MELODRAMA SENSIBILITY Beyond genre Critics and historians of moving images have often been blind to the forest of melodrama because of their attention to the trees of genre. (Williams 1998: 61) Melodrama consists of much more than the Hollywood family melodrama and the 'woman's film'. Since the 1980s, some film scholars have been rethinking melodrama beyond generic boundaries, as a style, mode, sensibility, aesthetic and rhetoric, crossing a range of genres, media, historical periods and cultures. During the mid-to-late 1980s, film scholars began to turn attention away from investigations into the ideology of the 'family melodrama' and the 'woman's film' to find ways of understanding the distinctive narrational and aesthetic effects of melodrama across a diversity of genres, sub-genres and film cycles. High on the agenda was melodrama's use of pathos and its emotional impact on audiences. So too was melodrama's relationship to realism. Increasingly, film melodrama was linked to stage and literary melodrama, establishing it as part of a much wider tradition. At the same time, the term 'melodrama' was applied to an expanded (and expanding) canon of films. Instrumental in this shift of direction for film scholarship on melodrama was the influence of Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry lames, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (originally published in 1976 and reprinted in 1985). This book has played a major role in the re-conception of melodrama within Film Studies. It has, amongst other things, provoked a return to the issue of melodrama's historical development on stage and screen. It has also made pathos one of the defining features of melodrama. On both counts, this has redirected film scholarship on melodrama back towards the debate initiated by Thomas Elsaesser in his seminal 1972 study, 'Tales of Sound and Fury'. Melodrama as a mode In 1986, inspired by Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination, Christine Gledhill began the process of reorienting the debate on film melodrama towards a more sustained investigation of the operations of pathos. Her contribution to a dialogue (with E. Ann Kaplan) on 'Stella Dallas and Feminist Film Theory' established the new terms for understanding melodrama as a distinctive mode. Working with the notion of three modes - realism, melodrama and modernism - Gledhill drew upon Brooks' thesis on melodrama in order to conceive it as 'an aesthetic and epistemological mode distinct from (if related to) realism, having different purposes, and deploying different strategies, modes of address, and forms of engagement and identification' (1986: 45). Where realism ignores and modernism exposes gaps in bourgeois ideology, melodrama insists on the realities of life in bourgeois democracy and, at the same time, implicitly recognises the limits (inadequacies) of conventional representation (for example, exposing the limits of language, its inability to express or articulate certain contradictions). In this way, the 'beneath' or 'behind' (the unthinkable or repressed) is evoked as metaphor through gesture, music and mise-en-scene. In Gledhill's account, melodrama was a mode altogether distinct from the classic realist text.1 She argued that only when film scholars embraced this fact would the debate successfully move on from an ironic and dispassionate appraisal of melodrama's excesses and absurdities to a more authentic assessment. This would entail understanding how melodrama was meaningful when taken at face value, in all seriousness: how, for instance, it was able to move audiences to tears. Gledhill also noted that the rhetoric of film melodrama was still an 'uncharted field' (ibid.). Only Thomas Elsaesser, she claimed, had provided an account of melodramatic rhetoric in the cinema up until the mid-1980s. Gledhill was particularly interested in his analysis of pathos and, in her own short essay, embarked upon a brief but perceptive discussion of how pathos functions in melodrama. Most crucially, she drew attention to an essential paradox of the form. Although melodrama is primarily 78 SHORT CUTS concerned with an intense focus on interior personal life, its characters (including the central protagonist) are not psychologically constructed and, rather than being introspective, convey their inner being through action, movement, gesture, decor, lighting and editing (1986: 46). This results in the spectator possessing knowledge that is not available to the characters themselves and this discrepancy contributes directly to the operation of pathos: 'Pathos involves us in assessing suffering in terms of our privileged knowledge of its nature and causes' (ibid.)