Melodrama

Gita Viswanath

True to its etymological roots in Greek – melos (song) and drama (action) – melodrama has essentially been associated with drama and film to the accompaniment of music. Initially the term melodrama was even used interchangeably with opera. Music was a structural necessity incorporated with the intention of heightening the spectator’s emotional identification with the character types. In Hindi cinema, the background score could even indicate the arrival on screen of character types such as hero or villain. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762) first staged in Lyon in 1770 is usually acknowledged as the first melodrama. The literary counterparts of melodrama were the sensation novels in England of the 1860s and 1870s. These novels dealt with sensational themes of adultery, murder and bigamy and the settings were the domestic spaces of middle-class households. Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White (1860) and Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) are some notable examples. This genre much like melodrama in film was panned by critics for not meeting high aesthetic standards.

Often, melodrama is considered in conjunction with a sub-genre called woman’s film popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Even if conventional, a woman’s film gave screen space to women which the popular genres of Western, gangster or the war movie denied. The common themes were romance, family relations and problems. The woman’s film was also an industry category in which case it meant films with ‘A’ certification, not necessarily those addressed to women (Cowie, 1997). According to Molly Haskell, a woman’s film “fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife” (1987: 155). The premium is on accepting one’s fate rather than fighting it. This led to the popularity of tropes such as sacrifice and self-abnegation which while purporting to portray women realistically also upheld cherished patriarchal values. This made masochism an integral part of the characterization in woman’s film and subsequently also in melodrama. The woman’s film was an early precursor to the soap opera of the television.

Like film noir, melodrama is more a mode of expression or style of presentation rather than a genre. Although describing it as a genre may not be entirely incorrect, it is surely limiting. It is an aesthetic practice; a way of viewing the world. It can cut across genres such as gangster, musical and even art house cinema as in the case of Ritwik Ghatak’s oeuvre. Melodrama is present “as a condition across various modes of culture, including the realist one” (Biswas in Vasudevan, 2000: 126). The roots of melodrama lie in the oral traditions of different cultures. Historically, melodrama is a response to the French and Industrial Revolutions. According to Peter Brooks, there was a loss of tragic vision in the post-industrial revolution west. In what is now considered a classic, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), Brooks reads Balzac and Henry James as using the rhetoric of melodrama within the format of the ‘realist’ novels. In melodrama, Brooks says that conflicts are secular unlike in the classical tragedy where the conflict was between man and the gods. For this reason, most melodramas are driven by an ethical imperative, not a tragic vision. The formula due to ideological compulsions demands the triumph of good over evil as a structural necessity in melodrama. This genre negotiates modernity through nostalgia for a pre-lapsarian world in its attempts to recover a lost world. To achieve this, the melodramatic mode revels in the formulaic.

English melodrama has several forerunners: mystery and morality plays, German Sturm und Drang drama and Parisian melodrama of the post-Revolutionary period. Also, the French romantic dramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the sentimental novels of England and France were the early precursors of melodrama (Hayward, 2004). Often treated as tragedy’s poor cousin, melodrama received critical attention in the early 1970s with the rise of feminist studies. Melodramas offered resistance to feudalism through its portrayals of bourgeois life. Greek gods and deities were replaced by middle class families. It is Madhava Prasad’s (1998) opinion that Indian cinema’s melodrama is also built upon a thematic that is a manifestation of a feudal structure much like early American stage melodrama. The theme of bourgeois acquisitiveness found a fertile soil in melodrama because the rise of this genre coincided with the rise of capitalism (Hayward, 2004). 

Melodrama, capitalism and consumerism form an inextricably intertwined link. Melodrama with its direct appeal to the emotions has from its beginnings been disparaged as ‘woman’s film.’ As the narrative of a melodrama usually unfolds in domestic spaces, its mise-en-scene is cluttered with objects. This automatically spells a fortune for advertisers who can embed their products within the filmic space. Susan Hayward (ibid) argues that as women are arbiters of taste within the private sphere of the home, melodramas while focusing on women also become vehicles for advertising goods and creating desire. According to Jyotika Virdi melodrama specially appeals to women because of the way it sells consumer culture and thereby “projects a fantasy that is transgressive in patriarchal terms” (2003: 149).

Melodrama was initially studied as part of auteur criticism but the nuanced inputs of feminist theorists helped gain a historical perspective on the genre as a whole (Cook in Prasad, 1998). Euro-American melodrama during interwar years withdrew into the private sphere in a move to escape confronting the crisis in the public space. In its own way, melodrama was a response to modernization. The consequent focus on the private sphere led to its concentration on the domestic, the familial and the engagement with the ethical. To make sense of rapid transformations in the social and economic fields, melodrama created a quaintly simple moral universe in which good and evil were embodied in stock characters. According to Paul Willemen they are mere agents or functions rather than characters who are well-rounded and individualist (ibid). Heroes are decidedly good, villains unequivocally bad. The melodramatic hero represented the socio-cultural norm and rarely trod beyond the right path. The hero, in fact, fought the villain who stood outside the norm creating chaos and the action was geared always towards restoration of order and stability. He achieved success because of his noble character and extraordinary bravery with a little help at times from the gods, fate and chance. The moral ambiguity of the film noir characters was deflected into ‘a melodramatic bipolarity’ by which the ethical right and wrong was dichotomized into hero-heroine/villain-vamp (Vasudevan, 2000). Thus, in melodrama, character is often reduced to mere narrative function. Also, the awareness of a single character is the pivot around which the narration moves in melodrama.

