Cry About It: Making Sad Scenes Sadder
Everyone's tough until the dog dies
Stories are about emotions.
Everything I talk about here is in the pursuit of eliciting some sort of emotional response from the audience. We make art because we feel something, and we in turn hope that what we create makes others feel something. Usually, we don’t have control over how it makes people feel. Maybe they’re angry at something that you thought was happy; maybe they get goosebumps at a random line you didn’t think twice about. In these moments it can be rewarding to see how your work speaks to different people in different ways.
But sometimes, you really need the audience to feel what you want them to. Otherwise, the moment will fall entirely flat.
I’m sure you can think of one off the top of your head: a death that somehow turned comical, or a farewell that leaves you feeling nothing? And on the other hand, I bet you can also envision a movie that really got you, that made your stomach roll and your heart beat faster and forced you to pretend that you’re just yawning, that’s why your eyes are watering.
What’s the difference? What did that movie do right? Why does one scene work and the other doesn’t?
Most importantly, where are the tissues?
1. Life’s Not Fair
I think that if there’s one thing that underlies almost every sad event, it’s this:
It’s unfair.
This is the starting point for any tragic event. It’s why every time a dog pops up in a movie, you can be sure it’s going to die at the end. A dog’s death is one of the most unfair things in the world, which makes it easy pickin’s for a sad scene.
I don’t care for Interstellar all that much, but I have to give it credit: about halfway through, it delivers a genuinely sad scene. Cooper, our protagonist, has been tasked with traveling to a distant planetary system in the hopes of discovering a replacement for Earth, which is dying. In doing so, he must leave behind his family (a daughter and son). Through a mishap that isn’t really anyone’s fault, Cooper is stranded for several crucial minutes on a planet that experiences significant time dilation; a minute on this planet is seven years on Earth. When he gets back up to his spacecraft, he is the same (only one hour older), but on Earth, many years have passed.
The sad scene comes when Cooper watches the backlog of video messages that his family has sent him during his time on this planet. His daughter, who always disapproved of the trip, leaves him a scathing message. She has turned the age he was when he left, and she feels that he has abandoned her. Cooper can’t reply; he can only watch and sob as his daughter rips him apart for leaving her on Earth to die.
It's so sad because it’s so unfair; Cooper had to go on the trip to save humanity, and he tried his absolute hardest to get off of that planet in time. At the same time, we completely understand his daughter’s resentment. It’s an incredibly unfair situation, which makes it incredibly sad.
2. Earn the Sad
Of course, you can’t just throw a random character in an unfair situation and call it a day. That’s how we get moments where a supposedly sad scene doesn’t evoke any emotion. No, we don’t feel sad because the situation is sad. We feel sad because a character we care about feels sad.
The Fault in Our Stars is a masterclass is meaningful sadness. The film explores grief through the lens of two terminally-ill teenagers, Hazel and Gus, who fall in love. Needless to say, Hazel experiences lots of emotions throughout the movie. And, importantly, we do too. There are funny scenes in the film that caused me to laugh out loud. There are heart-warming scenes that brought a smile to my face. There are tense scenes that got me on the edge of my seat.
My point is: I felt what Hazel felt, whether positive or negative. And so, when the sad scenes come, I didn’t stand a chance. The writers primed me to open myself up to the emotions of the film, which enabled me to fully empathize with the main character.
3. Bit of Both
Yin and yang, light and dark, happy and sad. You can’t have one without the other. A movie with non-stop sadness will certainly be sad, but the sad scenes won’t hit as hard as they could. I have already mentioned The Fault in Our Stars as a case of juxtaposing happy, fun moments with tragic ones. Now what about a movie whose entire theme revolves around the pairing of happy moments with sad ones?
Pixar’s Inside Out is a classic tear-jerker, and rightfully so. Hilarious moments like the botched dream operation are paired with deeply tragic scenes like Bing Bong sacrificing himself so Joy can return to headquarters. With no happy moments, the sad would overwhelm the film and desensitize the viewer. Similarly, with no sad moments, the emotionally-complex-but-we’ll-call-it-a-happy-ending ending wouldn’t feel so satisfying. It’s a delicate dance, but one that, when pulled off correctly, elevates both the sad and happy scenes.
4. Stay with the Sad
A soldier, called Blake, is tasked with delivering an important message that could save 1600 men, his brother among them. Blake takes a friend, Schofield, with him as he journeys across No Man’s Land and faces peril after peril to accomplish this task.
Halfway through the movie, Blake is killed.
It’s sad. We’ve grown to like Blake, and the circumstances of his death are painfully unfair: he was helping a rival combatant, who in return stabbed him.
This is the situation that we find in 1917, Sam Mendes’s WW1 masterpiece. Crucially, the saddest part of this scene is not this character that we love dying. No, the tears come when we see Schofield’s reaction.
