Sincerity is Scary - Losing Sentimentality at the Movies

February 2024

“I can’t stan’ ‘im!” Lina Lamont shrilly sobs. The 1927 audience of the opening night of The Dueling Cavalier breaks into laughter. Don Lockwood, seated amongst the crowd, sees his career shrinking before his eyes and cowers into his seat. As the scene plays on, Lockwood’s character strolls on screen, embraces Lina Lamont’s character and kisses up and down her arm, repeating “I love you,” while his audio gets muffled and then too loud and then muffled and then too loud. Lockwood thinks his life may be ending while the crowd roars with laughter. But this is the new reality of cinema: The Talkies have trotted out, and not every star will survive.

Ok, so that didn’t actually happen. Well, it did in Singin’ in the Rain in 1952, with Jean Hagen as the ditzy Lina Lamont and boy-wonder Gene Kelly as Don Lockwood. But it was based on a real event that happened in 1929, to John Gilbert, though it all went down a little differently.

Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen in Singin' in the Rain (1952)

John Gilbert was the 1920s’ own romantic heart throb. He had an illustrious silent film career, working with esteemed bigwigs like producer and writer Mary Pickford, MGM producer Irving Thalberg, director King Vidor, and true icons Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, among many more. [An aside here: Garbo and Gilbert dated for a while and were reportedly very passionate, but then she left him at the altar on their wedding day. Good for her.]

Though, by the late '20s, it became clear to MGM heads Louis B. Mayer and Thalberg, with whom Gilbert had a contract, that Talkies (films with synchronized, diegetic sound) could be valuable sources of revenue. Gilbert got mic’ed up and transitioned into the new world.

It went well, actually. He wasn’t immediately laughed out of the theater when he made his sound debut with the musical The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in June of that year. Indeed, some actors who made the leap into sound didn’t make it - the quality of their voices wasn’t quite right, they had “too strong” of an strong accent, or physically they couldn’t pull back from the over-gesturing required for silent film. Film critics paid close attention to the voices of stars who used to be mute on screen, and it became part of the film’s critical performance. Luckily, Gilbert made a fine transition with that musical film of summer ‘29.

Then came September. Gilbert’s next talking picture, His Glorious Night, directed by Lionel Barrymore (who was allegedly drunk throughout filming) premiered and was met with… weird response. The film played well, for a while, with Gilbert’s character Captain Kovacs both a romantic and aspirational hero, but then things got a little too romantic with Kovacs kissing up and down the leading lady’s arm, promising to love her, repeatedly. That’s when the audience laughed.

And it wasn’t just one screening where this occurred - the laughing epidemic was bi-coastal.

John Gilbert in His Glorious Night (1929)

In a review of the film by the New York Standard:

An audience in Manhattan nervously laughed during the love scene.

And the Los Angeles Times:

The audience last evening chose not to take the love scenes too seriously and there was, therefore, comedy aplenty.

It was like a switch had been flipped. The rest of the film continued on more as a romantic-comedy, if not an outright -com. But the thing that caused it was the film’s own sincerity! Audiences began to feel awkward at the emotionality, which was the film’s initial draw.

His Glorious Night wasn't the only talkie to experience this, either. In 1930, audiences for The War Nurse laughed at highly emotional scenes. The Film Spectator reported that while scenes had all the right stuff to make them “poignant and sympathetic,” such as an anguished mother giving birth out of wedlock, the audience still snickered throughout.

There is something peculiar about both films beginning as emotional, romantic, earnest, and sincere dramas before turning into something audiences could point their fingers and laugh at. In short, the sincere aspects of film had become cringe.

There’s enough think pieces out there about cringe-culture, but I want to consider the full-cycle of theatricality and lay out the ways, nearly 100 years later, our movie-consuming and movie-making habits are mirroring that of our centenarian counterparts.

