Reference

Theories of Melodrama

• Stylistic and Emotional Excess:
  Thomas Elsaesser: "[W]hen in ordinary language we call something melodramatic, what we mean is an exaggerated rise-and-fall pattern in human actions and emotional responses, a from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous movement, a foreshortening of lived time in favor of intensity - all of which produces a graph of much greater fluctuation, a quick swing from one extreme to the other than is considered natural, realistic or in conformity with literary standards of verisimilitude."  (Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Drama."  Home is Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. 52.)
   
• Inner violence:
  [in the family melodrama,]
  "the social pressures are such, the frame of respectability so sharply defined that the range of 'strong' actions is limited. The tellingly impotent gesture, the social gaffe, the hysterical outburst replaces any more directly liberating or self-annihilating action, and the cathartic violence of a shoot-out or a chase becomes an inner violence, often one which the characters turn against themselves.(56)
   
• Between the paralysed system and entropic desire:
  "the melodramatic text is balanced on the edge of two extremes, one of which is inertial (the paralysis of the system, its resistance to change or any form of external development) and the other of which is entropic (where action is expressed only as an irrational and undirected surplus energy). . . . In summary, even though the incorporation of the Oedipal scenario enable the domestic melodrama to establish a concrete form of narrative organisation, this scenario still reproduced, within its own structural relations, the central contradiction of the genre--the impossibility of an individual reconciliation of the law and desire.  This structure could thus resolve itself either on the symbolic level (acceptance of authority) or on the hermeneutic level (which accepted madness and usually self-destruction), but not on both   "  (David. N. Rodowick, "Madness, Authority and Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s."” Home is Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. 273.)
   
• Two kinds: male and female point-of-view melodrama.
  ". . . two different initial standpoints for melodrama.  One is coloured by a female protagonist's dominating point of view which acts as a source of identification.  The other examines the tensions in the family, and between sex and generations; here, although women play a central part, their point of view is not analysed and does not initiate the drama.  (Laura Mulvey.  "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama."  Home is Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: British Film Institute, 1987: 76.) . . . The few Hollywood films made with a female audience in mind evoke contradictions rather than reconciliation, with the alternative to mute surrender to society's over pressures lying in defeat by its unconscious laws (79).
   
• "In tragedy, the conflict is within man; in melodrama, it is between men, or between men and things.   Tragedy is concerned with the nature of man, melodrama with the habits of men (and things).  . .  .In melodrama, we accept the part for the whole; this is a convention of the form."  (R.B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama, qtd. in Laura Mulvey.  "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama."   Home is Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: British Film Institute, 1987: 77.)