5
Notes on Sirk and Melodrama*
• Presented as a paper for the SEFf weekend school Melodrama and published in Movie in 1977.
It has been suggested that the interest of Hollywood 1950s melodrama
lies primarily in the way that, by means of textual analysis, fissures and
contradictions can be shown to be undermining the films' ideological
coherence.1 These contradictions, whether on the level of form or of
narrative incident, seem to save the films from belonging blindly to the
bourgeois ideology which produced them. This argument depends on
the premise that the project of this ideology is indeed to conjure up a
coherent picture of a world and conceal contradictions which in turn
conceal exploitation and oppression. A text which defies unity and
closure would then quite clearly be progressive. Although this line of
argument has been productive and revealing, there is a way in which it
has been trapped in a kind of Chinese box quite characteristic of
melodrama itself. Ideological contradiction is actually the overt
mainspring and specific content of melodrama, not a hidden, unconscious
thread to be picked up only by special critical processes. No
ideology can ever pretend to totality: it searches for safety-valves for its
own inconsistencies. And the 1950s melodrama works by touching on
sensitive areas of sexual repression and frustration; its excitement comes
from conflict, not between enemies, but between people tied by blood
or love.
Melodrama as a safety-valve for ideological contradictions centred on
sex and the family may lose its progressive attributes, but it acquires a
wider aesthetic and political significance. The workings of patriarchy,
and the mould of feminine unconscious it produces, have left women
largely without a voice, gagged and deprived of outlets (of a kind
supplied, for instance, either by male art or popular culture) in spite of
the crucial social and ideological functions women are called on to
perform. In the absence of any coherent culture of oppression, a simple
fact of recognition has aesthetic and political importance. There is a
dizzy satisfaction in witnessing the way that sexual difference under
patriarchy is fraught, explosive, and erupts dramatically into violence
within its own private stamping-ground, the family. While the Western
and the gangster film celebrate the ups and downs endured by men of
action, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, like the tragedies of Euripides,
probing the pent-up emotion, bitterness and disillusion well known to
women, act as a corrective.
39
40 Visual and Other Pleasures
Roughly, there are two dramatic points of departure for melodrama.
One is coloured by a female protagonist's point of view which provides
a focus for identification. The other examines tensions in the family,
and between the sexes and generations; here, although women play an
important part, their point of view is not analysed and does not initiate
the drama. Helen Foley's article 'Sex and State in Ancient Greece'
analyses Greek drama in terms that illuminate the 'safetyvalve'
function of Hollywood's family melodramas. She argues that
Aeschylus shows how overvaluation of virility under patriarchy causes
social and ideological problems which the drama comments on and
attempts to correct: 'male characters ... overly concerned with military
and political glory at the expense of domestic harmony and their own
children', and 'the emotional domestic sphere cannot be allowed direct
political power and the wife must subordinate herself to her husband
in marriage; but the maternal or domestic claims are nevertheless central
and inviolable, a crucial check on bellicose male-dominated democracy'.2
For family life to survive, a compromise has to be reached, sexual
difference softened, and the male brought to see the value of domestic
life. As art and drama deal generously with male fantasy, a dramatic
rendering of women's frustrations, publicly acting out an adjustment of
balance in the male ego, is socially and ideologically beneficial. A positive
male figure who rejects rampant virility and opposes the unmitigated
power of the father achieves (at least by means of a 'happy end') the
reintegration of both sexes in family life. The phallocentric, misogynist
fantasies of patriarchal culture are shown here to be in contradiction
with the ideology of the family. These tensions are certainly present in
both the Hollywood Western and melodrama; both tend towards a
beneficial sacrifice of unrestrained masculine individualism in the
interests of civilisation, law and culture. Rafe in Home from the Hill reestablishes
the family and 'feminine' values on the grave of his overbearing
father. But, as Sirk has pointed out, the strength of the
melodramatic form lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the
road, the cloud of overdetermined irreconcilables which put up a
resistance to being neatly settled, in the last five minutes, into a happy
end.
