Living Screens

Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television

Monique Rooney

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783480487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce ), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a “plastic” form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

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Introduction

Melodrama sprang to life on the Enlightenment-era stage, where it gave new form to an old story of metamorphosis. As if in a permanent state of adaptation, melodrama has mutated as it has migrated from Enlightenment theatre to present-day film and television. Should melodrama be understood as a form? Or, rather, is melodrama a substance that, subject to modification, changes form? A compound of the Greek root words melos (music) and drama (deed, action, play), ‘melodrama’ denotes at once the form and the content of an enduring aesthetic category that, persisting and migrating across time and space, tends to elude precise categorisation. Combining basic elements of sight and sound and aimed at producing an effect or sensation in the broad-based audience to which it has historically appealed, melodrama has been described as a primal dramatic form that stirs base desires (Booth 1965, 38).¹

Defined thus, melodrama potentially describes all drama, and indeed some have argued that its form reaches back beyond Shakespeare to Ovid and Euripides (Booth 1965; Kaleva 2011; Michelini 1987). Nevertheless, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion: Scène Lyrique (written circa 1763 and first produced in 1771) is commonly identified as the first melodrama (Anker 2012; Booth 1965; Buckley 2006; Holmstrom 1967; Kaleva 2011; Smith 1973; Steele 1968). Rousseau’s one-act play was named after the story of Pygmalion, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which a sculptor falls in love with his own creation, the statue Galatea. Rousseau’s Pygmalion appeals to Venus to help him bring his statue to life within a ‘lyric scene’ (scène lyrique) that dramatises the erotic push and pull between the artist and his creation. Pygmalion ends with Galatea springing to life but then withdrawing from her maker; her act is one that marks the self-differentiation of the creation from its creator. It is significant that Rousseau composed this first mélodrame as a formal experiment, adapting an ancient myth within a form that melded old and new elements. Pygmalion unfolds its story of metamorphosis through pantomime, speech, lyric, melody and harmony. It alternates affective and sensory musical phrasings with a spoken prose poem in order to differentiate the various elements (pantomime, speech, lyric, melody, harmony) that the whole work comprises. Galatea’s withdrawal signifies the possibility of differentiation within this generalising system.

While there is a dominant thread of critical scholarship about melodrama in recent decades that attests to its cultural power and influence, melodrama has been depicted as a conservative genre that tends to reinforce the status quo and/or as a mode that generates melancholy and thwarted wish fulfilment. Such readings are somewhat in tension with melodrama’s endurance as an aesthetic category that has mutated as it has migrated across time and space. From its emergence on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stage, elements of which can be seen, as Peter Brooks argues, in the Victorian novel, melodrama moves into early cinema and classic and later Hollywood and now into televisual and digital formats. In its itinerary through stage, screen and digital media, melodrama’s surprising adaptability suggests that disruptive elements of unpredictability and uncertainty are carried in its very form. This book proposes a long-durational understanding of melodrama as a plastic and a transmedial form that connects disparate genres and modalities. In doing so, my reading necessarily risks reprising a dominant historical narrative whereby Enlightenment ideas and aesthetics coming out of England and parts of Europe in turn influence developments in popular and intellectual culture in North America and elsewhere. This account does not, for instance, explore melodrama’s role and asynchronic formation in cultural contexts such as India, Japan and China.² My reading does, however, aim to renegotiate the terms of dominant discourses and understandings that become a model or touchstone for present-day readings and that tend to represent new formations via discrete categories, periodic ruptures and formal discontinuities.

In Peter Brooks’s influential argument, melodrama not only belongs to modernity but also is its preeminent ‘imaginative’ mode insofar as melodrama’s emergence marks, and gives expression to, a radical epistemological shift in how the world is viewed and experienced (Brooks 1976, 3; see also Booth). This argument has been taken further: in more recent scholarship, melodrama is considered both modernity’s dominant aesthetic form and a preeminent mediator of modern subjectivities and subjective states (Anker 2014; Buckley 2009; Gledhill 1987; Williams 2001; Zarzosa 2010). In such accounts, melodrama is not only representative but also formative of the pervasive idea that we live in a ‘postsacred’ world. In many accounts, melodrama registers the preeminence of postsacred pathos and of longings for an impossible escape (Bentley 1965; Booth 1965; Grimstead 1968), for life as it ‘should’ be rather than as it is (Booth 1965; Gledhill 1987), and even for an alternative past; in other words, melodrama is said to articulate a ‘what if’ or an ‘if only’ (Elsaesser 1991; Neale 1986). The latter is the subjunctive or conditional tense of melodrama, expressed by countless melodramatic characters who long for a past that might have delivered a more satisfying moment than that which is being lived.

