Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television

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Melodrama in
Contemporary Film and
Television
Edited by

Michael Stewart
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Michael Stewart 2014
Individual chapters © Contributors 2014
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Contents

List of Figures vii

Preface and Acknowledgments viii
Notes on Contributors xiv

1 Introduction: Film and TV Melodrama: An Overview 1

Michael Stewart

Part I Television Melodrama

Section I Time, Space and Seriality in Contemporary
Melodramatic Television
2 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 27
Richard Butt
3 Nature, Culture, Space: The Melodramatic Topographies
of Lark Rise to Candleford 42
Douglas McNaughton
4 ‘We Are Like That Only’: Prime Time Family Melodramas
on Indian Television 61
Shoma Munshi

Section II Gender, Sexuality and Excess in

Contemporary US Television Melodrama
5 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’: Gory Excess, Melodrama
and Irony in Nip/Tuck 81
Alexia Smit
6 ‘Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik’: Unearthing Gay Male Anxieties
in Queer Gothic Soaps Dante’s Cove (2005–2007) and
The Lair (2007–2009) 96
Darren Elliott-Smith
7 Don’t Stop Believing: Textual Excess and Discourses
of Satisfaction in the Finale of The Sopranos 114
Martin Zeller-Jacques

v
vi Contents

Part II Film Melodrama

Section III Memory, Cultural Trauma and Destiny in
Contemporary Film Melodrama
8 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia: Reading
Hong Kong Director Yonfan’s Prince of Tears 135
Kenneth Chan
9 Vincere: A ‘Strikingly Effective’ Contemporary
Film Melodrama 153
Anne Gailly
10 Vienna to Beijing: Xu Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman
(China, 2004) and the Symbolic Simulation of Europe 171
Sarah Artt
11 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny:
Late Marriage (2001) and Two Lovers (2008) 187
Robert Lang

Section IV Rethinking Melodrama and Realism

in Contemporary Film
12 Anticipating Home: The Edge of Heaven as Melodrama 205
Michael Stewart
13 Framing a Hybrid Tradition: Realism and Melodrama in
About Elly 223
Taraneh Dadar

Index 239
List of Figures

9.1 Vincere (2009) 161

9.2 Vincere (2009) 169

vii
Preface and Acknowledgments

This collection of essays comes out of a one-day symposium on film

and television melodrama held at Queen Margaret University (QMU),
Edinburgh, in the autumn of 2010. The day was very enjoyable and
highly ambitious. How close could a one-day event hope to come to
understanding the historical and theoretical complexities of film and
television melodrama? I’m not sure the symposium forced a ‘plentitude
of meaning’ (Gledhill, 1987, p. 33), or produced any feelings of righteous
vindication or cathartic relief. But it did get close, I think, to recognizing
the complexities of the melodramatic mode; and it certainly asked a lot
of the right questions. Moreover, the symposium was a timely reminder
to participants of the long reach and remarkable properties of adapta-
tion and modification of melodrama – across time, cultures, media and
genres. These qualities are no less evident in this volume, which contains
contributions from eight of the QMU symposium’s participants. Indeed,
it’s arguable that melodrama’s endurance and malleability are more
obvious still in this collection, which, perhaps inevitably, is a little more
international in outlook than the original symposium.
With regard to acknowledgements, I’d like to thank all of the sympo-
sium participants who responded to the melodramatic call and made for
such an enjoyable day at QMU. I’d especially like to thank Gary Needham
for his support of the symposium, and his advice on how it might be
translated into a book. For their help in organizing the symposium, I’d
like to thank David Finkelstein and Richard Butt, and QMU generally for
hosting it. At Palgrave Macmillan, I’d like to thank Felicity Plester for her
interest in the project, and her advice on the shape the collection should
take, as well as Chris Penfold for his advice and well-stretched patience.
I’d like to thank the collection’s five new contributors for their interest
and keenness, and for strengthening an already impressive collection.
I’d like to thank Robert Lang for generously offering his published essay,
‘Deconstructing melodramatic destiny’, to the collection; and Melvyn
Stokes, the editor of SERCIA’s Film Journal (Issue 1, 2010) for allowing
Robert’s essay to be published again, here. I’d like to thank all the con-
tributors for their hard work and commitment, frequently in the face
of difficult circumstances and countless other demands on their time.
Finally, I’d like to thank my family for allowing me, for the sake of this
project, to be too absent too often.

viii
 Preface and Acknowledgments ix

For reasons of convenience not design, the collection is split into two
parts. Part I examines television melodrama and Part II looks at film
melodrama. If this underlines enduring distinctions between the two
media, then I hope it won’t negate important and perhaps increasing
similarities, melodramatically speaking or otherwise. The first section
of Part I considers questions of time, space and seriality in contempo-
rary television serials. Richard Butt’s chapter examines the operation of
the melodramatic mode in the classic television serial. It looks at four
BBC adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens and Elisabeth Gaskell,
Wives and Daughters (1999), North and South (2004), Bleak House (2005)
and Little Dorrit (2008), and considers how the melodramatic mode is
central to their narrative organization and emotional affect, rather than
something they occasionally lapse into or actively avoid. Focusing on a
selection of major plot episodes or ‘sensation scenes’, the chapter argues
that the melodramatic mode enables these programs to dramatize the
social injustices of mid-nineteenth century England, to generate an
emotional response to those injustices, and to provide moral clarity in
a period of rapid social change.
Douglas McNaughton’s chapter examines Lark Rise to Candleford from
the point of view of melodrama and narrative space. He notes that in
adapting Flora Thompson’s memoires, the program’s producers give
priority to locations and sets as primary narrators. This, along with
Lark Rise’s high production values, McNaughton argues, offers fertile
ground for the melodramatic mode – for the exploitation, for example,
of expressive mise-en-scène. This chapter fills a key gap in television
scholarship – partly, as McNaughton notes, because TV theorists remain
hesitant (or silent) with regard to the medium’s aesthetic range, values
and convergences. McNaughton’s work also connects with various
melodrama theorists, in this volume and beyond, to argue that Lark
Rise uses melodrama to revise history and negotiate the transition to
modernity, in so doing giving form especially to the experiences and
subjectivities of women.
Shoma Munshi’s chapter focuses on Hindi prime time family melo-
dramas on Indian television and examines the way they draw on several
cultural influences, both foreign and indigenous. The chapter’s main
focus, though, is on what is distinctively and uniquely Indianized about
the programs. The chapter first provides a brief overview of the history
of Indian television in order to set the context and then move on to how
India is currently one of the largest and most complex television markets
in the world. The analysis which follows delineates that singular speci-
ficity in Indian prime time family melodramas in the new millennium.
x Preface and Acknowledgments

The next section of the book looks at gender, sexuality and excess in
contemporary US television melodrama. Alexia Smit argues that Nip/
Tuck uses its melodramatic features largely to conservative effect. The
program uses excessively cut, leaking and contagious bodies to stage a
crisis in hegemonic white masculinity. Nip/ Tuck combines pathos and
action in order to produce a heightened sense of suffering, loss and,
at points, irony. This irony frequently verges on grotesque comedy,
Smit argues, but it is mostly used in a conventional way for the sake
of displacement. So while Nip/ Tuck takes melodramatic excess into
potentially interesting areas, and also exhibits moments of affective
dissonance, ultimately the program resorts to familiar expressions of
melodramatic loss and victimhood.
Darren Elliott-Smith examines gay masculinity and the queer gothic
in The Lair and Dante’s Cove. The programs, Elliott-Smith argues, com-
bine elements of gothic melodrama, horror and queer soap opera to
present an excessive and potentially radical genre of uncertainty. Instead,
however, the programs produce a gothic layering of gender and genre in
order to mask shameful femininity. In this respect, The Lair and Dante’s
Cove, while making homosexuality excessive, explicit and apparently
multiple, nonetheless fail to escape dominant discourses of guilt and
heteronormative strategies of de-gaying. The programs’ subversive poten-
tial, argues Elliott-Smith, ultimately is overwhelmed by the erotic lure of
machismo.
Martin Zeller-Jacques examines the famous ending and affective
economies of The Sopranos. He argues that the program uses melodrama
to negotiate its characteristic tension between the masculine and the
feminine, between Tony’s two families. More broadly, Zeller-Jacques
suggests that The Sopranos combines elements of industrial, Platonic
and melodramatic discourses. While melodrama perhaps predictably
is the disparaged member of this triad (in public discourses of cultural
value), it plays a key part in the production of The Sopranos’ semic and
performative excess – excesses which, Zeller-Jacques argues, engender
the program’s circularity and relative openness. In this respect, Zeller-
Jacques argues, The Sopranos both frustrates and liberates melodramatic
convention and desire.
Part II of the book focuses on film melodrama. The first section
examines memory, cultural trauma and destiny in contemporary film
melodrama. Kenneth Chan’s chapter examines Prince of Tears as a his-
torical and nostalgic melodrama. It considers how the film gives form to
contemporary Chinese anxieties, and also how the political history of
Taiwan – in particular the long traumatic period of the White Terror – gives
 Preface and Acknowledgments xi

energy to the film’s affective elements. Many of these elements, Chan

argues, are used for the sake of melodramatic displacement and political
disavowal. Moreover, Chan argues that Prince of Tears’ stylistic excesses are
insufficient and can never be excessive enough – can never capture the
depth and enormity of the historical injuries it revisits. Chan nonetheless
identifies a modification of the melodramatic mode in Prince of Tears and
examines this via theories of nostalgia, desire and queer time – making
useful connections in this respect with the work of Pidduck (2013) and,
in this volume, Artt.
Anne Gailly examines the productive clashes between anti-melodrama
and melodrama, and futuristic fascism and melodrama in Vincere. She
applies the long-standing theories of Balukhatyi (in Gerould, 1991) and
Brooks (1976) to show that Vincere retains elements of classic melo-
drama – in its mix, for example, of hyperbole, antithesis and oxymoron.
The film also uses the figure of Dalser as a nodal pre-text and meta-
phoric body for the communication of memory, trauma and uncertain
histories. While Vincere breaks a long silence in Italian cultural and
public life, it remains, argues Gailly, deferred analogy and frustrated
melodrama in its attempt to reconcile the present with the past.
Sarah Artt’s chapter makes strong connections with the work of
Kenneth Chan (2008, and also in this volume) and Lisa Rofel (1995), as
well as with other contributors to this volume. Melodrama, Artt
argues, is moving back to the center of the stage in Chinese cultural
and political life. In a film like Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004),
it does this via the figure of the woman, ‘perfect correspondence’,
historical reclamation and memory work. Female suffering is feti-
shized in Letter along familiar melodramatic lines; but the multiple
affects of masochism and desire arguably are heightened by the film’s
specific historical context. In this sense, Artt argues, Letter has an alle-
gorical force and transient quality that exceed the past as heritage or
museum, and takes the film closer to the performance of memory and
Baudrillard’s utopian past.
Robert Lang applies key tropes of melodrama in order to examine
the particular articulation and privileging of destiny in Late Marriage
and Two Lovers. He argues that while melodrama can be distinguished
from tragedy in its disposition to human suffering, it remains highly
circumscribed by its own particular myths: destiny, family and, on this
occasion, Jewish identity. The two films, argues Lang, are grounded in
identity drama and historical trauma. They also at some level attempt
to work through contemporary social dilemmas – the question, for
example, of genes as destiny. Ultimately, however, difficult questions of
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

kinship and identity are neither troubled nor examined by Late Marriage
and Two Lovers. They operate instead, Lang argues, along a familiar
plane of victimhood and acquiescence and are thus typically general-
ized and occulted by the two melodramas.
The final section of the book looks at developing or neo-realism in
film melodrama. My chapter applies theories of melodrama to The Edge
of Heaven. It argues that the film represents a form of melodramatic
renewal linked to cultural transition. The Edge of Heaven exhibits a
number of melodramatic themes and tropes, in order, at points, to
complicate them. It reproduces, for example, themes of prison and
entrapment, sacrifice and renewal, contractual and domestic relation-
ships of exchange, debt and oedipal identities and relationships, as well
as, arguably, the oedipalization of history. How successfully The Edge
of Heaven complicates these tropes is debatable. But the film clearly
exhibits strong and multiple desires to break free from unified notions
of home, family and nationhood, and to think again about uncertain
histories and the wayward projects of modernity.
Taraneh Dadar examines About Elly and argues that the film extends
the parameters of both neo-realist Iranian film and melodrama. About
Elly complicates melodrama’s moral universe in its production of hybrid
space and realist excess. This excess, argues Dadar, is achieved variously,
but especially via the film’s use of movement and dialogue. In its latter
‘distressed’ section in particular, a restless camera and intense dialogue
produce only further equivocation and a lingering ineffability, frustrat-
ing the film’s drive to moral legibility. In a complicated negotiation of
class and gender, and in the quest for the truth About Elly, more ques-
tions are raised by the film than answered.

References
Brooks, P. (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Chan, K. (2008) ‘Tactics of tears: excess/erasure in the gay Chinese melodramas
of Fleeing By Night and Lan Yu’, Camera Obscura 23(2): 141–166.
Gerould, D. (1991) ‘Russian formalist theories of melodrama’ in M. Landy (ed.)
Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press).
Gledhill, C. (1987) ‘The melodramatic field: an investigation’ in C. Gledhill
(ed.) Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies In Melodrama and the Woman’s Film
(London: BFI).
Lang, R. (2010) ‘Deconstructing melodramatic destiny: Late Marriage and Two
Lovers’, SERCIA Film Journal 1: 1–27.
 Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

Pidduck, J. (2013) ‘The times of The Hours: queer melodrama and the dilemma of
marriage, Camera Obscura 28(1): 37–67.
Rofel, L. (1995) ‘The melodrama of national identity in post-Tiananmen China’
in R. Allen (ed.) To Be Continued: Soap Operas Around the World (London:
Routledge).
Notes on Contributors

Sarah Artt is Lecturer in English and Film, and Program Leader for
the BA English and Film at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research
interests include screen adaptation in a variety of forms, the image of
nineteenth-century prostitution in cinema and television, the use of
silence in the cinema, and feminist theory. Her teaching interests center
on contemporary science fiction literature and cinema, contemporary
Hollywood cinema, women’s writing and filmmaking,  and narrative
structure in literature and film. Her work has appeared in edited col-
lections published by Palgrave Macmillan, Continuum and Manchester
University Press, and in Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television
Studies.

Richard Butt is Dean of Arts, Social Sciences & Management at Queen

Margaret University, Edinburgh.  He is the author of a number of essays
on Scottish screen culture, including contributions to From Tartan to
Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth; The Edinburgh History of
the Book in Scotland, Volume Four; and The Edinburgh History of Scottish
Literature, Volume Three: Modern Transformations: New Identities. His
research on adaptations of nineteenth-century literature has been pub-
lished in The Blackwell Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation.  He
is one of the screen section editors for The International Journal of Scottish
Theatre and Screen.

Kenneth Chan is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department

of English at the University of Northern Colorado. He is the author
of Remade in Hollywood: The Global Chinese Presence in Transnational
Cinemas (2009). His essays have also appeared in journals such as Camera
Obscura, Cinema Journal, Discourse and Journal of Chinese Cinemas. His
latest project is on Hong Kong auteur Yonfan and his film Bugis Street.

Taraneh Dadar received her PhD on gender and popular cinema in

post-revolutionary Iran at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. She
has taught courses in film theory at Queen Margaret University and
Edinburgh Napier University. Her research focuses on Iranian media,
particularly post-revolutionary cinema, world cinemas, genre, gender
and identity politics. She currently works as a journalist and indepen-
dent researcher.

xiv
 Notes on Contributors xv

Darren Elliott-Smith is a lecturer in Film and Television at University

of Hertfordshire. He was awarded his PhD, with a dissertation entitled
‘Off-Cuts: Gay Masculinities in Queer Horror Film and Television since
2000’, in 2013, at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published
several chapters on LGBT Horror film and television focusing on avant-
garde, cult and mainstream titles in edited collections for IB Tauris, ECW
and McFarland Press. His research interests include gender and sexuality in
film, psychoanalysis and cinema, the consumption of cult/trash television
and film and adaptation and appropriation in the moving image.

Anne Gailly is a teaching assistant in the Film Studies Department of the

Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) and a member of the Research
Center MuCiA (Musique, Cinéma, Arts de la scène). Her doctoral research
concerns the representation of children in French melodramatic produc-
tions, from 1900 to 1920. She co-edited Revisiting Film Melodrama (2014)
with Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin, in which she published an
article entitled ‘Doux Jésus! Prolégomènes à une sous-catégorisation
générique: le mélodrame de l’Enfance (Pathé 1900–1913)’. She has also
written chapter entries about Ghislain Cloquet and Alfred Machin for the
Directory of World Cinema: Belgium (2013).

Robert Lang is Professor of Cinema at the University of Hartford, USA.

He is the author of Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film and
American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli and the editor of The
Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director. His latest book is New Tunisian
Cinema: Allegories of Resistance.

Douglas McNaughton recently completed his PhD at Queen Margaret

University, Edinburgh. His thesis, titled ‘Uses of Space: British Television
Drama from Studio to Location 1955–82’, examines the narrative and aes-
thetic effects of British television drama’s move from multi-camera studio
video to single-camera location filming. With a background in academic
publishing, he has taught on a variety of courses including Culture and
Society, World Cinema and Contemporary Television. He has published
material on the fan cultures of Doctor Who (BBC 1963–present) and
forthcoming publications include work on the influence of the actors’
union Equity on British television drama, and the intersection of televi-
sion technology and drama production practices. His research interests
include the aesthetics of studio television drama, British telefantasy and
fan cultures.

Shoma Munshi is Professor of Anthropology at the American University

of Kuwait (AUK) and Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute
xvi Notes on Contributors

for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. She
is the author of Remote Control: Indian Television in the New Millennium
(2012), and Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television (2010); as well
as editor of Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia: Global Media, Local
Meanings (2001) and co-editor of Media, War and Terrorism: Responses from
the Middle East and Asia (2004, 2007). In addition to authoring several
articles in refereed journals, she has also worked at Delhi University,
University of Amsterdam, University of Pennsylvania and the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP), New Delhi, India.

Alexia Smit is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town in South

Africa. She received her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2010.
She has published in the area of affect and visceral displays of the body
on contemporary television. Her current research focuses on affect in
post-apartheid South African television.

Michael Stewart is Film and Media program leader in the Division

of Media, Communication and Performing Arts, Queen Margaret
University, Edinburgh. His primary research interest is film melodrama,
in particular family, or pathetic melodrama. He has published articles
on this topic in journals such as Journal of British Cinema and Television,
Cinema Journal, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies and
Critical Studies in Television.

