This blog post delves deeply into how melodrama has shaped the portrayal of the vulnerable’s suffering within each era’s social structures and values, and the significance of these changes.
‘Melodrama’ is known to have originated in 18th-century France as popular theater that presented sensational stories appealing to the masses through lavish spectacles and music. Early melodramas typically unfolded from a bourgeois perspective, telling stories of virtuous yet weak bourgeois characters oppressed by wicked feudal nobles. However, it stopped short of actively resolving social contradictions, instead relying on unexpected twists like leaps of logic or coincidence to ensure the bourgeoisie’s virtue and purity somehow prevailed.
With the development of capitalism in the 19th century, the character structure of melodrama changed. The role of the feudal aristocrat was replaced by a character who was evil yet powerful, and the protagonist became a good but poor person suffering at his hands. Accordingly, melodrama dealt with the protagonist enduring suffering through crises in the family, impossible love, thwarted motherhood, and inevitable separation, ultimately reaching happiness. The creation of pathos became more prominent than the simple opposition of good and evil. The primary focus became exaggeratedly displaying the suffering and sorrow endured by the weak to stimulate emotion. However, considering that it gave voice to the suffering and sorrow of the powerless who had no place to speak in society, this excess of pathos held its own significance.
In the 20th century, melodrama shifted its primary stage to film. Film facilitated audience emotional identification through close-ups, was well-suited to creating popular appeal and spectacle, and proved effective for expressing heightened emotion through music. Melodramatic films drew pathos not from the weak tormented by villains, but from the weak suffering under oppressive social contradictions, particularly women. These are beings trapped in situations of ‘helplessness,’ enduring pain from patriarchy or class divisions while yearning for forbidden horizons of life. For instance, Bider’s Stella Dallas (1937) features a lower-class woman protagonist who must part from her husband, unable to overcome the cultural barriers of the upper class. She yearns to keep her daughter by her side yet simultaneously suffers deep anguish, hoping her daughter will enjoy a better life. In this inescapable situation, her decision to ultimately send her daughter to her upper-class ex-husband could be seen as a compromise with the ideology of sacrificial motherhood. Yet, in the final scene where the mother watches her daughter’s wedding from outside the window, tears streaming down her face with a faint smile, the audience deeply empathizes with this motherhood that chose painful satisfaction.
By the 1950s, Hollywood had created another trend: the ‘family melodrama’. During this period, melodrama maintained its popular narrative framework while focusing on the American nuclear family, which could be seen as the axis of social conflict. This was because the family served as the stage where social powers like capital and patriarchy operated. For instance, Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) depicts the love, trials, and reunion of a wealthy widow and her younger gardener. In this process, her children, opposing their union, emerge under the banner of ‘family’. Now, the family no longer functions as a unit of tender bonds but as an institution managing individual lives. Therefore, the ending where she, who had abandoned love due to her children’s opposition, reunites with the gardener on his deathbed after repeated coincidences, is profoundly meaningful. As a family melodrama, this film embodies the core characteristics of melodrama that have persisted through changing times, while simultaneously opening up another possibility for the genre. This is because it presents a kind of ‘unhappy happy ending’ that contrasts with the conventional ‘happy ending’ where the audience feels relieved by the protagonist’s success while turning a blind eye to social contradictions. Sirk deliberately keeps the audience’s gaze fixed on an ending where fundamental conflicts remain unresolved, prompting them to reflect that what they are witnessing is a ‘manufactured reality’ and that a happy ending is only possible within an artificial fiction. Through highly expressive mise-en-scène, it revealed that the very richness of life enjoyed by the heroine was, in fact, a situation of oppression and alienation born from the dominant values and norms of the middle class.
Melodrama is often referred to with derogatory terms like ‘inappropriate realism’ or ‘women’s tearjerkers’. Yet, as seen in Sirk’s films, melodrama serves as a narrative conveying the unspoken sorrows and unattainable dreams of society’s marginalized, while simultaneously reading as an ironic response to social contradictions. This desperate demand to transcend reality while remaining bound to it, constantly resonating with the masses within the representational system of cinema, is what produced melodrama.
