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., 19^th 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.)