A friend recently told me that 
Up in the Air--the new movie about a man obsessed with taking airplane flights, based on the novel by Walter Kirn--was more sentimental than the book was. The movie, he said, is about a man growing out of his neuroses; and the book is about a man being increasingly trapped in them. “The movie is too ‘Hollywood,’” he said. “It bullies you into feeling certain emotions.”
I thought that was a good definition of “sentimental”: art that bullies you into an emotion. But a definition probably has to say more than that. What does it mean to be bullied into an emotion?
Or: What’s the difference between art that forces me to feel and art that inspires me to feel? After all, all art is made in order to evoke an emotion, or an emotionally charged response to some thing in life. An artist writes her book because she’s thinking about something with a positive or negative value for her. She almost certainly wants you to feel something about what she’s saying.
Maybe one definition of sentimental art is that it simplifies the experience that inspires emotion, as well as what emotions are composed of. I’m thinking, for instance, of a cheap romance novel in a supermarket checkout lane. The first page might introduce me to a lonely woman sitting at the ocean shore whose hair is whipping around her head. She’s watching an orange sunset, sad about the men who have left her. The book would strike me as “sentimental” because it relies on prepackaged images and ideas, like the assumption that women are sad without men, and the way a woman’s whipping hair conveys desperate feelings, and the convention of the poignant sunset.
In this sense, sentimental art could be called work that takes a short cut by relying on clichés to get us to feel. In contrast, non-sentimental art would be art that explores a situation in a more complex way. Maybe when an artist is not being sentimental, she’s actually more inspired. She might describe sadness, but that sadness would not be overly-familiar; it would be a strange or conflicted version of sadness.
If that’s the case, then I can understand why the movie Up in The Air is sentimental. It essentially stages an old or clichéd battle: between solitude and marriage. This movie presents, one the one hand, a guy who flies around the country, “free” in the sense that he’s not committed to anyone, but lonely. On the other hand, the move gives us marriage, which is staged as life’s true happiness. In the end, the hero regrets his life--feeling, if fleetingly, that it’s better to be committed to someone than to follow the false dream of freedom through solitude. And yes: We’ve heard this before. Which means that the movie gets us to feel the joy of love in a sentimental way.
Maybe the novel on which this movie is based does do a better job of exploring the grey area in feelings of independence and love. Perhaps novels generally do explore the grey area of emotion better than Hollywood movies do. I’m not sure, because I don’t see too many movies. And the grey area might be what attracts me to books.