Melodramas effectively dramatized conflicts that pitted the individual against society. Virdi notes that “in Asian melodramas, individual desire is in conflict with social elements (in China – state institutions, in India and Japan- moral or cultural codes)” (2003: 151, emphasis original). Further, she observes that “the family is the perfect locus for melodrama, since it draws upon intense affective relationships shared among its members” (ibid: 11, emphasis original). Due to focus on family, melodrama is associated with women. The mode is characterized by masochism through figures of self-sacrificing mother and wife as in the woman’s film as described above. Melodrama like film noir ensured that woman characters crossing their boundaries marked by society, community and nation received their just dues. For instance, in the Hindi film Aradhana (Shakti Samanta, 1969) the heroine has to pay a price for one unguarded moment of sexual passion. Karen Gabriel argues, “Cinema’s use of the melodramatic mode provides further substance to the argument that representing sexual economy is central to the narratives of this cinema since it establishes the connections between the sexual economy, social organization, nation, community and patriarchy” (2010: xxx). With a sharp focus on victimhood, melodrama reifies women’s psychosis. The female perspective is sometimes privileged in narratives of crisis in domestic spaces. The crises could also be stand-ins for larger political conflicts. In Hindi cinema for instance, stories of separated siblings act as allegories of the Partition of the subcontinent. Moinak Biswas argues that such a displacement of social/political into the familial has been a part of the literary tradition in Bengal if we look at the works of Bankim or Tagore. He says, “What is essentially interior or subjective in realist fiction gets translated into external polarities of character and action in melodrama” (in Vasudevan, 2000: 128). 

The formal features of melodrama hitherto diffuse got consolidated at a time when melodrama was ‘feminized’ that is, it began to specifically address women audiences in America (Gledhill, 1987). It depicts individual desire in conflict with cultural/moral codes. The plot is circular by taking recourse to flashbacks. With its abundant indoor shooting, the décor and mise-en-scene are stand-ins for meaning. It is pitted generally against the grander genre of tragedy. However, the conflict is usually external rather than internal and is based on sexual difference. The narrative strategy of coincidence is central to melodrama for “coincidence insistently anchors figures who have a definite social function to relationships of an intimate and often familial, generational order” (Vasudevan, 2000: 115).

Social crisis is mediated through private domain which invariably acts as a microcosm of the larger society. Highly charged emotional scenes, racy and action-filled plots are the hallmarks of melodramas. Threatening villains, brave heroes who can face the odds to get the virtuous heroines in characteristically happy endings form the tropes of melodrama. Over a period of time these have been reified as stereotypes. The format of the melodrama facilitated the narrative to chart the journeys of the heroes whose aim was to get the heroine. For instance, in Douglas Sirks’s Written on the Wind (1956) Mitch Wayne (played by Rock Hudson) falls in love with his best friend’s wife and pursues her till the end in a quiet, protective manner away from his best friend who drinks and brutalizes his wife. The plot also involves the sacrifice of the best friend’s sister who is in love with Mitch and the punishment of the friend by death. Love, sacrifice and death form a mandatory triad in the melodramatic template. Melodrama needs a morally legible universe and ‘an aura of psychological motivations and drives’ (Biswas in Vasudevan, 2000: 123). Coincidence and chance are important components. The audience is fully aware that all will be well in the end with rewards awaiting the hero and heroine and punishment for the villain. Thus, the element of suspense lies in the “how” of the narrative, not in the “what”. As Cowie (1997) notes: “How we learn of events in a narrative may encompass an effective component so that the structure of suspense in a melodrama or thriller may give rise to emotions of anxiety or compassion as well as enabling us to cognitively anticipate the narrative outcome or to evaluate the position of characters.” Melodrama favors spectacle. Its defining feature is surely excess. The hyperbolic mode that included large doses of sentimentalism made this form extremely popular in almost all parts of the world.

Peter Brooks has pointed out the close relationship between melodrama and realism since the nineteenth century. Vasudevan elaborates the history of critical discourse in Indian cinema to show how melodrama acquired pejorative connotations in the 1950s which sought to valorize art cinema and deride popular cinema as florid and excessive. However, the staunchest of critics (Kobita Sarkar, Chidananda Das Gupta) consented that there were still some elements of realism in commercial cinema which to them was its redeeming feature. 

            After having been scorned as derivative, undemanding and florid, melodrama still acquired status enough to merit the attention of theorists such as Peter Brooks and Thomas Elseassar.