Ben Singer,
Melodrama and Modernity. Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2001
ISBN: 0 231 113293
256 pp
US$24.50 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)

One of the best films released in the past twelve months was Far from Heaven (USA/France, 2002), Todd Haynes’s reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (USA, 1955) – with additional themes, characterisations and stylistic flourishes from Sirk’s Written on the Wind (USA, 1957) and Imitation of Life (USA, 1959). Unfortunately the film provoked the misleading perception that “melodrama” equalled the ironic, excessive, “subversive” family melodramas directed by Sirk and other usual suspects, especially Vincente Minnelli (such as Some Came Running[USA, 1958]and Home from the Hill [USA, 1960]) and Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause [USA, 1955] and Bigger than Life [USA, 1956]) in the 1950s. These films, which provided the model for approach and style of Far from Heaven, are certainly melodramatic and draw from the characterisations and situations of melodrama but they are hardly mainstream melodrama and, at best, emanate from a middle-class offshoot of nineteenth century theatrical melodrama which developed as a means of attracting a more “genteel” audience to drawing room melodrama which was termed “new melodrama” at the turn of the twentieth century. This form, also termed “modified melodrama”, was characterised by a more careful system of motivation as part of its “well-made” aesthetic values compared to the more rudimentary and sensational plots of the ten-twenty-thirty cent theatres. Sirk’s films, such as All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and There’s Always Tomorrow (USA, 1956), heighten the “melodramatic” to a point which often threatens the melodrama through the use of irony.

For the best part of two decades, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, Film Studies suffered from an “orthodoxy” which, in its most simplistic usage, equated “melodrama” with a small number of 1950s “subversive” family melodramas and, in its most extreme, with the “woman’s film”. During this period, with a few notable exceptions, there was little attempt to establish any kind of historical or institutional context as the term was bastardised in the service of those scholars more interested in gender issues, film and ideology, psychology, and Brechtian and modernist aesthetics. Few looked sideways to the work undertaken by literary and theatre historians, most notably Robert Heilman (Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience, Seattle, University of Washington Press,1968) and Peter Brooks (The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976).

The catalyst for the deviant position occupied by Film Studies was Thomas Elsaesser’s essay “Tales of sound and fury. observations on the family melodrama” which first appeared in Monogram (Number 4) in 1972. Although Elsaesser provided a brief historical and literary context, such as the influence of German ballads and French Romantic dramas, he was primarily concerned with how a small number Hollywood directors (such as Douglas Sirk) in a small number of Hollywood films (such as Written on the Wind) intensified and counterpointed classical film style to reveal the inadequacies of mainstream American culture in the 1950s. This was achieved, Elsaesser argues, through the formation of an ironic, alternative text in these films by the way the style (through the use of colour, camera composition, editing rhythms, and mise-en-scène) counterpointed the sentimental platitudes of the story.

To Elsaesser’s credit he presented the “melodramatic” in these films within a specific “mode of experience” (1950s) and he provided a brief, if selective, historical context to understand the way he was utilising this dramatic mode. Problems developed when others who followed him omitted the historical and the institutional basis as an orthodox position crystallised. Fortunately, sanity returned as this simplification was challenged from different positions and studies. My awareness of the misleading basis of the orthodox position occurred in the early 1980s when I returned to the work undertaken more than a decade earlier by Robert Heilman and Peter Brooks during research for my dissertation on the Hollywood combat film. Christine Gledhill, John Belton, Steve Neale, Linda Williams and others returned to the historical basis of this mode, and the significance of theatrical melodrama, to explain the importance of melodrama in understanding the American cinema. Ben Singer’s 1990 article “Female power in the serial-queen melodrama: The etiology of an anomaly” published in Camera obscura (22: January) was a significant step and it preceded, and complemented, Steve Neale’s invaluable empirical research (“Melo talk: on the meaning and use of the term ‘Melodrama’ in the American Trade Press “, in Velvet Light Trap, 32, Fall 1993) into the way “melodrama”, and its slangier form, “meller”, was used in the American film trade press, such as Film Daily, Hollywood Reporter, Motion Picture Herald and Variety in the period from the 1938 to 1960. Neale effectively demolished the basis of the orthodox position by demonstrating that in the press, at least, melodrama was primarily used in conjunction with action, adventure, war, westerns, horror films and thrillers – not the woman’s film. Importantly, he showed that the term “drama”, as distinct from “melodrama”, was reserved for the woman’s film and associated movies focusing on female-centred narratives involving romance and domesticity.

Ben Singer’s book Melodrama and Modernity. Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts, which had its basis in his dissertation, continues this process by showing how melodrama transferred from the theatre in the first decade of the twentieth century to form the basis of the American cinema in the Teens. While he initially planned to confine his study to the serial films produced in America between 1913 and 1918, his research mutated into a broad exploration of the meaning of, and interconnection between, melodrama and modernity at the turn of the century. A significant moment in his research occurred when he was sifting through the corporate papers of the Edison studio in West Orange, New Jersey and he came across a quality control chart from 1915 which divided the studio’s output into different genres. He noticed that “Melodrama” was distinguished from “Sob story”:

As I delved deeper into the trade journals looking for material on film serials, and at the same time began exploring the historical semantics of “melodrama,” I came to realise that the two topics were actually more like one. Whenever genre terms were used, sensational serials, I found, invariably were referred to as melodramas. (6)

Singer advocates a contextualist approach that explores the way in which a specific cultural object, sensational melodramas of the second decade of the twentieth century, grew out of, and existed within, a complex conjunction of social, intertextual and commercial contexts. These contexts, he argues, were part of “momentous and multifaceted historical transitions associated with the intensification of modernity” (8). The first two chapters are concerned with clarifying the meaning of modernity and melodrama. For the latter he proposes a “cluster concept” involving five key constitutive factors: pathos, emotionalism (which he also describes as “overwrought emotion”), moral polarization, a non classical narrative form and graphic sensationalism. While he attempts to utilise all five elements in his study, he admits that “at minimum [it] absolutely requires two – moral polarization and sensational action and spectacle” (58).

