1. ROMANCE & MELODRAMA
--the woman‟s film, chick flick, weepie, girlie film

2. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?

3. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?
 Emotional?

4. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?
 Emotional?
 Excessive?

5. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?
 Emotional?
 Excessive?
 Loud sound score?

6. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?
 Emotional?
 Excessive?
 Loud sound score?
 Lots of drama in interior spaces?

7. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?
 Emotional?
 Excessive?
 Loud sound score?
 Lots of drama in interior spaces?
 Exterior challenges?

8. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?
 Emotional?
 Excessive?
 Loud sound score?
 Lots of drama in interior spaces?
 Exterior challenges?
 Death, desire, illness, romance, dancing?

9. CONNOTATIONS
What comes to mind when you hear the word “melodrama”?
 Emotional?
 Excessive?
 Loud sound score?
 Lots of drama in interior spaces?
 Exterior challenges?
 Death, desire, illness, romance, dancing?
 Women, children have more central roles?

10. DEFINITIONS
Melodrama evolved from the Greek word melos (music) and drama (often meaning tragedy).
Northrup Frye describes “the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent
idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience.” (He also connected
these emotions to potential propaganda.)
Peter Brooks in his classic The Melodramatic Imagination, also reflects on the power of
melodrama in society—the “socialization of the deeply personal.” He saw melodrama as
similar to nightmares, where the good loses out to the evil. “The end of the nightmare is
an awakening brought about by confrontation and expulsion of the villain, the person in
whom evil is seen to be concentrated, and a reaffirmation of „decent people.‟” Heroes are
central. So is justice.
Melodrama is connected to popular appeal and condemned by critics as being sentimental,
naive and sensational.

11. WAY DOWN EAST, D.W. GRIFFITH (1920)
STARRING LILLIAN GISH
Way Down East, ice floes

12. IMPORTANT DIRECTORS, ACTRESSES & ACTORS
• 1920‟s D.W. Griffith Lillian Gish
• 1930‟s George Cukor
• 1940‟s Max Ophuls, Howard Hawks
Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh,
Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Cary
Grant, Spencer Tracy, Irene Dunn
• 1950‟s Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock
Ingrid Bergman, Rock Hudson, Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall

13. MOLLY HASKELL
Woman‟s Film Themes:
Sacrifice—herself for love, children, career, etc..
Affliction—burden of some sort to overcome
Choice—which partner is the best choice?
Competition—other women to fight off
"The domestic and the romantic are entwined, one redeeming the other, in the
theme of self-sacrifice, which is the mainstay and oceanic force, high tide and
low ebb, of the woman's film” Molly Haskell, 157.

14. SIGNS OF MELODRAMA
--A MODE, NOT A GENRE?
The persistence of the melodrama might indicate the ways in which popular
culture has…resolutely refused to understand social change in other than
private contexts and emotional terms.” Thomas Elsaesser
Roots in:
1. Medieval morality play—emphasis on actions, not psychology
2. Post-revolution French romantic drama—emphasis on interior moral
decisions for actions

15. CONTRADICTIONS=MORAL OCCULT
 Society vs. Individual
 Sacred/mythic world order vs. real, bourgeois world
____________________
Melodrama emerges to compensate for drop in the credibility of
allegorical/tragic myths and organized religion—only moral occult remains.
(E.g. horror genre, American Horror Story, Twilight, etc…)

16. THE STAR
By 20th century, moral value resides in the individual
personality—the star
Where did the community go?!
Melodramas exteriorize internal conflict—narratives of
clarification
Who am I?!
Character is revealed/transformed, internal truths emerge

17. COMING OF AGE MELODRAMAS
JANE EYRE/TWILIGHT
STORY ELEMENTS
 Presentation of virtue/innocence
 Obstacle or introduction of menace/monster
 Virtue challenged (in private, domestic spaces; reading books)
 Evil men, bad women—Vampyrs—subdued or killed by end
 Secrets—other women, not human, etc—are revealed/clarified
in excessive ways—I am “unconditionally & irrevocably in love
with him”

18. SIGNS OF COMEDY
ALTERNATIVES TO SUFFERING?!
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY
Women‟s Lives are Narrated by:
• Story within the Story (Parental marriage)
• Romantic Comedy & “comic unruliness” (Hepburn, Grant)
• Exclusion from (masculine, heroic) tragedies (Grant‟s drinking)
• Drive towards Utopian—wedding, renewal, rebirth (she made
the right choice and healed the family in the process, right?
wink, wink….)

19. TRANSGRESSIVE WOMEN
“…whereas melodrama allows the transgressive woman to
triumph only in her suffering, romantic comedy takes her story to
a different end, providing a sympathetic place for female
resistance to masculine authority and an alternative to the
suffering femininity affirmed by melodrama.”
Kathleen Rowe Karlyn

20. ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ENERGY, UTOPIA AND
COMMUNITY
“Comedy celebrates excess not only for itself but because it paves
the way for a community liberated from structures grown so rigid
and unyielding that they threaten its very existence.”
“Romantic comedy treats the social difference that impedes
community as a matter of sexual difference, and so it builds the
feminine into both the construction and the resolution of
narrative conflict”
“The utopian possibilities of a new social order lie in the couple‟s
victory over the obstacles between them, and in the child or new
life implicit in their union.”

21. OEDIPAL DILEMMAS—ABDICATING MOTHERS
If a heroine refuses to resolve her Oedipal passage with
her mother & the narrative leaves the mother/daughter
relationship in tact
then—
that generally means—under patriarchy—that the
mother/daughter relationship will fall apart in order to
make a (hetero) relationship happen in the story.

22. TORTURE THE WOMEN!
Body Genres
Weeping in melodrama/”women‟s” films
Violence & terror in horror films
Ecstasy in porn
Williams: There is “value in thinking about the form,
function and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses
in” horror, porn and melodrama…

23. WE ARE ALL PERVERTS.
Psychoanalysis has emphasized “perversions” of the
film gaze:
Fetishes (Guns, Shoes, Excessive make-up)
Voyeurism (Watching in the dark)
Sadism/Masochism (Watching others suffer pain; identifying
with the suffering)
DON‟T WE OSCILLATE BETWEEN VIEWS?