Martin Zeller-Jacques is a lecturer at Queen Margaret University,

Edinburgh, where he teaches film and television modules across a
range of undergraduate programs. His primary research interest is serial
narration in contemporary media and, in particular, American television
drama. He has published chapters in edited collections on television
drama, adaptation studies and gender studies. He has also contributed
essays and reviews to several volumes of the Directory of World Cinema
and is a contributor to The Big Picture Magazine: Online.
1
Introduction: Film and TV
Melodrama: An Overview
Michael Stewart

Foundations

There are a number of excellent attempts to define and locate melodrama

in film studies, for example, Gledhill (1987 and 2007), Neale (2000),
Williams (1998), Singer (2001), Byars (1991), Mercer and Shingler (2004)
and Zarzosa (2013). To do justice to these reviews here is impossible.
Instead, I will highlight those points that I consider to be important
generally and to this collection in particular.
The most generally valuable review of melodrama in Euro-American
film studies is the chapter on melodrama in the BFI’s The Cinema Book
(2007, pp. 316–332). This chapter summarizes the work of the theorists
who, in the 1970s, brought melodrama to prominence as a serious
object of study. Melodrama here is analyzed from the point of view of
auteurism and mise-en-scene; neo-Marxism; feminism; psychoanalysis;
history; and genre. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith captures a number of these
contours in his argument that ‘melodrama arises from the conjunction
of a formal history proper (development of tragedy, realism, etc.), a set
of social determinations, which have to do with the rise of the bour-
geoisie, and a set of psychic determinations which take shape around
the family’ (Nowell-Smith, in Gledhill, 2007, p. 316).
These founding analyses of film melodrama differ, as Gledhill indi-
cates (2007, p. 316), depending on what may be at stake theoretically
and politically in the advancement of a particular definition. Laura
Mulvey, for example, questions the validity of auteurist and neo-Marxist
approaches which focus on male perspectives in family melodrama (in
Gledhill, 2007, p. 321). Equally, however, in her earliest intervention in
film melodrama debates (Mulvey, 1974), Mulvey combines a feminist
approach with an argument that underlines the progressive features of

1
2 Michael Stewart

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s directorial style. Mulvey’s earliest analysis of

film melodrama, then, helps to define melodrama as a potentially criti-
cal or subversive form in the hands of the right director. Brecht is a key
theoretical and artistic influence here. Alongside Fassbinder and Sirk, he
continues to haunt analyses of film melodrama, in ways which are use-
ful, but which also raise questions. For example, while Gledhill (2007)
suggests that the analysis of film melodrama encompasses a potentially
problematic variety of forms (p. 316), it may also be arguable that an
emphasis on the films of key auteur directors has restricted analysis and
what counts as melodrama to a select body of films – that is, the most
visually and aurally expressive and intense 1950s Hollywood family
melodramas.
Unquestionably excessive, how subversive these films are is debatable.
Laura Mulvey argues that film melodrama’s excesses might frequently be
understood as a ‘safety valve’ (in Gledhill, 2007, p. 321) rather than an
ironic metaphor. By these terms, there is nothing inherently subversive
to melodrama’s form. However, and secondly, in neglecting the centra-
lity of gender, neo-Marxist auteurist approaches, Mulvey argues, also
overlook important differences between ‘male oedipal’ (p. 321) family
melodramas and those ‘coloured by a female protagonist’s dominating
point-of-view’ (p. 321). This latter form, she argues, might not only
be different in its narrative and aesthetic genealogy, taking as much
perhaps from the novel as the stage; it might also, given its focus on
the concerns of women, be less easily reconcilable to patriarchal norms.
Mulvey’s early contribution, then, shows a way out of obsessive method-
ological oppositions – particularly between melodrama as a progressive
or conservative text – and also underlines the importance of historical
and cultural specificity to analyses of film melodrama.
Christine Gledhill is the theorist who most effectively tries to think
through film melodrama’s relation to genre and history. She examines
melodrama as a mode, a genre, and a cultural, historical and ideological
form. Gledhill’s (1987) overview is distinguished by its genealogical
method and its emphasis on melodrama’s symbiotic and complex
relation to realism. On the former, Gledhill argues that melodrama’s
mixed form derives in part from social change and economic impera-
tives, in that mixed programs were designed to maximize the social and
economic reach of popular, legitimate and increasingly mixed stage
melodrama. Official prohibitions on theatrical dialogue, she argues,
opened the way for the development of spectacular sets, effects and
bodily performance. This was in part a return to preceding theatrical
and non-theatrical traditions and also part of the ‘expanding culture
 Introduction 3

of the visible’ (p. 21) – evident in science, art, architecture and growing
consumerism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and so
suited to the melodramatic mode that ‘melodrama became a model for
the nineteenth-century imaginative enterprise’ (p. 22).
Gledhill attempts to answer the melodrama–realism question by con-
sidering melodrama’s relation to the social, and its capacity for politi-
cal intervention and critique. In this respect, she follows the historical
and theoretical lead provided by Peter Brooks (1976). Crucial here is
modernity’s production of the ‘moral occult’, and the links it engenders
between emotion, morality and the psyche. This, for Gledhill, is the key
to understanding how melodrama uses and interacts with dominant and
emerging forms of realism. If we recognize this, we also understand that
melodrama is not ‘about’ the family and the individual. These, rather, are
means toward its ends: psychic realism and moral legibility. Melodrama
does not take permanent recourse to, for instance, Victorian morality.
Rather, it utilizes contemporary concerns, discourses and realisms in
order to produce moral conflict en route to moral legibility. Melodrama
is not secondary or diminished in its relation to the public sphere and
socio-political concerns. It, rather, ‘touches the socio-political only at
that point where it triggers the psychic’ (Gledhill, 1987, p. 37).

Advances

I’ll now look briefly at the work of other scholars (Neale (2000),
Williams (1998) and Singer (2001)), whose understanding of melo-
drama shares much with that of Gledhill. Neale’s historical method
reveals that contrary to most definitions of film melodrama, including
that of Gledhill (1987), the form was not a despised or pejorative cate-
gory in public discourses about film prior to the 1960s. Rather, it was
a relatively value-free way of describing films oriented to action, thrill
and sensation. Moreover, on the few occasions when film melodrama
was described as realistic in mid-twentieth century public discourses, it
tended to be with reference to impressive generic effects or ‘especially
interesting from an historical point of view … low-life events, characters
and settings … Naturalism … [and the] “[d]own to earth and highly
realistic”’(Neale, 2000, p. 186, quoting from Film Daily, 1946).
Neale’s chapter thus supports and extends Gledhill’s contention that
film melodrama extends well beyond family melodrama and the woman’s
film, both historically speaking and in specific public discourses. Neale
also argues that stage melodrama in the nineteenth century was an
increasingly mixed form; and that as this century progressed, popular
4 Michael Stewart

melodramas of blood and thunder were increasingly joined by drawing

room ‘melodramas of passion’. If the woman’s film and family melo-
drama draw especially from this latter tradition, argues Neale, then it
is important to recognize that nearly all non-comic Hollywood genres
are greatly influenced, to varying degrees and in different ways, by both
popular and ‘modified’ nineteenth-century melodramatic modes.
Along with Neale, the other key theorists who follow Gledhill’s his-
torical and theoretical lead in defining melodrama are Williams (1998)
and Singer (2001). Williams underlines a number of Gledhill’s important
points: the centrality of suffering, pathos and emotion to the mode; the
failure of melodrama theorists to ‘confront the importance of pathos
itself and the fact that a surprising power lay in identifying with victim-
hood’ (Williams, 1998, p. 47); the problem of melodrama being both in
opposition and inferior to classical realism in most theorists’ (including
Brooks’s) accounts – rather than a closely related founding mode of film
narrative; similarly, an overemphasis on the monopathy of melodra-
matic characters, resulting both in a reduced understanding of emotion
and a fatal splitting of emotion and thought; and the tendency to read
excessive pathos, emotions and theatricality as pejorative and defining
features of melodrama. These latter excesses, argues Williams, are the
means to something more important: ‘the achievement of a felt good, the
merger – perhaps event the compromise – of morality and feeling’ (p. 55).
Recognizing a character’s moral value via suffering and pathos, then,
is crucial to the melodramatic mode for Williams. And more often than
not, she argues, pathos and action are combined in melodrama:

To study the relation between pathos and action is to see that there
is no pure isolation of pathos in woman’s films nor of action in the
male action genres. If, as Peter Brooks argues, melodrama is most
centrally about moral legibility and the assigning of guilt and inno-
cence in a post-sacred, post-Enlightenment world where moral and
religious certainties have been erased, then pathos and action are the
two most important means to the achievement of moral legibility.
(Williams, 1998, p. 59)

The combination – or ‘dialectic’ (p. 69) – of pathos and action is one

of Williams’s five defining features of film melodrama, the other four
being: melodrama begins ‘and wants to end’ in a space of innocence
(p. 65); melodrama focuses on victim-heroes and recognizes their
virtue (p. 66); melodrama uses realism to its own ends (pathos and
action), and in so doing appears modern or contemporary (p. 67); and
 Introduction 5

melodramatic characters embody psychic roles organized around good

and evil (p. 77).
Ben Singer (2001) also produces a five-fold definition of melodrama,
which, following William Dye, he calls a ‘cluster concept’ (p. 44). If
a film manifests two of more of these features – pathos, overwrought
emotion, moral polarization, non-classical narrative structure and
sensationalism – suggests Singer, it may legitimately be considered
melodrama. Singer, however, advances a slightly different argument
to that of Williams regarding melodrama and pathos. That is, Singer
argues that most film melodramas do not depend on a dialectic of
pathos and action in order to produce moral legibility. Instead, a dis-
tinction can be made between pathetic melodramas – high on pathos
and low on action – and action melodramas – oriented to action but
almost devoid of pathos. Both forms strive for moral clarity; but the
former type tends to avoid moral polarization in favor of complexity or
‘moral antinomy’ (p. 54).

Recent work

Most recently, Agustin Zarzosa (2013) makes a valuable contribution

to theoretical definitions of the melodramatic mode. He questions the
usefulness, in particular, of Peter Brooks’s (1976) conception of melo-
drama and history (Zarzosa, 2013, p. 23). In so doing, Zarzosa reiterates
Gledhill’s (2007) question regarding the emergence of melodrama and
the relation of this emergence to specific histories and developing aes-
thetic forms:

[T]his historical conception (i.e. that of Brooks in The Melodramatic

Imagination) leaves unexplained the presence of melodramatic ele-
ments in works previous to the emergence of the melodramatic
genre, the appeal of melodrama in cultural contexts without any
parallel to the context in which melodrama first appeared, and the
survival itself of melodrama well beyond the historical context in
which it appeared. (Zarzosa, 2013, p. 23)

To the extent that the melodramatic mode should be conceived of as

a historical phenomenon, Zarzosa argues, it operates outside of history
(p. 24) – or, rather, it is ‘the terrain in which history takes place’ (p. 24).
This terrain, the melodramatic mode, argues Zarzosa, should be under-
stood as a ‘modulating system’ (p. 16) – a system that can only express a
social whole, or provide its perspective, via suffering (p. 16). This social
6 Michael Stewart

whole can expand and contract (p. 16), but it is never entirely transparent
or opaque (p. 14). Melodrama’s ‘modal essence’ (p. 14) is to redistribute
the visibility – and hence the legitimacy, by melodrama’s terms – of
suffering (p. 14). Zarzosa extends this argument to suggest that the
melodramatic mode has two ultimately incompatible registers of suffer-
ing: the voice of pain and pathetic speech (p. 15). Melodrama ‘operates
through the tension between these two modes of experience’ (p. 15).
Zarzosa’s definition of melodrama as a modulating system with its
focus on the axis of suffering is useful. How different it is from Christine
Gledhill’s (1987) argument, that melodrama only touches the social
and political at the points where the psychic is triggered, is debatable.
Indeed, the many values of Zarzosa’s study, along with the advances
made in others’ work and the similarities between Zarzosa’s ideas and
the ‘dominant theories of melodrama’ (Zarzosa, 2013, p. 38) against
which he sets them, threaten to be obscured by the length and force of
Zarzosa’s critique. One of the great values of Gledhill’s analysis is that
it theorizes melodrama as both a constitutive and disinterested terrain
of modernity with remarkable powers of accommodation and endur-
ance, and as an aesthetic and generic form with specific cultural and
ideological contents. A danger of Zarzosa’s Deleuze-inspired definition
of melodrama’s modal essence is that despite its emphasis on historical
specificity, specific historical questions remain unanswered.
It is in the analysis of specific films that the distinctiveness and value
of Zarzosa’s thesis is most evident. There isn’t space to look at these
essays in detail here. But brief reference to Zarzosa’s work on The Piano
will also lead us toward other recent and useful work on film melodrama.
Zarzosa’s (2010, 2013) essay on The Piano theorizes melodrama and
exchange via economic anthropology. At points it draws a line between
exchange, muteness in melodrama and kinship relations. Zarzosa revis-
its Juliet Mitchell’s (1975) argument regarding the endurance of the
exchange of women despite the apparent usurping of kinship structures
by commodity exchange in advanced societies (in Zarzosa, 2010, p. 404).
The logic of exchange endures, argues Mitchell, because it has been inter-
nalized by oedipal relations. Zarzosa modifies this argument to suggest
that exchange is crucial in giving women both value-in-themselves and
symbolic value in kinship relations, i.e. daughter, wife, sister, mother.
The inequality on which these relations are based, argues Zarzosa,
‘appears illegible or rather mute, that is, incapable of making itself heard
within the boundaries that kinship institutes’ (p. 404). The muteness of
Ada (Holly Hunter), in The Piano, ‘calls attention to the imbalance that
founds exchange’ (p. 405). Zarzosa’s primary interest in advancing this
 Introduction 7

argument is theorizing a new model for the analysis of melodrama via

exchange. Zarzosa does not theorize The Piano as a woman’s film, or as
a film that might open space for a reassessment of gendered or kinship
relations (though his theory, clearly, does not preclude these lines of
argument). These arguments and questions are more prominent in recent
work on queer melodrama.
If it’s true that melodrama is particularly accommodating of queer his-
tory and experience (Needham, 2010), then it’s also the case that queer
theory has most fully and productively colonized academic work on film
melodrama in recent years – joining with established feminist strands
and combining with work on trauma, memory and post-colonialism.
The journal that stands out in this respect is Camera Obscura. I’ll now
look briefly at three Camera Obscura essays (as well as a recent essay by
Gary Needham) – by Pidduck (2013), Doane (2004) and Chan (2008) –
which indicate some of the key developments in method and theory
in the study of film melodrama in recent times. As well as queer melo-
dramas, Julianne Pidduck (2013) refers to her film examples (The Hours
(2002) and Far From Heaven (2002)) as ‘thinking woman’s films’ (p. 55).
Pidduck’s essay, in part, is interested in the extent to which the films
‘present poetic and unexpected interrogations of kinship and intimacy’
(p. 39). Her answer is partly yes, but also that these queer male auteurist
melodramas exhibit a problematic fantasy of female suffering and nor-
mative domesticity (p. 56).
Pidduck’s work reflects significant changes to film family melodrama
in recent times. She refers to her films as a genre – family melodrama; as
part of a cycle – queer melodrama; and as having a particular genealogy –
imbricated in queer aesthetics, texts and reading formations, and fasci-
nated by the films of Sirk and Fassbinder (p. 40 ff). Sirk and Fassbinder’s
influence, then, endures, their work now being appropriated as much
by queer theory and cultural production as Brechtian neo-Marxism. At
stake for Pidduck is feminist and queer politics and challenges to the
continued dominance of white, middle-class, hetero-normative ideals of
family and suburban life. But she also wants to rethink genre’s relation
to time and history: applying Bakhtinian dialogics and Foucauldian
genealogy to queer melodrama, and assessing, for example, the way
The Hours incorporates temporal asynchronies and affects, mourning,
memory and ‘the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations
that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value to
us’ (Foucault, in Pidduck, 2013, p. 57).
Some of these ideas are shared by Gary Needham (2010) in his excel-
lent analysis of Brokeback Mountain as a pathetic melodrama. Melodrama,
8 Michael Stewart

argues Needham, ‘is a form that appears to be ideal in its potential to

explore and confer on the spectator an emotional and affecting experi-
ence that allows the painful history of queer life to be connected to the
present’ (pp. 83–84). Needham also reassesses the meaning and value
of pathos to queer melodrama and its audiences. Films like Brokeback
Mountain, he argues, question the entrenched and negative meanings
of pathos, which in certain instances and cultures extend to misogyny,
homophobia, and the high valuing of active masculinity. In the pathos
engendered by Brokeback Mountain, Needham argues, pleasure, pain,
sadness, helplessness and recognition are hard to disjoin:

Part of my own pleasure in melodrama … is the way the genre com-

pels one to let go and surrender to feelings of pathos … This, I would
argue, is one way in which melodrama could be seen as a pathetic
form of ‘feeling homosexual’ but in a way that also challenges the
stigmas attached to passivity and reception so often devalued and
debased as effeminate and sentimental. (Needham, 2010, p. 88)

These questions, these stigmas, have been pursued by Mary Ann Doane,
in her essay on the cinema of Todd Haynes (Doane, 2004) and else-
where (Doane, 1991). Like Pidduck (2013), Doane draws on Bakhtin
and theorizes Haynes’ films and the pathos they produce as dialogic.
Haynes’ films are part of specific image repertoires (Doane, 2004, p. 12).
They ‘inscribe the historicity of cinematic pathos’ (p. 11), and imbricate
fantasy and history (p. 15). Like Needham, Doane rethinks the meaning
and effectivity of pathos in queer melodrama. In this respect, Doane’s
essay both returns us to distanciation and irony – central to some 1970s
theories of film melodrama – and questions Zarzosa’s (2013) definition
of the melodramatic mode. Pathos, Doane notes, is closely linked to
suffering (p. 10), and typically is opposed to ethos (permanent or ideal)
and logos (speech or reason) – a binary upheld and unbridgeable in
Zarzosa’s (2013) theory of melodrama. Moreover, when we immerse
ourselves in the discourse of pathos ‘there is no distance’ (Bakhtin, in
Doane, 2004, p. 13).
However, Doane argues that Haynes uses pathos (in Far From Heaven)
without cynicism, in so doing taking ‘recourse to Sirkian strate-
gies of distanciation’ (p. 5). If combining pathos and distanciation
appears oxymoronic, suggests Doane, this is precisely the normality
that Haynes’ films reject. Pathos and distance are not only joined in
Haynes’ films, they are mutually sustaining (p. 14). This is achieved
in part by the ways these films give intense and excessive form to the
 Introduction 9

most deviant, illicit, contaminated aspects of pathos, emphasizing its

association with not only suffering but pathology: ‘Pathology opens up
the possibility of speaking suffering, an entanglement of the body and
the word … Like the pathos of distance evident in Haynes’ work, the
yoking together of the apparently incompatible pain and speech, body
and logos, seems to challenge the heavily entrenched opposition of
emotion and intellect’ (p. 14).
This particular expression of pathos and the pushing of it to the limits
of its deviance, Doane notes, results at times in Haynes’ films being
accused of dispassion and coldness (p. 17). The apparent coldness of
Haynes’ melodramas, however, is also explicable via the films’ cultural
moment. Jeffrey Sconce (2002), for example, argues that Safe is one of
a number of ‘cold (north American) melodramas’ (p. 350) that emerge
from a generation of filmmakers distrustful of the past and dismayed by
the present, who cultivate a blank style and dampen affect and focus on
the repressions, miscommunications and alienation of white, middle-
class suburban family life. According to Sconce, Haynes’ films evince
the ‘futility of pure politics or absolute morality’ (p. 368) in favor of a
transitional, ironic and nihilistic politics of disengagement. Whether
Haynes’ films are also definable as globalized art cinema (Kerr, 2010,
p. 39) melodramas is debatable. But they are part of a broad shift away
from traditional expressions of pathos and affect in family melodrama
that is evident across films of various national origins.