Busby Berkley's Footlight Parade (1933)

Hollywood figured out quickly that romantic, sincere Talkies weren’t everyone’s bread and butter (considering the laughing and all), and then the Great Depression began and with it a desperate need to watch any film but the sad kind. There was a great pivot to action films, led by men, and musicals. Some of the most popular films of the late ‘20s through the ‘30s were singing-and-dancing bona fides like Busby Berkley’s Footlight Parade, 42nd Street, and Gold Diggers of 1933, and hero flicks like King Kong, Robin Hood, and Cimmaron. Here were super-men overcoming the most outrageous of odds, giving the common man something to hope for. And here’s the high energy sopranos, altos and mezzos bursting into song at a moment’s notice, living in some other benign, exciting world. Here is where sincerity is manageable, behind the façade of organized kicklines and the downfall of bad guys. No plotline or emotion was too real, and that felt good. Distant.

This isn’t to say emotion wasn’t at the movies; the 1930s brought about the melodrama genre, often also known as “weepies” or “chick flicks,” because they make women and women’s issues protagonists. These films often examine gender roles, maternal sacrifices, virtuosity, social and class disparities, romance and rejection, tragedy. Yet, these films are hardly realistic. Variety, in its 1939 review of Dark Victory sums up the form nicely: “intense drama, with undercurrent of tragedy.” If we’ve learned anything from Shakespeare, it’s that tragedy need not be realistic at all! The melodrama’s need to commit tragedy, or create suspense or exaggerated emotion kept these films from truly being sincere.

The best melodramas like A Star is Born, Imitation of Life and Stella Dallas were all Academy Award nominees or winners, but the genre wasn't popular. These were "women's films," after all. And, such a high level of catharsis and oversaturated feeling - of so many things going wrong for these poor women! - meant moviegoers still preferred a rousing big-screen escapade, so Hollywood continued to churn.

Barbara Stanwyck and Anne Shirley in Stella Dallas (1937)

With emotion feminized and therefore minimized by Hollywood, audiences seeking an escape from the harsh reality of economic downfall, and classical Hollywood’s mechanistic output of highly stylized, fantastical genres, sentimentalism in film slowly slipped away.

And it’s slipping away again, now. Women and our femininity is constantly undermined by this new Alpha Male Roid Rage mentality and the insistence that emotion is a sign of weakness. Hollywood is relying on IP to carry their films to commercial success, regardless of audience preference for story, characterization or originality. Consumers and audiences are constantly reminded of atrocities being committed around the world and of the quickness with which our society, globally and locally, is falling apart - billionaires taking private jets to travel 28 miles while disenfranchised groups still recover from a pandemic and mass shootings occur once or twice a day.

It is all too much.

Sincerity is scary - it is the admittance of pain or joy or fear or relief or anger, or all of it at once. We see these intense emotions all day long on our little screens, why on Earth would we want to see it on the big screen?

Culture now, as curated by what we say and read and listen to, is a constant choice between irony and sentimentality. We’re often choosing the former.

In a Vogue article “The Importance of Being Earnest in a Cynical Age,” Yomi Adegoke writes:

“To be earnest, enthusiastic, keen, is to be cringe. It is the antithesis of cool. Cynicism and snark are the preferred alternatives in the internet age, especially on Twitter. Users tweet with an affected detachment that’s both quick-witted and acerbic, relishing in their inability to care about anything.”

Being online requires a performance - whether that’s to get retweeted (re-X’ed?) or get more followers - and a move away from earnestness. It’s a rejection of reality and the emotional endurance it requires. It’s a practiced and repeated behavior, that’s also reaffirmed by all those retweets and followers, and by what movies we choose to make and see.

Though Marvel’s downfall seems closer than ever before, its multi-decade prominence is perhaps the biggest signifier that cinema has slipped away from sentimentality. These are modern culture’s action-adventure films of the 1930s that promised heroes would save the day from extraterrestrial outsiders, that capitalist, militarist hegemony would prevail, and that men’s rewards were just a little bit more important to watch than women’s suffering.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

And sure - I cried really hard, and I mean really hard, at the end of Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home. These were characters I had gotten to “know” over years of pop culture consumption. But feeling emotion during a film doesn’t mean that the film, itself, is sincere.