Sirk, in the two films on which he had virtual independence (both
produced by Albert Zugsmith), was able to tum his attention to the
'masculine' or family melodrama without conforming to a standard
happy end. He turns the conventions of melodrama sharply. Roger
Shumann in Tarnished Angels and Kyle Hadley in Written on the Wind
(both played by Robert Stack) are tortured and tom by the mystique of
masculinity, haunted by phallic obsessions and fear of impotence. Both
are suicidal, finally taking refuge in death. In these two films Sirk
provides an extremely rare epitaph, an insight into men as victims of
Notes on Sirk and Melodrama 41
patriarchal society. He shows castration anxiety, not (as is common)
personified by a vengeful woman but presented dreadfully and without
mediation. In dealing with the male unconscious Sirk approaches
complexity near to the tragic. His Universal movies deal more specifically
with women, and work more dearly within melodramatic conventions.
Significantly, discussions of the difference between melodrama and
tragedy specify that while the tragic hero is conscious of his fate and
torn between conflicting forces, characters caught in the world of
melodrama are not allowed transcendent awareness or knowledge.
In tragedy, the conflict is within man; in melodrama, it is between
men, or between men and things. Tragedy is concerned with the
nature of man, melodrama with the habits of men (and things). A
habit normally reflects part of nature, and that part functions as if it
were the whole. In melodrama we accept the part for the whole; this
is a convention of the form.3
Melodramatic characters act out contradiction to varying degrees and
gradually face impossible resolutions and probable defeats. However,
the implications and poignancy of a particular narrative cannot be
evoked wholly by limited characters with restricted dramatic functions they
do not fully grasp the forces they are up against or their own
instinctive behaviour. It is here that the formal devices of Hollywood
melodrama, as analysed by Thomas Elsaesser,4 provide a transcendent,
wordless commentary, giving abstract emotion spectacular form, contributing
a narrative level that provides the action with a specific coherence.
Mise en scene, rather than the undercutting of the actions and words of
the story level, provides a central point of orientation for the spectator.
Sirk allows a certain interaction between the spectator's reading of
mise en scene, and its presence within the diegesis, as though the
protagonists, from time to time, can read their dramatic situation with a
code similar to that used by the audience. Although this device uses
aesthetics as well as narrative to establish signs for characters on the
screen as for the spectator in the cinema, elements such as lighting or
camera movement still act as a privileged discourse for the spectator.
In the opening scene of All That Heaven Allows, Cary Oane Wyman)
looks at Ron (Rock Hudson) with the first inklings of desire. The emotion
is carried through into the second scene through the presence of the
autumn leaves he has given her, so that we, the spectators, share with
Cary his secret importance. The touch of nature he has left behind
marks the opening seconds of her preparation for what is to prove a
barren evening at the Country Club. The children comment on Cary's
red dress, interpreting it, as we do, as a sign of newly awakened interest
in life and love but mistaking its object as the impotent and decrepit
42 Visual and Other Pleasures
Harvey, her date and their preferred future stepfather. The camera does
not allow the spectator to make the same mistake, establishing in no
uncertain terms the formal detachment with which Cary sees Harvey,
in contrast to the way in which in the previous scene Ron had been
subtly extracted from the background and placed in close face-to-face
with Cary.
Lighting style clearly cannot be recognised within the diegesis, and
in All That Heaven Allows it illustrates the basic emotional division which
the film is actually about: Cary's world is divided between the cold,
hard light (blues and yellows) of loneliness, repression and oppression
and the warmer, softer light (red/orange) of hope, emotional freedom
and sexual satisfaction. In keeping with the pace and emotion generated
by a particular scene, Sirk occasionally changes lighting from one shot
to the next, for instance, in order to use the dramatic potential of an
intricate screen which dominates Cary's confrontation with her son
Ned.
Although it is impossible to better Rainer Werner Fassbinder's plot
synopsis of All That Heaven Allows,5 it might be useful to bring out some
different emphases. The story-line is extremely simple, if not minimal
(concocted specifically to repeat the success of Magnificent Obsession)6
and is told strictly from a woman's point of view, both in the sense of
world view (the film is structured around female desires and frustrations)
and point of identification (Cary, a widow with two college-age children
and a standard of life in keeping with her late husband's elevated social
and economic position). The narrative quickly establishes lack (her
world is sexually repressed and obsessed simultaneously, offering only
impotent elderly companionship - Harvey - or exploitative lechery Howard).