- This is an application of Brooks' point about melodrama's play with the revelation of the protagonist's virtue, which is misunderstood due to 'misleading appearances, fatal coincidences, missed meetings, etc., all of which lead to a misrecognition of that character's nature or intent' (1986: 46). In this account of melodramatic rhetoric, pathos emerges as an 'aesthetic activity' (1986: 47). This, moreover, is 'intensified by the misrecognition of a sympathetic protagonist because the audience has privileged knowledge of the "true" situation' (ibid.). Melodrama and pathos The importance of pathos within melodrama and its operation through point of view and knowledge (between characters and between audience and characters) emerged even more strongly in 1986 in Steve Neale's essay, 'Melodrama and Tears'. As the title suggests, Neale was explicitly concerned with the way in which 'tear-jerking' constitutes a key component of melodrama's effect upon audiences and why audiences find the process of crying pleasurable and satisfying. He begins his essay by talking about melodrama as a 'mode of narration' and examines the specific ways in which melodrama orders and motivates its narrative events. Melodramas are defined here largely by the specific kinds of narratives they employ. For instance, 'melodramas are marked by chance happenings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last-minute rescues and revelations, deus ex machina endings' (1986: 6). They also involve continual surprises and sensational developments. Neale suggests that such narratives are essentially unrealistic in the sense that 'the succession and course of events is unmotivated (or under motivated) from a realist point of view' (ibid.). He claims that such preparation and motivation that does exist is always insufficient and that the tendency is towards excess over cause, extraordinary over ordinary (for example, fate, chance and destiny). MELODRAMA For Neale, the key to the narrative logic of melodrama is not realism or naturalism but rather the need to produce discrepancies between the knowledge and point of view of the spectator and the knowledge and point of view of the characters. This discrepancy is ultimately what produces the pathos that culminates in tears. Timing plays a crucial role here. Pathos results, Neale explained, from a realisation (characters discovering what the spectator already knows) that comes too late or almost too late (that . /p^ is, just in the nick of time): 'tears come whether the coincidence comes , ^ I Si too late or just in time, provided there is a delay and possibility, therefore, / '^ that it may come too late' (1986:11). Throughout the period of delay (whilst the spectator waits to see if the characters will discover what they already know), the spectator is unable to intervene, to change the events or the misconceptions of the characters. Tears result, in part, from this power-lessness. Moreover, the longer the delay (the longer the spectator feels this powerlessness) the greater the emotional impact on the spectator when the moment of realisation arrives. The dramatic expansion of the melodramatic field Recognition of the basic narrative structures of melodrama and the pinpointing of the mechanisms by which it provokes tears from its spectators, constituted an important first step towards rethinking melodrama beyond the limits of specific and easily-identifiable generic categories and film cycles. This shift in critical thinking about melodrama was even more marked a year later when the first published anthology of studies on film melodrama and the 'woman's film' was published under the title of Home is Where the Heart Is. Here, in Gledhill's introductory chapter, 'The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation', a radically new conception of melodrama was set out and a new methodology for studying melodrama was proposed. Written just three years after she had outlined the form as a genre in her section on melodrama in The Cinema Book (Cook 1984), Gledhill now outlined the development of melodrama criticism in Film Studies and found it wanting. She noted the largely pejorative use of the term 'melodrama' by film scholars, which had prevailed in film criticism until Douglas Sirk's 1950s films had been rehabilitated, regarded as ironic and subversive critiques of American ideology. Prior to this, she claimed, melodrama had been used by critics as the 'anti-value for a critical field in which tragedy and realism became cornerstones of "high" cultural value' (1987: 5)- For such critics, melodrama not only lacked the seriousness and 80 81 SHORT CUTS MELODRAMA intellectual weight of either tragedy or realism but, perhaps more importantly, was associated with mass entertainment (that is, with its appeal to the lowest common denominator). The rise of genre criticism in the 1960s concentrated on discrete and readily demarcated cinematic categories like the western and gangster film. In contrast, melodrama seemed too messy and uncontainable (as fragmented across genres and pervading others such as the western and gangster film), lacking a clear evolution on screen and being thematically inconsistent. Gledhill noted, however, that radical shifts within Film Studies reversed this situation, bringing melodrama to the fore. