The saddest scene in cinema history, according to science
Right, have you got some tissues ready? Sad tissues, I mean, not happy ones, because today we’re going to put our white coats on, grab a clipboard and some bottletop glasses and dive headfirst into the science of what makes a movie really, really sad.
For some reason, we love watching films that get us right in the gut, weepies that have us sobbing like Matthew McConaughey completely losing it while listening to Murph’s video in Interstellar, or Forrest Gump getting all wet-cheeked at Jenny’s grave at the end of… er, Forrest Gump.
Now we’ll be honest, because it’s the best policy and also we don’t want to get sued, and admit that it’s not actually us that has looked at the science of exactly what makes a movie scene particularly sad, but in fact the boffins at Berkeley University in America, who put together a study called Emotion Elicitation Using Films, which pretty much does what it says on the tin.
In it, they evaluated more than 250 films and showed them to almost 500 people in order to see which emotional states they triggered most, like anger, fear, sadness and surprise. While the films which delivered the most amount of fear are probably not all that surprising, given they turned out to be The Shining, which is pant-soilingly scary and The Silence of the Lambs, in which Anthony Hopkins is a big, terrifying nope, the saddest scene in history came from a movie you may not know.
Runner-up in the list of the saddest clips of all time is one that has gone down in folklore as a moment that tests even the stiffest of upper lips, namely the death of Bambi’s mother in the 1942 Disney animated classic. That’s a scene that for over 80 years has turned the most granite of hearts to rubble, grown men complaining of something in their eyes as the unsteady deer pathetically prods at his fallen parent, muttering ‘Momma?’ in a despairing, high-pitched voice. I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
But is it the saddest scene in cinema history? Well, no, because according to the science bods over the pond, that dubious honour goes to a 1979 sports drama starring Jon Voight called The Champ, a boxing movie co-starring Faye Dunaway and a kid called Ricky Schroder, who would go on to win a Golden Globe for his performance at the age of just nine.
The scene in question comes at the end of the film, as Voight’s champion boxer lies dead from brain damage after a fight, as his young son tries desperately to wake him up. According to the study, it was the scene which consistently elicited sadness most effectively from all of the films shown to the group, which is not really surprising because it’s upsetting as hell.
To be honest, you don’t even have to watch the rest of the film to find your lip quivering at it; the final few minutes are plenty, as you’ll discover below, especially if you’re a dad with a son, a son with a dad, or presumably if you happen to be a boxer of some description.
Is there a sadder scene in movie history? Well, you may well have one that personally hits particularly hard. Certainly, the end of Beaches with Bette Midler is a tough one, as is Turner and Hooch if you like animals, as is My Girl with Macaulay Culkin, a film so sad that just reading the Wikipedia entry is enough to have you stocking up with Kleenex. Again, in a sad way. Jesus.