She then discovers love and a potentially physically and
emotionally satisfying country way of life in Ron Kirby, her gardener
(whose resonance shifts from that of the socially unacceptable in the
Country Club world to that of the independent man in harmony with
nature out by the old mill where he grows trees). Cary's transgression
of the class barrier mirrors her more deeply shocking transgression of
sexual taboos in the eyes of her friends and children. Her discovery of
happiness is then reversed as she submits to pressure and gives Ron
up, resulting in a 'ffight into illness'. The doctor puts her on the road to
success through self-knowledge and a happy end, but, by an ironic deus
ex machina in reverse, their gratification is postponed by Ron's accident
(caused by his joy at seeing Cary in the distance). A hidden shadow is
cast implicitly over their perfect, joyful acceptance of love, although as
the shutters are opened in the morning, the cold, hard light of repression
is driven off the screen by the warm light of hope and satisfaction.
Jon Halliday points out the importance of the dichotomy between
contemporary New England society - the setting for the movie - and
Notes on Sirk and Melodrama 43
'the home of Thoreau and Emerson' as lived by Ron. 'Hudson and his
trees are both America's past and America's ideals. They are ideals
which are now unattainable... .'7 The ftlm is thus posited on a
recognised contradiction within the American tradition. The contemporary
reality and the ideal can be reconciled only by Cary moving, as it
were, into the dream which, as though to underline its actual ephemeral
nature, is then broken at the end by Ron's accident. How can natural
man and woman re-establish the values of primitive economy and the
division of labour when the man is bedridden and incapable? How can
a mother of grown children overcome the taboo against her continued
sexual activity in 'civilised society', when the object of her desire is
reduced to child-like dependence on her ministrations?
In other films, particularly All I Desire, Imitation ofLife and The Tarnished
Angels, Sirk ironises and complicates the theme ofthe continued sexuality
of mothers. The women perform professionally (from the depths of
Laverne's parachute jump in Tarnished Angels to the heights of Lora's
stardom in Imitation ofLife) and attract the gaze of men and the curious
crowd. Their problems are approached with characteristically Sirkian
ambiguity as they try to brazen out their challenge to conformity as best
they can. Cary, on the other hand, has no heroic or exhibitionist
qualities, and the gaze and gossip of the town cause her agonies of
embarrassment. It is only very occasionally that the setting and the
narrative move away from Cary and, when they do, it is significant.
The gaze of Cary's friends at Sara's party is established in a scene before
Cary and Ron arrive. The camera takes in the prurient voyeurism which
turns the sexual association of a middle-aged woman with a younger
man into an act of public indecency (this view is then expressed and
caricatured by Howard's drunken assault on Cary).
Melodrama can be seen as having an ideological function in working
certain contradictions through to the surface and re-presenting them in
an aesthetic form. A simple difference, however, can be made between
the way thatirreconcilable social and sexual dilemmas are finally resolved
in, for instance, Home from the Hill, and are not in, for example, All That
Heaven Allows. It is as though the fact of having a female point of
view dominating the narrative produces an excess which precludes
satisfaction. If the melodrama offers a fantasy escape for the identifying
women in the audience, the illusion is so strongly marked by recognisable,
real and familiar traps that escape is closer to a day-dream
than to fairy story. Hollywood ftlms made with a female audience in
mind tell a story of contradiction, not of reconciliation. Even if a heroine
resists society's overt pressures, its unconscious laws catch up with her
in the end.
44 Visual and Other Pleasures
Notes
1. Paul Willemen, 'Distanciation and Douglas Sirk', Screen, vol. 12, no. 2. Paul
Willemen, 'Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System', Screen, vol. 13, no. 4.
Stephen Neale, 'Douglas Sirk', Framework, no. 5.
