience cry, early on and then with some regularity. Soon enough, all those tears get distracting. Too much crying and the body calls attention to itself: to the breathing that involuntarily catches and breaks; gluey skin going blotchy; that irritated nose. With significantly more gravitas, the Russian formalists would call this effect ostranenie—a moment of setting apart, of making-strange, so that the audience is shaken out of their empathetic identification with a fictional character. In TFIOS, the various indignities of the long-term cry produce this somewhat jarring effect. These bodily discomforts require attention, yes, but this moment involves, as well, an awareness of a being in a particular body, in an air-conditioned theater, amongst other persons, at a certain time of the day, in a location that is not the location on screen. Perhaps it's not you who are crying too much, but the people nearby caught up in the throws of vicarious grief. In any case, quite a bit of extra-diegetic shuffling occurs. Tissues must be located and noses blown. Noisy, too, are all those other minor malfunctions of the sinus cavity. A result of empathetic identification, an imaginary feeling with the sufferings a fictional character, all of this crying gets to be too much. The accumulating bodily discomforts eventually, at least momentarily, open up a space—literal, snotty, shuffling around—between the you in the audience and the you on screen. At these moments, TFIOS is not about the universality of suffering for everyone, everywhere, fictional and real, but the frisson that occurs when this sense of universality is revealed to be false.

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That lurch, between what might have seemed natural and what turns out to be true, is also a story about growing up, though not a nostalgic one. As Augustus likes to remind us, lots of things, like cigarettes and swing sets, can be a metaphor. Beyond the sheer literality of the cancer narrative, TFIOS is a story about bad odds. Augustus has an 80% chance of recovery and relapses anyways; Hazel is in the 30% that respond to an experimental trial, but is nevertheless terminally ill. It is a story about the ways that these odds for survival necessitate a particular kind of math, wherein, to make the numbers work, one person's existence requires another's suffering. At cancer support group, Hazel reasons, "when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in an you figure that's one in five ... so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards."

In order for the math to add up, to escape the bad odds into the expectation for a longer future, a healthy or successful future, the future you might have imagined as a child, someone else must be cut out of their own version of the good future, impersonal though this struggle may be. For those on the wrong side of the percentage point, this math colors everything. The world is divided, for Hazel, between persons that have terminal cancer and persons that do not. ("I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us.") There are then subdivisions: those that take the elevator and those that do not; those that are still in school and those that haven been taken out of school; those that have hobbies and those whose full-time job is having cancer. These subdivisions fold out onto others more polarizing: Van Houten lives on inherited wealth that allows him to fly first-class across the world at a moment's notice; Hazel's family has acquired a vast amount of medical debt.

This sort of social division, undergirding and overlapping with the more prominent divide between the sick and the healthy, allows us to see TFIOS as part of a larger sea-wave of dystopian young adult fiction from the last decade. All this at a moment of perpetually rising youth unemployment, student debt, campus occupations, and a larger international movement of squares attributed, in large part, to jobless, disaffected youth populations.12 Though TFIOS dispenses with apocalypse or gladiatorial combat, it too, a part of this dystopian response to the absent future of youth populations living in the wake of economic crisis. This is the imagination of a world with no future for its narrators: "But this is all you get ... you're not going to be the first man on Mars, and you're not going to be an NBA star, and you're not going to hunt Nazis," Hazel tells Augustus. The litany of the futures not to be seamlessly recalls the speech given to the young organ-donor clones in Never Let Me Go (2005): "None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets ... You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided."13

In the 1930s weepies, the victim-heroines generally wait for their fate, all the time hoping-against-hope to be saved. In TFIOS, director Josh Boone stages this elongation of loss, the hoping-against-hope, inside houses strangely sterile and filled with Ikea furniture. However, what becomes interesting, in TFIOS and the larger teen dystopian tendency, is the ways that these worlds of social division, between the healthy and the sick, the young and old, between those with vast incomes and those in permanent indebtedness, become something acted upon rather than passively suffered. Take, for instance, Isaac's destruction of the basketball trophies, a feat that leaves the statuettes in a grotesque heap of mangled parts. Or consider the egging of Monica's sports car in the middle of the day, a scene so brightly lit is seems like we could eat the grass. When Monica's mother steps out of her brick McMansion, Augustus summons up a grotesque monster of vengeance: "between the three of us are five legs, four eyes and two and a half working pair of lungs, but we also have two dozen eggs, so if I were you I would go back inside." This threat works, Augustus explains, because it changes the narrative:

'See Isaac, if you just take—we're coming to the curb now—the feeling of legitimacy away from them, if you turn it around so that they feel like they are committing a crime by watching—a few more steps—their cars get egged, they'll be confused and scared and worried and they'll just return to their—you'll find the door handle directly in front of you—quietly desperate lives.'

Who is they? The wealthy that live in the manicured houses? The adults? The teenagers without cancer, like Monica? It doesn't really matter. What is significant is the solidification of an us and a them, a world of polarization rather than everyone, everywhere, and the beginnings of a non-metaphorical refusal to accept this ordering as fate.

Allegories for youth in revolt can go very wrong, as the third installment of Divergent reveals. Imagining a future for surplus youth populations, without imagining a new social system altogether, proves to be an impossible task. Though these series often begin by breaking the notion that social division is a product of fate or god, untouchable by man, they often return, after the violence of bloody uprisings, to a Thatcheresque "there is no alternative." What is more valuable is what happens on the way to these bad endings. TFIOS is saved from such conclusions because it stops in medeas res, with Hazel's life still before her. It is a happy ending, sort of. Against the prescription for celebrating what is, there is also a spectrum of emotion, as the internet taxonomies suggest, from laugh-crying to weepy, that is also about what if feels like, not just to lose a future that you never had, but to change this narrative altogether. That you, you, you is not a point of confusion, of excessive, syrupy slippage between fictional and real, but an attempt to work out a feeling for social division, between us and them, some and others. We cry, the critics say, because we know how the story will end and we are powerless to change it. TFIOS is, in many ways, a narrative about the ways it makes you cry, but it is also about taking charge of narratives altogether: "if you just take—we're coming to the curb now—the feeling of legitimacy away from them, if you turn it around," says Augustus. There again is that second person, the you, you, you of the dash-phrase this time a kind of interruption. Because you are not a blind teenager being led to the curb and you know that. You know, too, what is might feel like to sink into a given story about fate, to be lost to the world and then, suddenly, be jerked awake, unmoored, and, in that moment of vertiginous detachment, to locate a different sort of narrative, beyond the given, crying or not-crying, slowly and then all at once.

Jill Richards is an assistant professor in the English Department at Yale University. She is working on two projects: a book manuscript entitled Fire-Starters: Women's Rights, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes and an experimental history about the civil rights of the adolescent.