Marvel’s own language, in its script and cinematography, undermines its sentimentality. Cheesy, trope-y one-liners have proliferated in cinema forever (“Uh, he’s right behind me isn’t he?”), but by mocking tropes and hinting at self-awareness to try and connect with the viewer, Marvel films basically say to you: “We don’t really believe this! We know we’re in a comic book movie!” These films fail at true sincerity in exchange for seeming totally ironic and therefore irreproachable and anti-emotional. 

We have our own versions of melodrama lately too, but we tend to call it “Oscar bait”. Oscar bait is the concept of a kind of film that de-emphasizes visual spectacle for emotional spectacle. These movies seem to tackle big ideas without actually saying anything very transgressive. Oscar bait films are often pointed at months before they’re even released, causing some to prejudice themselves against the film outright, for the sense that it seems like the creators or the subject matter wants to privilege heartstrings over technicality. Mark Harris in a New York Magazine article even argues, “'Oscar bait'” is a way of diminishing movies by feminizing them, in a way.” Attempts at sincerity in film and filmmaking is again relegated and diminished.

Barbie (2023)

Then there’s Barbie. Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar hit can go toe-to-toe with the flourishing classical Hollywood musicals of the 1920s through the 1930s, but it's a melodrama too. With the actual musical numbers aside, Barbie has one of the most talked about monologues, probably ever, delivered by America Ferrera (who received an Academy Award nomination). It’s a very earnest delivery with a very earnest message, but the film, for many critics, has landed with a simplified or even fake sincerity. In order to be palatable for the film's corporate sponsor, Mattel, the film often goes after ironic online-speak, keeping viewers and politics and reality at an arm's length. Ferrara's sincere monologue then plays as an attempt at sincerity without actually saying anything emotionally.

In a New York Times opinion by Pamela Paul, the critic identifies this imbalance:

There were no recognizable human characters … There were no actual stakes, no plot to follow in any real or pretend world that remotely made sense. In lieu of genuine laughs, there were only winking ha-has at a single joke improbably stretched into a feature-length movie.

An MSNBC critique pursues the same argument:

[Barbie is] a two-hour toy commercial backed by Mattel that, by its very nature, could never offer us radical ideas about feminism and power in society.

When Barbie ends, I don’t really care if Barbie chooses to live in reality - I want to go to Barbie Land. It seems a whole lot better than reality!

This regression to, or perhaps mirroring of, early 20th century film is a beast of our own creation. Our language in online culture is quick one-liners for immediate comedic relief with no build up and little to no meaningful payoff, and it's seeping into our films to undermine our stories. We shuttle millions of dollars towards safe-bet movies to mitigate the risks of actually being transgressive in culture. We disengage, if we have the privilege to, with the worst parts of reality because it has become easy to reject emotion. The loss of sincerity is the loss of radicalism.

But, if we can’t be sincere, why should our movies?

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Thank you for reading! This is my first of hopefully more, brief essays to come.

Resources / More Reading:

• “The Importance of Being Earnest in a Cynical Age.” Yomi Adegoke, Vogue, 2022.

• "The 'Barbie' snub discourse has lost the plot." Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC, 2024.

• "The Death of a Mute Mythology: From Silent Movies to the Talkies in the Day of the Locust." Blake Allmendinger, Literature/Film Quarterly 16.2, 1988.

• “Is There Even Such a Thing As ‘Oscar Bait’?” Mark Harris, Kyle Buchanan, New York Magazine/Vulture, 2016.

• “The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s.” Lea Jacobs, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008.

• "Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term 'Melodrama' in the American Trade Press." Steve Neale, The Velvet Light Trap, 1993.

• “‘Barbie’ Is Bad. There, I Said It.” Pamela Paul, New York Times, 2024.

• “The Audience Laughed.” The Film Spectator. 1930. Clipped.

• His Glorious Night, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929.

• The War Nurse, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1930.

• Singin’ in the Rain, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952.

• Barbie, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023.