Melodrama as movie
modality
the
fundamental mode?
Melodrama is the fundamental mode of popular American
moving pictures. It is not a specific genre like the western or horror film' it
is not a "deviation" of the classical realist narrative; it cannot be
located primarily in woman's films, "weepies," or family
melodramas-though it includes them. Rather, melodrama is a peculiarly
democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and
emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and
action. It is the foundation of the classical Hollywood movie. ((Williams,
“Melodrama Revised,” 42)
Melodrama
should be viewed, then, not as an excess or an aberration but in many ways as
the
typical
form of American popular narrative in literature, stage, film, and television.
It is the best
example
of American culture's (often hypocritical) notion of itself as the locus of
innocence and
virtue.
If we want to confront the centrality of melodrama to American moving-image
culture,
we must
first turn to the most basic forms of melodrama, and not only to a subghetto of woman's
films, to
seek out the dominant features of an American melodramatic mode. For if
melodrama
was
misclassified as a sentimental genre for women, it is partly because other
melodramatic
genres
such as the western and gangster films, which received early legitimacy in film
study, had
already been
constructed, as Christine Gledhill notes, in relation to supposedly masculine
cultural
values.
(Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 50)
Out of
this institutional context [i.e., 19th c. melodramatic theater],
aesthetic, cultural, and ideological
features
coalesce into a modality which organizes the disparate sensory phenomena,
experiences,
and
contradictions of a newly emerging secular and atomising
society in visceral, affective and morally
explanatory
terms …. The notion of modality, like register in socio-linguistics, defines a
specific mode
of aesthetic
articulation adaptable across a range of genres, across decades, and across
national cultures. It provides the genre system with a mechanism of 'double
articulation', capable of generating specific and distinctively different
generic formulae in particular historical conjunctures, while also providing a
medium of interchange and overlap between genres. If comedy, tragedy, and
romance are among the oldest and most widespread of modalities, tragedy has, in
Peter Brooks's (1976) argument, largely been
displaced by melodrama, while romance has radically shifted its purview from
chivalric adventure to women's mass fiction (Radford, 1986). Because of its
wider socio-cultural embrace, the melodramatic mode not only generates a wide
diversity of genres but also draws other modes into its processes of articulation.
Thus melodrama thrives on comic counterpoint, can site its fateful encounters
in romance, and keeps pace with the most recent of modes, realism, which first
worked in cooperation with melodrama and then disowned it. In such permeability
lies the flexibility of the system necessary to the forming of a mass-produced
‘popular culture’ for a broadening society, drawing into public view a
diversity of audiences, sometimes dividing but working more generally to unite
them….(Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Gledhill and Linda Williams [London,
2000], 222-43 [228-30])
“hidden moral legibility”
[Peter]
Brooks's greatest advantage in this project may have
been his ignorance of film theory and criticism. Unlike film critics who have
seen melodrama as an anachronism to be overcome or subverted, Brooks takes it
seriously as a quintessentially modern (though not modernist) form arising out
of a particular historical conjuncture: the postrevolutionary,
post-Enlightenment, postsacred world where
traditional imperatives of truth and morality had been violently questioned and
yet in which there was still a need to forge some semblance of truth and
morality.
Brooks's
central thesis is that, in the absence of a moral and social order linked to
the sacred, and in the presence of a reduced private and domestic sphere that
has increasingly become the entire realm of personal significance, a theatrical
form of sensation developed that earned the burden of expressing what Brooks calls
the "'moral occult; the domain of operative spiritual values which is both
indicated within and masked by the surface of reality" (5). This quest for
a hidden moral legibility is crucial to all melodrama. (Williams, “Melodrama
Revised,” 51-2)
pathos vs./and
action
Film
study needs an even bolder statement: not that melodrama is a submerged, or
embedded, tendency within realist narrative-which it certainly can be-but that
it has more often itself been the dominant form of popular moving-image
narrative. The supposed excess is much more often the mainstream, though it is
often not acknowledged as such because melodrama consistently decks itself out
in the trappings of realism and the modern (and now, the postmodern). What
Altman refers to as the dialectic of the melodramatic mode of narrative in
American popular culture is nothing less than the process whereby melodrama
sheds its old-fashioned values, acting styles, and ideologies to gain what
Gledhill calls the "imprimatur of 'realism'" while it still delivers
the melodramatic experience.
Thus the basic vernacular of American moving pictures
consists of a story that generates sympathy for a hero who is also a victim and
that leads to a climax that permits the audience, and usually other characters,
to recognize that character's moral value. This climax revealing the moral good
of the victim can tend in one of two directions: either it can consist of a
paroxysm of pathos (as in the woman's film or family melodrama variants) or it
can take that paroxysm and channel it into the more virile and action-centered
variants of rescue, chase, and fight (as in the western and all the action
genres). (Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 58)
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 postsacred, 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, “Melodrama Revised,”
59)
Elements of melodramatic cinema
1.
Melodrama begins, and wants to end, in a space of innocence.
2.
Melodrama focuses on victim-heroes and the recognition of their virtue.
3.
Melodrama appears modern by borrowing from realism, but realism serves the
melodramatic passion and action.
4.
Melodrama involves a dialectic of pathos and action—a give and take of “too
late” and “in the nick of time.”
5.
Melodrama presents characters who embody primary
psychic roles organized in Manichaean conflicts between good and evil. (monopathy)
(Williams,
“Melodrama Revised,” 64ff.)