2. Helen Foley, 'Sex and State in Ancient Greece', Diacritics.
3. R. B. Heilman, TragedyandMelodrama (Seattle: UniversityofWashington Press,
1968).
4. Thomas Elsaesser, 'Tales of Sound and Fury', Monogram, no. 4.
5. R. W. Fassbinder, 'Six Films by Douglas Sirk', Halliday and Mulvey (eds)
Douglas Sirk, Edinburgh Film Festival Publication (Edinburgh, 1972).
6. Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1971).
7. Ibid.
6
Fassbinder and Sirk*
• Written as a review of Ftlll Eats the Soul for S~re Ribin 1974.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder is proving to be one of the most important
directors of the 1970s, and his film Fear Eats the Soul, which launches
London's new art cinema, the Gate, is a good example of his recent
work. Fassbinder's films are not specifically feminist but they are of
interest to women because they deal consistently with themes in which
women have an independent importance, and have been emphasised
by the women's movement: the family, hysteria, and the contradictions
between the oppressed and the oppressor within a class. His particular
interest, the individual's desire that fmds itself in direct conflict with
class and family ideology, links him to the Hollywood melodrama
of the 1950s. Fassbinder acknowledges his debt to Hollywood. His
understanding of the Hollywood melodrama, the way its greatest
directors built up a picture of ideological forces and the insoluble
problems of sex and desire within them, contributes to the complexity
he achieves in his own work.
Fassbinder came to the American cinema through the influence of the
French New Wave and its acknowledged debt to Hollywood. (His first
feature was dedicated to Chabrol, Rohmer and Straub, showing in itself
a sense of history and of heritage.) But much more than they, he has
looked back to Hollywood melodrama in its own right. He takes it
further along its own path, transposing and bringing out its essential
themes with a clarity that comes from both the passing of time and
freedom from studio supervision, and a bitterness that comes from his
perception of contemporary German society. There are two important
ways in which Fassbinder develops the American melodrama. First, he
focuses on hysteria or the symptoms of repression in the oppressed.
Although hysteria has traditionally been considered a female phenomenon,
Fassbinder has brought out its meaning in men, by dealing with
men who are an ambiguous and oppressed situation (most particularly
in Merchant of Four Seasons) in relation to their class and family, men
who are trapped, as women are, in a way they can neither grasp nor
articulate.
Fassbinder uses role reversals and sex confusions in his own manner,
but particularly to expand the American melodramain a second direction,
to take it outside the confines of the bourgeoisie. While Hollywood in
the 1950s dealt above all with the oppression and frustrations of the
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46 Visual and Other Pleasures
bourgeois woman, Fassbinder goes into the repressions of bourgeois
ideology within the working class, the lumpenproletariat and its tyranny
within the petite bourgeoisie. Women still have an unusual importance in
his films, maintaining the subtly subversive tradition of the Hollywood
genre at its best (made about women and for women), where women
are a sign ofdesire that makes them a potential weaklink in the ideological
structure.
Fassbinder has particularly acknowledged his debt to Douglas Sirk,
pioneer director of some of the greatest melodramas, first in Germany
in the 1930s and then reaching the peak of his career with his so-called
'women's weepies' in Hollywood in the 1950s. Both come from the
theatre, both brought to the cinema a sense of theatrical distanciation
(drama as spectacle) that works against the tendency of film to absorb
the spectator into itself. (They are both also conscious that the cinema
is in the camera. Fassbinder quotes Sirk as saying: 'A director's philosophy
is his lighting and camera angles'.) Fear Eats the Soul is loosely
based on Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, not as a re-make but as a
transposition. The plot changes bring out, to begin with, the way
in which working-class people are infinitely more trapped than the
bourgeoisie when in an intolerable personal situation. Having no means
ofescape, no economic alternatives, their problem is not one of emotional
choice but of facing the situation, going under, struggling against it, in
a succession of desperate attempts at mastery over the world. At the
same time, Fassbinder himself has pointed out that the escape of Sirk's
hero and heroine contains the irony of the happy end: you cannot
escape from yourself and your past as easily as all that.
