Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television

M. Stewart, M. Stewart

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137319852
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.

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Introduction: Film and TV Melodrama: An Overview

Michael Stewart

Foundations

There are a number of excellent attempts to define and locate melodrama in film studies, for example, Gledhill (1987 and 2007), Neale (2000), Williams (1998), Singer (2001), Byars (1991), Mercer and Shingler (2004) and Zarzosa (2013). To do justice to these reviews here is impossible. Instead, I will highlight those points that I consider to be important generally and to this collection in particular.

The most generally valuable review of melodrama in Euro-American film studies is the chapter on melodrama in the BFI’s The Cinema Book (2007, pp. 316–332). This chapter summarizes the work of the theorists who, in the 1970s, brought melodrama to prominence as a serious object of study. Melodrama here is analyzed from the point of view of auteurism and mise-en-scene; neo-Marxism; feminism; psychoanalysis; history; and genre. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith captures a number of these contours in his argument that ‘melodrama arises from the conjunction of a formal history proper (development of tragedy, realism, etc.), a set of social determinations, which have to do with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and a set of psychic determinations which take shape around the family’ (Nowell-Smith, in Gledhill, 2007, p. 316).

These founding analyses of film melodrama differ, as Gledhill indicates (2007, p. 316), depending on what may be at stake theoretically and politically in the advancement of a particular definition. Laura Mulvey, for example, questions the validity of auteurist and neo-Marxist approaches which focus on male perspectives in family melodrama (in Gledhill, 2007, p. 321). Equally, however, in her earliest intervention in film melodrama debates (Mulvey, 1974), Mulvey combines a feminist approach with an argument that underlines the progressive features of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s directorial style. Mulvey’s earliest analysis of film melodrama, then, helps to define melodrama as a potentially critical or subversive form in the hands of the right director. Brecht is a key theoretical and artistic influence here. Alongside Fassbinder and Sirk, he continues to haunt analyses of film melodrama, in ways which are useful, but which also raise questions. For example, while Gledhill (2007) suggests that the analysis of film melodrama encompasses a potentially problematic variety of forms (p. 316), it may also be arguable that an emphasis on the films of key auteur directors has restricted analysis and what counts as melodrama to a select body of films – that is, the most visually and aurally expressive and intense 1950s Hollywood family melodramas.

Unquestionably excessive, how subversive these films are is debatable. Laura Mulvey argues that film melodrama’s excesses might frequently be understood as a ‘safety valve’ (in Gledhill, 2007, p. 321) rather than an ironic metaphor. By these terms, there is nothing inherently subversive to melodrama’s form. However, and secondly, in neglecting the centrality of gender, neo-Marxist auteurist approaches, Mulvey argues, also overlook important differences between ‘male oedipal’ (p. 321) family melodramas and those ‘coloured by a female protagonist’s dominating point-of-view’ (p. 321). This latter form, she argues, might not only be different in its narrative and aesthetic genealogy, taking as much perhaps from the novel as the stage; it might also, given its focus on the concerns of women, be less easily reconcilable to patriarchal norms. Mulvey’s early contribution, then, shows a way out of obsessive methodological oppositions – particularly between melodrama as a progressive or conservative text – and also underlines the importance of historical and cultural specificity to analyses of film melodrama.

Christine Gledhill is the theorist who most effectively tries to think through film melodrama’s relation to genre and history. She examines melodrama as a mode, a genre, and a cultural, historical and ideological form. Gledhill’s (1987) overview is distinguished by its genealogical method and its emphasis on melodrama’s symbiotic and complex relation to realism. On the former, Gledhill argues that melodrama’s mixed form derives in part from social change and economic imperatives, in that mixed programs were designed to maximize the social and economic reach of popular, legitimate and increasingly mixed stage melodrama. Official prohibitions on theatrical dialogue, she argues, opened the way for the development of spectacular sets, effects and bodily performance. This was in part a return to preceding theatrical and non-theatrical traditions and also part of the ‘expanding culture of the visible’ (p. 21) – evident in science, art, architecture and growing consumerism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and so suited to the melodramatic mode that ‘melodrama became a model for the nineteenth-century imaginative enterprise’ (p. 22).