Late-modernity and globalization

Kenneth Chan’s (2008) recent essay, in addition to connecting with the

work on queer melodrama above, helps us to answer questions regarding
the applicability of Euro-American melodrama theory to international
texts. Like Pidduck (2013), Chan shows that the queer melodramas he
examines – Fleeing By Night and Lan Yu – are best understood as part of
dialogic or discursive histories – in this case, Chinese as well as queer
histories. Chan shows the long tradition of Chinese family melodrama
of which the films are a part, and also locates them within specific
Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong political contexts. He notes that the
films are the products of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers,
whose work is increasingly exposed to international, especially festival,
markets – to varying benefits and costs, and producing ambivalence on
the parts of critics and audiences.
Fleeing By Night and Lan Yu also exhibit familiar features of melo-
drama, by Euro-American standards. Lan Yu is an adaptation of Pretty
10 Michael Stewart

Woman; and Fleeing by Night uses spectacle and mise-en-scene to classical

melodramatic effect. Both films, though, rework the melodramatic
mode, and as such are late-modern, globalized family melodramas in
different and distinct ways:

Fleeing by Night is really a film about diaspora as both material reality

and existential metaphor; the tropes of migration and exile encap-
sulate not only the state of flight that Shaodong and Linchung are
subjected to because of their sexuality but also the idea of fleeing as
an ontological state of being. (Chan, 2008, pp. 148–149)

The film, Chan argues, highlights questions of home and fantasy, and
‘reconstitut(es) the notion of home for gay male identification’ (p. 151).
Unlike Fleeing by Night, Lan Yu resists melodramatic excess in favor of
restraint and partial erasure:

He (the film’s director Stanley Kwan) truncates the form to create

a semiminimalist text, which then frustrates audience expectations
of the melodramatic tradition. This … reemphasizes queerness not
through the spectacular excesses of traditional melodrama but by
maintaining a subdued quotidian quality in the representation of
gay subjectivities, practices, and lifestyles. (Chan, 2008, p. 156)

The value of Chan’s chapter is difficult to overestimate. Chan applies

traditional Euro-American theory to Chinese films, but does not risk
‘domesticating’ them (Kaplan, 2005, p. 9) This is partly because he
operates in the positive spirit of cross-fertilization endorsed by Kaplan.
It’s also, though, because the pitfalls of Euro-American domestication
aren’t on his map. Chan speaks from a number of overlapping per-
spectives, which means that the knowledges he applies (personal and
professional) include and go beyond the normal tools of Euro-American
analysis.
The films Chan examines, too, speak to various audiences and depend
on shared knowledge and experience – of hetero-normative and patri-
archal oppression, of Chinese history and culture. To be sure, Chan’s
concepts and questions of flight, migration, border crossing, exile and
home will be most acute and prominent in particular cultures and
national traditions of melodrama – where particular political and histori-
cal events, geo-political relations and historical traumas have resulted
in the lived consequences of and inescapable mediations on the tenu-
ousness of home, identity and the present. Chinese, Latin American and
 Introduction 11

Iranian history and film cultures come first to mind in this respect, but
the list and versions of melodrama extend well beyond this.
Alongside this, however, is globalization – which opens these ques-
tions and experiences to increasing numbers of countries and people,
including the ‘deracinated’ (Kerr, 2010, p. 49) directors of what Paul Kerr
calls ‘globalized art cinema’ (p. 39) – and the fact that melodrama is a
modern trans-cultural mode which by definition seeks to give a voice and
form to the suffering, silenced and exiled. These constituencies may not
have grown, but they are increasingly visible; and melodrama increas-
ingly uncovers and rewrites partial and hidden histories of suffering –
making, for example, Chan’s queer global public sphere (2008, p. 143)
a possibility.
Lan Yu’s semiminimalist, quotidian, cool/cold style is also increas-
ingly the mode of melodrama encountered by global audiences – and
we see versions of this mode in this volume in the films examined
by Dadar and Stewart, as well as Chan. It has emerged for various
inter-linked reasons too numerous to examine here, but which would
include: the re-organization of Hollywood in the 1990s and twenty-first
century and the rise of ‘indiewood’ (King, 2009); digital technology and
the growth of a TV producing and consuming generation which sees
little distinction between TV and cinema, and perhaps less distinction
between fictional and non-fictional forms; an increase in ‘post-classical’
(Thanouli, 2009) narratives and ‘intensified continuity’ (Bordwell,
2006); the rise of ‘globalized art cinema’ (Kerr, 2010); a renewal of
prestigious European cinema which privileges the visual over the oral
(Cousins, 2008).
Cold and understated family melodrama is also put to different uses
by contemporary filmmakers. As I’ve noted, Chan argues that Lan Yu
confounds melodramatic expectations in order to delineate queerness
more sharply. This is comparable to the way Brigitte Peucker (2007)
theorizes the ‘coldest’ (Peucker, 2007, p. 151, quoting Elfriede Jelinek)
modernist melodramas of Michael Haneke. Haneke’s films, Peucker
argues, ‘wrest their spectators from passivity by preventing the tears
that melodrama seeks to solicit’ (p. 156). If tears do flow, Peucker sug-
gests, they do not result from straightforward emotions or ‘mere sen-
timent’ (p. 158). Instead, they are ‘the products of affect deprived of
association’ (p. 158). Haneke achieves this, Peucker argues, via a specific
mix of forms that is distinctively European. Haneke’s ‘parody’ (p. 149)
of melodrama, especially in his bourgeois trilogy (p. 129), Peucker sug-
gests, both renews specific European traditions of melodrama (Diderot,
Lessing) and critiques them via aspects of European modernism
12 Michael Stewart

(Shoenberg, Adorno). In this respect, Peucker argues that Haneke’s films

at once engender emotion, cognition, affect and distance – reminding
us, for all their Europeanness, of Doane’s analysis of Haynes’ melodra-
mas. However, unlike Doane’s assessment of Haynes’ films, Peucker
does not consider Haneke’s films to be Brechtian in their effect. Instead,
his modernist melodramas ‘elicit a spectator who is provoked, feels
irritated, on the defensive, and in a situation of conflict, thus moving
considerably beyond Brecht’s intellectual provocation into the realm of
programmed emotion’. (p. 132).
Haneke’s modernist melodramas, then, push realism and affect (if
not pathos) into new realms of meaning and excess. Peucker notes that
Haneke’s films replay bourgeois drama’s narrative of nation as family
(p. 141); but also make reference to migration, globalized politics, and
broader national traumas. So, however much Haneke’s melodramas
are rooted in European traditions and the disconnectedness of the
European middle classes, they nonetheless also revisit the traumatic
histories and tenuous experiences of late-modern border crossers. Late-
modern filmmakers like Haneke are rewriting the terms of melodrama
and of history. The changes they articulate mean we have to rethink key
terms of analysis (pathos, affect, excess), as well as melodrama’s engage-
ment with history and politics. Theorists like Pidduck, Chan and Doane
show us how. Melodrama remains in many ways a circular, backward-
looking form. Moreover, Peter Brooks’s argument that melodrama fills
a post-sacred void and occults morality remains highly applicable to
many film melodramas.
However, the terrain on which melodramatic morality operates may
be broader and less sure – to the extent that melodrama is able now
to more fully complicate time, place and identity; and push morality
further toward a local and global ethics of living. These changes might
mean that melodrama may be hyperbolic, pathological, clinical, socio-
logical, poetic and human across films, in the same film, and even
perhaps during one inspired, ambiguous and intense ‘expression event’
(Kaplan, 2010, p. 290). They might mean that we expect the best
melodramas to dissect, inhabit and re-script the traumas, memories and
desires that define us. They might also mean that lost opportunities,
economic constraints and political disavowal are more disappointing
and frustrating than ever before – to dampen the weather a bit, and
remind ourselves both that there is nothing innate to melodrama’s
form, and that some family melodrama really does speak more directly,
powerfully and enduringly to its audiences. Audiences decide this and
so does time. It’s also judged and decided by film melodrama theorists;
 Introduction 13

and equally valuably – though thinner on the ground – by theorists of

television melodrama.

Television melodrama

The best-known application of melodrama to television is Ien Ang’s

(1985) study of Dallas and its Dutch women viewers. Watching Dallas
is a faithful application of Peter Brooks’s (1976) melodramatic thesis
to the US dynastic soap opera and its apparent modes of engagement
for a select audience. The study also extends Brooks’s ideas into what
Ang calls a tragic structure of feeling, recognizable not only to Dallas’s
viewers, argues Ang, but to women generally. Like the incomplete and
fragmented structure of Dallas, argues Ang, women’s lives under patri-
archy are perennially frustrating and dissatisfying; they identify with
‘the tragic and masochistic positions of Sue Ellen or Pamela as a form of
“oppression in ourselves”’ (Ang, 1985, p. 133).
This connects, in some ways, to Needham’s (2010) argument regard-
ing pathetic film melodrama. Ang’s argument shares more still with
Tania Modleski’s (1979) provocative and influential theory of women
and soap opera. As Gledhill (1992) notes, the similarities between Ang’s
and Modleski’s theses raise questions for scholars of melodrama. For
instance, while Ang emphasizes the melodramatic nature of soap opera’s
form, as well as (for women) it characteristic mode of engagement,
Modleski argues that there are key historical and structural differences
between melodrama and soap opera. Gledhill’s (1992) review of soap
opera and melodrama, once again, is extremely useful; she continues
her interest in melodrama’s (and, here, soap opera’s) relation to realism
and is also prescient regarding recent developments in television and
melodrama.
Gledhill (1992) notes that melodrama generally is absent from soap
opera theory, or is applied loosely. She suggests this may be understand-
able, in that in their early years, Anglo-American soap operas drew
mostly on domestic realism. Moreover, this close relation between
dialogue-driven soaps and female discursive forms has continued and
expanded in recent times due to the proliferation of popular media
aimed at women. However, Gledhill’s and others’ historicizations show
that melodrama, as a mixed form, equally has drawn on domestic real-
ism in specific instances – not least some of the successful Hollywood
women’s films of the 1930s and 1940s. So melodrama’s relation to
domestic realism, no less than classical realism, is symbiotic and sub-
ject to varying emphases and articulations depending on historical
14 Michael Stewart

and cultural circumstances. On US and UK television in the 1990s, for

example, soap operas were joined by a host of not-clearly-gendered and
not-quite-soap fiction which continued domestic realism’s articulation
of ‘realizable social programs in which the superior values of the domes-
tic sphere are extended to embrace society as a whole an bring about
male reformation’ (Gledhill, 1992, p. 111).
Unfortunately, few of these non-soap, non-female programs have
been studied from the vantage point of melodrama, which is one reason
why the work of television scholars in this collection is such a welcome
addition. Lynne Joyrich (1988) does apply melodrama to popular zeit-
geist US television drama thirtysomething, though her argument is more
broadly concerned with television. Contrary to Mulvey (1986) and
Feuer (1984), and following Thorburn (1987), Joyrich argues that US
television is a paradigmatically melodramatic form across the diversity
of its output or flow:

TV parallels melodrama in its form as well as content as it centers

on familial space, a situation fostered by the size of the screen and
its location in the home. Together with the low visual intensity of
the medium and the smaller budget of its productions, these factors
encourage television’s reliance on background music, the close-up,
confined interior, and intimate gesture rather than action – elements
that resonate with melodramatic conventions. ( Joyrich, 1988, p. 136)

Moreover, the triumph of late-modern therapeutic discourses – with

their emphases on selfhood, personality and post-sacred ethics – serves
to make Peter Brooks’s (1976) theory of melodrama increasingly appli-
cable to television, argues Joyrich. Joyrich also suggests that melo-
drama’s ‘radical ambiguity’ (p. 148) may be increased by TV serials’
never-ending form.
Joyrich’s characterization of television as melodrama’s paradigmatic
home seems both dated and enduringly accurate – just as UK and US
television continue to be highly intimate and domesticated, but are also
radically changed and frequently difficult to distinguish from cinema.
In her essay on melodrama and soap opera, Gledhill (1992) suggests
that soap operas’ move to prime-time, and their higher production
values and enhanced technology, along with greater evidence of soaps’
influence in masculine genres, have lent melodrama’s affective codes
new possibilities.
Gledhill also suggests that these changes may lead to a diminution
of national specificity in soap opera production. This may be the case
 Introduction 15

in certain instances. But I want to finish this brief section on television

and melodrama with reference to a very nationally specific soap opera,
and an essay whose praises I have sung elsewhere (Stewart, 1999). The
soap opera is Yearnings (1991), and the essay is Lisa Rofel’s (1995) ‘The
melodrama of national identity in post-Tiananmen China’. Yearnings,
suggests Rofel, constitutes a ‘historically specific use of the melodra-
matic form’ (p. 303). The soap was adapted from previously success-
ful soaps imported to China from Japan, Taiwan and Latin America,
and proved hugely successful and highly controversial with Chinese
audiences. Despite a long Chinese tradition of family melodrama
(as noted by Chan, 2008), Yearnings differed from US and UK soaps in
its focus on the domestic. That is, its focus on home and personal rela-
tions provided a radical departure from traditional Chinese dramas of
imperialism and landlord exploitation, and in so doing, Rofel argues,
became a site of imaginative possibility (p. 309). In keeping with other
scholars (for example, Dissanayake, 2005), though, Rofel notes the spe-
cific meanings of the personal in Chinese history and culture, which
has less to do with the unified subject of European thought, and is more
concerned with difficult shifts in marital, filial and romantic relations
in Chinese life.
However, Yearnings does exhibit anxieties about masculinity during
the period of its production, in keeping with various US serials. It also,
as Joyrich (1988) argues about thirtysomething, uses its serial form to
underscore the ambiguities and ambivalences wrought by key histori-
cal events – in particular, the move away from ‘speaking bitterness’
as a lived generic strategy of re-inventing the nation post-Cultural
Revolution, and a modification (along highly circumscribed feminine
and domesticated lines) of intellectuals as victim-heroes of the nation
(Rofel, 1995, p. 306). Rofel’s melodramatic analysis of Yearnings shares
much with that of Chan (2008). Yearnings should be understood as
a political allegory, ‘as composed of a history that is a landscape of
ruins’ (Rofel, 1995, p. 309). Here Rofel draws on Benjamin (1977).
And like Chan’s analysis of Fleeing By Night and Lan Yu, Rofel effec-
tively adapts Euro-American theory to a highly situated Chinese
melodrama.
Rofel’s primary interests are gender and nationhood, and she draws
on various post-structuralist feminist theorists (including Modleski,
1979), as well as Foucault (1978) and Volosinov (1973). The domestic
and the figure of woman in Yearnings exceed subversive critique or
progressive/regressive representation. The new self-sacrificing female
hero of the nation in the soap (Huifang) both gave form to Chinese
16 Michael Stewart

women’s desire for political status and embodied the ‘ideal womanhood
of Chinese masculine fantasies’ (p. 310). Moreover,

meanings that have circulated through post-Mao official discourses

were laced throughout the narrative. The deep ambivalence about
intellectuals, the use of gender in the creation of that which is called
‘personal life’, and the assertion of a personal sphere that is felt to exist
apart from the state have all been state projects. For one of the major
visions of the state about itself since the Cultural Revolution is its
claim to non-interference in that space that has come into existence as
‘the personal’. If people in China, then, did not recline in a realm out-
side the state as they viewed Yearnings, they none the less seized upon
the ambivalences within the story to read across the cultural economy
of state power … The radical ruptures in who counts as a national
hero and what narrative form represents these figures open up the
possibility of reading these texts as not only contextualized and reflec-
tive of a national space, but constitutive of that entity called China.
Yearnings produced a powerfully seductive knowledge of viewers’ lives
that led them, in part, to view themselves as the program portrayed
them. Thus, in making cultural sense of this television text, viewers
in China were also making sense of themselves. As with other forms
of discourse, it would be impossible to distinguish the way they spoke
about the program from the way the program ‘spoke’ through them.
(Rofel, 1995 pp. 314–315)

To oversimplify, and for the sake of brevity, if Gledhill (1992) maps out
some of the most useful ways to analyze soap opera via melodrama,
then Rofel applies more of these methods more effectively than any
other TV scholar. But, to my knowledge, she remains in a small minor-
ity, in that since the publication of her essay, few TV theorists have
applied melodrama in a sustained, discursive way to fictional texts.
This observation is given support by a similar one made by Jason
Jacobs (2003) in his short section on melodrama in his excellent study
of hospital dramas (p. 30). The work of TV scholars in this collection,
I’m pleased to say, helps to expand the ranks of this important and
growing minority.

