Sentimental (emotional) identification with characters
Graduation of sequences (almost musical-like)
Melodrama: Connotations
Brooks
Characters at the intersection of primal ethical forces and the clash of these forces.
The indulgence of strong emotionalism
Moral polarization and schematization of good/evil
Extremes states of being, situations, actions, crises
Good/Evil: Overt villainy, persecution of the good, and the final renewal of virtue
Inflated and extravagant expression
Internal emotional and ethical drama
Darkplotting
Suspense
Breathtaking peripety
Allowing the viewers to have the pleasure of self-pity
The experience of wholeness
Identification with monopathic emotion
Melodrama: Definition
The term was used pejoratively.
The cultural specificity of the term/genre (like romanticism and baroque)
Melodrama, not as a set of themes, or a genre, but as a mode of conception and expression; a certain fictional system for making sense; a semantic field of force.
Attributes (B. Klinger)
Impossibility of happiness
Theme of blindness: characters (mis)perception of the world
Mise en scene
Obvious artifice;
Visual artifice: conveys a sense of delusory and the characters’ impotence
Unnaturalistic lighting
Foregrounded objects
Mirror-ridden compositions
Melodrama is an excessive narrative form, used to articulate moral conflicts as an expression of modern sensibility, shifting away from faith in a divine order to a new preoccupation with the moral occult (Mercer and Shingler)
Directors associated with Melodrama:
Critics and scholars have favored the melodramas of certain directors, King Vidor, Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, over those by Michael Curtiz and Joseph Mankiewicz
Prevalence of Gay Directors:
Minnelli
Irving Rapper
George Cukor did not make many melodramas; his specialty was comedy or dramedy.
Gender
Melodrama is a genre intrinsic to the so-called “women’s film.”
Films meant for women, but always made by men (in studio era).
They construct a female spectator “who is made to participate in what is essentially a masochistic fantasy.”
Disturbance about gender roles and social positions
Transgression:
S. Hayward, Melodrama, p. 68
If fathers transgress, the whole family suffers and is punished.
If women transgress, they are personally punished, and punishment is wreaked upon their bodies
Examples: Kramer Vs. Kramer, Terms of Endearment, Fatal Attraction
Genre
Most critics and viewers have regarded Hollywood melodrama as a femme-centric genre.
But a closer look reveals that there are at three types of melodramas:
Male-Centric
Male weepies
Male melodrama is part of family melodrama.
But how different from female-centered melodrama
Laura Mulvey:
The ideological contradictions in Sirk’s films are not produced by the authorial voice but are congenital feature of melodrama as a genre filled with ideological inconsistencies
How melodrama exhibited unconscious and subconscious dynamics that undermined dominant ideological values (the genre might otherwise seem to endorse (Klinger).
Mulvey praises Sirk over Minnelli for not resolving the tensions and contradictions in the narrative via ironic deux ex machina devices.
These are over-determined irreconcilables, which resist being neatly resolved in the last 5 minutes of the film.
Male melodramas tend to resolve the irreconcilable social and sexual dilemmas
In 1950s, masculinity dictates that males need to reassure and reassert the role of the patriarch within the family unit.
But films with female protagonists, the dilemmas remain and resolution cannot be achieved.
Rebel Without a Cause
East of Eden
Not as a Stranger
Some Came Running
Female-Centric
Magnificent Obsession (1934, 1954)
All That Heaven Allows
Picnic
Peyton Place
Family-Centric (Dynasty at Center)
Giant
Written on the Wind
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Long Hot Summer
God’s Little Acre
Melodrama Definition:
Melodramas as more narrowly defined category of cinema.
Melodrama as referring to a set of films that deal with:
Highly-charged emotional issues
Extravagantly dramatic register and overtly emotional form of address.
Oppression of women within the family
Marriage Vs. Career (Imitation of Life)
Motherhood (rewards, price)
Disturbance about gender roles and social positions
Audience: Gay Men
Most American audiences are not capable of appreciating melodrama as an art form; they tend to take it as camp.