Gledhill attempts to answer the melodrama–realism question by considering melodrama’s relation to the social, and its capacity for political intervention and critique. In this respect, she follows the historical and theoretical lead provided by Peter Brooks (1976). Crucial here is modernity’s production of the ‘moral occult’, and the links it engenders between emotion, morality and the psyche. This, for Gledhill, is the key to understanding how melodrama uses and interacts with dominant and emerging forms of realism. If we recognize this, we also understand that melodrama is not ‘about’ the family and the individual. These, rather, are means toward its ends: psychic realism and moral legibility. Melodrama does not take permanent recourse to, for instance, Victorian morality. Rather, it utilizes contemporary concerns, discourses and realisms in order to produce moral conflict en route to moral legibility. Melodrama is not secondary or diminished in its relation to the public sphere and socio-political concerns. It, rather, ‘touches the socio-political only at that point where it triggers the psychic’ (Gledhill, 1987, p. 37).

Advances

I’ll now look briefly at the work of other scholars (Neale (2000), Williams (1998) and Singer (2001)), whose understanding of melodrama shares much with that of Gledhill. Neale’s historical method reveals that contrary to most definitions of film melodrama, including that of Gledhill (1987), the form was not a despised or pejorative category in public discourses about film prior to the 1960s. Rather, it was a relatively value-free way of describing films oriented to action, thrill and sensation. Moreover, on the few occasions when film melodrama was described as realistic in mid-twentieth century public discourses, it tended to be with reference to impressive generic effects or ‘especially interesting from an historical point of view … low-life events, characters and settings … Naturalism … [and the] “[d]own to earth and highly realistic”’(Neale, 2000, p. 186, quoting from Film Daily, 1946).

Neale’s chapter thus supports and extends Gledhill’s contention that film melodrama extends well beyond family melodrama and the woman’s film, both historically speaking and in specific public discourses. Neale also argues that stage melodrama in the nineteenth century was an increasingly mixed form; and that as this century progressed, popular melodramas of blood and thunder were increasingly joined by drawing room ‘melodramas of passion’. If the woman’s film and family melodrama draw especially from this latter tradition, argues Neale, then it is important to recognize that nearly all non-comic Hollywood genres are greatly influenced, to varying degrees and in different ways, by both popular and ‘modified’ nineteenth-century melodramatic modes.

Along with Neale, the other key theorists who follow Gledhill’s historical and theoretical lead in defining melodrama are Williams (1998) and Singer (2001). Williams underlines a number of Gledhill’s important points: the centrality of suffering, pathos and emotion to the mode; the failure of melodrama theorists to ‘confront the importance of pathos itself and the fact that a surprising power lay in identifying with victimhood’ (Williams, 1998, p. 47); the problem of melodrama being both in opposition and inferior to classical realism in most theorists’ (including Brooks’s) accounts – rather than a closely related founding mode of film narrative; similarly, an overemphasis on the monopathy of melodramatic characters, resulting both in a reduced understanding of emotion and a fatal splitting of emotion and thought; and the tendency to read excessive pathos, emotions and theatricality as pejorative and defining features of melodrama. These latter excesses, argues Williams, are the means to something more important: ‘the achievement of a felt good, the merger – perhaps event the compromise – of morality and feeling’ (p. 55).

Recognizing a character’s moral value via suffering and pathos, then, is crucial to the melodramatic mode for Williams. And more often than not, she argues, pathos and action are combined in melodrama:

To study the relation between pathos and action is to see that there is no pure isolation of pathos in woman’s films nor of action in the male action genres. If, as Peter Brooks argues, melodrama is most centrally about moral legibility and the assigning of guilt and innocence in a post-sacred, post-Enlightenment world where moral and religious certainties have been erased, then pathos and action are the two most important means to the achievement of moral legibility. (Williams, 1998, p. 59)

The combination – or ‘dialectic’ (p. 69) – of pathos and action is one of Williams’s five defining features of film melodrama, the other four being: melodrama begins ‘and wants to end’ in a space of innocence (p. 65); melodrama focuses on victim-heroes and recognizes their virtue (p. 66); melodrama uses realism to its own ends (pathos and action), and in so doing appears modern or contemporary (p. 67); and melodramatic characters embody psychic roles organized around good and evil (p. 77).

Ben Singer (2001) also produces a five-fold definition of melodrama, which, following William Dye, he calls a ‘cluster concept’ (p. 44). If a film manifests two of more of these features – pathos, overwrought emotion, moral polarization, non-classical narrative structure and sensationalism – suggests Singer, it may legitimately be considered melodrama. Singer, however, advances a slightly different argument to that of Williams regarding melodrama and pathos. That is, Singer argues that most film melodramas do not depend on a dialectic of pathos and action in order to produce moral legibility. Instead, a distinction can be made between pathetic melodramas – high on pathos and low on action – and action melodramas – oriented to action but almost devoid of pathos. Both forms strive for moral clarity; but the former type tends to avoid moral polarization in favor of complexity or ‘moral antinomy’ (p. 54).