This collection

This collection of chapters has a number of linked aims. Firstly, it

wants to show the enduring value of the established literature on film
 Introduction 17

and TV melodrama, some of which is referred to above. The limits in

some analyses and conceptions of melodrama – that it is a singularly
feminine, sentimental and domestic form, and realism’s poor relation –
remain evident despite the important and long-standing interven-
tions of theorists like Gledhill (1987), Neale (2000), Williams (1998)
and Mulvey (1977/8). The collection nonetheless aims to show how
melodrama is part of changing narrative and aesthetic forms and takes
them in specific directions. In this respect, the collection aims to show
both the distinctiveness of melodramatic expression in specific cultural
contexts and how melodrama adapts to and negotiates changed social
and political circumstances.
As I note above, the collection also seeks to address the relative
paucity of scholarship on television melodrama. Moreover, one of the
collection’s primary aims is to bring together work on contemporary
film and TV melodrama. In recent years, as I indicate above, some very
valuable work has been conducted on contemporary melodrama – that
is, films and TV programs produced during the last 25 years and defined
by theorists as melodrama. However, while, gladly, this work grows in
volume, it is dispersed across a variety of journals and books, some of
which (the book chapters) are part of projects whose primary focus is
not melodrama. The chapters that follow, then, address a relative gap in
the literature on contemporary film and television melodrama.
This collection has common themes, a number of which are evident in
the brief review above. The following chapters examine history, memory
and trauma; suffering and pathos; the figure of the woman, linked to
suffering, heroic victimhood and the nation; home, modernity and the
public sphere; realism, genre and mode. The collection shows that melo-
drama remains a ‘persistently nostalgic’ (Gledhill, 1987, p. 21) form, but
also, following Needham (2010), that it is capable of connecting painful
histories to the present in powerful and authentic ways. It is, as Bratton
et al. (1994) put it, a ‘form both to register change and to process change,
in particular mediating relations between a lost but problematic past and
the present’ (p. 3). Gailly, Artt and Chan, in particular, show melodrama’s
complex engagement with time, mourning and loss – how, following
Pidduck (2013), melodrama’s asynchronies and affects do indeed point to
the ‘faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to
exist and have value to us’ (Foucault, in Pidduck, 2013, p. 57), and how,
as Artt in this volume puts it, the past can be made utopian again – how
loss and mourning might be made ‘agentive’ (LeBlanc, 2006, p. 140).
In a number of the collection’s films and TV programs, history is a
process of reclamation or re-visioning. Nation and the figure of woman
18 Michael Stewart

remain central to this process, and the lines of gender, sexuality and
nationhood cross in predictable and unexpected ways. As I suggest of
Haneke’s films, above, a number of the textual examples are rewriting
the terms of melodrama and history, so that while narratives of nation
as family and woman as heroic victim endure, these figures – in keep-
ing with the ideas of Rofel (1995) and Zarzosa (2013) – are modified
and redistributed nonetheless. In this respect, the collection indicates
at points throughout (the chapters of Smit, Dadar and Stewart being
only the most obvious examples) that melodrama continues to be a
key cultural form for negotiating the experiences and contradictions of
modernity.
Melodrama, the following chapters show, does not only use contem-
porary realist strategies in order to appear modern, as Williams (1998)
puts it. It is better understood as a form of ‘vernacular modernism’
(Hansen, 1999, p. 64). In this respect, while in this collection melo-
drama remains quite clearly a restricted form of the social – touching
‘the socio-political only at that point where it triggers the psychic’
(Gledhill, 1987, p. 37) – it is nonetheless a constitutive part of changing
and emerging public spheres. This is shown in several of the collection’s
chapters. Chan’s analysis of Prince of Tears, for example, revisits some of
the questions he raises in his 2008 Camera Obscura essay. Chan identifies
a modified form of melodrama, which, as I note above, and in different
ways, is evident now across films produced in various cultures. However,
the review above shows that modified forms and melodrama’s engage-
ment with ‘naturalism … [and the] down to earth and highly realistic’
(Neale, 2000, p. 186) are not altogether new.
Neale (2000) and Gledhill (1987) show how important it is to recog-
nize melodrama as a historically and generically mixed form. This comes
through strongly in this collection, which understands melodrama as
a mode, genre and sub-genre. The chapters that follow don’t so much
engage with the question of whether melodrama is a genre. They are
more interested in how it might be theorized as a genre – and in this
respect they generally follow the leads provided by Doane (2004) and
Pidduck (2013). That is, they conceive of their texts as dialogic and as
being part of specific reading formations. The chapters also follow Doane
in keeping pathos and emotion at the center of their analysis, simulta-
neously avoiding what, following Williams (1998), I call above the fatal
splitting of thought and emotion. In this respect, the collection builds
on the foundations laid by theorists like Williams (1998) and Mulvey
(1977/8); but also reconsiders the forms and meanings of pathos in what
appear, frequently, to be morally hesitant and ambivalent melodramas.
 Introduction 19

Ben Singer’s (2001) moral antinomy increasingly is joined by mobility

and transience, as couples, families and nations are opened, broken and
partially re-configured. Brechtian efforts at negation combine with or are
usurped by witnessing and mediation as primary modes of engagement
with family and pathetic melodrama.

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 Introduction 21

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Part I
Television Melodrama
Section I
Time, Space and Seriality in
Contemporary Melodramatic
Television
2
Melodrama and the Classic
Television Serial
Richard Butt

This chapter is concerned with the operation of the melodramatic mode

within the classic television serial. It argues that the melodramatic
mode is central to the narrative organization and emotional effect of
a number of BBC adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens and
Elisabeth Gaskell broadcast between 1999 and 2008, and that melo-
drama is something those programs productively engage with rather
than something they occasionally lapse into or avoid. This challenges
the frequent categorization of the classic television serial as a homog-
enous group of texts lacking either the distinctiveness or artistic merit
of their literary sources. Rather, their reproduction of the melodramatic
mode distinguishes these television dramas from serialized adapta-
tions of other nineteenth-century authors, most notably Jane Austen
or Charlotte Brontë. This argument depends in part on the recogni-
tion that Dickens’ and Gaskell’s literary works actively engage with
the melodramatic mode, a recognition that has tended to be either
pejoratively reluctant or totally absent. The chapter is not concerned
with the process of adaptation per se, preferring to consider the dramas
as texts in their own right. Nonetheless, in its analysis of those dramas
it is indebted to those critics who have recognized the operation of
the melodramatic mode in Dickens’ and Gaskell’s works as a deliber-
ate strategy. In addition, it draws on theorists such as Brooks (1995),
Williams (1998) and Singer (2001) to analyze major sensation scenes
in each of the adaptations, in order to establish how the melodramatic
mode is both a significant narrative component of these programs, and
central to their overall purpose.
I am not arguing for the generic reclassification of these particular
adaptations as melodrama, as within the context of television production
and consumption they are most clearly constructed and recognized first
27
28 Richard Butt

and foremost as classical television serials. I am interested rather in how,

following Williams (1998), melodrama functions in the dramas as their
‘basic mode of storytelling’ (p. 51), and how the operation of that mode
enables them to dramatize the social injustices of mid-nineteenth-century
England, to generate an emotional response to those injustices, and to
articulate ‘moral legibility’ (pp. 51–2).
Much of what has been written on the classic television serial has
focused on its role in reconfiguring the literary canon, reshaping our
understanding of the past, and renegotiating the ideological frames of
its sources. Critics have also examined the place of the genre in the aes-
thetic development of television drama, and its role in the commercial
operation of the BBC in particular as a high value export commodity
for the international broadcasting market (cf. Cardwell, 2002; Butt,
2012). All four of the dramas under discussion here, Wives and Daughters
(1999), North and South (2004), Bleak House (2005) and Little Dorrit (2008)
either have been or could be considered within this critical framework:
they manifest the textual conventions of the genre, were critically well
received, and achieved significant domestic audience figures and over-
seas sales. But virtually none of the critical or academic attention they
attracted makes reference to melodrama. Indeed, when melodrama is
mentioned it is as something that has been carefully avoided, as the
quality of the dramas is partly measured, by both producers and critics,
in terms of their distance from the form. The blurb on the Bleak House
DVD box for instance reads: ‘Here is the murder mystery, the love story,
the comic genius and the tantalizing scandal of the novel but, stripped
of its sentimentality, we find ourselves swept along by a pulsating and
edgy drama’. Christine Geraghty (2012) similarly documents how the
show’s production team ‘were wary of slipping into melodrama’ (p. 30),
as melodrama was regarded as antithetical to the kind of realism the
team wanted to achieve.
The history of the pejorative reception of melodrama requires no
further rehearsal here, but it is significant for my argument that both
Dickens’ and Gaskell’s works were caught up in that discourse. Christine
Gledhill (1992) for instance notes how ‘in fiction it [melodrama] con-
stituted a fall from the seriousness and maturity of the realist novel,
relegating authors such as Dickens and Hardy to the second rank’
(p. 5). While Tore Rem (2002) argues that ‘although there are notable
examples of critics who have attempted to take these modes seriously in
Dickens, it is again an everyday pejorative usage which prevails’ (p. 18).
Harrison (2008), for instance, writing on the centrality of sympathy and
affect in Dickens’s work, states that ‘his portraits of poverty can appear
 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 29

to the modern eye – and even some contemporary ones – to be mired

in melodramatic conventions’ (p. 266). Melodrama is also regarded
by some critics as something that Gaskell occasionally ‘lapsed into’,
particularly in less well-known novels such as Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and
other shorter works. Raymond Williams (1958), who admired North
and South’s representation of the working conditions of the industrial
north, was critical of its melodramatic use of the ‘device of the legacy
which solved so many otherwise insoluble problems in the world of
the Victorian novel’ (p. 104). Patsy Stoneman (2006) regards this kind
of criticism as an ‘example of a mistaken definition producing its
own condemnation’ (p. 92), but this defense perpetuates the mistaken
conceptualization of social criticism and melodrama as mutually exclu-
sive categories.
Other critics have recognized Dickens’ and Gaskell’s debt to melo-
drama and the purpose to which they employed it. An early example
is Purton (1975), who states that ‘the influence of the contemporary
theatre on Dickens is usually seen as one of the great divides between
the early and late novels. Nicholas Nickleby particularly is soaked in
theatrical references and overly dramatic scenes’ (p. 22). However, he
argues ‘not only that Our Mutual Friend is as theatrical in its own way
as Nicholas Nickleby, but that the melodrama tradition was essential to
Dickens throughout his career’ (p. 22). Rem agrees, arguing that ‘the
distinction between the serious, artistic Dickens and the melodramatic
Dickens is false. Dickens perceived his subjects in theatrical space and
his melodrama is as serious as any other mode employed in his fic-
tion’ (p. 31). Sally Ledger (2007) regards his use of the mode as central
to both his ideological and professional aims: ‘On the one hand, the
emotional affects of his writings were designed to promote individual
charity as well as to plead on behalf of systemic social change; on the
other hand, his exploitation of the melodramatic mode played to the
widest popular audience so as to maximise the commercial success of
his writing projects’ (p. 3). Similarly, Thomas Recchio (2011) argues that
Gaskell’s ‘deployment of scenic figurations from melodrama’ is central
to her representation of the working class as more than just ‘an abstract,
economic, rather than social category’ (p. 290).
The position of this chapter in relation to the deployment of melo-
drama by these two authors is effectively summarized by Peter Brooks,
who argues that the view

that such novelists as Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, even Henry James

have more or less frequent lapses from ‘serious (social) realism’ into
30 Richard Butt

lurid romance, remains prevalent and blocks an understanding of

the very premises of all this literature. Melodrama is a necessary
mode of ethical and emotional conceptualization and dramatization
in these forms and for these writers, and only in direct, unembar-
rassed confrontation of the melodramatic element do they yield their
full ambition and meaning. (Brooks, 1995, p. 55)

With their narratives of family secrets, forbidden desire, lost wills

and honorable sacrifice, their casts of scheming lawyers, exploitative
industrialists, handsome surgeons and villainous Frenchman, and their
highly affective scenes of pathetic or virtuous suffering, Dickens’ and
Gaskell’s works have all the ingredients of late-eighteenth-century pop-
ular melodrama. But they put these melodramatic conventions to very
particular use, as a way of responding to, and making sense of the social
and moral realities of the nineteenth century. For Brooks (1995), it is
their dual engagement with the social realities of everyday experience,
and the moral dramas that underlie it, that defines them as ‘social melo-
dramatists’: writers who ‘refuse to allow that the world has been com-
pletely drained of transcendence; and they locate that transcendence
in the struggle of the children of light with the children of darkness, in
the play of ethical mind (p. 22). The rest of this chapter examines key
sensation scenes from four serialized adaptations of these two authors
to examine the extent to which the melodramatic mode is manifest in
these television dramas and the use to which it is put.

Bleak House (2005) and Little Dorrit (2008)

Bleak House (2005) manifests the clear moral polarization typical of

the melodrama to which Brooks, in the above quotation, refers, not
only in the conflicts that drive its multi-strand narrative, but also in its
casting, and that cast’s performance, underscored by clearly coded
make-up, costume and lighting. Against Charles Dance’s cool, calculated
performance as the lawyer Tulkinghorn, and Phil Davis’s maliciously
comic performance as the moneylender Smallweed, is ranged the gen-
erous John Jarndyce (Denis Lawson), the kind hearted surgeon Allan
Woodcourt (Richard Harrington), and, at the centre of the drama, its
heroine and moral compass Esther Summerson (Anna Maxwell Martin).
Their ethical orientation is most starkly signaled by their treatment
of society’s innocent victims: Ada Clare (Carey Mulligan) one of the
young, naïve wards of Chancery in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce;
Miss Flite (Pauline Collins), the comi-tragic elderly eccentric obsessed
 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 31

with the case; and Jo, the homeless crossing sweeper whose encounters
with the narratives’ principles bring its different strands together. In
Episode Eleven Jo, who has contracted pneumonia in both lungs, dies,
surrounded by these other ‘children of the light’, to use Brooks’s termi-
nology. His status as an innocent victim – a homeless child caught up in
Tulkinghorn’s amoral pursuit of Lady Dedlock’s secret – and the ensuing
pathos of the scene, is underscored by the dialogue, with its repeated
references to him in his last few minutes of screen time as a ‘poor little
thing’, ‘poor wee scrap’, ‘poor young patient’, ‘poor lad’ and ‘poor boy’.
His own virtuous status is manifest in his final desperate desire to see
Esther, who he believes he has made seriously ill, to tell her he meant
her no harm. When Woodcourt tells Jo that Esther is on her way, the
emotional stakes of the scene are explicitly driven up by the surgeon’s
comment ‘Pray God he lives that long, there’s very little I can do for
him’, a classic melodramatic nick-of-time device. When Jo dies, he does
so repeating, after Esther, the first two lines of The Lord’s Prayer. The
audience’s appropriate emotional response is cued by that of the actors,
particularly the tears shed by Carey Mulligan’s weeping Ada, reinforced
by the violin soundtrack. Pathos is central to melodrama’s operation,
and the drama effectively restages this melodramatic set piece of inno-
cence lost. The narrative clearly attributes responsibility for Jo’s death
to Tulkinghorn. Earlier in the scene Jo, frightened the lawyer may be
on his way, says of meeting him that ‘it’s when all my troubles started’;
Tulkinghorn’s pursuit of Jo as a key witness is partly responsible for
the boy’s contraction of pneumonia, and his demise is cross cut with
shots of the lawyer plotting in his chambers. The underlying logic of
Brooks’s moral occult is made explicit by what happens in the drama
after Jo dies. Jarndyce moves away from his body and across to the win-
dow where, gazing out across London, he intones: ‘Dead. Dead, your
Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, your worships. Dead,
right reverends of every order and degree. Dead and dying all around
us every day,’ Jo’s death metonymically standing in for all the capital’s
innocent victims. A few minutes of screen time later, Tulkinghorn is
shot dead by an unidentified (at this point) assailant and the episode
ends, satisfying our desire that Jo’s death be ethically avenged and in
doing so restoring moral order to the drama.
Esther Summerson is both the drama’s heroine and one of its princi-
pal victims. Separated from her mother at birth she has been raised by
her spiteful godmother, and lives under the burden of a perceived guilt.
This is revealed in a memory flashback at the start of the serial in which
her godmother spits at her: ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace and
32 Richard Butt

you hers’. Unbeknownst to Esther, her mother is Lady Dedlock (Gillian

Anderson), her godmother’s sister. Esther and Lady Dedlock meet only
twice, and at the second meeting Lady Dedlock, having now learned the
truth of Esther’s identity, reveals her relationship to Esther but immedi-
ately forbids their ever meeting again. The pathos of the scene is famil-
iar from maternal melodramas, which centre ‘on the lost connection
to the mother’ (Williams, p. 48). In this pivotal sensation scene, Esther
undergoes a double reversal of fortune: having found her mother, she
immediately loses her again. As Brooks argues, such ‘peripeties and coup
de theatre so characteristic of melodrama frequently turn on the act of
nomination or its equivalent, for the moment in which moral iden-
tity is established is most often one of dramatic intensity or reversal’
(Brooks, 1995, p. 39). The psychic rupture triggered by the revelation of
her true identity and the interdiction that mother and daughter never
meet again is foreshadowed by Lady Dedlock’s ‘startling’ of Esther on
the two occasions she meets her, Esther’s physiological reaction to her
mother’s sudden arrival in the screen signifying the interior shock that
will follow their reunion.
Each of the serials under discussion features such peripeteia, most
typically as reversals of financial fortune. In Little Dorrit, for instance,
Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam exchange their respective places in
the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and high society, with a similar reversal
marking the end of North and South, when the now bankrupt mill owner
accepts the financial backing of the now wealthy clergyman’s daugh-
ter. In each drama, wills and inheritance play the role of a providence
whose hand is either delayed or unexpected. Delay is typically the prod-
uct of uncertain or contested identity, Esther’s initial failure to identify
correctly either her mother or her aunt is just one of ‘a whole series of
mistaken female identities in the novel’ (Ledger, 2007, p. 11) that are
reproduced in the adaptation. For Rem, following Brooks, narratives of
lost and recovered identities are another of the ways in which melo-
drama ‘attempts a recovery of order and meaning’ (Rem, 2002, p. 128)
that, in the secularized nineteenth century, appeared to have been lost.
A similarly highly emotive scene, this time between father and
daughter, takes place in Episode Seven of the BBC adaptation of Little
Dorrit (2008). William Dorrit (Tom Courtenay) has been imprisoned in
the Marshalsea debtor’s prison for many years and expects his daughter
Amy (Claire Foy) to accept the turnkey’s son’s marriage proposal as it
will secure Mr Dorrit’s favorable future treatment. Amy, who has grown
up in the prison but is free to leave during the day, is attracted to Arthur
Clennam (Matthew Macfadyen), the son of the seamstress she works
 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 33

for, and turns down John Chivery’s proposal. John is devastated, and,
once his father learns of his rejection, his behavior toward Mr Dorrit
deteriorates. Disturbed by this, and moving directly to his room where
Amy has prepared his supper, Mr Dorrit explains to Amy that something
has angered Chivery, adding that, ‘in such a life as mine I am dependent
on the man for something or other. Good heavens, where I to lose the
support of Chivery or his brother officers I might well starve to death
here’. The camera pushes in on Amy who, well aware of the cause of
the change, becomes increasingly distressed as her father, rather than
directly confront her, descends into self-pity: ‘What does it matter if
such a blighted life as mine comes to an end? What am I worth to
anyone?’ With tears in her eyes, Amy tries to calm him down but he
moves away from her across the room his speech and actions becoming
increasingly hysterical:

William Dorrit: Yet, I have some respect here. I’m not quite trod-
den down. Go and ask who is the chief person in
this place. They’ll tell you it is William Dorrit.
Amy Dorrit [quietly]: I know Father.
William Dorrit: Go and ask who is never trifled with. They’ll tell
you it is William Dorrit
Amy Dorrit: I know Father.
William Dorrit: Go and ask what funeral here will make more talk,
yes, and perhaps more GRIEF [gestures with both
arms as if addressing a large crowd] than any that
has ever gone out at that gate [breaking down and
clutching his side] it is William Dorrit’s. William
Dorrit’s. William Dorrit’s [collapses onto a chair
and buries face in his hands].
Amy Dorrit: I know Father. I know. I know.

