Excerpt from Crying at the Movies

I have no memory of my father's drowning when I was nine years old. I was present at the scene—along with my mother and two brothers—and I can remember things that happened immediately before and after, but I don't recall anything related to the actual moment of his disappearance.

I used to think it was because I was inattentive. Maybe I had my back turned. Or I had my mind on something else. I just didn't notice. But how can this be? How could I have missed an event of such significance?

Both of my brothers—one of whom was seven years old at the time, the other twelve—have memories (though they don't completely jibe) of what happened. Only I draw a blank. In the place of narrative, I have only an image. When I force myself to focus on this instant, what I see is a piece of overexposed film. There was too much light.

I knew I had lost my father, but somehow missed the experience of his loss. The gap in my memory contained the terrifying feelings that flashed through me at the moment of his death. Where did they go? Am I even sure I had them? How to validate the existence of something you simply can't remember? Trauma, I have since learned, can induce this kind of amnesia. In trauma, the self is overwhelmed. Faced with the imminent threat of annihilation, it blinks, steps aside, opts out. What is not perceived, in turn, seems not to exist. Trauma, according to the psychoanalytic theorist Cathy Caruth, causes "a break in the mind's experience of time," the shock of which causes a temporary blank.

Yet, even if I could, through hypnosis or some other means, recover a semblance of memory of my father's drowning, what would it tell me? Not much more, I think, than what I already know. That there was a violent rupture in my sense of reality, a dividing of my life into "before" and "after," and a consequent deadening of my capacity to feel—not just grief or sorrow, but also (more significantly and tragically) love.

My emotions, like migrating birds, fled the cold climate of my heart, alighting somewhere else, where, from a safe distance, I could sometimes view them. This was the function of reading, for me, in childhood. I devoured tales of orphans and sick or dying girls—books like Heidi, Little Women, and The Secret Garden. I couldn't get enough of such books, though I also didn't understand the source of my appetite. Eventually, this habit led me to a Ph.D. in English literature.

Yet the first time I truly encountered one of my lost and alienated selves was not in the solitude of my study poring over a novel of traumatic orphanhood like Bleak House or Jane Eyre, but at the movies. I first wept, in a desperate and brokenhearted way, not over a loss of my own, but that of someone whom I did not know, who didn't actually exist, and who belonged to a radically different culture. I had this sudden emotional breakdown at the age of twenty-six, while watching the classic Indian film Panther Panchali, by director Satyajit Ray. I wasn't merely tearful, I was convulsed. My crying was totally physical and out of my control. While the film deals with death, I had seen plenty of movies about death, without having a reaction like this. Why this story, in particular, and why now?

For years afterward, I cried at the movies. When bad things happened to me in real life, I didn't react. I seemed cool or indifferent. Yet in the dark and relative safety of the movie theater, I would weep over fictional tragedies, over someone else's suffering. So deeply ingrained was this habit that I didn't think to question it until my convulsive reaction to Panther Panchali surfaced again in my mid-fifties—in a dramatic and ultimately life-changing way.

Copyright 2002 by Madelon Sprengnether. All rights reserved.