Critical emphasis on this affective aspect of melodrama’s aesthetic and rhetorical structure sees it as a mode that is complicit in perpetuating a restless, endlessly dissatisfied way of being, one that is attached to impossible wish fulfilments and inevitably thwarted desires. In such readings, pathos is melodrama’s dominant affect insofar as its subjects are bereft, without divine guidance and unable to make proper ethical judgments. Critics have emphasised how, in this disenchanted situation, the characters of melodrama tend to seek escape from, rather than face, the alienating effects of modernity. This depiction of melodrama as a vehicle for false consciousness is identified in the popular melodramas of the French Revolutionary stage, in which innocent waifs, suffering at the hands of manipulative villains, were destined to be rescued by a gallant hero (Brooks 1976; Buckley 2006).³ In the apparent absence of the sacred and of faith, melodrama is presented, by Brooks and others, via its foregrounding of personal suffering within a narrative arc that sees virtue (often associated with victimhood) always rewarded and vice punished.

Such readings of melodrama as dialectic of suffering and moral certainty, pathos and action, tend to assume a spectatorial narrative structure, one that is based on the process of seeing and being seen and that mimetically reproduces further melodramatic sensation, action and pathos.⁴ It is via emphasis on a visual framework that viewer identification with melodramatic spectacle is understood theoretically. It is also via a visual sensorium that melodrama is understood to move beyond a restricted aesthetic domain to influence broad cultural narratives that condition everyday responses to suffering, trauma and loss. As Elisabeth Anker has persuasively argued, mainstream media and government responses to the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, fuelled the idea that victims, their families and communities, and the state itself were innocents exposed and vulnerable to perpetrators of absolute evil. At its height, this rhetoric was widespread and expunged the possibility of ethical ambiguity, helping to justify the state’s aggressive retaliation for the attacks (Anker 2005). Arguments such as Anker’s are invaluable for the way they demonstrate the often occluded relationship between politics and the cyclical theatrics of the mediasphere and other popular narrative engines. Yet I wonder if one effect of such an approach feeds the critical tendency to simplify melodrama’s sensory effects and, in particular, to overemphasise the role of melodramatic spectacle in engendering sensational responses in viewers. The privileging of the visual—as that which structures transmission and reception of melodrama’s sensations and affects—may feed the critical tendency to overlook the surprising elements, unpredictable effects, doubts and/or uncertainties that might arise through the remoulding that accompanies the production and reception of melodrama as a plastic form.

‘Melodrama handles its feelings and ideas virtually as plastic entities, visual and tactile models held out for all to see and to handle,’ writes Brooks in a book that otherwise emphasises the spectatorial rather than the handleable or mouldable structure of melodrama (1976, 41).⁵ A ‘text of muteness’ that includes ‘mute tableau and gesture’ (56), melodrama’s (primarily) visual structure is linked, in Brooks’s account, to the rise of a bourgeois consciousness/secular worldview that turns away from divine models, yet expresses anxiety and fear in the wake of a ‘godless’ world. For Brooks, it is the French Revolution that marks melodrama’s occulted recognition of divine absence, the dawning realisation that there is nothing beyond human consciousness and cultural production. Recognition of the limitation of manmade production takes places through a spectatorial structure whereby the consciousness of everyday viewers is shaped by that which is seen on stage. This development can, however, be discerned earlier than the French Revolution, in Rousseau’s Pygmalion. The latter mélodrame conveys, before the revolutionary event that organises Brooks’s account, a sensory interplay of music, dialogue and action as well as sceptical ideas about cultural production as self-determination and melancholy self-perpetuation.⁶ Both these aspects of Rousseau’s mélodrame are communicated when his artist declaims, ‘I know not what emotion I suffer when touching this veil; a fright seizes me; I believe that I touch the sanctuary of some Divinity . . . Pygmalion! it is a stone; it is your work. What does it matter? Gods are served in our temples who are of no other material and who have been made by no other hand’ (Rousseau 2004, 230–31).