This scene dramatizes what Brooks, Williams and Rem all regard as
central to the melodramatic mode, ‘the moment of ethical evidence’
in which the virtue and moral integrity of the hero victim is tested
in extremis (Rem, p. 28). Amy, the frustrated victim of her father’s impris-
onment, and the heroic figure whose thankless task it is to hold her
family together, has her virtue dramatized here by her refusal to fight
back against what the audience understand to be the manifest injustice
of her treatment by her father. As Williams argues, ‘the victim-hero of
melodrama gains an empathy that is equated with moral virtue through
suffering’, moreover, ‘the key function of victimization is to orchestrate
34 Richard Butt

the moral legibility crucial to the mode’ (Williams, p. 65). As with the
death of Jo in Bleak House, this legibility is reinforced by the scene’s
mise-en-scene. Amy sits still in her chair, her pale features emphasized
by side lighting, while Mr Dorrit becomes more distressed, his gestures
more expressive and his speech increasingly loud, its rhetoric punctu-
ated by Amy’s quiet repetition of the phrase ‘I know Father’; full expres-
sivity on one side, the repression of expression on the other. As Brooks
(1995) argues, in scenes such as this characters ‘dramatize through
their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of
their relationship. They assume primary psychic roles, father, mother,
child, and express basic psychic conditions’ (p. 4). Amy’s simple ‘I know
Father’ metonymically represents the moral truth of the drama, that
her identity is defined and determined by her position as her father’s
daughter, her own desire subjugated by the patriarchal logic of the
prison system and the wider society that it reflects. Given melodrama’s
moral polarization, it might be assumed that with Amy so clearly
constructed as the victim, Mr Dorrit, as her persecutor, must be the vil-
lain. But Mr Dorrit himself is a pathetic figure, lacking the intellectual
capacity or emotional honesty to recognize his own delusions of gran-
deur as the ‘Father of the Marshelsea’ for what they are. We see father
and daughter, as Elsaesser (1992) argues of melodrama’s victims more
generally, ‘helplessly struggling inside their emotional prisons with no
hope of realising to what degree they are the victims of their society’
(Elsaesser, 1992, p. 66). Amy is the victim of her father’s tyranny, but her
father is a victim of and cipher for the patriarchal tyranny of the insti-
tution in which he has been imprisoned, and the society whose logic
it reproduces. As Elsaesser argues of some film melodramas, the serial
convincingly presents all the characters as victims in some manner
or other: ‘The critique – the questions of “evil”, of responsibility – is firmly
placed on a social and existential level, away from the arbitrary and
finally obtuse logic of private motives and individualised psychology’
(Elsaesser, 1992, p. 64). A further layer of meaning is produced for those
amongst the drama’s viewers who recognize that what is being drama-
tized is also Dickens’ own situation, as his father too had been imprisoned
in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, an awareness that doubles the affective
impact of the scene.

Wives and Daughters (1999) and North and South (2004)

A similar dramatization of the sublimation of a daughter’s desire, but

one in which the consequent emotional frustration is expressed rather
 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 35

than repressed, occurs half way through Episode One of the BBC’s
adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1999). This
particular television serial might appear as something of an outlier
in relation to the others under discussion. Whereas North and South
is commonly classed alongside Dickens’ Hard Times as an ‘industrial
novel’, directly engaging, as we shall see, with the social conditions of
the manufacturing classes, Wives and Daughters could be viewed as a
provincial Bildungsroman, sharing more in common with the works of
Jane Austen than Charles Dickens. However, both novel and adapta-
tion feature familiar melodramatic tropes, including ‘a secret marriage,
clandestine meetings, and a villainous suitor (Mr Preston) who exerts a
sinister hold over his prey’ (Foster, 2002. p 166). Like the adaptations
of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Wives and Daughters’ main narrative is
centered on a young woman and her struggle to assert her individual
autonomy in the face of social pressure from all those around her to
conform and comply. As such Wives and Daughters is another instance
of melodrama’s interest in ‘the material conditions of women’s lives’
(Gledhill, 2007, p. 324) and ‘the contradictions within which women’s
lives are constructed’ (p. 325), specifically, in this instance, as they apply
to the reproduction of female subjectivity within the bourgeois family.
The main narrative begins when widowed Mr Gibson (Bill Paterson),
a village doctor, sends his daughter, Molly ( Justine Waddell) away
when he becomes aware of the intentions of one of his apprentices to
court her. She is sent to live with the Hamleys of Hamley Hall, a gen-
try family of ‘old stock’ whose fortunes are in slow decline. In Molly’s
absence, Mr Gibson becomes engaged to Mrs Kirkpatrick, primarily so
that Molly will have a stepmother to protect her from unwanted male
attention, and school her in the ‘appropriate’ feminine arts. When her
father rides to Hamley Hall to tell her of his engagement he finds her
asleep on the sun dappled garden patio, lying across two chairs. We
look down at her sleeping form from his point of view, at her bare arms
and tight curls piled up on her head. Her long flowery frock, while
relatively simple in style for the period, particularly in comparison to
that of her stepmother, Mrs Kirkpatrick, nonetheless features the same
ballooning sleeves and pulled in waist of a fashion that deliberately
infantilized women. The whole mise-en-scene works to represent her
as both vulnerable and childlike, in topoi that are, as Brooks argues,
‘remarkably prevalent’ in melodrama, ‘the enclosed garden, the space
of innocence, surrounded by walls’ (Brooks, 1995, p. 29). This space,
Williams (1998) observes, is typically where melodrama begins and
where it ‘wants to end’: ‘the most classic forms of the mode are often
36 Richard Butt

suffused with nostalgia for rural and maternal origins that are forever
lost yet – hope against hope – refound, re-stablished, or, if permanently
lost, sorrowfully lamented’ (Williams, p. 65). Indeed, the period and
location in which the drama is set is the time and place of Gaskell’s own
childhood. Having established this narrative space of innocence, the
moment of peripeteia is set up. Mr Gibson, bending on one knee takes
his daughter’s hand and wakes her. When he stands, holding his hat in
front of him looking slightly agitated, she remarks ‘Do you know Papa
I don’t think you’re looking well’. Although he replies, ‘that must be all
your fancy, Goosey. I am well. In fact I’m uncommonly well’, when he
sits next to her she insists: ‘What is it? Is it something bad?’ to which,
after some prevarication, he replies:

Mr Gibson: Well, my love, I think you have felt, as I have, the difficulty
of your situation. Of a girl growing up and you have felt
the lack, as I have, of...
Molly: [interrupting] You’re going to be married again.
Mr Gibson: Yes [beat]. To Mrs Kirkpatrick.

As Mr Gibson continues, Molly begins shaking her head slightly, the

lights picking out the tears in her eyes. She withdraws her hands from
her father’s, stands up and walks away from him. Looking back down at
him, her face set, she exclaims: ‘So that’s why I was sent away – so that
all this could be quietly arranged in my absence.’ The camera cuts to
Mr Gibson, who doesn’t reply, but looks at her, his expression changing
from agitation to anger. He picks up his hat, stands up and walks off as
Molly glares after him. The camera remains on Molly, her head framed
by the arch of one of Hamley Hall’s windows, as she begins to shake and
closes her eyes, then we cut to her running through large hedge arches
to the woods where she sits down on a stone bench, lays her head on
her arms and sobs audibly, her body shaking.
As in Little Dorrit, what is partly at stake in this confrontation between
father and daughter is the denial of female autonomy in the exchange
of women within the kinship system. At stake in this scene is Molly’s
realization of the extent to which her father’s apparent paternal concern
has narrowly constrained her subjectivity. As Foster (2002) argues, ‘For
all his paternal care, Mr Gibson, like Farmer Holman, wants to keep his
daughter in a state of childhood. His pet name for her, ‘Goosey’, signi-
fies a mode of infantilization’ (p 170). What differentiates Molly from
Little Dorrit’s Amy is her immediate and explicit articulation of this
denial, and her un-feminine refusal to repress her emotional response.
 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 37

As Brooks argues, ‘Melodrama refuses repression or, rather, repeatedly

strives towards moments where repression is broken through, to the
physical and verbal staging of the essential: moments where repressed
content returns as recognition, of the deepest relations of life’ (Brooks,
1994, p. 19). In a patriarchal system, the socialization of women is pri-
marily concerned with the production of wives from daughters; Molly’s
acting out represents a recognition that her situation is not simply the
result of having a fallible father, but rather the consequence of the posi-
tioning of women within this social formation. Molly’s weapon against
this formation, as it will be for North and South’s Margaret Hale, is her
voice, her speaking out, her straight talking truth telling.
Raymond Williams (1958) described Gaskell’s North and South (1855) as
part of ‘the response to industrialism’, one of the mid-nineteenth-century
‘industrial novels’, with which he groups her earlier Mary Barton (1848)
and Dickens’s Hard Times (p. 99). Both the Gaskell industrial novels are
set in the manufacturing cities of the north of England, and engage
directly with the conditions in which the laboring classes worked and
lived. Both novels employ the melodramatic mode in articulating those
conditions in a manner designed to produce an effect on their middle
class readers. As such, they demonstrate melodrama’s capacity for enga-
ging with social reality and potentially stimulating political reform.
The desire for such articulation is explicit in Dickens’s letter to Gaskell
inviting her to contribute to Household Words:

My Dear Mrs. Gaskell, You may perhaps have seen an announcement

in the papers of my intention to start a new cheap weekly journal of
general literature. […] As I do honestly know that there is no living
English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the
authoress of ‘Mary Barton’ (a book that most profoundly affected
and impressed me), I venture to ask you whether you can give me
any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for
the projected pages.

[…] every paper […] published […] will seem to express the general
mind and purpose of the journal, which is the raising up of those
that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition.
(Dickens, 1894, pp. 274–5)

Gaskell accepted the invitation, and North and South was serialized in the
journal, drawing, like Mary Barton, on the author’s first hand encounters
with ‘those that are down’. Raymond Williams argues that ‘few persons
felt more deeply than Elizabeth Gaskell the sufferings of the industrial
38 Richard Butt

poor. As a minister’s wife in Manchester, she actually saw this […] her
response to the suffering is deep and genuine’ (p. 102). In North and
South ‘she takes up here her actual position, as a sympathetic observer.
Margaret Hale, with the feelings and upbringing of the daughter of a
Southern clergyman, moves with her father to industrial Lancashire,
and we follow her reactions, her observations, and her attempts to
do what good she can. […] this is largely Mrs Gaskell’s own situation’
(p. 103). In particular, Gaskell used the eight-month weaver’s strike and
lock out that took place in Preston in 1853–4 as source material for the
story of the striking Milton mill workers, along with details of the physi-
cal ailments of the laborers with whom she came into contact, particu-
larly the lung disease that commonly afflicted those who worked in the
cotton mills. The novel and its 2004 adaptation demonstrate the way in
which melodrama is grounded in realism. Both iterations of North and
South deploy the melodramatic mode to dramatize the conditions and
injustices of industrial life in the north of England, and the economic
conflicts and ideological mindsets it understands to be their cause.
As in Wives and Daughters, the television serial’s narrative begins in
an archetypically idyllic village, in this instance Helstone in the South
of England. Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe), the nineteen-year-old
daughter of a Church of England pastor, is forced to leave this pastoral
idyll (which she describes as ‘the best place on earth’) and move to
Milton (Manchester/Preston) in Darkshire (the Black Country) when her
father leaves the Church over a matter of conscience. Milton is domi-
nated by the cotton industry, which is in the middle of an industrial
dispute between masters and workers. Shocked by the poverty and dis-
ease of the workers and their families, Margaret is sympathetic to their
demands, and comes into conflict with the proprietor of Marlborough
Mills, John Thornton (Richard Armitage), who is being tutored by her
father. Margaret finds herself at Thornton’s mill when a mob of striking
workers arrives at the gates, furious that Thornton has brought in Irish
workers to replace them. When they break down the gates to search of
the Irish, Margaret demands: ‘Mr Thornton go down this instance and
face them like a man. Speak to them as if they were human beings.
They’re driven mad with hunger. Their children are starving. They
don’t know what they’re doing. Go and save your innocent Irishmen.’
Thornton goes down onto the steps and stands in front of the mob, his
arms folded across his chest. Seeing one of the workers (Boucher) pick
up a small rock, Margaret runs out to stand in front of him, declaiming:
‘In God’s name stop! Think of what you’re doing! He is only one man
and you are many! Go home. The soldiers are coming. Go in peace. You
 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 39

shall have an answer to your complaints.’ The mob go quiet as Margaret

speaks, her white dress, picked out by non-diegetic lights, stands out
against the brown and grey stonework of the mill, Thornton’s black
suit and the dull clothes of the mob. But when Thornton confirms he
will not ‘send the Irish home’, the mob erupts again. Thornton tries to
manhandle Margaret, who has her arms on his shoulders, back inside,
Boucher throws his rock, it hits her, and she falls to the floor.
Margaret’s public intervention is misinterpreted by Thornton’s family
and servants as confirmation of the private desire they suspect she holds
for Thornton. As Catherine Gallagher argues, ‘she acts out of an abstract
sense of justice. She is consequently deeply mortified when observers
misinterpret her action as an expression of love for Mr Thornton’ ( p. 172).
The impact of her exemplary ethical action, the melodramatic stag-
ing of her virtue reinforced by the polarized lighting and color of the
mise-en-scene, ‘is blocked by the moral blindness of those who wit-
ness it. The private–public disjunction is so automatically accepted by
Mrs. Thornton and her servants that they are incapable of associating
a generous act with an impersonal motive’ (Gallagher, 1985, p. 173).
Nonetheless, her impulsive act to save Thornton, who subsequently
unsuccessfully proposes to her, is likely to be understood by the audi-
ence as the outward manifestation of her repressed, and narratively
inevitable, desire for him, and this is evident in the erotic tension that
develops in each subsequent scene in which they meet. At the pub-
lic level, Margaret has a positive ethical influence on Thornton and,
against the advice of the other mill owners, he determines to improve
industrial relations at his mill until the impact of both the strike and
fluctuations in the cotton market make him bankrupt.
The series concludes with the kind of implausible, ‘outrageous coin-
cidence’ that Singer argues is typical of melodrama’s non-classical nar-
rative structure ( p. 46). Margaret, who has unexpectedly been left a
large sum of money, and her lawyer (and admirer) Henry, are delayed
at Midland Central as their train waits for a northbound train to pass.
Stepping outside the carriage Margaret sees the northbound train arrive,
with Thornton looking pensively out of one of the carriage windows.
As his carriage stops opposite where she is standing she walks across
to meet him as he steps out. He gives her a flower he recently picked
from the hedgerow near her former Helstone home and, sitting down
together at the platform, she explains her business proposition to him.
She insists that ‘it is only a business matter. You’d not be obliged to
me in any way’, only to bring his hands up to her lips to kiss them. As we
have observed, Raymond Williams was critical of Gaskell’s use of the
40 Richard Butt

‘device of the legacy which solved so many otherwise insoluble problems

in the world of the Victorian novel’ (p. 104). But following Brooks we
might argue that coincidence is not, in melodrama, an implausible narra-
tive convenience, but rather the revelation of a hidden order behind the
apparent chaos of the modern world. Narrative coincidences that reveal
an underlying moral order are common in the Dickens’ adaptations too
and, as in North and South, when they occur at the end of the narrative it
is to reward virtue and punish evil. Brooks argues that:

It is, of course, in the logic of melodramatic acting out that the body
itself must pay the stakes of the drama: the body of the villain is pub-
licly branded with its identity, exposed in a formal judgement scene,
then, if not put to death in hand-to-hand combat, driven from the
stage and banished from human society. (Brooks, 1994, p. 19)

Little Dorrit’s unequivocal villain is the apparently motiveless murderer

Rigaud Blandois. Juliet John (2001) describes Rigaud as ‘flagrantly
inauthentic, a cannibalistic performer who personifies the horror of
a hollow universe’ (p. 186). His presence in the drama can thus be
understood as a figurative manifestation of the fear that the modern
world has lost all meaning. Following Brooks, Rigaud thus requires the
kind of spectacular, unequivocal expulsion from the narrative that the
adaptation provides. Returning to Mrs Clennam’s house to blackmail
her over Arthur Clennam’s true parentage, Rigaud remains in the house
when, providentially, the entire dilapidated edifice collapses into a pile
of rubble, crushing him to death as he is trapped inside.
This chapter has considered the extent to which these four classic
television serials deploy the melodramatic mode, examining its role in
their narrative organization and production of affect. It argues that this
mode is evident in their clear moral polarization, their reliance on coin-
cidence for narrative progression and conclusion, and most notably in
their ‘sensation scenes’ which dramatize the ethical virtue of their central
female characters to highly emotive effect. Rather than the nostalgic
flight from reality for which the classic television serial often stands
accused, the chapter also argues that the adaptations’ deployment of
melodrama enables them to reproduce the social critique of their lite-
rary sources and to dramatize their authors’ call for reform. The opera-
tion of this mode in the classic television serial is not, I suggest, unique
to these four programs, and one might equally consider other serialized
adaptations of the period such as Our Mutual Friend (1998), Wuthering
Heights (2009) and Great Expectations (2011). Such consideration enables
 Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial 41

a more considered delineation of the different forms of classic television

serial, as well as further recognition of the melodramatic mode’s central
place in contemporary television drama.