Recent work

Most recently, Agustin Zarzosa (2013) makes a valuable contribution to theoretical definitions of the melodramatic mode. He questions the usefulness, in particular, of Peter Brooks’s (1976) conception of melodrama and history (Zarzosa, 2013, p. 23). In so doing, Zarzosa reiterates Gledhill’s (2007) question regarding the emergence of melodrama and the relation of this emergence to specific histories and developing aesthetic forms:

[T]his historical conception (i.e. that of Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination) leaves unexplained the presence of melodramatic elements in works previous to the emergence of the melodramatic genre, the appeal of melodrama in cultural contexts without any parallel to the context in which melodrama first appeared, and the survival itself of melodrama well beyond the historical context in which it appeared. (Zarzosa, 2013, p. 23)

To the extent that the melodramatic mode should be conceived of as a historical phenomenon, Zarzosa argues, it operates outside of history (p. 24) – or, rather, it is ‘the terrain in which history takes place’ (p. 24). This terrain, the melodramatic mode, argues Zarzosa, should be understood as a ‘modulating system’ (p. 16) – a system that can only express a social whole, or provide its perspective, via suffering (p. 16). This social whole can expand and contract (p. 16), but it is never entirely transparent or opaque (p. 14). Melodrama’s ‘modal essence’ (p. 14) is to redistribute the visibility – and hence the legitimacy, by melodrama’s terms – of suffering (p. 14). Zarzosa extends this argument to suggest that the melodramatic mode has two ultimately incompatible registers of suffering: the voice of pain and pathetic speech (p. 15). Melodrama ‘operates through the tension between these two modes of experience’ (p. 15).

Zarzosa’s definition of melodrama as a modulating system with its focus on the axis of suffering is useful. How different it is from Christine Gledhill’s (1987) argument, that melodrama only touches the social and political at the points where the psychic is triggered, is debatable. Indeed, the many values of Zarzosa’s study, along with the advances made in others’ work and the similarities between Zarzosa’s ideas and the ‘dominant theories of melodrama’ (Zarzosa, 2013, p. 38) against which he sets them, threaten to be obscured by the length and force of Zarzosa’s critique. One of the great values of Gledhill’s analysis is that it theorizes melodrama as both a constitutive and disinterested terrain of modernity with remarkable powers of accommodation and endurance, and as an aesthetic and generic form with specific cultural and ideological contents. A danger of Zarzosa’s Deleuze-inspired definition of melodrama’s modal essence is that despite its emphasis on historical specificity, specific historical questions remain unanswered.

It is in the analysis of specific films that the distinctiveness and value of Zarzosa’s thesis is most evident. There isn’t space to look at these essays in detail here. But brief reference to Zarzosa’s work on The Piano will also lead us toward other recent and useful work on film melodrama. Zarzosa’s (2010, 2013) essay on The Piano theorizes melodrama and exchange via economic anthropology. At points it draws a line between exchange, muteness in melodrama and kinship relations. Zarzosa revisits Juliet Mitchell’s (1975) argument regarding the endurance of the exchange of women despite the apparent usurping of kinship structures by commodity exchange in advanced societies (in Zarzosa, 2010, p. 404). The logic of exchange endures, argues Mitchell, because it has been internalized by oedipal relations. Zarzosa modifies this argument to suggest that exchange is crucial in giving women both value-in-themselves and symbolic value in kinship relations, i.e. daughter, wife, sister, mother. The inequality on which these relations are based, argues Zarzosa, ‘appears illegible or rather mute, that is, incapable of making itself heard within the boundaries that kinship institutes’ (p. 404). The muteness of Ada (Holly Hunter), in The Piano, ‘calls attention to the imbalance that founds exchange’ (p. 405). Zarzosa’s primary interest in advancing this argument is theorizing a new model for the analysis of melodrama via exchange. Zarzosa does not theorize The Piano as a woman’s film, or as a film that might open space for a reassessment of gendered or kinship relations (though his theory, clearly, does not preclude these lines of argument). These arguments and questions are more prominent in recent work on queer melodrama.

If it’s true that melodrama is particularly accommodating of queer history and experience (Needham, 2010), then it’s also the case that queer theory has most fully and productively colonized academic work on film melodrama in recent years – joining with established feminist strands and combining with work on trauma, memory and post-colonialism. The journal that stands out in this respect is Camera Obscura. I’ll now look briefly at th...