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, realism (for example, the 'classic realist text') was increasingly seen as a reactionary form, bound up with bourgeois values. Ideological analysis provided a new critical context in which melodrama emerged 'with full force into this reconstituted critical field' (1987: 6). The advent of Neo-Marxist film theory in the 1970s created a new context for examining (and celebrating) stylistic excess and narrative inconsistency, these attributes prized for their abilities to expose ideological contradiction. As we have explained in the previous two chapters, Sirk's 1950s films played a leading role in this respect; his style and his ironic stance heavily informed notions of melodramatic conventions in Hollywood cinema. As Gledhill put it, 'there occurred a slippage of the "subversion" argument from its attachment to Sirk as "author" to melodrama itself (1987: 7). She pointed out that Sirk's authorial signature was now expanded to a generic trademark, the genre of the Hollywood family melodrama constructed out of the 1950s films of directors such as Minnelli, Ray, Ophijls, Cukor and Kazan. Gledhill saw this as the expansion of the parameters for a new critical field. At this point, scholars began to wonder what kind of field melodrama offered (genre, style, mode, ideology, and so on). Reviewing the early film scholarship on melodrama, Gledhill suggested in 1987 that the most useful work was Elsaesser's essay 'Tales of Sound and Fury'. This was partly because it included a historical review of film melodrama's theatrical and literary antecedence and partly because it recognised melodrama as the basis of Hollywood's aesthetic, emotional and cognitive effects. Another important and valuable feature of Elsaesser's piece, for Gledhill, was that it recognised and gave due consideration to the importance of pathos. Of course, what most film scholars in the 1970s and 1980s found valuable about Elsaesser's essay was that it offered the possibility of conceiving of melodrama as a coherent genre; namely, the 'Hollywood family melodrama of the 1950s'. This provided a much more straight-forward way of thinking about and investigating melodrama than if one were to take the form as an aesthetic or mode which pervaded Hollywood across virtually every decade and every genre, sub-genre and film cycle. By 1987, Gledhill had come to regret that in the late 1970s and early 1980s 'the issue of melodrama as a formative cinematic mode was not pursued' (1987: 8). She pointed out that this would have entailed a wholesale re-conceptualisation of the form and entailed extensive investigation, particularly into the relationship between realism and melodrama. But in the new critical climate of 1970s' film criticism, realism (not melodrama) was the anti-value and 'realist' texts, under the umbrella of the 'classic realist text' (whether films, novels or television programmes), were condemned as inherently reactionary since they reproduced bourgeois and/or patriarchal ideology. Gledhill argued that the construction of melodrama as the family melodrama, as a specific Hollywood genre, 'made it difficult to pursue its connections with the nineteenth-century melodramatic traditions which ... constituted a founding tradition of Hollywood as a whole' (1987: 12). She challenged this approach by questioning (or demanding a justification) for the confinement of melodrama to films about domestic situations and 'feminine' conditions, suggesting that the themes of the western are just as excessive. She asked, 'if melodramatic rhetoric informs westerns, gangster and horror films, psychological thrillers and family melodramas alike, how tenable is it to constitute melodrama in a critical, disruptive relation to the classic realist/narrative text?' (1987: 13). Gledhill was now describing not a specific group of films that could be labelled 'melodrama' but, rather, a 'melodramatic rhetoric' that a range of films of different genres could utilise. To understand the rhetoric of melodrama, Gledhill perceived that first of all film scholars would have to stop thinking of melodrama and realism as inevitable opposites or as mutually exclusive categories. Consequently, she called for a much more systematic and thorough-going exploration of the relationship between the two modes. In her introductory chapter to Home is Where the Heart Is, Gledhill offered an example of a more wide-ranging cultural and aesthetic investigation. In the sections headed 'Historicising Melodrama' (1987: 14-28) and 'Melodrama as a Cultural Form' (1987: 28-38), she examined the historical relationship between melodrama and the bourgeoisie, drawing upon Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination of 1976. In the process, she also examined the performative and aesthetic traditions of stage SHORT CUTS MELODRAMA melodrama and the narrative traditions of stage and literary melodramas. This also involved the institutional and political factors that shaped the aesthetics and rhetorical devices of melodrama as a theatrical form. The undertaking of such a potentially large academic project within the limited space of a chapter was (it would appear) to fill a perceived gap within Film Studies, undertaking the type of work which could have logically followed on from Elsaesser's essay in 1972 had the ideological debate