It turns out, watching something unfair is hard enough; watching the character who has to carry on in the face of such sadness will break you. The death scene in 1917 hits me hard every time, specifically the moment when Schofield stops frantically trying to save Blake’s life and instead begins speaking calmly to him. He’s easing him into his death.
This movie is filmed to look like one shot, so there is no way to escape the pain. There is no cutting away to something else. We stay there with Schofield as he grapples with this death. It’s brutal.
The inability of the film to cut away compounds the sadness of the scene. Films will often cut away from a sad scene too quickly. It’s almost as if the moment was there out of necessity (“just kill off the likable character, and then we can move on”). To really make a moment like this stick, you need to stay in it. Specifically, you need to stay with the character most immediately affected by whatever has happened.
In Interstellar, we don’t see Murph for most of her message; rather, we see Cooper breaking into tears. In The Fault in Our Stars, we don’t watch Hazel as she reads Gus’s eulogy to him; we watch him reacting to her words. The same is true in 1917. Schofield’s reaction is the sad part, not Blake dying.
5. Be Clear
Let’s say you’ve done everything right. You’ve crafted an unfair situation that affects a much-loved character. Something sad happens and you stay with the affected party as long as fits. Even then, there is something that can undermine the full effect of the sadness.
Is it clear what just happened?
Take a Marvel movie. About two-thirds into the movie, the main character is beat by the bad guy and sent flying off the edge of a cliff. Everyone in the movie thinks they’re dead.
But you, the audience, don’t. You know it’s a Marvel movie, and so the character will come back. You probably don’t feel anything at all in that moment, because you don’t believe that the sad thing really happened.
Different moments can be clarified in different ways. If someone is dead, the easiest way to prove to the audience that they are truly dead is to show them. There are other ways too (I’m sure you’ve seen a close-up of the heart monitor flat-lining). One I appreciated a lot was the death scene in 1917.
When a character dies, the actor must make a decision. Having never died themselves, they have to find a way to believably check out. Sometimes they go completely limp, or their head will roll, or their tongue will fall out, or something like that. In 1917, Schofield is holding Blake tightly, in such a way that even if Blake did go limp, we would probably not see a difference. So how do we know the moment that he actually dies?
The music. Throughout the film, the music ebbs and flows beautifully with the gradually shifting scenes (this is a byproduct of the one-shot vision of the film). As Blake takes his last breath, the music cuts out completely. It is possible you didn’t even notice that there was music before; but now, the silence is deafening. The audience can feel that something has just dropped out. It’s powerful and clear. Blake has died.
The reason this is such an important aspect to writing a sad scene has to do with the five stages of grief. The first step, as we’ve discussed, is denial. When confronted with a sad situation, we will immediately search for any reason to deny its reality. It is paramount, then, for the writer to ensure that there is no such reason.
In other words, the sadness comes from the futile pursuit of an excuse. If there is reasonable room for doubt, the scene won’t punch like it should.
6. Be Honest
John Greene, author of The Fault in Our Stars, used to serve as a chaplain at a children’s hospital.
Christopher Nolan, writer/director of Interstellar, is the father of four children.
Sam Mendes, co-writer and director of 1917, first heard the story of a soldier delivering an urgent message from his grandfather, a WW1 veteran.
Meg LeFauve, writer of Inside Out, spent time researching emotional intelligence in young kids at Children’s Circle Nursery School.
In other words, they weren’t thinking of these steps when they wrote their sad scenes. They were writing something personal to them; they were writing something real.
And real life is sad sometimes.
Start from a genuine place; don’t write a scene with the intention to make your audience cry. If that’s the goal, you’ve already messed up. Write about what stirs you and trust that it will stir something in your audience. Be honest, and your audience will feel it and respond to it.
Something interesting happened when I started writing this newsletter. As I undertook the process of documenting different devices writers employ to make a scene as sad as possible, I began to draw some parallels to the devices used to make scenes funny, as I discuss in this newsletter.
“Doubling down” corresponds to “stay with the sad'“, as both devices encourage you to stay in a scene longer than you may think is necessary. “Be specific” echoes “Be honest", since you’re trying to find a new perspective on something personal to you. Finding the joke by cutting to a straight character parallels punching up the sadness by focusing on the character most affected by the sad event, rather than the event itself. “Make us care” corresponds to “Earn the sad”, since the audience will only empathize with a character if it’s a genuinely well-written, fleshed-out character.
There are more parallels than these; I won’t go through each one.
At first, this seems counter-intuitive. You may think that to make a scene sad, you should do the opposite of what would make it funny.
But then you may remember the conclusion of the comedy newsletter: the best way to make a scene funnier is to make that scene better. In doing so, the funny parts will naturally become funnier.
Well, reader, I’m here to say that you’ve been swindled yet again. Over two thousand words later, I can confidently conclude that the best way to make a sad scene sadder is, indeed, to make that scene better. It makes sense, then, that some of the same devices that improve a funny scene can be tweaked to improve a sad scene.
It’s kind of funny, when you think about it.