Abstract
Melodrama elicits the participation of our senses. It causes us to buckle in tears, tugs at our heartstrings, harnesses our rage, swirls up our hope, requests our empathy, and prompts our sense of justice. For this reason, melodrama has been an enduring and crucial conduit for producing and mediating our understanding of the world around us. Our emotional contact with melodrama drives our complicity; it turns us into active participants of those very societies that it reflects back to us and which it helps construct. The melodramatic mode breathes dramatic life into those elements that ground our emotional experience of the world: our bodies, the family, the home, the nation, the community, the wish for romance, and the bonds that bind us. The stories melodrama helps tell remind us that we cannot move through the world intact—physically, psychically, or emotionally. We now live at a time when the transformations brought about by globalization, more and more, challenge how we perceive and make sense of the world around us, at times eliding the full reach of our comprehension. Film, predicated on the capture and projection of the world, and cinematic narratives, which participate in the process of both making sense of that world and creating sense for it, must view the world anew.
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Notes
Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 2006): 29.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).
Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen (London: BFI, 1994): 1.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Works such as Frederic Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)
Simon During’s “Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?,” Critical Inquiry 23.4 (1997): 808–833, are some of the first examples of cultural critics taking up the question of how film narratives shift in order to address the changes brought about by the new world system.
See Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007)
Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).
Take, for example, Barbara Klinger’s work on the films of Douglas Sirk. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Or other directors not working in Hollywood, some influenced by Sirk, who have prompted such analyses: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodóvar, Atom Egoyan, and Lars von Trier, to name a few. The films of David Lynch could be said to continue this tradition within the American industry. Todd Haynes famously adapted three of Sirk’s films for his 2002 homage to the director, Far from Heaven.
See Nick Browne, “Griffith’s Family Discourse: Griffith and Freud,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987): 223–234.
Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 42–48.
Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 10.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983): 19.
Also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000): 95.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Williams adapts this statement, which she attributes to Henry James, who was describing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. See Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001): 6, 12–13.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): 13. On the link between the introduction of the guillotine, revolutionary ideals, and melodrama, an interesting film to ponder is Patrice Leconte’s The Widow of Saint-Pierre (2000).
Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011): 10.
Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000): 226.
Bhaskar Sarkar, “Melodramas of Globalization,,” Cultural Dynamics 20.1 (2008): 31–51.
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), in particular chapter 3, “Sensationalism and Urban Modernity,” 59–99.
On digital special effects and a new verticality that has become an important feature in contemporary film, including an analysis of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, see Kristen Whissel, “Tales of Upward Mobility,,” Film Quarterly 59.4 (Summer 2006): 23–34.
See Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in an Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
See Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
See Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? (New York: Seagull Books, 2007). Butler is thinking together statelessness from an American context: post-9-11 detention in Guantanamo, the displaced of Afghanistan/Iraq wars, and, even more centrally, the politicization of immigration rights in the United States—from where the title of the essay comes.
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© 2015 Carla Marcantonio
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Marcantonio, C. (2015). Introduction: Global Melodrama. In: Global Melodrama. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528193_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137528193_1
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