not imposed itself. Confined as it was to two sections of an introductory essay to the anthology of critical studies on melodrama and the woman's film, Gledhill's project here could never have been more than a sketch or a provisional investigation. Its purpose was to instigate a new approach and a new area of investigation for scholars of film melodrama rather than provide the definitive account. What it did do was identify an alternative body of scholarship on melodrama that film scholars might usefully consult in order to understand its historical development, cultural significance and aesthetic aspects. Much of Gledhill's revised notion of film melodrama has been derived from Brooks' study of melodramatic theatre and literature. More than any other single source, this book has been instrumental in the perception of melodrama as a mode. In opposition to the more pejorative and restrictive notion of melodrama that had emerged in Film Studies by the 1980s, Brooks perceived melodrama as a 'modern mode', that used the rhetoric of realism alongside an aesthetic of'muteness' to make sense of everyday life in a modern and secular world. Brooks understood melodrama as a dramatic and literary form that developed in post-sacred cultures where society needed to find a secular system of ethics and of making everyday life meaningful in the absence of religion. He referred to this as the 'moral occult' and saw it as involving a psychic need as well as an ideological one (that is, the need to make sense of life for personal and social reasons). If theatrical forms are to articulate or represent such meanings and ethical values, they necessarily require a degree of realism. The issues, in other words, need to be made relevant to people's ordinary lives. Brooks' assertion that traditionally melodramas have fulfilled this function simultaneously insists that they also required a level of realism in order to win audience recognition and assent (rather than being opposed to realism). Whilst perceiving the necessity for melodramas to use realism as part of their aesthetic, Brooks also described/them as being similarly determined by 'muteness' whereby speech was replaced by music, gesture and expressive mise-en-scene for dialogue, giving melodrama its distinctive form. 84 Melodrama and morality Central to understanding the ideology of melodrama is its Manichean outlook: that is, its polarities of good and evil, vice and virtue, innocence and villainy (as black and white). For Brooks, melodrama always involves ethical conflicts, symbolically rendered (but never abstract). Initially, characters were emblematic (such as mother, father, son, daughter) and the drama was invariably built around the triadic relationships of a hero, heroine and villain, each being clearly, even elaborately, defined and distinguished. The opposition of vice and virtue, good and evil, innocent hero/heroine and villain, insists upon suffering and pathos. The good (hero and/or heroine) suffer as a direct consequence of their virtue, goodness and innocence, falling prey to the evil vices of the villain. Pathos is evoked for the audience and the other characters who witness the suffering of the virtuous innocents, culminating in almost excruciating moments of sympathy and pity at the sight of such prolonged and undeserved suffering. This constitutes the ultimate melodramatic scenario and the ultimate melodramatic emotion and becomes, for Gledhill, what film melodrama is really all about whatever specific form it takes (historical costume romance, science fiction, crime thriller, horror or western adventure): Characteristically the melodramatic plot turns on an initial, often deliberately engineered, misrecognition of the innocence of a central protagonist. By definition the innocent cannot use powers available to the villain; following the dictates of their nature, they must become victims, a position legitimated by a range of devices which rationalise their apparent inaction in their own behalf. Narrative is then progressed through a struggle for clear moral identification of where guilt and innocence really lie. (1987: 30) This was a critical statement, describing in precise terms the rhetoric of melodrama that would transform its conception within Film Studies as a mode: as, indeed, the pervasive mode of American cinema. This rhetoric also enables us to see, as Geldhill notes, Steven Speilberg's adaptation of The Color Purple (1984) directly linked to D. W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920), both having victimised innocent heroines persecuted wrongfully by their husband/lover, both films driven to identify good and evil. Melodrama emerged from Gledhill's introductory chapter to Home is Where the Heart Is as something far more wide-ranging and pervasive than 85 SHORT CUTS MELODRAMA anything described in the other studies of melodrama and the women's film included in that anthology (i.e. the established critical literature). Here it was recognised as a cross-class and cross-cultural form, of mixed heritage, both bourgeois and popular. It was dominated by a non-verbal aesthetic (spectacle, gestural performances and music) but had undergone a series of aesthetic transformations involving fantasy and realism as well as spectacle. It was an intertextual form which drew (promiscuously) on journalism, legitimate theatre, opera, paintings, poetry, songs and popular fiction, for inspiration and adaptation. Melodrama and realism Gedhill's essay 'The Melodramatic Field' charts melodrama's history, from European (chiefly France and England in late eighteenth century) to American theatre, to the birth of cinema and its development from silent to sound pictures. What is stressed throughout is the interdependence of melodrama and realism in this development. Realism, is recognised here not as a static form but rather as one that has to consistently change as social and cultural perceptions of truth change. Gledhill sees realism as opening up new areas for representation which, once uncovered, melodrama assumes. Moreover, realism's relentless search for renewed truth and authentication pushes it towards stylistic innovation, whereas melodrama's search is for something lost, producing a more nostalgic attitude that can accommodate not just established forms of representation but even archaic ones. Melodrama's attachment to an outmoded past has frequently resulted in its derision. Melodrama is neither realism nor its opposite. For Gledhill, it takes 'its stand in the material world of everyday reality and lived experience, and acknowledging the limitations of the conventions of language and representation, it proceeds to force into aesthetic presence identity, value and plenitude of meaning' (1987: 33). Whereas realism seeks to possess the world by understanding, melodrama seeks to 'force meaning and identity from the inadequacies of language' (ibid.). This approach to understanding melodrama enabled the re-evaluation of the relationship of melodrama and the woman's film as proposed within Film Studies. Gledhill further noted that the identification of melodrama with the woman's film had been a 'retrospective categorisation' that was a consequence of realism's association with masculinity (ibid.) and how historically the realm of feeling has been assigned to women whilst realism has become associated with masculine restraint, hence the cultural prohibitions on men weeping in public: Very soon cinema was constituted as an inherently'realist' medium and it has become a given of film history that while early cinema produced melodrama by default, the power of speech instituted a critical break between a cinema destined for realism and its melodramatic origins. At the same time genre divisions were consolidated, allowing melodrama a separate identity ... which facilitated critical boundaries drawn by gender. The 'classic' genres were constructed by recourse to masculine cultural values - gangster as 'tragic hero'; the 'epic' of the West; 'adult' realism - while 'melodrama' was acknowledged only in those denigrated reaches of the juvenile and the popular, the feminised spheres of the woman's weepie, the romance or family melodrama. (1987: 34) Gledhill asserted, however, that many of Hollywood's classic genres retained their melodramatic pre-dispositions and noted that 'the industry recognised this pervasive melodramatic base in its exhibition categories - western melodrama, crime melodrama, sex melodrama, backwoods melodrama, romantic melodrama and so on' (1987: 35). Indeed, she noted a fundamental paradox here, that it was actually the male genres of westerns and gangster films and other action genres that perpetuated a melodramatic rhetoric. Meanwhile, the woman's film (later to be described as melodrama by scholars) adopted quite a different form, being dominated by words and dialogue, openly expressing and articulating its central issues and conflicts. Such films were, in other words, anything but texts of muteness, forced to transform the unspeakable into spectacular action sequences or mise-en-scene. Nevertheless, it was the male genres that took on the aura of prestige associated with realism, whilst women's genres became increasingly linked with the pejorative associations of melodrama. Revising the Film Studies' account of melodrama Gledhill's position was almost entirely at odds with the other studies contained in her anthology (although sharing occasional sympathies). It was, in many ways, a call for the adoption of a completely new approach to melodrama within Film Studies rather than an endorsement of the SHORT CUTS MELODRAMA approaches that had been taken already. Her position has subsequently been taken up most enthusiastically and most explicitly by Linda Williams. In her essay, 'Melodrama Revised', she offered a 'revised theory of a melodramatic mode - rather than the more familiar notion of the melodramatic genre' (1998: 43). She argued that melodrama, rather than being a genre or any other sub-set of American filmmaking, is the pervasive American mode of filmmaking, constituting many genres and being ever-present. 