The Family in Hollywood Melodrama: Actual or Ideal?

Abstract

This paper suggests that 1950s movie melodrama highlights the gulf between the experience of an actual family and its members’ belief, implicit and sometimes explicit, in Family as an idealised Platonic form. At the dénouement, the transcendental ideal of the latter entity is maintained despite the unsettling experiences of a particular family, or the discovery of a superior version of family, in the preceding narrative. Melodrama’s apparent celebration of familial ideology, and of the mythology which makes the bourgeois patriarchal family so ‘natural’ that it marginalises all rival versions, could be viewed as reactionary in terms of sexual politics. Perhaps, though, the very exposure of the consequences of Family mythology could be thought to be at least potentially ‘progressive’. An especially succinct exemplfication of the process whereby a particular family fictionalises itself into a closer approximation to the ideal is provided by Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Several other movie melodramas of the 1950s are also brifiy explored, however, to show that reluctance to jettison family, as long as there is belief in Family, is widely shared.