We have science to thank for breakthroughs in medicine,
improving people’s lives, and even unlocking some mysteries of the universe.
But can science tell us which movie will make us shed the most tears? Stay tuned as we find out.
Very few people might like sadness as a concept, but there's no denying that
there's a time and place for sitting down to watch a sad movie. However,
exactly what constitutes a sad movie and how it can be experienced is a more difficult thing
to figure out. We all have those certain films that just tug on our heartstrings.
Some prime examples include the horrifically depressing ending in Million Dollar Baby,
the haunting journey portrayed in The Pianist, and the gut-wrenching conclusion to The Green
Mile. Each movie works in different ways to make the audience weep for the characters,
and all are critically acclaimed for their success in evoking such sadness.
Thanks to the large variety of things people convey as sad and the vast array of films that
depict said things, you could say the list of sad movies is nearly endless. As such,
if you were to ask someone what the saddest movie of all time is,
they would probably only be able to give you a subjective answer — that is,
unless you ask the right people. See, while it's easy to assume that it's pretty much impossible
to designate a single film as the saddest movie of all time, Smithsonian Magazine's
Richard Chin thinks otherwise. He spotlights an astounding scientific study by psychology
researchers Robert Levenson and James Gross, who have apparently succeeded in such an endeavor.
Working at the University of California, Berkeley back in 1988, Levenson and Gross were researching
the relationship between movie scenes and emotion. Specifically, they were searching
for a scene that succeeded in eliciting only a single emotion at a time, Smithsonian
Magazine reports. On the sadness front, the winner was as clear as it was surprising.
After testing 78 carefully vetted sad movie scenes across almost 500 undergraduate volunteers,
they discovered that the ending scene in Franco Zeffirelli's 1979 sports drama The Champ was
distilled sadness, evoking the emotion more often than any other scene. To put this in context,
second place went to the famous scene in Bambi where the titular character's mother dies.
Since the results of the research were published in 1995, The Champ has been used in a great many
psychology experiments and features in over 300 papers. This is largely due to the scene's ability
to cause sadness in test subjects in a powerful, yet comparatively ethical way. Levenson said:
"It's wonderful for our purposes. The theme of irrevocable loss,
it's all compressed into that two or three minutes."
Curiously enough, despite its off-the-charts emotional punch, critics don't consider The
Champ a particularly great movie. It only has a 36 percent Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes,
so while scientists may be convinced of its importance,
perhaps being a sad movie doesn't make it a good movie. Then again,
its audience score is a respectable 82 percent, so maybe critics just don't like feeling sad.
So what makes The Champ such a sad movie? Well, if you know what it’s about, it's
easy to understand why the film is custom-made to put your feelings through the wringer. The
movie follows Billy "Champ" Flynn, played by Jon Voight — an aging boxer who's struggling
to be a good father for his adorable son, T.J., played by Ricky Schroder. As this is happening,
the boy's estranged mother, played by Fay Dunaway, attempts to pry the kid away from his dad.
All three proceed to go through the wringer throughout the movie's duration. In the
scientifically ultra-sad final scene, Billy dies in the aftermath of his desperate comeback match
in plain view of the distraught T.J., who slowly realizes that his father is dead.
"T.J. please." "I want champ!”
“T.J.” “I want champ!"
“TJ. Please, T.J. Listen to me. He's gone."
The heart-rending, nearly three-minute scene consists pretty much entirely of
T.J. uncontrollably crying over his father's earthly remains. Pretty sad,
right? What's more, the movie has plenty of star power in Voight and Dunaway,
and young Schroder actually won a Golden Globe for his role as the emotive T.J. As such,
you can be sure that all those sad scenes and dramatic beats get driven home with five-star
ability. The end result is so extremely sad that, according to Smithsonian Magazine,
even the scientists in charge of the experiment weren't immune to its power. James Gross admitted:
"I still feel sad when I see that boy crying his heart out."
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