--the woman’s film, chick flick, weepie, girlie film

ROMANCE & MELODRAMA

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

CONNOTATIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

Emotional?

CONNOTATIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

Emotional? Excessive?

CONNOTATIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

Emotional? Excessive? Loud sound score?

CONNOTATIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

Emotional? Excessive? Loud sound score? Lots of drama in interior spaces?

CONNOTATIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

Emotional? Excessive? Loud sound score? Lots of drama in interior spaces? Exterior challenges?

CONNOTATIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

Emotional? Excessive? Loud sound score? Lots of drama in interior spaces? Exterior challenges? Death, desire, illness, romance, dancing?

CONNOTATIONS

What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

Emotional? Excessive? Loud sound score? Lots of drama in interior spaces? Exterior challenges? Death, desire, illness, romance, dancing? Women, children have more central roles?

CONNOTATIONS

Melodrama evolved from the Greek word melos (music) and drama (often meaning tragedy).

Northrup Frye describes “the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience.” (He also connected these emotions to potential propaganda.)

Peter Brooks in his classic The Melodramatic Imagination, also reflects on the power of melodrama in society—the “socialization of the deeply personal.” He saw melodrama as similar to nightmares, where the good loses out to the evil. “The end of the nightmare is an awakening brought about by confrontation and expulsion of the villain, the person in whom evil is seen to be concentrated, and a reaffirmation of ‘decent people.’” Heroes are central. So is justice.

Melodrama is connected to popular appeal and condemned by critics as being sentimental, naive and sensational.

DEFINITIONS

Way Down East, ice floes

WAY DOWN EAST, D.W. GRIFFITH (1920)STARRING LILLIAN GISH

• 1920’s D.W. Griffith Lillian Gish• 1930’s George Cukor• 1940’s Max Ophuls, Howard Hawks

Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart,

Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunn• 1950’s Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock

Ingrid Bergman, Rock Hudson, Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall

IMPORTANT DIRECTORS, ACTRESSES & ACTORS

Woman’s Film Themes:

Sacrifice—herself for love, children, career, etc..

Affliction—burden of some sort to overcome

Choice—which partner is the best choice?

Competition—other women to fight off

"The domestic and the romantic are entwined, one redeeming the other, in the theme of self-sacrifice, which is the mainstay and oceanic force, high tide and low ebb, of the woman's film” Molly Haskell, 157.

MOLLY HASKELL

The persistence of the melodrama might indicate the ways in which popular culture has…resolutely refused to understand social change in other than private contexts and emotional terms.” Thomas Elsaesser

Roots in:

1. Medieval morality play—emphasis on actions, not psychology

2. Post-revolution French romantic drama—emphasis on interior moral decisions for actions

SIGNS OF MELODRAMA--A MODE, NOT A GENRE?

Society vs. Individual Sacred/mythic world order vs. real, bourgeois world

____________________

Melodrama emerges to compensate for drop in the credibility of allegorical/tragic myths and organized religion—only moral occult remains. (E.g. horror genre, American Horror Story, Twilight, etc…)

CONTRADICTIONS=MORAL OCCULT

By 20th century, moral value resides in the individual personality—the star

Where did the community go?!

Melodramas exteriorize internal conflict—narratives of clarification

Who am I?!

Character is revealed/transformed, internal truths emerge

THE STAR

Presentation of virtue/innocence

Obstacle or introduction of menace/monster

Virtue challenged (in private, domestic spaces; reading books)

Evil men, bad women—Vampyrs—subdued or killed by end

Secrets—other women, not human, etc—are revealed/clarified in excessive ways—I am “unconditionally & irrevocably in love with him”

COMING OF AGE MELODRAMAS

JANE EYRE/TWILIGHTSTORY ELEMENTS

Women’s Lives are Narrated by:

• Story within the Story (Parental marriage)• Romantic Comedy & “comic unruliness” (Hepburn,

Grant)• Exclusion from (masculine, heroic) tragedies

(Grant’s drinking)• Drive towards Utopian—wedding, renewal, rebirth

(she made the right choice and healed the family in the process, right? wink, wink….)

SIGNS OF COMEDYALTERNATIVES TO SUFFERING?!

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

“…whereas melodrama allows the transgressive woman to triumph only in her suffering, romantic comedy takes her story to a different end, providing a sympathetic place for female resistance to masculine authority and an alternative to the suffering femininity affirmed by melodrama.”

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn

TRANSGRESSIVE WOMEN

“Comedy celebrates excess not only for itself but because it paves the way for a community liberated from structures grown so rigid and unyielding that they threaten its very existence.” “Romantic comedy treats the social difference that impedes community as a matter of sexual difference, and so it builds the feminine into both the construction and the resolution of narrative conflict”

“The utopian possibilities of a new social order lie in the couple’s victory over the obstacles between them, and in the child or new life implicit in their union.”

ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ENERGY, UTOPIA AND COMMUNITY

If a heroine refuses to resolve her Oedipal passage with her mother & the narrative leaves the mother/daughter relationship in tact

then—

that generally means—under patriarchy—that the mother/daughter relationship will fall apart in order to make a (hetero) relationship happen in the story.

OEDIPAL DILEMMAS—ABDICATING MOTHERS

Body GenresWeeping in melodrama/”women’s” filmsViolence & terror in horror filmsEcstasy in porn

Williams: There is “value in thinking about the form, function and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses in” horror, porn and melodrama…

TORTURE THE WOMEN!

Psychoanalysis has emphasized “perversions” of the film gaze:

Fetishes (Guns, Shoes, Excessive make-up)Voyeurism (Watching in the dark)Sadism/Masochism (Watching others suffer pain; identifying with the suffering)

DON’T WE OSCILLATE BETWEEN VIEWS?

WE ARE ALL PERVERTS.