From Maine to Japan

My friend Mina recently shared a link with me to a photo exhibition: Crying Men, in which movie stars were asked to produce tears for the camera. I spent maybe two hours scanning the pictures, totally absorbed by them, by the images of men weeping for the camera. Which ones are "sincere"? And what does "sincere" mean here, anyway? Clearly all are crying on cue, and yet some seem to be "acting" more than others (and I'm not at all sure my intuitions on who is doing what are valid at all!) Some made my heart break just looking at them...I want to take Jude Law (above) and Robin Williams home and give them some cocoa and tell them things will be all right, they will. Somehow!

There are the men who look directly, almost defiantly at the camera, like Daniel Craig and Laurence Fishburne: Yeah, I got nothing to be ashamed of, this is me crying. There are the ones who seem so racked by emotion that they've forgotten the existence of the camera: Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Michael Madsen. There are the ones who seem lost in an abysmal, almost existential pain: Jude Law (my God, his posture), Sean Penn, Tim Roth. There are the ones who seem unable to quite manage it: Ben Stiller, Woody Harrelson, and Benicio del Toro all seem mildly bummed about something.

Then there's Robert Downey Jr., who's doing something pretty amazing with the whole form and assumptions behind it, but I'm not sure exactly what.