Long derided as a “woman’s genre” that was unworthy of serious consideration in the world of film criticism, melodrama experienced a surge in critical popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s. During this period, classical Hollywood productions like Stella Dallas (1937, dir. King Vidor), Mildred Pierce (1945, dir. Michael Curtiz), Written on the Wind (1956, dir. Douglas Sirk), Imitation of Life (1959, dir. Douglas Sirk), and I Want to Live! (1958, dir. Robert Wise) were re-evaluated by a group of largely feminist film scholars who, inspired by Peter Brooks’ writing on the importance of melodrama in 19th century literature and theater, claimed that melodrama was as foundational to cinema as realism. In this way, melodrama came to be understood as a cinematic mode in which simplistic narratives and psychologically monopathic characters were overwhelmed by emotional and stylistic excess. Film scholar Linda Williams elaborates that, broadly, melodrama is “marked by ‘lapses’ in realism, by ‘excesses’ of spectacle and displays of primal, even infantile emotions, and by narratives that seem circular and repetitive” (3). The attractions of the melodramatic mode are emotionally affective: spectatorial pleasure is not, necessarily, found in the simplistic moral universe and predictable plots of most melodramas, but rather in the excess of the film’s emotional appeals and the richness of its visual register.
In the “woman’s genre,” female characters figure large–or, more specifically, women’s emotional and physical mortification, humiliation, and anguish does. In what Williams calls “body genres,” female bodily and emotional excess is crucial to generic spectacle and attraction. In Vidor’s Stella Dallas, Wise’s I Want To Live! and Sirk’s Written on the Wind, the distress of persecuted and repressed women and their “primal” emotion serves as a key attraction. In each film, the female body, overtaken by the pangs of emotional excess, becomes symbolic of the aesthetic and narrative excesses of the melodramatic mode. Women become attractions in a voyeuristic and emotionally identificatory way.
Melodramatic excess, with its particular focus on the extremity of female suffering, has proven ripe fodder for later filmmakers and social critics. Seizing upon the drive to moral order inherent to classical melodrama, John Waters’ work critiques American moralities by utterly subverting the moral hierarchies of classical melodrama while echoing–to an extent–the emotional and visual excess of Sirk, Douglas Ray, and Vincente Minnelli. Drawing on similar camp traditions and the histories of the avant-garde, Matthias Muller uses found-footage techniques to critique the superficial hysteria and oppressive domesticity of classical melodrama. Martha Rosler offers a similarly feminist critique of Baby M (1988, dir. James Steven Sadwith), a made-for-ABC movie of the late 1980s which uses melodrama’s conception of motherhood and the trope of women’s suffering in its treatment of a 1988 custody case. In each of these appropriations and detournements, filmmakers seize upon the recognizable tropes of melodrama–particularly that of women’s spectacular torment–and use its excess as a vehicle for gendered critiques.
Curators: Eliza Heitzman, Kaela Rae Jensen, Hyunjee Nicole Kim
References:
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4: 2-13.
Examining the trope of the woman on trial and its place within the scope of the melodramatic mode, my comparison of I Want to Live! and Female Troubles will center primarily around Waters’ casting of drag queen Divine as the female criminal and the resulting commentary on “gendered” cinema.
-Kaela Rae Jensen
I plan to examine two different critical approaches within the melodramatic genre: those of Douglas Sirk and Matthias Muller. Sirk’s employment of visual and emotional excess in his melodramas–primarily, Written on the Wind–which (as noted by Paul Willemen) contributes to an ironic distance between the work’s surface and its subtext while simultaneously entrancing his audience with superficial spectacle. The found-footage approach of Matthias Muller’s Home Stories attempts to subvert melodrama’s moral order by visually deconstructing the mode’s gendered tropes. In both of these films, the spectacular body of the melodramatic heroine (or villain), in ecstasy or torment, becomes an attraction that is to the directors’ critical work.
-Eliza Heitzman
An excerpt from Matthias Muller’s “Home Stories” can be found here.
The “maternal melodrama” becomes a site to explore the psychological relationship between mother and child and the construction and de-construction of morality of women within film. King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) and James Steven Sadwith’s Baby M (1988) are films that both demonstrate the visual and emotional cues used to delineate “good” versus “evil” in the melodramatic mode. While Stella Dallas is a literary adaptation and Baby M is an adaptation of a real-life case made for television, both shed light on the attractive nature of the excessive dramatization of the everyday.
The Cinema of Attractions 