The Melodrama

This is my first official, my first labeled, entry on the melodrama genre. I have been going through something of a melodrama phase lately. And by phase I mean the figure of melodrama has taken shape amidst the immensity of film history, and whispered in my ear sweet things about Max Ophüls's Caught, André De Toth's The Other Love, Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory, and Michael Curtiz's Flamingo Road. Flamingo Road came recommended to me by the dead, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who listed the film as one of his favorites.

The functional melodrama works because of an agreement between the heart and screen. It is a visual, visceral secret shared with a person by a film, and the greater and braver the truth of this secret, the more the film works. Honesty is achieved by commitments from the filmmakers and actors - they must fully believe in the material and invest in it a seriousness and purpose to match the extreme heights of the human emotions conveyed.

Human emotions are conveyed with the utmost sincerity in a melodrama, even when the utterly absurd occurs. This is why melodramas from Hollywood are dazzling, and specifically, dazzling from Hollywood in the 1930s through 50s. During this period the craft of populist and sensationalistic filmmaking reaches for the highest peaks of the human heart, and the two, craft and heart, ignite and explode before the teary eyes of the audience. These movies are hot messes. The hotter and messier the better and bigger the film.

It takes a large, powerful personality to lead a melodrama, someone like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, or Elizabeth Taylor. It takes a sensitive and keen filmmaker to create a melodrama. The latter seems more interchangeable than the former: certain actors cast long shadows over the melodrama genre, while the filmmakers they worked with are more numerous, and truly great melodrama filmmakers, like Max Ophüls and Douglas Sirk, are as rare as truly great melodrama actors.

I have always been attracted to the melodrama genre, but tend to have consumed it in small doses. This is because the films destroy me, viz., they wreck my heart. I wonder what it is about the melodrama that attracts me to it; is it desire for purgation, contrition, catharsis, escape, masochism, or other, or all? Do I want to suffer and does the film help glorify my suffering? Do I want to fantasize my life as some thing of great importance and terrific emotional scope? Do I want to pretend to be rich, or pretend to be a servant? I cannot know for sure. If the answer is simple, the film isn't good.