Suspenseful Situations: Melodramatic Narrative and the Contemporary Action Film Scott Higgins Abstract The concept of situational dramaturgy, a form of narrative construction inherited from nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, reveals continuities between classical narrative and the "post-classical" action film. This essay argues that situations bridge spectacle and narrative, provide generative structures for action plots, and are enmeshed in the contemporary three-act structure. The action film has the double distinction of being both one of the most popular and most popularly derided of contemporary genres. In mainstream discourse, the genre is regularly lambasted for favoring spectacle over finely tuned narrative. As the critic Annabelle Vilaneuva put it, "action movies don't even feel like movies anymore, they're little more than two-hour trailers for action movies."1 Nonetheless, every summer testifies to the genre's pride of place in major studio economics. Action films serve Hollywood well, displaying the production values that enable American movies to dominate world markets. Ten of the twenty-five all-time, worldwide, top-grossing films are in the action genre; event films often wear action clothing.2 Critics and studio marketers have actually cooperated in defining the genre's popular reputation as a vehicle for sensation. The master metaphor for the action film is the "roller coaster ride," or more simply "the ride," which promises to sweep the viewer through a series of thrills. This might seem derogatory, but it can just as easily be co-opted as a means of selling the films. Newspaper ads for Mission Impossible II, for example, used Joel Siegel's Good Morning America quip "put your mind on Cruise control and fasten your seatbelts." The blurb is hardly a ringing endorsement of character complexity or nuanced drama, but it is an endorsement nonetheless. This reputation has led a number of scholars to claim that the creation of marketable thrills has replaced narrative coherence as the primary concern of popular American cinema.3 In this essay, I seek a more precise understanding of the action genre as a particular kind of storytelling. Action films do appear to offer something distinct from classical narrative as it is commonly defined, but they are not wholly divorced from Hollywood tradition, nor are they necessarily anticlassical or nonnarrative. [End Page 74] The roller coaster metaphor has descriptive value, but not necessarily at the expense of coherent and engaging narrative. Rather, I argue that the action genre inherits a melodramatic narrative tradition that predated, and was absorbed by, classical Hollywood cinema. The commonly held view of narrative and spectacle as oppositional, and the emphasis on the genre's apparent subversion of classical qualities, have clouded our historical understanding of the action film. In contrast, the concept of situational dramaturgy helps bridge spectacle and narrative, and places the contemporary action film in a tradition that stretches through the classical period from historical adventures, to sound serials, to the James Bond franchise. In fact, in the action film, we often find an elegant integration of classical and melodramatic narrative practice, and this helps account for the particular pleasure of the genre, for its power to produce a "ride." Melodrama may well inform other contemporary Hollywood genres, but in the action film, it flourishes. The genre gives us privileged insight into the interaction between melodramatic and classical dramaturgy, and should help us rethink what we mean by "nonclassical." Rethinking the Spectacle/Narrative Divide Any account of the action film must confront the venerable question of spectacle and narrative. Most scholars approaching the genre are occupied with the tension between the two terms, seeing them in opposition, with spectacle dominating. Spectacular moments figure strongly as product differentiation within the genre.4 In his essay "Action Films: The Serious, the Ironic and the Postmodern," James Welsh describes action films as "products designed by committees of writers and armies of technicians with one goal in mind: building bigger spectacle in order to generate millions of box-office dollars."5 Classical Hollywood, the common argument goes, subordinated spectacle to...
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Aug 13, 2023
Marina Dias-Neto + 1
Open Access