Too Sentimental
Why do writers distrust sentimentality?
San Francisco 2012
Position yourself below the marquee of your local theater and wait until a performance ends. If you’re patient, someone will soon stroll past while saying the word sentimental. You might even hear them amplify the claim with the word too. Or stand just inside a bookstore—somewhere adjacent to the best sellers but within reach of the remainder bin. Watch as books are passed hand-to-hand but quickly discarded: Oh, that’s too sentimental. Wherever you find storytelling, you’ll find someone barking about sentimentality.
Yet a crucial aspect of the charge seems lost when you look closer. Somewhere between the lips of those complaining and the ears of those blamed is a mistranslation. There’s no agreement on just what is precisely meant by the word.
For those who have just enjoyed a film, a live performance, or a novel, hearing a remark about sentimentality sounds like an accusation. The objection is perceived as a mock or snub, and it sounds similar to a rejection of emotion: that story is too emotional.
Sentimentality as a complaint, however, seems to come from a different place, as the charge isn’t about the amount of passion, nor about the potential sappiness of a story; a gripe of sentimentality highlights unearned emotion. A love story with nothing but romantic entanglements from beginning to end isn’t necessarily too sentimental; an action story with explosions and danger and violence could easily be too sentimental. Rather than an objection to some aspect of plot—love letters, passionate kisses, romantic intrigue—a whine about sentimentality concentrates on whether the emotional salience of a story was justified.
The feeling of being an artist’s toy is what’s most resented. Those attuned to this complaint give a subtle lift to their eyebrows when a storyline appears suspiciously dramatic. A character may cry or celebrate, they may succeed or fail, a storyline might collapse into tragedy, yet these emotional climaxes must feel genuine, they must occur as natural, undeniable results of the storyline—not as mere methods to tug at the emotions of the audience. Rather than push a character toward a volcanic moment, the artist has chosen, instead, to nudge the audience toward an emotional reaction. Being an artist’s plaything feels manipulative, uncomfortable, there’s a sensation of unease, a sensation that comes when you’re treated as an instrument to be played; the storyline has completely stopped in these moments, and the only goal seems to be the strumming of your limbic system.
In a darkened theater that feeling is always the same. Perhaps a character looks into the distance, a soft violin plays, there’s a sepia tone to the scene. Rather than write the drama, rather than write those tears into the character’s storyline, the writer has outsourced that job and forced you to do the labor. As a viewer you’ve abruptly become an unpaid employee of the screenwriter—and the right reaction to manipulation is irritation and resentment.
Nothing prevents an audience of teary eyes or roaring laughs. Great stories frequently catalyze both, but those reactions are always earned; they’re a byproduct of an actual journey by an actual character, and not simply the result of a different, more deceitful goal, one that simply wants those tears and laughs. Storylines shouldn’t be molded to produce the desired reaction.
A quote comes to mind from a very different subject—on cruelty in images, on pictures of war crimes—for which Susan Sontag makes a similar point:
People don’t become inured to what they are shown—if that’s the right way to describe what happens—because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.
Her concern was passion, and she cared about the reactions of those who saw horrid image after horrid image. The thrust of her argument was that a sense of sympathy must remain; a viewer must not become numbed to terrible images. Yet this sometimes happens when the emotional force of those images is lost.
A distrust of sentimentality in storytelling has a similar root, one that comes with a curious, typically unnoticed, aspect: those who complain about sentimentality are actually complaining about a lack of emotion in stories. They’ve observed passion in a plot, yet they’ve also noticed that nothing intrinsic to the story accounts for its appearance. What they’ve seen, instead, is a simulacrum of emotion, and that false note just might diminish the real sensation.