BY DAVE PRAAMSMA
I recently saw a movie called “A Man Called Otto.” It was a shamelessly sentimental film with a predictable storyline, and it reduced me to a blubbering baby.
Years ago, as an undergrad studying literature, it was exactly this type of sentimental storytelling that was a high crime. Any obvious and unsophisticated attempt at yanking on audience’s heartstrings was decidedly low-brow stuff. Weepy. Sappy. Gushy. Mushy. Corny. Schmaltzy. It was all porridgy prose for the toothless masses. And yet…
If we’re honest, “sentimentalism” may be as much a problem with readers as with storytellers. Even the most stoic of us falls for that subtle invitation to get soppy, which may explain why we respond the way we do after getting emotionally ambushed. If we get conned into an emotion or two, at least we can hurl the accusation and hold our heads high. That puppy reunion scene that reduced us to unsightly mush? Sentimentalism! We were emotionally hijacked!
If there is a population especially at risk, it’s got to be us empty-nesters in our 50’s. Sure, we soldiered through our 30s and 40s, shoulders squared, stiff upper lip. And then it hits us: Nostalgia Sentimentalism. That melancholic whispering in our ears of years gone by. The kids are gone, the house is quiet, and then you find your spouse standing in that empty bedroom getting leaky over a lanyard you’ve found under the bed.
I heard tell of one family who was having a rather uneventful family camp reunion until the band rolled out a few 1980s songs. When they got to “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, the otherwise stoic father grabbed the microphone and melted into a mushy mess of reminiscence. His deeply concerned children later asked the camp director to please avoid such music in the future.
Of course, triggers are everywhere: sights, smells, sounds…cheesy Bon Jovi songs from high school proms-gone-by. I was reminded of this recently on a trip with my wife to Mexico. We trekked into an historic little hill town famous for its charming cobblestone roads and winding passageways. The two of us were having a completely sober emotional experience until we realized the place was overrun with classic old Volkswagen Beetles! It was the taxicab of choice. It also happened to be the memory-filled car of our dating years. All of it was just an interesting novelty until from a rooftop restaurant the sun started to set and a chorus of purring Volkswagen Beetles wafted up to our ears.
If I could be allowed at least one moderately emotional appeal, sentimentalism seems to have fallen on hard times. Sure, we might allow for a tear or two in a darkened theatre. Anything public beyond this is nothing short of poor emotional self-regulation. Emotional incontinence really. “An ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion” according to one anti-sentimentalist.
And then of course there’s that familiar bit of criticism from playwright Oscar Wilde: “Sentimentalism is nothing more than the luxury of having an emotion without having to pay for it.” The big-hearted among us, apparently, are nothing more than emotional free-riders. Vicarious arm-chair emotionalists!
As a storyteller and card-carrying sentimentalist, I find it hard not to get a little melancholy.
“The world is made up of stories, not atoms!” I have quoted more than once to my stoic New England neighbors. (In the unseen and ancient battle between the rationalists and the sentimentalists, the sentimentalists are ahead I must say.)
I don’t think my Otto film took any Oscars at the Academy Awards this past week. But if you can look past its sentimentalism, you might also notice that it’s about one man rediscovering his humanity. Sure, it was little schmaltzy, but it was a good schmaltzy.
I realize it is customary at this point to insert “spoiler alert” here, but I’m sure you could see it coming anyway: emotionally crusty man, through the power of people, finds a way to enlarge his Grinchy heart.
It may be a cliché we’ve all heard before, but told the right way I think we could hear it again. In fact, maybe we should.