References
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Gledhill, Christine (eds) Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen (London BFI).
Brooks, P. (1995) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Butt, R. (2012) ‘British Television and the Classic Novel Adaptation’ in D. Cartmell
(ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell).
Cardwell, S. (2002) Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel
(Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Dickens, C. (1894) The Writings of Charles Dickens G. Ashville Pierce (ed.) Vol XXX
(Life, Letters & Speeches of Charles Dickens) (New York: Houghton Muffin).
Elsaesser, T. (1992) ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family
Melodrama’ in C. Gledhill, Christine (ed.) Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in
Melodrama and the Women’s Film (London: BFI).
Foster, S. (2002) Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life. Gordonsville (VA, USA: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Gallagher, C. (1985) The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse
and Narrative Form 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Geraghty, C. (2012) Bleak House (London: BFI).
Gledhill, C (1992) ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’ in C. Gledhill (ed.)
Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film (London:
BFI).
Gledhill, C. (2007) ‘Melodrama: Problems of Definition’ in P. Cook (ed.) The
Cinema Book (London: BFI).
Harrison, M. (2008) ‘The Paradox of Fiction and the Ethics of Empathy:
Reconceiving Dickens’s Realism’, Narrative 16(3): 256–278.
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Oxford University Press).
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19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 4, www.19.bbk.ac.uk.
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Press).
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Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press).
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1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus).
3
Nature, Culture, Space:
The Melodramatic Topographies
of Lark Rise to Candleford
Douglas McNaughton

Introduction

British television drama has seldom been considered for its aesthetics.
Politicized critics have traditionally focused on television’s potential
as an Ideological State Apparatus, which could challenge or reinforce
conservative hegemonies within a public service broadcasting frame-
work (Buscombe, 2000). The academy studied ‘the politics of dramatic
forms and the potentially radical effects of television drama on a mass
audience’ (Bignell, Lacey and Macmurraugh-Kavanagh, 2000, p.82). The
resulting critical focus on the writer as auteur (Brandt, 1981; Pike, 1982;
Brandt, 1993) led to a consequent evasion of television drama’s visual
properties or discourses around television’s ‘theatricality’ (Gardner and
Wyver, 1983). Television is often characterized as ‘nothing but talk-
ing heads … facial close-ups and speech are singularly important to it’
(Seiter, 1992, p. 43). In this formula, sound predominates over image,
in part as a compensation for the low-resolution image and small-screen
size, and it is deployed to attract the attention of the distracted domes-
tic viewer (Ellis, 1992; Morley, 1992). Critical approaches based in the
primacy of the word have assumed that television is radio with pic-
tures (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991; Morley and Brunsdon, 1999; Sexton,
2006). This functionalist approach, with its focus on communication
value over aesthetic, means that television’s ‘audio-visual pleasures are
often deemed to be limited by size of screen and poor-quality image’
(Geraghty, 2003, p. 33).
These reductive positions are inadequately nuanced to cover the hete-
rogenous development of so complex and diverse a medium, and they
often mistake generic conventions for medium essentialisms. Essentialist
accounts have been critiqued (Corner, 1995; Hill and McLoone, 1996),

42
 Nature, Culture, Space 43

and later scholars have argued that the visual complexity of television
is converging with that of other media (Caldwell, 1995; Caughie, 2000).
Recent critical work pays more attention to the aesthetics of televi-
sion drama (Cardwell, 2002; Jacobs, 2003; Cooke, 2005; Nelson, 1997,
2007) and offers a redemptive reading of multi-camera studio drama
(Wheatley, 2005a), while an emergent concern with experimental televi-
sion has redrawn the orthodox trajectory of television’s stylistic devel-
opment (Mulvey and Sexton, 2007). However, it remains the case that
‘Visual style in television drama has been paid relatively little attention,
compared to the body of work on style in film’ (Cooke, 2005, p. 82),
and the study of television aesthetics remains relatively undeveloped
(Geraghty, 2003; Cardwell, 2006).
Greater attention to the aesthetics of television drama and its treatment
of issues of space and place, might therefore inform understandings of
how the poetics of television drama actually function. Kozloff (1992)
argues that cinema films place more emphasis on their settings than does
television: where cinematic place is ‘a character it its own right’, by con-
trast, ‘television narratives commonly underutilize setting’ (p.75). Given
that Laura Mulvey has called melodrama ‘the genre of mise-en-scène, site
of emotions that cannot be expressed in so many words’ (cited in Gibbs,
2002, p. 67), this chapter examines how contemporary television might
utilize its increasingly ‘cinematic’ mode of ‘high-end’ production (Nelson,
2007) to negotiate the connection between production space and narra-
tive place in television melodrama. Bignell and Lacey have commented
on ways in which ‘imagined geographical and political spaces, where the
ideological and aesthetic representations of space combine in particular
programmes and programme categories, intersect to shape the meanings
of programmes’ (2005, p. 4). Using the BBC series Lark Rise to Candleford
(2008–2011), this chapter examines how the visual qualities of setting are
mobilized to construct a mise-en-scene of melodramatic excess. It ana-
lyzes one key episode along the discursive axes of inside/outside, male/
female, public/private and nature/culture to examine its construction of
Bakhtinian chronotopes, dramatic sites charged with narrative and the-
matic meaning. Bakhtin gave the name ‘chronotope’ (literally ‘time space’)
to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that
are artistically expressed in literature’ (Holquist, 2004, p. 84). Chronotopes
are ‘organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel.
The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and
untied … the chronotope makes narrative events concrete’ (p. 250).
For Bakhtin, the chronotope is a key element of the geographically and
historically determined world of the fiction, from which narrative and
44 Douglas McNaughton

character emerge. The chronotope has been deployed by Pidduck (1998,

2004) to analyze the narrative spaces of costume drama, and her work will
be returned to later in the chapter.

Lark Rise to Candleford: ‘a vanished corner

of rural England’

Lark Rise to Candleford (2008–2011) is a BBC series based on Flora

Thompson’s memoirs of her Oxfordshire childhood, set in the late
nineteenth century. The official BBC website calls it ‘a love letter to
a vanished corner of rural England and a heart-warming drama series
teeming with wit, wisdom and romance’ (BBC, 2009). This chapter
looks at gendering of spaces and the binary opposition between exteri-
ors and interiors within one episode (Series 2, Episode 10, TX 1-3-09),
from which all quotations come.
Lark Rise to Candleford is ‘an account of a social journey, a rite of pas-
sage between the ancient, oral, self-sufficient culture of the traditional
countryside and the new world of the commuter village, the rural
suburb’ (Mabey, 2008). Thompson’s books provide an account of tra-
ditional rural culture, its populace still working the land and ruled by
observance of the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun, at the
point of its transformation by modernity. The tension between stasis
and change is one to which the series returns again and again. As an
example, the series narrative centers on Dorcas Lane ( Julia Sawalha)
who runs Candleford Post Office, and her assistant Laura Timmins
(Olivia Hallinan), who introduces and concludes each episode in
voice-over, delivered in the past tense and by an older actress (Sarah
Lancashire). The central competing tensions of tradition and progress,
stasis and change, are constantly referenced in dialogue and in Laura’s
voice-overs: ‘That year’s [harvest] show brought other changes too …
and for some of us younger ones it was time to move on too … to let go
of the past’ (my emphasis).
The series’ focus on class and progress as expressed through space is
revealed in the title – Lark Rise being a small hamlet inhabited by relatively
impoverished farm laborers, and Candleford being the nearby, upwardly
mobile market town, topographically representing rural/tradition, and
urban/progress respectively. Caughie (2000) has noted the way in which
television drama connects its characters to larger themes and narratives;
characters are points of condensation for the social and historical; con-
nected to the social by the space in which they circulate ( p. 135). The title
Lark Rise to Candleford illustrates class tensions between the two towns,
 Nature, Culture, Space 45

and the urge to better themselves expressed by some Lark Rise inhabitants
as they follow Victorian ideals of improvement and industry. In this way,
the transition from pre-modernity to modernity is mapped onto geogra-
phy, reified through place names, and personalized through narratives of
social aspiration and class structures. Moreover, the title evokes geographic
and temporal movement: ‘the whole pulse of rural life seems distilled into
those few words, from the sky-bound bird at daybreak to the last light of
a cottage evening’ (Mabey, 2008). Lark Rise to Candleford explores the ten-
sions between tradition and progress in nineteenth-century British society,
and embodies them in the activities of the characters and events in the
community. Moreover, the two towns are ‘geo-ideological’ (Billingham,
2000), in that space and location convey a dialectical matrix of identity,
narrative and ideology. Lark Rise represents tradition, nature and country
ways; characters live in simply furnished cottages, working the land, keep-
ing bees and dispensing bucolic wisdom. Candleford represents progress,
business and modernity: its Post Office and modern telegraphic apparatus
connote communications; the large hotel suggests visitors from outside;
the dress shop stocks the latest fashions from the city and many of the
inhabitants are smartly dressed. Significantly, the main studio sets – for the
Post Office and the hotel – depict Candleford interiors, while much of Lark
Rise’s narratives take place outdoors on location; these dyadic chronotopes
embodying a rural/urban split across the exterior/interior axis, implying a
social evolution from nature to culture.
Lark Rise to Candleford was explicitly designed to have a long life.
Originally intended by BBC Drama Production as a conventional
drama serial, the books were ultimately developed as a long-running
drama series. The press pack quotes BBC Head of Series and Serials Kate
Harwood: ‘the books are crammed so full of stories that you can just
shake the pages and another one falls out’ (BBC, 2008). But Harwood
notes the particular challenges of adapting Thompson’s stories for televi-
sion: ‘they are anecdotal and personal and therefore need a dramatist’s
imagination and narrative skills to take them from a beautifully evoked
idea and to turn them into a fully fledged, hour-long drama’ (BBC,
2008). This possibility of an ongoing series constructed around person-
alized narratives structuring a loosely narrativized source text that can
be mined indefinitely for period detail is confirmed by the production
team: ‘Thompson’s books are teeming with character and incident’, said
executive producer Sue Hogg, ‘so we hope to go back again for further
series’ (BBC, 2008). Thompson’s vignettes are dramatized through the
tropes of melodrama to provide a serial narrative utilizing familiar con-
ventions of television costume drama.
46 Douglas McNaughton

In addition to the fertility of the literary source, the physical spaces

of the locations are emphasized in production discourses as a way of
extending the series’ run. A collection of farm buildings near Bristol was
converted into exterior sets for both the rural hamlet Lark Rise and the
neighboring market town Candleford Green. According to Hogg, the
decision to construct an open-air set came at an early stage of planning
locations: ‘It means not only can we maintain the same high quality, it
is also very good value because we can go back and re-use them’ (cited in
Thorpe, 2008). Exteriors were constructed at Neston and Box near Bath,
while 16 sets in a warehouse near Yate formed the interiors. According
to Director of Photography Balazs Bolygo, ‘It’s probably the biggest set
build that the BBC’s done for 20–30 years’ (cited in Sony, 2009).
Uses of space constitute a key element in the official discourses sur-
rounding Lark Rise to Candleford. Although some interiors are shot in
studio sets, the BBC press release emphasizes the creation of the diegetic
spaces of Lark Rise and Candleford by adapting existing buildings on
location. Writer Bill Gallagher says:

Having written the two communities we then had to find them.

Not easy, given the demands of a long-running series and its heavy
schedule. Two pieces of brilliance gave us the answer.

The first came from Nicolas Brown, director of BBC Drama Production.
He simply said: ‘Why don’t we build them?’ The second came with
designer Malcolm Thornton (Our Mutual Friend ). From a few farm
buildings, Malcolm has created the most extraordinary world. Two
worlds! (BBC, 2008)

Gallagher emphasizes the production team’s understanding of Lark Rise

and Candleford as socially, spatially and aesthetically differentiated.
Indeed the sets are seen as active protagonists in the drama, imbued
with meaning, as Gallagher suggests:

The Post Office itself is an important character in the make-up of the

show: full of life, reaching out into the wider world, and bringing to
it the foibles and frailties of the locals, not just of the town but of the
surrounding countryside. (BBC, 2008)

Set dressings and action props too have a part to play in the narrative.
Plots are often driven by the arrival of letters or telegrams: produc-
tion designer Martin Boddison states that ‘the telegraph machine
is probably the focal point of the Post Office’ (BBC, 2009). The sets
 Nature, Culture, Space 47

and locations are not just backdrops to the action, but inform and
influence character and narrative, while the encroaching technologies
of modernity – clocks, trains, and communication – symbolizing social
change, regularly threaten to irrupt into the diegetic space and disrupt
the narrative.
Geraghty (2008) suggests that the values of art cinema have migrated
into television costume drama, specifically the visual pleasures of herit-
age settings, theatrical actors and strong women, and these tropes of
melodrama are all in evidence in Lark Rise to Candleford. Performances
include broad comedy ‘turns’ by some of the Lark Rise actors (such as
Dawn French) contrasting with the mannered Victorian primness of
characters such as Miss Pearl or Dorcas, and the female-centeredness
of the narrative is emphasized by Sarah Lancashire’s framing narration
and by the centrality of Laura and Dorcas as the progressive and modern
occupants of the Post Office. The ‘Backstage Video’ on the BBC’s website
emphasizes viewing pleasures such as ‘Fabulous frocks … beautiful back-
drops and dashing leading men’ and explores the series’ carefully recon-
structed nineteenth-century interiors and exteriors, elaborate costumes
and hairpieces – noting that, for example, actress Claudie Blakley’s wig
cost £2000 (BBC, 2009). Its ‘high-end’ production values (Nelson, 2007)
give the series a rich mise-en-scene, with golden sunlight bathing most
exterior scenes, and the insertion of certain highly composed shots. The
importance of design and visual texture in the show is signaled further
by the availability of the series in High Definition.

Painterly spaces: the mise-en-scene of

television melodrama

Its large cast means that Lark Rise to Candleford uses ‘flexi-narrative’
(Nelson, 1997), enabling threads of story to run across the series while
individual narratives come to the fore in particular episodes. The epi-
sode under examination here (2:10) guest stars Jason Watkins as local
policeman, ‘Cabbage’ Patterson, with whom Miss Pearl (Matilda Ziegler),
spinster owner of Candleford’s dress shop and a regular character,
begins a flirtation. Patterson’s wife is annually confined to bed with an
unspecified illness, which may be depression brought on by Patterson’s
obsession with his garden. Laura’s voiceover tells us ‘the annual show
brought about another yearly episode: Mrs Patterson’s deathbed’ (my
emphasis). ‘Cabbage’ Patterson’s nickname connects him with the
produce of his garden and links him with the rhythms of nature.
By contrast, we are told that Mrs Patterson ‘goes into hibernation’
48 Douglas McNaughton

due to her ‘seasonal sickness’. As this episode is about harvest time,

with autumn leaves, crop gathering and harvest festivals much in
evidence, the language emphasizes the cyclic nature of the narrative,
and the stable, predictable repetitions of country life; this ‘seasonal’
aspect of her illness links Mrs Patterson with nature, but her abjection
suggests that her relationship with the natural is problematic, unlike
those of the other inhabitants.
The opening, pre-titles scene of the episode introduces Constable
Patterson, identified in Laura’s voiceover, working in his garden. The
camera tracks left to right over the garden, lingering over and empha-
sizing the saturated, hyper-real colors of the vegetables with which
Patterson hopes to win the harvest festival competition. The second
shot shows his wife in the kitchen, turning toward the camera from
the dresser, which is festooned with her husband’s blue ribbons from
previous harvest festivals. The camera pulls focus from the ribbons to
her face to highlight her anguished expression. Without dialogue, this
single shot combines space, performance, mise-en-scene and visual
rhetoric to convey the character’s resentment of her husband’s garden,
and the intrusion of signs of his gardening success into the conven-
tionally female domain of the kitchen; the aesthetics of the domestic
(Nowell-Smith, 1977) demonstrating the suppressed hysteria beneath
the surface of the entrapped wife’s subjection.
The episode’s plot is initiated by Mrs Patterson commanding her
husband to remarry when she dies. The framing of the shot in the
gloomy sickroom – Mrs Patterson lying in bed with her head frame
right, silhouetted in chiaroscuro by light from an artfully placed candle,
her husband standing frame left against the window with his back to
the camera, the crumpled scarlet bedclothes – is very similar in com-
position to the archetypal Victorian deathbed scene, such as a popular
photograph by Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away (1858), which
shows the death of a young woman from tuberculosis ( Jalland, 1996).
Such carefully composed shots are a form of tableau vivant, offering a
painterly television mise-en-scene borrowing framing, composition and
lighting from earlier cultural forms. The claustrophobic composition of
the ‘deathbed painting’ shot displaces the implied suppressed hysteria
(Elsaesser, 1991) of Mrs Patterson’s abjection onto the visual excess of
the oppressive sickroom.
This painterly quality is acknowledged by cast and crew alike as key to
the program’s appeal. In the press pack, actor John Dagleish comments
‘it looks like an oil painting […] a living, breathing painting’ (BBC, 2008),
 Nature, Culture, Space 49

while cinematographer Balazs Bolygo describes the way in which the

lighting plan of the show was based on Victorian art:

Paintings from the period show that rural cottages in England in

that period were very dark and people worked where the light was
available – in windows and doorways. I wanted to give the series a
real flavour and texture of 1890s rural England so I lit the sets mainly
through the windows with only one to two lamps on set. (cited in
Sony, 2009)

Bolygo also discusses the way in which HD cameras are increasingly able
to cope with the softer imagery demanded by costume drama, which
until recently would have been shot exclusively on film. He also indi-
cates that he was aware of the need to differentiate the two ‘worlds’ of
Lark Rise and Candleford:

The hamlet of Lark Rise was characterised by a soft lighting scheme

with reflected light bounced from big sources, contrasting with
the richer Candleford which was lit brighter and harder. ‘I wanted
there to be a big visual difference between the two’, says Bolygo.
(cited in Sony, 2009)