Following this declamation, Rousseau’s Pygmalion expresses and enacts his desire not only to see but also to hear and touch his sculpted creation and to have her reciprocate his advances. The stone statue, Galatea, becomes an intermediary figure that represents the possibility of multiple-sensory interplay, within a mélodrame that itself adapts Ovid’s original myth. In Ovid, Galatea is both statue (stony sculpture) and sea nymph (watery spirit) who impossibly combines opposite elements and who represents an ideal form of the feminine for Pygmalion, whose motive for sculpting a statue in the first place is to defy the Propoetides, the hardened or painted ladies whom the goddess Venus had turned into public prostitutes, and then to stone, as punishment for their refusal of her divinity (1998, 325).⁷ Pygmalion’s falling in love with his beloved statue is predicated on his disillusionment with these hardened prostitutes. Venus, pleased with his appeal to her divinity, grants Pygmalion his wish that his statue, the creation of his own hands, might live.

In Rousseau’s mélodrame she is a similarly liminal figure. Rousseau’s Galatea exists on the threshold between stasis and movement, old Ovidian myth and new mélodrame, divine and secular worldviews, sight and touch. Animating a mélodrame in which the artist expresses his desire to reconcile sensory elements of sight, sound and touch, Galatea awakens the possibility that an art form (including Rousseau’s mélodrame) might be felt and experienced as a living thing. As she moves from the place of stone to the world of the living, Galatea stands for melodrama’s role as a plastic and a transmedial form. Indeed, the two concepts are mutually reinforcing as Galatea’s plasticity, her capacity to mould and be moulded, enables transmediality, the capacity for form to move and be moved from one medium to another. Pygmalion’s desire to experience his statue as a numinous being eroticises the creative process; yet her animation does not lead to a satisfying union between artist and art form. Galatea ultimately withdraws from the artist who created her, and it is this retreat that simultaneously negates Pygmalion’s desires and signifies that she has a life of her own. Her withdrawal casts doubt on the idea that the created is assimilable to the desires and demands of the creator.

The libidinal structure of Rousseau’s Pygmalion prefigures our relation to media and, as suggested in what follows, provides an early model for how we interact with digital screens. By placing centre stage Rousseau’s ur-melodrama, and by emphasising the continuities between his Pygmalion and digital-age productions that thematise and enact metamorphosis, Living Screens renovates the very terms by which melodrama has been understood and studied. In conceiving of melodrama via Rousseau’s prototechnological paradigm, this book draws attention to a (melodramatic) form that has long addressed the hopes and anxieties that attach to the ways in which communications technologies mediate our everyday lives. Analogous to Rousseau’s evocation of the circulation of the art form in his time are the fears and longings generated via new media. Communications media are, on the one hand, lauded for their ability to connect people who are now more likely than ever before to be dispersed across time and space. On the other hand, our attachments to commercially produced devices and profit-making social networking sites abide alongside suspicion concerning our loss of agency within a cooptive and regulatory techno-industrial apparatus. While social media offer the promise of connection across alienating distances and the thrill of instant response, anxieties persist about the role of technology in everyday life. Are our lives irrevocably mediated? Do we exist at a permanent remove from the ‘real’?

Living Screens names the paradox of this situation in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives. In the chapters that follow, we will repeatedly return to this contradiction via a selection of case studies of contemporary film and television series that revisit the Pygmalion allegory. My selection of texts may seem surprising or unconventional given that the texts do not all conform to commonplace taxonomies of melodrama as a genre that foregrounds domestic scenes of suffering, witnessing and redemption or that would normally feature morally polarised characters, exaggerated emotion and/or excessive mises en scène. Living Screens instead conceives as melodramatic stories that narrate, revise or embed versions of Ovid’s ancient tale of metamorphosis and that are themselves plastic (re)sculptings of old and new form. AMC’s Mad Men (2007–2015) animates an archive of midcentury sounds, images and texts for its digital-age, long-form television series about New York advertising executives who adapt to the demands of corporate and consumer cultures. Like Mad Men, Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce (2011) is made in a time of so-called convergent media; yet it looks back to and brings together, for cable television, tableaux, songs and dialogue produced during a previous era of mass-media broadcasting. In doing so, it revives a Depression-era story of a mother who turns home cooking into commercial product and who raises a Galatea-like daughter. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) similarly sculpts old (Wagnerian opera) with new (computer-generated imagery) as it adapts Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for a film about a rogue planet that is on a collision course with Earth.