In the Sirk film, a rich country club widow falls in love with the freelance
gardener (who comes to prune her trees), young, handsome, poor
and from the wrong social class. The revulsion of her teenage children,
her friends and her small town, country club community put her in a
state of agonised conflict. Her love for the gardener is not only based
on deep sexual re-awakening but on an identification with the Utopian
dream of complete social and economic self-sufficiency he is attempting
to create for himself (and for her, if she can break with her past) in the
countryside. In the Fassbinder, an elderly working-class office-cleaner
falls in love with a Moroccan immigrant worker. They marry and she
tries to incorporate him into her world, thus bringing down racist
ostracism from her grown-up children, her fellow workers and her
whole neighbourhood. But the greatest crisis comes after the couple
have finally become accepted; it is difficult for her, in her gratitude at
being allowed to belong again, to stay uncontaminated by the racism
that pervades her surroundings. Both films bring the couple together at
the end, as they realise how much they mean to each other, but the
Fassbinder and Sirk 47
man falls victim to the stress of the relationship and ends an invalid,
with the woman at his bedside.
The two films have more in common than a romantic love story of an
older woman ostracised for her love for a younger man of different
social status. They both depict the contradictions of a woman's economic
position within her own class, and the way she is tom apart by trying
to move outside a predestined path. In these two relationships, the
women are culturally dominant, belonging by birth and marriage to a
dominant class, in All That Heaven Allows, the higher bourgeoisie, in Fear
Eats the Soul, the white, indigenous working class. But both have a lower
economic status than the men of their own class; one is a housewife
living off her dead husband's legacy and the other is an office-cleaner
(Emmi is reluctant at first to admit what she does). There is an implicit
identity in both films between the economic position of the woman and
that of the man she falls in love with. In Fear Eats the Soul the two
protagonists belong to the main sectors of casual, unorganised labour
that capitalist society depends on but refuses to recognise as an integral
part of the work-force. Nor are they treated as serious workers by the
unions, who see only the casual intermittent nature of the work, ignoring
both the degree of exploitation involved and its meaning for the capitalist
economy as a whole.
The lower antinomy in the polarisations - man/woman, indigenous
worker/immigrant worker - creates an unexpected parallel between the
two terms, underlining the closeness of indigenous woman/immigrant
man. Although the Sirk film takes place within a bourgeois milieu,
there is also a parallel economic interest between the protagonists. The
isolated unproductive labour of the housewife is comparable to the
isolated unproductive labour of the gardener. But together they can
achieve social independence through economic self-sufficiency, outside
capitalism and its urban services: the gardener to control his own labour
power and the widow to find her place as an equal and useful partner
in the primaeval division of labour that has always played a part in the
rural American dream. Fassbinder acknowledges the power of Sirk's
film, and brings out its social implications as he transforms it.
The sexual implications of both films are complex. The woman's
higher social status contributes to her sexual fulfilment and allows her
to fmd equality and solidarity with a man for the first time. But an
active/passive role reversal is no solution. The man loses dignity, risking
stereotyping as sex-object, for example, when Emmi asserts her triumph
over the other women and displays Ali to them as a man would a
woman. And Sirk has often dealt with the humiliation heaped on a
mother (not necessarily, even, an 'older woman') who still publicly
asserts her active sexuality. Cary's romance becomes a source of scandal
48 Visual and Other Pleasures
and gossip. The mother who refuses to be made a back number attracts
the otherwise indifferent gaze of her neighbours. In Fear Eats the
Soul the spectator has the sense of staring along with the whole
neighbourhood; the heroine has literally made a spectacle of herself.
It is satisfying to see the hidden strengths of the American melodrama
brought out so vigorously. Sirk's clear sense of the oppression of family
life, the repressive nature of bourgeois society, his irony and unusual
grasp of the dilemma of women, should be used and remembered. And
Fassbinder does not work, as Sirk did, with one hand tied behind
his back by the restrictions of Hollywood. Finally, in structure and
composition Fassbinder has learnt from Sirk this crucial fact, as he
quotes: 'Sirk has said: you can't make films about things, you can only
make films with things; with people, with light, with flowers, with
mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things that make life
worth living'.