While critical orthodoxies around television suggest that its image is

‘more likely to be functional than beautiful’ (Lury, 2005, p. 43), these
discourses suggest that, on every level, the production team is aware of
the aesthetics of the series, and the need to create two differentiated
but compatible worlds. The thematic tradition/progress binary is subli-
mated into the mise-en-scene of the series’ dramatic topography.
The episode is further structured around a gendered inside/outside
binary, which relates to public and private space. Duncan (1996) has
argued that space is ordered around a series of gendered dualisms,
which operate to legitimate oppression and control on the basis of
gender. ‘The public/private dichotomy (both the political and spatial
dimensions) is frequently employed to construct, control, discipline,
confine, exclude and suppress gender and sexual difference preserv-
ing traditional patriarchal and heterosexist power structures’ (p. 128).
With Mrs Patterson confined to her sickroom, Constable Patterson’s
interaction with the regular characters begins when Laura rides past
on her bicycle, disturbing him from collecting horse manure from the
road. Rowe (1995) has described the ‘unruly woman’, transgressing
50 Douglas McNaughton

masculine hegemony through rebellious behavior that inverts the

social hierarchy. Women on bicycles represent a disruptive element that
is an ongoing trope of Lark Rise to Candleford series two. Not only are
they outdoors and unrestrained but they offend the ‘natural’ order
and male sensibilities by using new technology (which frequently runs
away from them). In the book Candleford Green, bicycling females rep-
resent a key step in the overturning of the patriarchal order. ‘The knell
of the selfish, much-waited-upon, old-fashioned father of the family
was sounded by the bicycle bell’ (Thompson, 2008, p. 478). Speed and
time–space compression are also consequences of modernity (Harvey,
1990); bicycles liberate women from spatial and temporal restrictions
as well as social ones, defying time and space by putting what had
been a day’s journey on foot behind one in a couple of hours (Harvey,
1990). Thus public space, formerly controlled by men, is increasingly
compressed and feminized through its colonization and manipulation
by women. The television serial personalizes this through Patterson’s
outrage at Laura’s antics on her ‘dandy horse’; ‘You’re a public hazard’.
As a woman outdoors, moving more quickly than Patterson through
public space, the flâneuse Laura – literally, a ‘fast’ woman despite her
character’s demureness – is out of place and transgressive.
Patterson is distracted from Laura by screams emanating from Miss
Pearl’s dress shop; a public, but interior, space that is clearly femi-
nine: decorated with crimson drapes and pink striped wallpapers that
parallel the rich fabrics of the identical outfits worn by Pearl and
her sister Ruby. The visual excess of costume and set contribute to a
mise-en-scene of melodramatic emotion, suggesting a repressed pas-
sion under the sisters’ Victorian primness. The shop’s harvest deco-
rations have been attracting mice; bringing outside indoors proves
problematic. ‘Hazard of the harvest season’, says Miss Pearl, ‘next year
we will decorate with wax comestibles’. Mary Douglas (1966) argues
that cultures require clearly delineated boundaries to remain stable,
and she demonstrates that the impurity generated by boundary cross-
ings violates social and cultural proprieties. Matter out of place disrupts
symbolic boundaries, and here it is the trespass of nature into culture
that is problematic. It is the incursion of nature, in the metonymic
form of mice, into the cultured feminine space of the dress shop – and
Miss Pearl’s dispatching of them with a poker – that sets up the initial
narrative disruption, bringing Patterson into the shop for his first
encounter with Miss Pearl. Patterson bringing horse manure on his
police boots into the feminine space of the dress shop imposes mascu-
linity and the patriarchal authority of the law into the feminine space,
 Nature, Culture, Space 51

and this intrusion of nature into culture also initiates the transgressive
flirtation between the two characters. For Douglas (1966), dirt is matter
out of place, its ontological impurity violating social conventions and
cultural categories. Again, permeable boundaries between inside and
outside offend the proper order and threaten the social and narrative
equilibrium.
Patterson’s relationship with Miss Pearl quickly develops into
acknowledged reciprocal admiration but their assignations need to
be secret. Patterson suggests a walk through a local copse of trees,
which offers escape both from the public interiors of the dress shop
and the public exteriors of Candleford, and thus the prying eyes of
neighbors. Victor Turner (1988) suggests that liminality through ritual
journeys offers the possibility of social change, and the copse offers a
chronotope of transformation and potential. Paradoxically, Pearl and
Patterson’s flirtation is consummated in the public but natural spaces
of woods: a liminal space that is public yet offers privacy. Away from
the clearly delineated public and private spaces of Candleford, nature
has a liberating effect on Pearl, who says ‘I do love this time of year,
everything’s so … ripe’. Pidduck (1998) notes the way in which the
country walk offers women in costume drama escape from the con-
straints of social propriety and the romantic rush of physical peril and
rescue as plot points rather than real danger (p. 392), and Pearl, now
dressed in maroon to code her as a potential scarlet woman, manufac-
tures such a moment. When an observer happens by she dives into
the undergrowth to avoid the ‘vicious tongues’ of Candleford. When
Patterson rescues her from the undergrowth, it is her close contact with
nature that permits their physical contact; he extracts her from the
bushes, and brushes a leaf from her cheek. She is so carried away by the
physical contact and her immersion in nature that she embraces him
and they kiss passionately. The camera cuts back twice, from medium
shot to long shot to very long shot, as if to give them privacy whilst still
allowing the audience to look at them. In landscape painting, the pic-
turesque Ideal Landscape is composed of receding background planes, a
centre of light, and a coulisse of foliage or other natural features framing
the edges of the composition (Clarke, 1979; Harper and Rayner, 2010).
Pearl and Patterson are framed here in a painterly composition with a
highly expressive melodramatic aesthetic, the saturated colors of the
copse displacing their passion into the mise-en-scene and signifying
the release of repressed emotions. ‘High-end’ television aesthetics are
mobilized to represent Bakhtin’s chronotope of the idyll, but the idyll
is transient; it cannot last.
52 Douglas McNaughton

’I don’t know. I think nature’s rather growing on me’

(Miss Pearl )

On her return to the shop, Pearl is visibly disheveled and smudged, and
her performance implies post-coital relaxation: she explains ‘I slipped by
a bramble bush’. Her sister Ruby comments ‘You and nature have never
really seen eye to eye, have you. Really can’t think why you wanted to
go for a walk in it.’ Entering into the natural space of the copse not only
disrupts social norms but also destabilizes Ruby’s understanding of her
sibling’s very identity. In addition, the line offers an ironic counterpoint
to Pearl’s earlier rejection of real fruit for wax decorations. Another meto-
nym of nature is brought into the shop by Patterson when he brings
a cat to deal with the mice. Ruby protests ‘I don’t really like cats …’
but the newly ‘natured’ Pearl asks her ‘Do you like mice?’ Cats may be
animals intruding into the shop but at least, unlike mice, they can be
domesticated (as can gardens). As Patterson hands over the cat, Pearl
allows his fingers to touch hers; the presence of this natural element in
the shop allows a signal that the affair may develop. In a subsequent
scene, Ruby is breakfasting in the hotel because of the cat’s presence at
home. The emphasis on the need to maintain divisions between nature
and culture is underlined by Dorcas’ tale of a cat that lives in the forge;
Ruby snaps ‘Yes, in the forge. Not the house; not the shop; not on the
kitchen table, at breakfast, and I’m sure it has fleas.’ Even domesticated
animals should stay in their place: again, the breakdown of boundaries
between natural and cultural space is problematic, highlighting the rup-
tures caused by strains on the episode’s structural tensions.
In fact, it is not the cat, but another animal Pearl is seeing that
breakfast time: Constable Patterson is in the shop. He suggests that
he will be visiting the copse today and asks her ‘Might you be taking
a walk out that way again?’ The very suggestion of entering natural,
undomesticated space acts as code for another illicit assignation, open-
ing the characters to the possibility of impropriety. Pearl picks up the
metaphor and replies ‘it is a pleasant walk’, the walk functioning here as
metaphor for escape, desire and sexual pleasure. If country walks offer
Pidduck’s heroines physical and metaphorical liberation, and an oppor-
tunity to express a desire for romance, marriage, and social mobility,
the obverse is represented by the figure of the woman at the window,
who signifies feminine constraint and longing. Windows represent a
Bakhtinian threshold, a chronotope of crisis or break, demarcating pub-
lic and private space and the limits of female social mobility (Pidduck,
2004). The woman at the window may ‘condense a gendered “structure of
 Nature, Culture, Space 53

feeling” … a generic spatiotemporal economy of physical and sexual

constraint’ (Pidduck, 1998, p. 382). As Pearl and Patterson embark on
their final assignation, Miss Pearl walks up the main street of Candleford
and is joined wordlessly by Patterson. As they walk out of frame, the
camera tilts up to Mrs Patterson’s window and shows a curtain twitch.
A cut to the interior shows that Mrs Patterson is out of bed, though still
in her nightdress. The next shot is another interior, Dorcas at her window
also watching the couple walking up the street, doubling Mrs Patterson
at her window. Ostensibly the central character who knows everything
that goes on, Dorcas is powerless to act; she sees everything from the
post office, the hub of communication, but is trapped by the Post
Office’s physical space, by her duties there, and by social propriety.
Several succeeding intercuts between Dorcas and Mrs Patterson under-
line their linked status as disempowered women looking out of windows
and highlight the gendered topography of social forces that align interi-
ors with social constraint and exteriors with freedom.
Wheatley (2005b) recalls Mary Ann Doane’s suggestion that the win-
dow informs the social and symbolic positioning of the woman, as it is
a threshold between inside and outside, ‘feminine’ family space and the
‘masculine’ space of production. As discussed, the first view of Patterson
showed him in his garden, but he is first seen indoors when standing at
the window of his wife’s sickroom. Patterson can move between inside
and outside, but his bedridden wife cannot. Moreover, Mrs Patterson
and Dorcas are positioned within constraining intradiegetic frames,
trapped behind windows, but the camera is trapped alongside them.
Their faces are never seen from outside, and thus the viewer is posi-
tioned alongside the powerless woman onlooker. The alignment of the
trapped women and the audience with the camera’s gaze is clear. ‘One
could perhaps extend this symbolic use of the window to embrace a
wider metaphor relating to the television screen, in that it has also to be
seen as a “window to the world” within the domestic viewing context’
(Wheatley, 2005b, p. 159). In this episode, every shot of someone look-
ing out of a window shows them indoors looking out; they are never
viewed from outside. Viewers know no more than do the other charac-
ters once Patterson and Pearl escape to the copse. The two characters
disappear from regulated, public space and are unknown. Mrs Patterson
and Dorcas are positioned alongside the viewer: in possession of knowl-
edge but unable to influence the outcome. Due to the arrangement
of the sets and the camera framings chosen, the audience never sees
through the windows. The audience watches characters watching other
characters through windows, but never sees through those windows,
54 Douglas McNaughton

suggesting that the boundary between inside and outside, although

soft, is ultimately impermeable, as the episode’s resolution suggests.
The episode is about being seen in public (the woods, the street)
and how disastrous that would be for a woman. ‘Reputation for a
woman is a precarious thing’ as Pearl says, but there is no suggestion
that Patterson will be ruined. Wolff (1985) notes that the literature
of modernity mainly accounts for the experiences of men, ignoring
the concomitant separation of public and private spheres from the
mid nineteenth century, and the increasing segregation of the sexes
around that separation. ‘The public sphere, then, despite the pres-
ence of some women in certain contained areas of it, was a masculine
domain. And insofar as the experience of “the modern” occurred
mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily men’s experience’ (p.37).
Patterson is no Baudelairian flâneur, but his status – both as a man and
as a policeman – gives him the authority to move between public and
private spaces. The classic plot of Gothic fiction has been characterized
as depicting a young wife, trapped in a forbidding home by her new
husband while the ghost of the first wife hovers over events (some-
times corporeally, as the ‘madwoman in the attic’). Wheatley (2005b)
notes the way in which viewers of Gothic fiction piece together clues
as to the central enigma of the drama in the same way as does the
heroine, with her restricted view of events. Not only do Mrs Patterson
and Dorcas have incomplete knowledge of events, but so does the
audience. Mrs Patterson’s sickbed and her disconnection from public
life align her with the madwoman in the attic of Gothic melodrama,
the abject monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993). However she can also be
positioned as the Gothic heroine, trapped in the home with incom-
plete knowledge of her husband’s activities; both the abject first wife
and the disempowered second wife of Gothic fiction.
Immediately following the shots of Dorcas and Mrs Patterson at
their respective windows, the next scene shows time has passed as
Mrs Patterson is once again in bed, with lamps lit, and the window
shows darkness outside. Patterson returns and his wife asks ‘Where you
been?’ ‘Just the garden’ he replies evasively. The audience does not see
what passes between Pearl and Patterson, but the elapsing of several
hours for their absence gives at least the ambiguous suggestion that
the affair has been consummated. The missing hours, which take place
in the liminal period between daylight and evening, in the transition
between light and dark, open up a conceptual temporal space within
the episode analogous to the geographical space of the copse, where the
possibility exists for liberation, transgression and fulfillment.
 Nature, Culture, Space 55

Mrs Patterson’s discovery of the assignation leads to her rallying and

leaving the private and abjectly feminized space of her sickbed. Her
recovery is signaled by her presence in the garden; another liminal
space in that it is public but is also private, which can be entered by
anyone, but is her husband’s; crucially, it is a site where nature is
domesticated, disciplined and subjected to culture. Laura, as post office
delivery girl (and liberated woman) is empowered to enter the garden
where she finds Mrs Patterson, who describes herself as a ‘sad old shell
that curls up into a ball because she can’t bear the thought of another
year gone by with nothing changed’. Laura’s freedom of movement is
contrasted with Mrs Patterson’s physical and social immobility. The
frustrations of the character of Mrs Patterson – who does not exist
in the books – embody the central dynamic of the series, the tension
between tradition and progress, underlined by her presence in the gar-
den, a place of growth and changing seasons. The emancipated Laura
says ‘You’re not a sad old shell’ and suggests ‘I’ll go to the harvest show
if you will.’ It is the empowering support of a New Woman that gives
Mrs Patterson the confidence to go out into public life again, as well
as her reconnection with the natural, outdoors world. ‘I used to love
this garden’, she says, the buzz of a bee on the soundtrack connoting
fertility and emphasizing nature’s hand in her recovery and return to
public life.
The Pearl/Patterson affair is concluded with a symbolic reversal.
Patterson’s wooing of Pearl has been effected by his bringing garden
produce into the shop for the two sisters. Pearl makes the produce into
soup for Mrs Patterson. The end of the affair is publicly marked by
Mrs Patterson’s incursion into the dress shop to return the soup can,
when she says ‘The soup was delicious. Done me a power of good. I’ve
just come to return what’s yours. And I’m trusting you’ll be doing the
same for me.’ In narrative terms Patterson’s wife feels doubly neglected,
first because of Patterson’s devotion to his garden, then because of his
devotion to Pearl. But the product of his garden can be read in symbolic
terms as connoting love and desire. Patterson gives his garden produce
to Pearl and not to his wife; it is returned to the wife by Pearl in a much
modified form; her ingesting of Patterson’s garden produce induces
Mrs Patterson’s recovery; finally the return of the empty soup can sig-
nals to Pearl that the affair is over. As Pearl takes the can, Mrs Patterson
holds on to the handle for a moment, mirroring the earlier moment
when Patterson handing over the cat signaled a development in his
affair with Pearl. This moment of touch, by contrast, signals a reversal in
the affair. Later, Mrs Patterson tells her husband ‘Let’s do some work in the
56 Douglas McNaughton

garden.’ If husband and wife can work together in the garden – a space
both natural and cultural, which reconciles both male and female – then
equilibrium is restored through the restoration of domestic order and
the resolution of the social contradiction of the boundary crossings in
the illicit affair, which disrupted the social and emotional stasis of the
narrative. The physical and emotional ‘matter out of place’ has been
cleared up, and the symbolic order restored in the classic conservative
ending of domestic melodrama.

Summary of structuring topographies

Iris Kleinecke (2006) has examined the gendering of period space in

recent television drama, noting that ‘Domestic spaces and the home bear
gender connotations, as do the pleasures of costume drama’ (p. 160) and
concluding that space in two adaptations of The Forsyte Saga (BBC, 1968/
ITV, 2002) can be divided along gender lines as follows:

Female Private spaces (bedrooms, bathrooms)

Male Architectural (i.e. not domestic/furnished spaces)
Neutral Semi-public spaces (i.e. public rooms in domestic spaces such as
drawing rooms of grand houses).

She argues that the gendering of these represented spaces reflects

the ideological shifts taking place in television drama, giving greater
emphasis to female and personalized narratives:

These gender connotations are further underlined by the gendered

nature of the move away from the patriarchal versions of grand
History towards histories that are lived and experienced, and the
drive towards the discovery of alternative truths, which very often
focuses on female subjectivities. (Kleinecke, 2006, p.160)

Similarly, Nelson (2008) notes a tendency in recent costume drama to

favor an aesthetic of heritage spectacle and narratives of ‘[p]ersonal
relationships in close-ups of domestic situations … to the detriment of
the broader scope of higher ideals’ (p. 50). This gendered repositioning,
alongside the increasing aesthetic complexity available to television
production, opens up a space for exploration of the tropes of melo-
drama in contemporary ‘high-end’ television drama.
 Nature, Culture, Space 57

Thus, building on Kleinecke, this paper argues that Lark Rise to

Candleford complexly extends the gendering of its spaces across both
public and private spaces:

Private/Female/Cultural/Interior Kitchens, bedrooms

Public/Female/Cultural/Interior Dress shop, post office
Public/Male/Cultural/Exterior Street
Public/Male/Natural/Exterior/Liminal Copse
Public/Private/Exterior/Natural/Cultural/Liminal Garden

Pidduck (1998) has suggested that key elements of costume drama are
women at windows and outdoor walks, conveying a gendered topography
of female restraint and longing: in effect, a personalized, spatialized ten-
sion between tradition and progress. Both of these images feature heavily
in this episode of Lark Rise to Candleford, along with certain aspects of the
Gothic (itself imbricated in melodrama) in its use of images of abjection
and female entrapment (Wheatley, 2005b). Lark Rise to Candleford then
mobilizes its aesthetic of ‘high-end’ television to exploit classic tropes of
melodramatic narrative and aesthetics, structured around Thompson’s
vignettes of a ‘forgotten corner of rural England’. The domestic spaces
of the Pattersons’ cottage are abject and constraining, pressuring the
characters and hinting at frustration and suppressed hysteria beneath
the surface. The saturated colors of the Pattersons’ garden construct it
as a hyper-real site of restoration, fertility and redemption, while the
rich reds of the dress shop connect setting to character and convey the
repressed female sexuality at work beneath the prim Victorian façade.
The use of location filming enables the production to construct a liminal,
Bakhtinian idyll in the copse, which is the site of the transgressive affair’s
putative consummation, framed with a painterly aesthetic sublimating
repressed passion into the mise-en-scene.
This chapter has suggested that use of space in Lark Rise to Candleford
explores and disrupts the tensions between structuring oppositions of
male/female, inside/outside, public/private, and nature/culture. Duncan
(1996) has asserted that ‘Public space is regulated by keeping it relatively
free of passion or expressions of sexuality that are not naturalized, nor-
malised or condoned’ (p. 141). This episode is structured around the
disruption of spatial and ideological boundaries which are isomorphic
with its wider themes around the transition to modernity. But in Lark
Rise to Candleford, there exists in nature the possibility of space which
58 Douglas McNaughton

is both public and private, neither Lark Rise nor Candleford, which
allows the characters to explore the possibility of transgression. In this
liminal space, the characters can imagine the possibility of breaking
free of their existing identities and social restrictions. Despite the innate
conservatism of melodrama, the narrative construction and aesthetic
composition of the episode offers the audience the oblique possibil-
ity to imagine that the affair has been consummated. However, at the
episode’s conclusion the possibilities for the characters are closed down
and order is restored; in the series’ ongoing tension between stasis and
change, it is stasis that wins.

