Williams on Melodrama

“Narrative cinema as a whole has been theorized as a realist, inherently masculine medium whose “classical” features were supposedly anathema to its melodramatic infancy and childhood. Thus, while narrative silent cinema has always been recognized as melodrama at some level, the “essential” art and language of cinema has not. Melodrama has been viewed either as that which the “classical” cinema has grown up out of, or that to which it sometimes regresses. However, as Gledhill notes, well into the sound era, industrial exhibition categories continued to assert the melodramatic base of most genres. The names of these categories are themselves revealing: western melodrama, crime melodrama, sex melodrama, backwoods melodrama, romantic melodrama, and so on (Gledhill 1987, 35). What is striking in the above examples is the way the noun “melodrama” functions to denote a certain form of exciting, sensational, and, above all, moving story that could then be further differentiated by more specifications of setting or milieu and/or genre. It is this basic sense of melodrama as a modality of narrative with a high quotient of pathos and action to which we need to attend if we are to confront its most fundamental appeal” (Williams 17).


In this passage, Williams is describing the transition and binary of classical cinema and melodramatic cinema. She evokes examples from earlier in the chapter when she cites Henry James’ reaction to a production of Uncle Tom, noting that it evoked his childhood sentimentality of what is right and what is wrong. It is this reaction to which Williams refers through the phrase “melodramatic infancy and childhood.” She notes the progression of film history as the “rising up” from the melodrama, because silent movies in a sense, had to be melodramatic in order to evoke the meaning and purpose of the film through over-exaggerated acting. She notes that “classical” cinema is considered to be the more mature offspring of the melodramatic “movie”- the film that emotionally “moves” the reader. However, throughout the chapter, she argues that this is not necessarily the case. Rather, the melodramatic film in a sense has been reborn, so that we as a nation might “talk to [ourselves]” about the dilemma and moral binary of negrophilia versus negrophobia in American culture (11). The “high quotient of pathos” to which Williams refers is a manipulation of the heartstrings that allows for the viewer to contemplate a sufferer within a social setting of which they are already previously aware. Williams argues that this emotionality leads the viewer to a “state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness” for African Americans in race films (13). It is this ability to “establish a moral good” through melodramas that “fundamentally appeals” to the viewer (13, 17).

In evaluating the claim and overall project of Williams’ Chapter 1, I thinking about the movies we have seen in class and obviously was able to notice the melodramatic elements concerning the establishment of a “moral good” to which Williams refers. For example, the jail scene in “Lying Lips” when the damsel in distress is wrongfully imprisoned, and we the viewers are able to feel and sympathise with the injustice of her imprisonment. However, I could not help but think about Williams’ assertion that there has been a type of “regression” in popular media towards that of the melodramatic. I felt that her example concerning the 1996 Olympics was particularly inventive, as it did not have to do necessarily with race, but still untangled the emotionality of the reader. Interesting that in her article, when she is referring to the melodramatic nature of the 1996 Olympic Summer Games, she refers to the melodramatic nature as a type of “feminization”—implying a certain emotionality associated with women—that such melodrama has a “moralizing function” (16). This led me to consider (what is now potentially turning into my seminar paper) the recent Oscar-nominated film “The Help.” Generally, I am wary of such racialized narrative bestsellers for reasons of historical innacurracy (aka Bill O’Reily’s new book “Killing Lincoln”), yet I had heard so many positive reviews about the novel and movie that over my Christmas break I read and watched both. While the history of racism in America is hardly a new problem, it is an old problem that seems to be popularly resurfacing since the election of President Obama.

My first question, as inquiry for a burgeoning seminar paper, what are we to make of this melodramatic nature in films today that, because of its sentimentality, it is nominated for the most prestigious film award? Do we fall into this trap of melodrama ourselves? Or do we agree with Williams’ project, that aside from noticing films’ melodramatic tendencies, such sentimentality can potentially result in social good? How do we make sense of this if melodrama is often said to try to reassemble a lost past? (36)

Second Question: In her essay, Williams evokes the argument of film critic Peter Brooks, who argues that the melodrama must begin with a moment of virtue, a safe and “idyllic space” that will be unjustly invaded. He notes that even if it is not “literally represented” that it will be remembered or implied some way through the nostalgia of the characters and potentially their memories. In the films that we have watched for class so far, how is this “idyllic space” embodied in the different films even if it is not literally represented?

Third Question: In her second chapter, Williams notes how the former nineteenth-century stereotype of villain and hero/heroine in the melodrama is reversed through the concept of the Uncle Tom, as someone who is victimized by the white master. Does this reversal occur in the films we have watched so far? And if so, does it do so to the detriment of the filmmakers’ social intentions?