While this is, essentially, in accordance with the recent work of Linda Williams, there is one substantial difference. This relates to the significance of pathos in melodrama. Williams in Playing the Race Card. Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, University Press, 2001) argues that the dialectic of pathos and action can be viewed as a crucial feature of melodrama. It was a melodramatic staple long before Way Down East (USA, 1920) and it will continue to be so long after Titanic (USA, 1997). It controls the structures of feeling that animate the form. It combines a fear of loss with the excitement and suspense of action. The study of melodrama has often suffered from the misperception that it was either one or the other of these poles (38).

While agreeing with Williams that “a great deal of melodrama interweaves pathos and action” (55) and that both serve the same function in that they “establish moral legibility” (55), Singer argues that it is “an overstatement to assert that melodrama must necessarily incorporate both pathos and action” (56).

Certainly in terms of the melodramas he selects to study, the female-centred serials of the second decade of the twentieth century, action is paramount. Singer points out that the “intriguing element” in these serial-queen melodramas was the “extraordinary emphasis on female heroism” (221) as the “intrepid young” heroines of these popular films regularly “exhibited a variety of traditionally ‘masculine’ qualities: physical strength and endurance, self-reliance, courage, social authority, and freedom to explore novel experiences outside the domestic sphere” (221). The titles provide a strong indication of these qualities in films such as The Adventures of Dorothy Dare, A Daughter of Daring, Ruth of the Rockies (USA, 1920), Pearl of the Army (USA, 1916), The Girl Spy (USA, 1909), The Girl Detective (USA, 1915) and Perils of our Girl Reporters (USA, 1920). Such female centred serials, Singer argues, were indicative of the “excitement and anxieties surrounding major transformations in the cultural construction of womanhood around the turn of the century” (222).

While he argues that both the positive (the empowerment) and the negative (the victimisation) reflect the excitement and the fears of this transformation, the positive aspect is more convincing as it assimilates a deliberate commercial strategy on the part of the studios to engage females with these films. (232) The negative side, the recurring victimisation of the heroine, is less revealing as the cultural significance of this trend is complexly intertwined with a basic melodramatic convention concerning the violation of innocence and its function in developing the moral polarisation of the text, a necessary condition of melodrama. On the positive side he argues that these films, viewed ” as a utopian fantasy of female empowerment”, suggest “an escapist response to the constraints of women’s experiences within patriarchal society” (233) where, on the screen at least, women can exhibit “strength, courage, independence, success, sexual freedom [and] the right to choose a partner” (233). The Girl and the Game (1918), for example, employs the frequent plot device of focusing on a single heroine in a social sphere where few, if any, other women are found. Here, the heroine (Helen) is “surrounded by buddies” and is “just one of the guys” (231) as part of the concern of these serials to show the “emancipated woman out in the masculine world”(224). This was accompanied by a compete reversal of gender positions such as Helen controlling the wheel of a speeding car while her three male companions are relegated to mere passengers. Similarly, A Lass of the Lumberlands (1916-1917) shows the heroine rescuing a male tied to the railway tracks as a train is speeding towards them. These films, Singer maintains, regularly document the novelty of the “New Woman” through utopian fantasies of female power.

This is a rich book and a brief overview of its detailed empirical work and the speculative ideas concerning modernity cannot do it justice. Perhaps the strongest part of the study traces in convincing detail the transformation of “blood and thunder, or sensational, melodrama from the 10-20-30 theatres in the first decade of the twentieth century to its cinematic form in the nickelodeon boom. This transition was swift. Just two or three years after its peak around 1907, 10-20-30 melodrama was virtually extinct, killed off by its cinematic equivalent (12). Singer argues that this shift, and boom in sensation melodrama, was closely associated with modernity as “the emphasis on sensationalism situates melodrama within the context of modern hyperstimulus” (12). Both modernity and the popularity of sensational melodrama was, he argues, an outgrowth of modern capitalism as it was contingent on the rise of an urban consumer society in which the household was no longer a self-sufficient sphere of production along with various innovations in transportation and media technology. This melodrama was, and is, a dramatic form ideally suited to these changes with its graphic displays of violent action, gripping suspense, startling surprise and remarkable spectacle (149). A new wave of technological change and commercial rationalisation, the rise of the mass-market cinema, facilitated the shift from the theatre to the cinema. As Lincoln Carter, a famous producer of stage melodrama, remarked after the rise of the film melodrama had driven him out of business:

The heroine and the hero and all the scenic effects of the melodrama have simply moved over to films. That’s all. (12)

The success of the first serial What Happened to Mary in 1912 and 1913 prompted The Adventures of Kathlyn the next year and soon all of the studios, except Biograph, were regularly producing twelve to fifteen chapter serials. Reportedly Universal made more money from serials than any other branch of production. Although the boom in female-centred sensational serials levelled out after 1917, they were commercially and culturally important in the Teens. For example, they ushered in, Singer argues, a new era of mass publicity through their tie-ins with newspapers and magazines “and, on a broader scale, they epitomized a new … cultural appetite for powerful stimuli. Perhaps, above all, they were significant expressions of a new destabilisation of traditional ideologies of gender. Serials were energized by the excitement and anxiety prompted by the emergence of the New Woman” (220).

Geoff Mayer,
La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04