COMMENTARY : A Touchy-Feely Summer of Tears and Testosterone : Movies: A new character emerges for the ‘90s--the sensitive male. Even the Terminator qualifies.

The male weepie, a newly minted genre for the post-yuppie era, is in full flood.

Consider: In “Regarding Henry,” a crass, hotshot lawyer played by Harrison Ford is wounded in the head, suffers almost total amnesia and, in his new life, realizes the error of his anything-for-success ways. He and his family end up making the supreme downwardly mobile sacrifice: They trade the Upper West Side for Greenwich Village.

William Hurt’s crass, hotshot doctor in “The Doctor” literally gets a taste of his own medicine when he comes down with cancer of the larynx. His suffering is meant to tenderize him to the plight of others and make him a better healer.

In “Dying Young,” a well-to-do, highly educated cancer patient, played by Campbell Scott, finds true love in a seaside idyll with his down-to-earth, working-class nurse, Julia Roberts (!).

In “City Slickers,” which is ostensibly a comedy, a trio of male friends led by Billy Crystal go on a cattle-drive vacation that turns into a consciousness-raiser on the prairie.

Then there are the movies that, while not strictly speaking weepies, still turn the spigot-- Mel Brooks’ “Life Stinks” and the new Michael J. Fox comedy “Doc Hollywood.”

Even the Terminator is weepy these days. In “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” our Austrian-accented cyborg sacrifices himself, and the last words spoken about him have the ring of benediction: “If a terminator can learn the meaning of a human life, we can too.”

For a while, it looked like the only men making a grand-scale impression in the movies were the psychos--like the wise guys in “GoodFellas,” or Dr. Lecter from “The Silence of the Lambs.” The men in the new male weepies are the reverse-image of the psychos; they implode not from rage but from “sensitivity.”

We’ve been primed for these men for a while now. “Awakenings” was essentially a male weepie; “Dances With Wolves” was one too. It had many of the requisite requirements, including a martyred central male figure who chucks the cruelties of civilization for “the simpler life.” Kevin Costner’s Lt. Dunbar was a selfless sufferer--and we got to witness his selflessness in, by rough estimate, 469 adoring close-ups. Raging narcissism is the keystone of the male weepie.

The major precursor, however, is probably “Big,” where Tom Hanks played an 8-year-old in a grown-up’s body. The film’s measured, ungoofy style clued us in that it wasn’t just a romp--it was a parable. It stumped for the spiritual benefits of being a child again. The new male weepies, keying into the current pop-psych-speak, are real big on “locating the child within yourself”--though most male execs don’t seem to have any trouble locating that child. It’s the humane adult they can’t find.

In a male weepie like “Regarding Henry” or “T2,” the hero is led by a child to discover his innocence and, in effect, becomes a child himself. The alternative to the hard-driving power-mongering breadwinner is a kind of stunted, baffled, sexless creature. We’ve gone from Rambo to Rain Man.

Like most movie trends, the male weepie is a delayed reaction to long-term rumblings in society. It’s actually a step behind: in popular culture now, the sort of male sensitivity-training represented by these films has been muscled aside by the likes of Robert Bly (author of “Iron John”) and Sam Keen (“Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man”), patriarch worshipers who sponsor retreats where middle-class achievers huddle in tepees, grab their tom-toms and get all atavistic.

Sometimes what’s churning up the country never makes it into the movies at all; the studios, which thrive on formula, are scared off by anything they can’t digest. Hollywood conspicuously ignored feminist outrage in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in much the same way that Vietnam was ignored for many years. But in this age of the recession, the downturn of the well-to-do has a Depression-era sentimentality that Hollywood, and many film critics, find irresistible. These movies give everyone a chance to plump their virtue.

Hollywood is never so much Hollywood as when it’s thumping for the simple, humane life--for everything it isn’t. (May one presume that the producers of these films will follow the advice of their movies and devote the remainder of their lives to good works?) Since most of the big breadwinner roles still go to male actors, it makes sense that many of these actors would mainline the new sentimentality by sucking in their cheeks and looking bereft. (How aptly named is William Hurt!) It’s the kind of socially conscious star-trip that actors, and Oscar voters, adore.

The male weepie shares many of the same defining qualities as the female weepie, and it has the added commercial advantage these days of attracting a sizable female audience. Both genres are intimately keyed into middle-class values. Despair is usually recorded as a fall from affluence; the sanctity of home and hearth is nostalgically rendered; romantic transgressions are punished with a Puritan vigor. The tone of these films is often subdued and dewy, for that all-important “prestige” effect. Repeated close-ups of the trembling, suffering hero or heroine are stockpiled.

It should come as no great surprise that the women in these new movies are really no more invigorating or three-dimensional than in the usual Hollywood fare. Since the male weepie is essentially about the hero’s narcissism, the wives and girlfriends appear primarily as helpers. They broker their men’s new-found sensitivity. It’s significant that very few of the male-female relationships in these films have a sexual edge. The women’s ministrations are essentially motherly, as befitting their infantilized men. If the female weepie, with its cult of sacrifice, often reinforced the female audience’s most masochistic side, the male weepie tells men not to worry if they fall. Someone will still be there to tuck them in at night.

The dream of chucking it all for a simpler life is rampant right now among superannuated yuppies, but the simple life in these movies still looks pretty flashy. No one takes a real financial bath: That downgrade from West Side penthouse to Village townhouse in “Regarding Henry” is about as bad as it gets. This have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too fantasyland quality is typical of the male weepie: Just as what befalls the hero is often “accidental” (an unexpected affliction), so is the resolution equally fortuitous (the illness is stayed, the memory creeps back, justice prevails). The social background for these movies is rooted in Reagan-era, greed-is-good malfeasance but the movies themselves have no social reality. Weepies rarely do. And so it’s probably irrelevant to point out that, of course, fancy apartments in the Village cost a fortune, or that famous surgeons are not likely to get routine patient treatment in their own hospital.

The hero’s loss of traditional, career-related power in these films is accepted as a virtue. That’s because power, as defined in movies like “The Doctor” and “Regarding Henry,” is perceived as a disease separating these men from their own best and most tender selves. It’s a disease handed down from father to son: Both movies point up how the father’s work ethic was instilled in the boy. (Hurt’s character is the son of a doctor; the father of Ford’s character co-founded his law firm). The lawyer played by Harrison Ford is shown to be a conniving workaholic who chews out his daughter, carries on an affair, has gaudy, expensive taste, and doesn’t like showing affection in public (or, one presumes, in private). Why, he even smokes. The doctor drives around in a Mercedes, talks glibly to his patients on his car phone, and actively downplays the importance of a bedside manner. “A surgeon’s job is to cut” is his credo.

The disaffection for power in these movies is deliberately, and offensively, simplistic. The implication in these movies is that, in the professional arena, absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s a convenient fantasy for a downwardly mobile era.

The psychosexual subtext of the greed-is-good ‘80s was that riches equalled virility. Lucre was the emollient of the soul. We passed through that decade as we might pass through a radioactive cloud, and now the most irradiated and soul-sick of its moneyed survivors--the shell-shocked, fallen-on-hard-times careerists--are starting to crowd our screens. In the new recessionary climate, the same Hollywood that used to glorify money and macho now glorifies their absence. In ‘80s terms, the men in these movies have been emasculated but that’s not how we’re meant to view them. Instead, their weepiness is sugarcoated in moral superiority. In the guise of a new sensitivity, the male weepies are simply glamorizing the loss of power. Its heroes have the glossy, martyred look of sainthood.