There’s an inter­lude between the first and sec­ond acts of The Hustler that begins when Fast Eddie los­es all his mon­ey to Minnesota Fats and, as a pro­fes­sion­al con­man with no fixed address, he’s forced to store his belong­ings in a lock­er at the bus sta­tion. He meets Sarah there, then moves in with her after a brief courtship¹.

Charlie, his old shark­ing part­ner, final­ly man­ages to find him at her house and is eager to hit the road again, but Eddie remains focused sole­ly on earn­ing enough to face Minnesota Fats one more time. Eddie needs to prove he’s a win­ner, both to the world and to him­self. That’s why there’s noth­ing that can be said to con­vince him to change his mind, and when he finds out Charlie was hold­ing out on him dur­ing the last run — even though it was for Eddie’s sake, even though he had absolute­ly no right to the cut that right­ful­ly belonged to Charlie — Eddie quick­ly becomes enraged, think­ing he could have beat Fats with the remain­ing juice.

“Lay down and die by your­self”, Eddie says, “Don’t take me with you.”

“Just like that?”, Charlie repeats in dis­be­lief after a brief pause.

“Yeah, just like that!” Eddie spits the words with­out any hes­i­ta­tion.

Unable to help but over­hear, a sin­gle tear rolls down Sarah’s cheek. After hav­ing recent­ly met both men, she could­n’t have enough con­text to under­stand all the his­to­ry they’ve been through. But that does­n’t mat­ter. No one needs to explain to her how hurt­ful those words are. She has no stakes in the sit­u­a­tion; only empa­thy and sad­ness.

It was a moment that made me real­ize how rare it is to expe­ri­ence expres­sions of emo­tion like that nowa­days. Aside from a few instances of peo­ple cry­ing dur­ing a movie², it’s hard to recall the last time some­one shed a tear due to a tragedy that did­n’t affect them­selves in some way, direct­ly or not.

Vulnerability, ten­der­ness, or com­pas­sion have increas­ing­ly been viewed as weak­ness­ness, while rage and greed are glo­ri­fied and worn like badges of pas­sion. I can’t help but won­der how much the Marvel fran­chise — which has come to define cin­e­ma for an entire gen­er­a­tion — has con­tributed to this by under­cut­ting scenes that fea­ture any poignan­cy with some kind of humour to make them more palat­able (and, hence, prof­itable), at the cost of true emo­tion­al impact. Perhaps SNRIs are to blame as well; most peo­ple I know are on an anti-depres­sant of some kind, the pur­pose of which was described to me by my psy­chi­a­trist as “putting one’s feel­ings in a cast“³.

That’s why I’ve been mak­ing a con­scious effort to con­nect with those with kind hearts and gen­tle souls. People who react with com­pas­sion instead of indif­fer­ence when I’m in dis­tress. People who aren’t afraid to say it back when I end a cor­re­spon­dence with “Love Jeff”. People whose ini­tial instinct upon find­ing out that they’ve hurt me is to seek for­give­ness and under­stand­ing instead of turn­ing defen­sive and angry.

It’s an approach to being social that’s left me increas­ing­ly iso­lat­ed from the world, but also giv­en me an even deep­er appre­ci­a­tion for who’ve remained in my life.

1. And if Eddie was played by any­one oth­er than a young Paul Newman, I’d like­ly con­sid­er this an immer­sion break­ing detail. [↩]
2. Shawn dur­ing this scene in Interstellar, me from this scene in The Artist. [↩]
3. More than once, Heather has told me she’d be cry­ing if it was­n’t for her meds after I did some­thing thought­ful for her. [↩]