North American Postmodern Fiction and Film, Spring
2000
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Stylistic and Emotional Excess:
Thomas Elsaesser: "[W]hen in ordinary language we call something melodramatic,
what we mean is an exaggerated rise-and-fall pattern in human actions and
emotional responses, a from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous movement, a foreshortening
of lived time in favor of intensity - all of which produces a graph
of much greater fluctuation, a quick swing from one extreme to the
other than is considered natural, realistic or in conformity with literary
standards of verisimilitude." (Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound
and Fury: Observations on the Family Drama." Home is Where the
Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. 52.)
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Inner violence:
[in the family melodrama,]
"the social pressures are such, the frame of respectability so sharply
defined that the range of 'strong' actions is limited. The tellingly
impotent gesture, the social gaffe, the hysterical outburst replaces
any more directly liberating or self-annihilating action, and the cathartic
violence of a shoot-out or a chase becomes an inner violence, often
one which the characters turn against themselves.(56)
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Between the paralysed system and entropic desire:
"the melodramatic text is balanced on the edge of two extremes,
one of which is inertial (the paralysis of the system, its resistance to
change or any form of external development) and the other of which is entropic
(where action is expressed only as an irrational and undirected surplus
energy). . . . In summary, even though the incorporation of the Oedipal
scenario enable the domestic melodrama to establish a concrete form of
narrative organisation, this scenario still reproduced, within its own
structural relations, the central contradiction of the genre--the impossibility
of an individual reconciliation of the law and desire. This structure
could thus resolve itself either on the symbolic level (acceptance of authority)
or on the hermeneutic level (which accepted madness and usually self-destruction),
but not on both " (David. N. Rodowick, "Madness, Authority
and Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s."” Home is Where the
Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. 273.)
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Two kinds: male and female point-of-view melodrama.
". . . two different initial standpoints for melodrama. One is
coloured by a female protagonist's dominating point of view which
acts as a source of identification. The other examines the tensions
in the family, and between sex and generations; here, although women play
a central part, their point of view is not analysed and does not
initiate the drama. (Laura Mulvey. "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama."
Home is Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: British
Film Institute, 1987: 76.) . . . The few Hollywood films made with a female
audience in mind evoke contradictions rather than reconciliation, with
the alternative to mute surrender to society's over pressures lying
in defeat by its unconscious laws (79).
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"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). . .
.In melodrama, we accept the part for the whole; this is a convention of
the form." (R.B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, qtd. in Laura Mulvey.
"Notes on Sirk and Melodrama." Home is Where the Heart Is.
Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: British Film Institute, 1987: 77.)