“I just want to be a decent citizen”

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For instance, Norma Rae (1979) and Silkwood (1983) both use melodrama to engage the sympathies of the audience, while making liberal arguments for labor unions and against workplace exposure to hazardous chemicals, respectively. Christine Gledhill, Steve Neale, and Linda Williams have each argued that melodrama functions as a cultural “mode,” with a sphere of influence wider than a single genre. As part of this argument, Williams (, p. 42) has noted that melodrama constitutes the principal mode of film‐making in Hollywood. Although I find this position convincing, in this paper I have focused specifically on melodrama as a discrete film genre rather than an overarching mode. In fact, one might suspect that the left's suspicion of affect, emotion, and bodily response corresponds to the decline in leftist rhetorical agency and appeal in the last decades of the twentieth century. While the film overwhelmingly corresponds to the genre, it does depart from melodramatic conventions in a few ways. In one notable deviation, it does not foreground a musical score or theme song [unlike Norma Rae or Titanic (1997)]. The film also downplays its romance narrative, subordinating it to plotlines featuring Brockovich as a professional and a mother. Although a heterosexual couple is formed—a convention upon which many melodramas and almost all Hollywood films rely—the couple's status at the end of the film remains ambiguous. Instead, Brockovich's professional and maternal commitments are given precedence over her romantic relationship. Although by advocating mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs for mothers on welfare, conservative politicians might seem to have conceded that mothers can work and still be good mothers, their agenda has been chiefly to promote a work ethic rather than to legitimate working mothers. One might even suspect these legislators of seeking to punish poor mothers by preventing them from behaving like traditionally good mothers and staying home with their children. Thanks to Hiram Pérez for pointing this out. While this list is by no means comprehensive, the proliferation of angelic, ailing mothers in domestic melodramas of the last decades of the century suggests that these films represent a mournful elegy for a disappearing, idealized, entirely domestic mother. As increasing numbers of mothers work outside the home, these melodramas testify nostalgically to the decline of the stay‐at‐home mother, figured by her literally dying body. This list also raises the possibility that Erin Brockovich succeeds as a mother because of her good health, a notable attribute in a film about the toxic effects of chemicals upon the body. The film thus suggests that one of the dangers posed by corporate pollution is that it prevents women from being effective mothers. The film also earned the distinction of being the first movie starring a woman to sell more than one million DVDs, an arena primarily dominated by action films with male protagonists (Lew Irwin ). Conservative writer Michael Fumento also decries the payment Brockovich received, as well as other aspects of the film and the historical events it represents (2001). Neither Norma Rae nor Silkwood, for instance, have fairytale endings. Norma Rae, though empowered and triumphant, remains poor at the end of the film, while Karen Silkwood, in accordance with historical fact, is killed. Phillip Lopate (), for example, argues that Erin Brockovich ultimately advocates complicity with corporate power: “If you can't beat them, join them. There is no perceptible alternative.” Ann Douglas ([] 1998, p. 4), for instance, has characterized nineteenth‐century sentimental fiction and its twentieth‐century counterparts (popular songs and movies) as purely passive exercises in emotional consumerism. See Flo Leibowitz (1996) for a different response to this charge. Elaine Roth is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at Indiana University South Bend, where she teaches Screenwriting, Film Criticism, Women in US Film, and Introduction to Film Studies, among other courses. She is currently working on a project on Steven Soderbergh's films. E‐mail: elaroth@iusb.edu