The Men Who Couldn't Stop Crying, and Other Unbearable Realities

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"He's married, owns a house, has two kids" Even one of those things these days could qualify as a life goal.

Being able to support a wife and two kids on a salesman's salary AND owning your very own house sounds like a success story by today's standards. This dude was a rockstar and didn't even know it.

“who actually had their tv on live at 9:48 in the morning that day” kills me as a question because all i can think about is my mother. she worked at a blockbuster. she and her coworkers were surrounded on every side by screens of the second tower getting hit and falling. everyone was told to go home, and she said she didn’t know what to do with herself until she got a call from my brother’s school saying that broke his arm, so she focused on the only thing she could; being a mom.

Creative writing teacher here. One of my students suggested your channel and I’m absolutely floored. This was a sublime piece of academic eloquence. Enargeia got referred to in the class last week as “Speech 100” and it’s nice to know that this is where the mention came from, as she must have probably just seen your video before our class started. Thanks, for the suggestion, P. 🤟🏾

Jacob out here giving English teachers a free lesson plan.

This is gonna be existential isn’t it? Hell yeah it is.

Notably, the “train crashes through a station” scene in Hugo is also heavily based off the real life Montparnasse Derailment, where a train overran its final stop. In fact, the final position of the train in the movie is made to mimic a famous picture of the aftermath of the Montparnasse Derailment.

I only ever saw my Dad cry once, at his Mothers Funeral. Sitting on the pew in front of me, almost bent double, sobbing uncontrollably. The only boy among 5 sisters. My aunt put her arm around him and hugged him. It was the first time I ever realised how close he was to her, and not having a dad how he had been raised entirely around women, she had been his rock.

"The Men Who Couldn't Stop Crying" would make a good title for film or novel.

I love how Jacob Geller’s general appearance and video aesthetic is just slowly edging more and more towards a late 1800s doctor. Like at some point he could just be inserted into a movie of Jekyll and Hyde and I’d be like ‘yeah looks right.’

I had a film theory and history teacher who said that audiences ran out of "L`arrivee d`un train", not because they were afraid that the train would literally come out of the screen and run them over, but instead because they feared for the cameraman's safety and they they would be watching essentially a combination of Blair witch and snuff film.

When we think about existential horror and the authors who have best explored that theme, we think of H. P Lovecraft, Jeff Vandermeer or even Junji Ito. Arthur Miller's name doesn't usually appear on the list of authors in that genre but I think it should. With Death of a Salesman Miller perfectly described the horror of the mundane, the ordinary and the monotonous. With The Crucible he described the horror of a community turning in on itself, trying to make sense of the world by blaming their ills on demonic powers when the real demons haunting them are all the pent up resentments and petty hatreds that anyone who grew up in a small country town will probably be familiar with. The horrors in Miller's work are the fears and anxieties of daily existence.

I don't think Jacob Geller has ever put out a un-interesting video, all of the content he makes is consistently interesting, in depth, and very well made. Keep up the good work!

I bawled like a baby in the middle of Soul. There was something about a middle aged man that couldn't get it together that struck something deep in me. It's more haunting than any horror I've ever watched or read

I mean, we like to joke about “ooh people got scared of a train coming at them from a screen” but seriously I still flinch when seeing an object like a baseball fly towards the camera unexpectedly in a video

The other thing to note about the play “Death of a salesman” that might also play into the fears of the men who cried, a lot of these men probably fought in WW2 or were sent over seas.

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality." This video in particular struck me pretty deeply. Thank you, Jacob.

Seeing people react to VR headsets always made me think of that train story. Stuff like the reactions to falling off a cliff in VR where people would scream and even fall over in real life. It made me wonder if one day VR would be so common that reactions like that would seem ridiculous in the same way.

My late grandmother was born in 1915. She used to tell me stories about her youth and childhood, some of which sound so alien to someone born in the late 80s such as myself that it took knowing her to actually believe it, if it makes any sense. She told me stories about how people genuinely believed you couldn't move from a country like Mexico to a colder climate such as Canada without dying of hypothermia, how slavery was very much present during her childhood, just not called slavery anymore and, more relevant to this video, how she wanted to watch Nosferatu when it was released but her mother thought her too young, so only her older sister was allowed. Returning home that evening, her sister was terrified, she was genuinely afraid that a vampire would attack her and drink her blood, so as a small act of revenge my grandma waited patiently until the middle of the night, sneaked through the house and slowly opened her sister's door with her pale hand just to hear her scream. I've lived in small cities where a man once asked me "didn't this guy die in the last soap opera?". I've seen actors being attacked on the street for playing evil characters. I have no doubt people were afraid of trains moving towards the screen, it may be an exaggeration that people ran from their seats, but that's all, an exaggeration based on a real observation.