At the Intersections of Mode, Genre, and Media: A Dossier of Essays on Melodrama

Abstract

Melodrama has never yet been a term of praise, though its derogatory status has not stopped it from being broadly applied to print and playhouse, across live and film, video, and digitally recorded performances screened at drive-ins, shopping malls, or art-house cinemas, to nondramatic art forms such as novels and paintings, and even to other forms of social or political life susceptible to cultural and rhetorical analysis. We think we know what we mean when we use term to describe exaggerated emotional manipulation, but slight definitional pressure reveals enormous variation. When theater historians tell story of melodrama's emergence in wake of French Revolution, they identify a modern, multimedia genre of drama featuring integration into plays themselves of music, dance, and pantomime-performance elements usually kept discreet-where they serve to amplify and diversify play's expressive capacities. Recent film criticism, by contrast, tends to treat melodrama as a mode that includes silent film and classic woman's film, as well as aspects of westerns, buddy movies, and almost any other kind of narrative film. Apart from a recent suggestion that mode exists below, rather than above, genre-that is to say, that it works closer to scene of human production-little attention has been paid to relations between these categories.1As either mode or genre, however, melodrama has been persistently associated with modernity, whether this is modernity of cinematic technology or that of subjectivity ushered in by French Revolution.2 Lauren Berlant has recently proposed that contemporary films of precarity-those, that is, that dramatize the impact of neo-liberalism on everyday life of formerly protected classes-be understood as postmelodramatic because they explore what comes after coimplication of sentimental and liberalism in fantasy of the good life.3 Berlant treats melodrama less as a mode than as an ideologeme, and, as such, a periodizing tool, though its double status as both historical genre and transhistorical mode of representation makes this use somewhat tricky. We don't need to decide whether our own moment is postmelodramatic to observe that perhaps moonlit contours of melodrama are edging into visibility as sun of modernist aesthetics sets. As one of great disavoweds of modernism, under whose aegis we have been operating and to whose longevity even by now more than twenty-year-old heralds of postmodernism themselves paradoxically attest, melodrama may have something to tell us about status of such categories as media, mode, and genre as they contribute to standards of realism, as well as about modernist aesthetics.The role melodrama has played in modern organization of literary and nonliterary forms and styles has yet to be fully theorized and described, in part because some of most sophisticated work on it has taken place in different disciplines. The essays assembled in this issue of Criticism were written for an interdisciplinary workshop, funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose goals were to study melodrama in its historical emergence, as well as at other moments, including our own as a way to explore terms media, mode, and genre, and their interrelations. Contributors each ruminate on texts of their choice and treat melodrama more or less explicitly as a mode, a genre, and/or a critical tool. To introduce what these essays do, I describe what concept melodrama has been and can be used for. The goal is not to define melodrama for once and for all, nor to police its future uses but rather to see how it functioned as a multimedia genre in its moment of emergence, to identify its contributions as a mode to representation, and to examine its usefulness as a tool to enrich our critical practices.Melo-drame: term was first used to signify dramatic speech accompanied by music but quickly came to signify dramatic performances that included dance and pantomime elements, in addition to musical accompaniment of speech, as well as song, often with spectacular scenery, an exotic setting, and a repertory of plot elements that feature persecuted innocence overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles and a cast of characters that often included mute, lame, blind, deaf, or simple people and sometimes animals. …