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 classic realist narrative; it cannot be located primarily in women's films, 'weepies' or family melodramas - though it includes them. Rather, melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moraland irrational truths through a dialectic of pathos and action. It is the foundation of the classical Hollywood movie. (1998: 42) Williams' arguments and observations were largely informed by Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination and Gledhill's work on melodrama, adopt-ingthe thesis that melodrama has been the means of articulating vice and virtue in a post-sacred world. She argued that melodrama is ultimately concerned with articulating moral values and establishing moral right, which usually involves a central protagonist whose moral virtue goes unrecognised by other characters in the film (but, crucially, not by the audience) until the climax of the narrative. Throughout her essay, Williams argued that as melodrama has developed on the American screen it has modernised itself and, effectively, disguised itself by adopting tropes of 'realism' and developing more fully realised characters. She urged film scholars to look beyond these to recognise the more fundamentally melodramatic nature of American movies (old and new):'If emotional and moral registers are so sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims; if the narrative trajectory is ultimately more concerned with a retrieval and staging of innocence than with the psychological causes of motives and actions, the operative mode is melodrama' (ibid.), Williams* project was to re-inscribe the melodramatic mode into the history of American cinema, arguing that it lingered on throughout the sound era in many genres (including action movies). For her, the term 'melodrama' indicates a form of exciting, sensational and, above all, moving story. Constructing a new history of American film melodrama, she linked together American forms such as the novelistic romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, the popular theatre of Belasco, Aitken and Boucicault, the silent films of Griffith, DeMille and Borzage and the sound films of Ford, Coppola and Spielberg. The common thread uniting them is, for Williams, 'the combined function of realism, sentiment, spectacle and action in effecting the recognition of a hidden or misunderstood virtue' (1998: 54). Williams chooses American Vietnam films, including The Green Berets (1968), The Deer Hunter (1978), Rambo (1982), Platoon (1986) and Casualties of War (1989) to make a striking case for the pervasive nature of melodrama. These most male-oriented of action movies might at one time have seemed the very antithesis of Film Studies' definition of melodrama as family melodramas and women's films. Good reason then for Williams to claim that 'what makes them tick is ... not simply their action-adventure exploits but the activation of such exploits with a melodramatic mode struggling to "solve" the overwhelming moral burden of having been the "bad guys" in a lost war' (1998: 61). Moreover, 'what counts in melodrama is the feeling of righteousness, achieved through the sufferings of the innocent' (ibid.). Williams warned that neither the realism nor the virility of action should fool us into think-,v ing that action films are not melodramas. This is a way of opening out the 'genre' of melodrama. Williams makes what she herself admits is a 'bold statement' which is that, rather than a submerged, embedded tendency within realist narrative, melodrama has been the dominant form of popular cinema. She argued that as melodrama has developed it has shed its old-fashioned values, acting styles and ideologies along the way whilst continuing to deliver the melodramatic experience. Consequently, the structures and effects of American cinema are in essence melodramatic. Hence, Williams claims: 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 recognise that character's moral value. The climax revealing the moral good of the victim can tend in one of two directions: either it can consist of paroxysm of pathos (as in the woman's films or family melodrama variants) or it can take that paroxysm and channel it into the more virile and action-centered SHORT CUTS MELODRAMA variants of rescue, chase, and fight (as in the western and all the action genres). (1998: 58) This strategy makes all Hollywood cinema, except for comedy, melodramatic given that the revelation of moral superiority is such a central and recurrent feature of American filmmaking. Facing up to the tears 'In cinema the mode of melodrama defines a broad category of moving pictures that move us to pathos for protagonists beset by forces more powerful than they and who are perceived as victims' (Williams 1998: 42). This broad definition of melodrama does not simply classify all films that make audiences cry 'melodrama' (because some films that can make audiences cry are not melodrama). It does, however, recognise the importance of the affective and emotive power of film melodrama to move audiences to tears. In reviewing the Film Studies' account of melodrama from the 1970s and 1980s, Williams noted that the 'so-excessive-as-to-be ironic model j^^J^