The most conspicuous group of 1950s family melodramas were gay men.
Gay men appreciate melodramas years before they were recovered ad rediscovered as subversive works by mainstream (and gay) critics.
Films by Minnelli, Sirk, Ray, Billy Wilder, Cukor, Joseph Losey achieved cult status among gay men.
Gay male appreciation of these films, due to their excessiveness, extreme emotionalism, mannered over the top performances by stars, forms of address, intentional and unintentional manifestation of camp, subversive, ironic, and progressive tone
Status
Melodrama was often considered to be a trivial form, though the good melodramas achieved the status of a serious and artistic form.
The good melodramas defined the potential of the genre, surpassing its cathartic aims and reactionary tendencies.
They achieved aesthetic complexity and social commentary.
They realized the genre’s historical capability to act as a revolutionary form during times of cultural crises.
The vivid critique of family as social institution; anguished sexual malaise
Melodrama as transgressive of the repressive Eisenhower era with its vision of complacent nuclear family.
Height
The melodrama’s most productive and fascinating period was between 1954 and 1960: Sirk, Minnelli
The genre’s associations with post-War attitudes about sexuality, masculinity, mass culture
More recently, rewriting about the genre as subversive by younger critics
Gay men see it as camp
Pathos
Pathos is evoked for the audience–and other characters who witness suffering.
Intense, excruciating moments of sympathy and pity at such prolonged and undeserved suffering.
Melodrama enables to reevaluate the value-laden binary opposition of realism and melodrama
Melodramatic situations in realistic plays by Ibsen (Doll’s House) Strindberg (Miss Julie), situations that are similar in register or treatment to conflicts, tensions, hysterical climaxes of Holly family melodramas of the 1950s.
Movie Genres: Melodrama–Genre, Approach, Directors, Gender, Audiences, Gay
Research in progress: Nov 3, 2022–984 words
Issues of Melodrama to Study
Actors
Appeal/audience
Approach
Censorship: Impact
Connotations
Consumer Culture
Context (filmic and other)
Directors
Gay viewers
Gender
Genre
Goals
History: Melodrama’s historical variability, multi-faceted structure
Star Images
Status
Subservient
Mulvey, Laura
Williams, Linda
Approaches to Melodrama:
Melodrama: Goals
For some critics, melodrama has 3 goals:
Melodrama: Connotations
Brooks
Characters at the intersection of primal ethical forces and the clash of these forces.
The indulgence of strong emotionalism
Moral polarization and schematization of good/evil
Extremes states of being, situations, actions, crises
Good/Evil: Overt villainy, persecution of the good, and the final renewal of virtue
Inflated and extravagant expression
Internal emotional and ethical drama
Darkplotting
Suspense
Breathtaking peripety
Allowing the viewers to have the pleasure of self-pity
The experience of wholeness
Identification with monopathic emotion
Melodrama: Definition
The term was used pejoratively.
The cultural specificity of the term/genre (like romanticism and baroque)
Melodrama, not as a set of themes, or a genre, but as a mode of conception and expression; a certain fictional system for making sense; a semantic field of force.
Attributes (B. Klinger)
Impossibility of happiness
Theme of blindness: characters (mis)perception of the world
Mise en scene
Obvious artifice;
Visual artifice: conveys a sense of delusory and the characters’ impotence
Unnaturalistic lighting
Foregrounded objects
Mirror-ridden compositions
Melodrama is an excessive narrative form, used to articulate moral conflicts as an expression of modern sensibility, shifting away from faith in a divine order to a new preoccupation with the moral occult (Mercer and Shingler)
Directors associated with Melodrama:
Critics and scholars have favored the melodramas of certain directors, King Vidor, Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, over those by Michael Curtiz and Joseph Mankiewicz
Prevalence of Gay Directors:
Minnelli
Irving Rapper
George Cukor did not make many melodramas; his specialty was comedy or dramedy.
Gender
Melodrama is a genre intrinsic to the so-called “women’s film.”