Created in the contemporary moment of so-called convergent or multimedia production, the digital-era film and television series studied in this book reveal some degree of self-reflexivity about the way in which present-day viewers receive, consume and handle content via a multiplicity of portable, and often handheld, digital screens. In this situation, viewers not only watch and listen but also interact with and retransmit narratives that are received and that can be remoulded via digital devices. The plasticity of these media can be found, prior to the emergence of communications technologies, in Rousseau’s theorisation of his ur-melodrama. As we shall see in the next section, Rousseau evokes basic human senses of sight, sound and touch as media that enable representation, connection and shaping of form.

ROUSSEAUIAN MÉLODRAME

While Rousseau’s Pygmalion is routinely cited as the first known melodrama, the link between Pygmalion’s form and content and Rousseau’s treatises on language, being and social transformation—treatises that influenced Enlightenment-era philosophical thought from Kantian idealism to Marxism and, later, deconstruction—has seldom been recognised.⁸ It is not, however, the aim of this book to trace the precise ways in which Rousseau has influenced either philosophy or aesthetics. Nor will this book explicate in detail the links between Rousseau’s aesthetic productions and his philosophical argument. Rather, my outline here of the crossovers between Rousseau’s theatrical and print productions illustrates and frames Living Screens’ key proposal about melodrama as a transmedial and plastic form.

The 1771 print publication of Pygmalion contained Rousseau’s stage directions as well as his directions for the pantomime that accompanied the music (composed by himself and Horace Coignet) and spoken lyric.⁹ The problem of naming and categorising attends Rousseau’s theorisation of his inaugural mélodrame. While Rousseau called Pygmalion a lyric scene, he used the term mélodrame in a letter to English organist and music historian Charles Burney in which he outlined the principles and method constituting his theatrical experiment (Rousseau 1998b; see also Kaleva 2011; Preston 2011). In his letter to Burney (circa 1777), in which he provides his views on Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste (1767), a work greatly influenced by Rousseau that would later, in turn, influence Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, Rousseau described his Pygmalion as the example of ‘a genre of Drama’ he had ‘devised’ and as one that had no ‘imitators.’ He goes on to describe to Burney how this new ‘genre of Drama’ (a phrase that echoes the problem of naming and classification) comprised an arrangement whereby ‘the words and the Music, instead of proceeding together are made to be heard in succession and in which the spoken phrase is in a way announced and prepared for by the musical phrase.’ Through the alternation of speech with a variety of harmonic and melodic musical phrasings, this arrangement would better enable the ‘accent,’ ‘the ‘foreign colors,’ of the actor’s voice to be heard (Rousseau 1998b, 497).

Rousseau’s description, in the letter to Burney, of the casting of a ‘foreign’ actor, with its implication of the retention of a distinct accent, involves a sense of transposition. The latter is evoked when, in the Essay on the Origin of Languages,¹⁰ Rousseau defines as ‘figural’ the language of the first man, insofar as figural carries the sense of both ‘troping’ and transposing meaning. He characterises voice (melodious accent) and movement (gesture and action) as not only representative of but also vital connectors—that is, as mediums that can transpose meaning between people, places and things (1998b, 294–95). Further on in the Essay, Rousseau describes words as ‘tropes’ that ‘transpose’ passions and ideas (Rousseau 1998a, 298).¹¹ Various meanings of transposition come into play when Rousseau further differentiates the communicative capacities of other forms of language—that is, when he explores the ‘means’ by which form moves or is moved across space and time. Rousseau writes of how print and painting can be carried from place to place and of how these forms can communicate elements that do not necessarily arise from the situation in which they were initially produced (Rousseau 1998a, 298). The circulation of print and visual media—which do not represent their own moments but rather the elements of another time and space that they carry within their forms—enables further abstraction of ideas and concepts from an immediate situation or context. Voice and movement are, in the rhetoric of the Essay, forms that respond to and are shaped by the immediacy of a particular situation. The speech of the first man, Rousseau writes, was melodious insofar as it emerged out of an initial stage of human collectivity defined by the necessities of place and as a situation in which bodies existed in close, mimetic quarters with other bodies (Rousseau 1998a, 293–95). Although associated with the language of the first man, melodious speech and gesture are, for Rousseau, figural languages insofar as they are capable of both communicating and transposing meaning, both temporally (from past into present and possibly into the future) and spatially (near and far).

From the French transposer...