So I’m reading this film studies article by Linda Williams called “Film Bodies,” which explores the connection between horror films, pornography, and tear-jerkers. She actually makes a pretty persuasive case. Each genre shows us actors experiencing the things we as audience members are supposed to be experiencing (whether it’s terror, horniness, or grief), each displays an excess (of violence, of sex, of emotion), and each focuses on the body engaged in a kind of fit (death throes, orgasm, sobbing) accompanied by inarticulate vocalizations (”NOOO!” “YEEES!” “WAAAH!”) and the fetishized release of bodily fluids (blood, semen, tears). I was a little skeptical about the inclusion of tears in that last one until I remembered this scene from Garden State, which is an emo money shot if I ever saw one. (The salient part appears right at the start of the video*, after the jump.)

When somebody gets hit in the nuts in a baseball movie, it is customary to laugh. When the plucky underdog wins in a baseball movie, it is customary to cry.

Back in my days as a Real World, Non-Movie Little League catcher, the opposite was often the case, let me tell you. Except that I very rarely won the big game, especially when I played for the plucky underdog.

Nut violence notwithstanding, it is abundantly clear that the famous Tom Hanks line from A League of Their Own is patently and deliberately false.