Films meant for women, but always made by men (in studio era).
They construct a female spectator “who is made to participate in what is essentially a masochistic fantasy.”
Disturbance about gender roles and social positions
Transgression:
S. Hayward, Melodrama, p. 68
If fathers transgress, the whole family suffers and is punished.
If women transgress, they are personally punished, and punishment is wreaked upon their bodies
Examples: Kramer Vs. Kramer, Terms of Endearment, Fatal Attraction
Genre
Most critics and viewers have regarded Hollywood melodrama as a femme-centric genre.
But a closer look reveals that there are at three types of melodramas:
Male-Centric
Male weepies
Male melodrama is part of family melodrama.
But how different from female-centered melodrama
Laura Mulvey:
The ideological contradictions in Sirk’s films are not produced by the authorial voice but are congenital feature of melodrama as a genre filled with ideological inconsistencies
How melodrama exhibited unconscious and subconscious dynamics that undermined dominant ideological values (the genre might otherwise seem to endorse (Klinger).
Mulvey praises Sirk over Minnelli for not resolving the tensions and contradictions in the narrative via ironic deux ex machina devices.
These are over-determined irreconcilables, which resist being neatly resolved in the last 5 minutes of the film.
Male melodramas tend to resolve the irreconcilable social and sexual dilemmas
In 1950s, masculinity dictates that males need to reassure and reassert the role of the patriarch within the family unit.
But films with female protagonists, the dilemmas remain and resolution cannot be achieved.
Rebel Without a Cause
East of Eden
Not as a Stranger
Some Came Running
Female-Centric
Magnificent Obsession (1934, 1954)
All That Heaven Allows
Picnic
Peyton Place
Family-Centric (Dynasty at Center)
Giant
Written on the Wind
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Long Hot Summer
God’s Little Acre
Melodrama Definition:
Melodramas as more narrowly defined category of cinema.
Melodrama as referring to a set of films that deal with:
Highly-charged emotional issues
Extravagantly dramatic register and overtly emotional form of address.
Oppression of women within the family
Marriage Vs. Career (Imitation of Life)
Motherhood (rewards, price)
Disturbance about gender roles and social positions
Audience: Gay Men
Most American audiences are not capable of appreciating melodrama as an art form; they tend to take it as camp.
The most conspicuous group of 1950s family melodramas were gay men.
Gay men appreciate melodramas years before they were recovered ad rediscovered as subversive works by mainstream (and gay) critics.
Films by Minnelli, Sirk, Ray, Billy Wilder, Cukor, Joseph Losey achieved cult status among gay men.
Gay male appreciation of these films, due to their excessiveness, extreme emotionalism, mannered over the top performances by stars, forms of address, intentional and unintentional manifestation of camp, subversive, ironic, and progressive tone
Status
Melodrama was often considered to be a trivial form, though the good melodramas achieved the status of a serious and artistic form.
The good melodramas defined the potential of the genre, surpassing its cathartic aims and reactionary tendencies.
They achieved aesthetic complexity and social commentary.
They realized the genre’s historical capability to act as a revolutionary form during times of cultural crises.
The vivid critique of family as social institution; anguished sexual malaise
Melodrama as transgressive of the repressive Eisenhower era with its vision of complacent nuclear family.
Height
The melodrama’s most productive and fascinating period was between 1954 and 1960: Sirk, Minnelli
The genre’s associations with post-War attitudes about sexuality, masculinity, mass culture
More recently, rewriting about the genre as subversive by younger critics
Gay men see it as camp
Pathos
Pathos is evoked for the audience–and other characters who witness suffering.
Intense, excruciating moments of sympathy and pity at such prolonged and undeserved suffering.
Melodrama enables to reevaluate the value-laden binary opposition of realism and melodrama
Melodramatic situations in realistic plays by Ibsen (Doll’s House) Strindberg (Miss Julie), situations that are similar in register or treatment to conflicts, tensions, hysterical climaxes of Holly family melodramas of the 1950s.