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4
‘We Are Like That Only’:
Prime Time Family Melodramas
on Indian Television
Shoma Munshi

Introduction: specifying the Indian context

This chapter focuses on prime time family melodramas on Indian

television that draw on several sources, both foreign and indigenous.
The chapter primarily will examine what is distinctively and uniquely
Indianized about these melodramas. They have the largest audience
share among all genres of programming, and their popularity – despite
their ‘indulgence of strong emotionalism, moral polarization and sche-
matization; extreme states of being, situations, action; overt villainy,
persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated and extrava-
gant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety ….’
(Brooks, 1976, pp. 11–12) – baffles their critics. When no answer seems
suitable to explain their continuing popularity, one has only to look at
their uniquely Indian flavor to know why, and respond because ‘we are
like that only …’. I will begin with a brief history of Indian television,
in order to set the context, and then move on to a discussion of India
as currently one of the largest and most complex television markets the
world. The analysis that follows delineates and explores the particularly
Indian qualities in Indian prime time family melodramas in the new
millennium.
A few important points need to be made at this juncture. First, India
currently has close to 700 television channels and many regional lan-
guages, but my focus here is only on the Hindi soap operas that have
the largest viewership in the country. Hindi is also India’s national
language and the language in Bollywood films. Second, these soap
operas are broadcast on satellite television channels, not on the state-
run channels of Doordarshan. Third, the soaps under study here are
aired on prime time, generally understood to be from 7 pm to 11 pm

61
62 Shoma Munshi

on weekday evenings. Fourth, most households in India still own only

one TV, hence prime time shows need to cater for a family audience
that includes not just women, but also men, and often children and
grandparents – so several generations in fact (see Munshi, 2010, 2012
for details). Fifth, when I say ‘popular’, I am referring to those soaps
that have consistently remained in the top ten of Television Audience
Measurement (TAM) ratings and were/have been on air for at least
two years running. Sixth, the first prime time family melodramas (the
K ones) had Mumbai (Bombay) as their setting because, at the time,
satellite TV reached mainly urban markets where viewership preferences
were measured. As viewership increased and started to be measured in
Tier II and Tier III towns as well as rural areas, there was obviously a
need for new content. Issue-based stories took center stage, and the
geographical setting of narratives spread to these areas. Seventh, it is
also both important and interesting to note that family melodramas on
Indian prime time garner the highest viewership ratings for the GECs,
managing to sustain audience interest in a daily format – without the
season breaks common in the West! (Munshi, 2010, 2012). This has
larger implications for the way that such soaps are watched and for
audience engagement with them on an everyday basis throughout the
year, a point I will return to later.
While the study of soap operas on television gained currency in
Western academia from the 1980s onwards, due in large measure to
growing academic legitimacy of the study of the media texts of popular
culture, very little was known, or written, about Indian television before
then. What literature there was focused on either the two state-run
channels of Doordarshan, or the first years of satellite broadcasting in
India, and dealt mainly with religious and nationalist themes such as
the televising of the epics Ramayan and Mahabharat, and serials such as
Hum Log and Buniyaad (see for instance, Das, 1995; Brosius and Butcher,
1999). Gokulsing (2004) made a fleeting reference to a couple of prime
time soaps. It was not until the publication of my recent Prime Time Soap
Operas on Indian Television (2010) and Remote Control: Indian Television in
the New Millennium (2012) that this imbalance was corrected.
The first prime time family melodrama, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu
Thi (Because the Mother-in-Law Was Also Once a Daughter-in-Law,
henceforth Kyunki), debuted in July, 2000, on Star Plus. It was followed
a few months later by Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii (The Story of Every Home,
henceforth Kahaani). The producer of both, Ekta Kapoor, with her
Balaji Telefilms, is different from her western counterparts in her long-
standing astrological obsession with the alphabet ‘K’, which is why for
 We Are Like That Only 63

many years all the titles of her productions started with this letter of the
alphabet. In typical Indian fashion, other leading producers also rely
heavily on astrology and favorable planetary positions. For example,
spellings of their names deviate from the usual pattern, with extra let-
ters being added or deleted, according to need. Even offices of content
production houses have Hindu deities everywhere and the fragrance of
fresh flowers and incense fill rooms.
Family melodramas are aimed (many times) at multi-generational
family viewing during the prime time slot; hence, the importance of
parivaar (family) and parampara (tradition) cannot be overstressed in the
Indian context. This is partly to do, of course, with the current upheaval
in Indian society, which is in a state of transition from a rule-based
collective to a society attached to the ebb and flow of global markets;
culturally speaking, current Indian society has lost the benchmarks of
yore. This transition means that on the one hand there is a large portion
of the Indian population, especially the poor, who still respond to the
state-as-benefactor, which hands out some benefits from time to time.
On the other hand is an aspirational India, which wants to join the
ranks of those who have succeeded; the dividing lines between these
two ‘Indias’ are getting more blurred every day. The small town has
changed irrevocably in India – thanks to mobile telephones, cable, satel-
lite and DTH TV connections, multiplexes and malls where western-
branded goods jostle alongside upmarket Indian products. Writing in
Times Crest, The Times of India, India’s oldest and largest selling English
daily newspaper, journalist Neelesh Misra (2012) noted that ‘[O]ut of
India’s 7,935 towns, 2,774 were created in just 10 years between 2001
and 2011, according to the census … the big city is marching in and
conquering one small town after another with its openness, pushing
the envelope on social mores … and … in the villages, a primitive,
primordial, caste and clan-based worldview … that can even hang or
hack lovers, is digging in deeper and becoming more audacious in rural
India, where three-quarters of the country’s 1.2 billion population lives’.
This societal upheaval finds reflection in the broad spectrum of soap
opera narratives. Alongside stories of the travails of rich extended
families, themes such as child marriage, female foeticide, the killing of
young lovers from different castes or sub-castes – themes that remain
realities of life in rural areas – are also on the air, making urban audi-
ences aware that such practices take place near their own comfort
zones. As Purnendu Shekhar, celebrated writer of successful soaps like
Balika Vadhu (Child Bride), told me during my fieldwork, ‘Why sweep
away unpalatable truths – like child marriage, a Dalit (low caste) girl’s
64 Shoma Munshi

struggles, the preference for fair-skinned daughters – under the carpet?

These are real truths in India, and soaps nowadays are tackling them
head on’.1 Shekhar added that a number of child marriages in his home
state of Rajasthan had been called off due to the positive impact of
Balika Vadhu.

A brief history of Indian television and the first

Doordarshan serials

India’s experience with television is unique in many ways. In 1975,

India became the first country to use satellites for television broadcast-
ing. Despite this, there remained only two state-run channels, called
Doordarshan, whose programming focused mainly on developmental
issues such as agriculture, animal husbandry, health, family welfare,
and similar topics. By the mid-1980s, however, with the beginning of
economic deregulation, Doordarshan’s terrestrial network expanded
faster than any other TV network anywhere in the world. India was
also the first country to market news and current affairs on videotape,
thanks to the government’s control over the medium. Doordarshan
shifted to color broadcasting with the live telecast of the 1982 Asian
Games hosted in New Delhi, and for the first time, Doordarshan started
to broadcast more entertainment-based genres, such as serials and soap
operas (for details, see Munshi, 2012).
The first family-based serials to be aired on Doordarshan were Hum
Log (We People, 1984–85), which dealt with the daily life and strife of
the lower middle class family of Basesar Ram and Bhagwanti, followed
by Buniyaad (Foundation, 1986–88), which portrayed the struggles of
an ordinary Punjabi family caught up in the Partition of India in 1947.
Both serials were immensely popular with audiences (see Brown and
Cody, 1991; Das, 1995 for details). The timing of their broadcast was
crucial in India’s history. As well-known social commentator Santosh
Desai (2009) remarked: ‘The most inspired thing about Hum Log was its
name. These two words captured the essence of the show and what it
meant for millions of viewers …. Hum Log was an account of both who
we were and wished to be as well as of the times in which “we people”
lived. The year 1984 marks the eve of the birth of economic reform; it is
the point of origin of a new generation as it moved decisively from one
kind of world with its implicit set of assumptions to another’.
These serials, while contextualized within the folds of the parivaar,
defined the larger space of the society of the times. They were followed
by Nukkad (Street Corner, 1986–87), about everyday life of another
 We Are Like That Only 65

lower income group family in urban areas, and Tamas (Darkness, 1987),
based again on the Partition of India. Rajani (1985–87) and Udaan
(Flight, 1989–91) represented Doordarshan’s discourses on the ‘New
Indian Woman’. Rajani, of the eponymous serial, and the police officer
Kalyani, of Udaan, showcased strong, assertive women who fought
corruption from within the system and worked bravely and tirelessly
towards bettering the lives of others. This was a time when women
were starting to become visible in the paid workforce. India had her
first, and so far only, woman Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and Kiran
Bedi became the first woman police officer. The women-oriented serials
on Doordarshan in the 1980s reflected the state’s need to mobilize mid-
dle class women, not just towards the twin goals of modernization and
development, but also as custodians of the unity of the nation. By the
1990s, and the advent of satellite television, the ‘New Indian Woman’
became ‘modern’, in a more consumerist sense, but she still remained
the guardian of India’s religious and (Hindu) cultural traditions (see
Munshi, 1998, 2010; Mankekar, 1999). By the twenty-first century, soap
operas ‘foreground discourses of consumerism in a globalizing India,
while at the same time threading together discourses of a normative
Hindu identity’ (Munshi, 2010, p. 176). Within this framework, soap
opera heroines became the symbols of the ‘New Indian Woman’. Two
other very important milestones on Doordarshan were the televising of
the two great Indian epics, the Ramayan (1987–88) and Mahabharat
(1989–90). Their unprecedented popularity underlined what many have
called Doordarshan’s attempt at forging a pan-Indian Hindu culture (see
especially Mitra, 1993; Mankekar, 1999).
Family melodramas in the new millennium work on different regis-
ters. As Desai (2009) rightly states, ‘[I]nstead of getting inside the skin of
the real, they magnify the real to make it spectacular. Hum Log’s studied
realism has given way to a hyperreal depiction of epic domesticity
where household strife gets rescaled to epic proportions. Everything is
in 70 mm, even on the small screen’. The pace of change from the 1990s
onwards, when India first opened its doors to economic liberalization
as well as deregulation within the media market, has been supercharged;
the country is not simply catching up, but is leapfrogging develop-
ments that have taken decades in other countries. According to TAM
(Television Audience Measurement) data, until 1992, only Doordarshan
existed; but by October 2011 India had 647 television channels … and
counting. Homes with cable and satellite (C&S) TV connections, which
numbered just 1.2 million in 1992, had grown to 103 million by 2010,
and 108 million by 2011.2 In 2010, the number of digital pay-TV homes
66 Shoma Munshi

numbered 32 million, and this figure was expected to rise to 69 million

by 2014.3 This incredible growth has been aided by huge increases in
advertising revenues, as advertisers work to tap into India’s rapidly
growing consumer market. Whether their setting is urban or rural,
and whatever stories the family melodramas tell, they all reiterate the
centrality of the parivaar and emphasize the upholding of parampara in
their narrative. In this way, an intended outcome of these family melo-
dramas on prime time is to act as a vital communicator in raising aware-
ness and conveying social messages through their unique, hybridized
and Indianized way of story telling. I expand on this in the next section.

Distinctiveness of Indian prime time family melodramas

Prime time family melodramas in India are different from those in other
parts of the world. Indian family melodramas ‘represent a continuation
of their culture’s pre-cinema dramatic forms and stories, transformed
by the capitalist economy of scale and the power of the mass media.
Where they differ from their Western counterparts is in the dramatic
traditions from which they emerged’ (Booth, 1995, p. 172).4 For most
Indians, drama traditionally draws from the two epics of the Ramayan
and Mahabharat, the Puranas and other Indian legends, as well as a con-
stellation of genres that share an amalgamation of dramatic narrative,
song and dance that take different regional manifestations and names.
These include the north Indian Ramlila, nautanki, khyal, and svang, the
eastern Indian genre of jatra, the bhavai of Gujarat, the burrakatha of
Andhra Pradesh, the tamasha and natyasangeet of Maharashtra.5 All were
performed by peripatetic professional or semi-professional troupes, usu-
ally in outdoor settings; all emphasized music and dance.
What I am suggesting, in particular for the K soaps of Kyunki and
Kahaani,6 which first defined the parameters of prime time family
melodramas in India, is that there are many links and connections with
the large body of epic stories, in both oral and written form, particu-
larly the Ramayan and Mahabharat. Asked how she had conceptualized
Kahaani, Ekta Kapoor is known to have answered that she ‘wanted to
make a modern Ramayan. Doesn’t every home have a Ram? That’s how
Kahaani ... took shape’. Indeed, when Kahaani aired its last episode, on
October 9, 2008, the central protagonist, Parvati, explicitly reminded
audiences that ‘hamari is kahaani ka adhar Ramayan raha hai’ (the
basis of our story has been the Ramayan). Content borrowed from the
Ramayan and Mahabharat and other pan-Indian tales frequently broadens
 We Are Like That Only 67

characterization and interpretation of plots in daily prime time family

melodramas. This is in line with aesthetic theories found in Indian
epic narratives. Interpersonal relationships, which are the backbone of
soaps, suggest the Indian epic structure.
Sara Mitter writes of the Mahabharat that it is ‘the epic of epics, the
longest poetic composition in world literature, eight times the length of
the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It recounts the lifelong rivalry between
two clans of warrior princes. Interspersed in the narrative of intrigues
and battles is much independent material: legends, instruction manu-
als for kings, and philosophic discourses, the best known of which is
the Bhagavad Gita’ (1995, p. 91). Psychologist Sudhir Kakar notes of the
Ramayan that ‘the popular epic contains ideal models of familial bonds
and social relations to which even a modernized Hindu pays lip service,
however much he may privately question or reject them as irrelevant to
the tasks of modern life’ (1982, pp. 63–64).
Epic content also interacts with soaps through a variety of visual
frames imposed by the conventions of filming soaps. The standard
opening credits of Kyunki and Kahaani are framed in a distinctly Indian
dramatic convention. Kyunki has Tulsi pouring water into the tulsi (holy
basil plant) and Kahaani focuses on the deities of Lord Ram, Sita and
Lakshman and Parvati and Om’s hands guarding the sacred flame of
the diya (lamp) at the altar. These shots immediately lend meaning to
the plots, characters and narratives and establish the intertextual con-
nections between the epics and the soaps. Both couples – Mihir-Tulsi
in Kyunki and Om-Parvati in Kahaani – are referred to as the Ram-Sita
ki jodi (the Ram-Sita couple) by the elders in the family.7 With such
references, producer Ekta Kapoor is obviously relying on the audience’s
understanding of the intertextual relationship between Ram-Sita of the
Ramayan and television’s Ram-Sita to augment their positive reception
of the stories and their characters (cf. Booth, 1995, p. 174).
Filming conventions of soaps, with their reliance on many lengthy
frontal close up shots of central iconic characters such as Parvati and
Tulsi, and now Anandi (Balika Vadhu) and Akshara (Yeh Rishta Kya
Kehlata Hai, What Is This Relationship Called, Star Plus, 2008–), call
to mind the cultural practice of darshan that is most often used in the
context of religious worship, where it is a two-way look between the
deity and devotee (see Babb, 1981; Uberoi, 2006). Simply put, darshan
is an act of seeing and of being seen by a divine image. Just as many
visual representations of deities in India are depicted straight on from
the front so that both eyes directly face the devotee, so also most close
68 Shoma Munshi

up shots of heroines film them with faces directly at the screen where
the camera lingers for long moments, ‘arranged by the directors accord-
ing to iconographic prescription’ (Lutgendorf, 1991, p. 327). The end
of each day’s episode, nine times out of ten, also freezes the picture
directly on the faces of Parvati and Tulsi, and now on the faces of newer
family melodrama heroines like Anandi and Akshara. By means of
direct address to the viewer, the television image of the heroine allow it
to ‘constitute itself and its viewers as held in a relationship of co-present
intimacy’ (Ellis, 1999, p. 388). This form of direct address blends well
with the dramatic conventions of soaps. Similar to audiences watching
the telecast of the epic Ramayan on Doordarshan in 1987, audiences
of soaps also enter into ‘visual communion’ with soap characters and
where emotions are conveyed through close up shots, and intense emo-
tions by repeated zoom shots (Lutgendorf, 1995, p. 230).
The Ramayan and Mahabharat also involve conflicts within the family.
In the Mahabharat, initial weaknesses of good characters (mostly men),
the Pandavas, leads to war. This is echoed in Indian family melodramas:
for example, in Kyunki, it is the inherent weaknesses of Sahil that leads
to turmoil and dissension in the Virani household, when he forsakes
his faithful wife, Ganga, for the scheming Trupti. In Balika Vadhu, it
is Jagdish’s waywardness in leaving Anandi, his bride since childhood,
for the more modern Gauri that leads to the strife in his household, and
ultimately to Anandi’s second marriage to Shiv Raj Shekhar, a senior
civil servant, posted in the same district.
Plots in epics are often interrupted by sub-plots, which branch off
from the main narrative. Narratives are frequently extended over a wide
range of characters and a number of generations. Similarly, all family
melodramas on Indian television show generations of each family and
numerous characters that take the narrative forward. Blackburn and
Fleuckiger (1989, p. 4) have observed that Indian epic stories can broadly
be classified as martial, sacrificial and romantic. While all three epic types
can be found in Bollywood cinema (see Booth, 1995), television family
melodramas focus on the sacrificial. It has been noted that ‘sacrificial
epics emphasize the preservation of social norms or mores. Conflicts are
usually emotional and internal, and are resolved either through sacrifice
or superhuman endurance and perseverance’ (Newcomb, 1974, p. 137).
Beck (1989, p. 168) discusses how in sacrificial epics, ‘… a heroine
is more likely to play the role of protector and guardian of the sta-
tus quo’. Sacrifice and perseverance in sacrificial epics is undertaken
by the women. In television, Tulsi and Parvati, and now Anandi and
Akshara, as well as others, undergo innumerable trials and hardships
 We Are Like That Only 69

parivaar ke bhalaai ke liye (for the good of the family). The importance
of the central figure of the woman in sacrificial epics has also been
noted (see for instance, Kinsley, 1988; Pauwels, 2008). Kinsley suggests
that the virtuous and long-suffering Sita in the Ramayan and the firm,
determined, revenge-seeking Draupadi, in the Mahabharat provide the
central models of behavior in most Indian narratives.8 Both of them are
to be found, in one way or another, in all representations of heroines
in family melodramas.
One important point needs to be made here. Patricia Uberoi, in her
superbly lucid and accessible work on popular culture in India, defends
it in allowing for ‘a creative dialogue between the modern mass media
and genres of folk culture – something [she believes] to be very important
in the context of a society like India – the emphasis being on their com-
mon vernacularism …’. Uberoi argues that the three genres of calendar art,
Bollywood cinema, and magazine romance in her analysis are not folk art
forms, but on the contrary are ‘ “popular” by virtue of their wide distribu-
tion as products of the modern mass media’. This holds true for the genre
of prime time family melodramas as well, all of which ‘are produced
and marketed by formidable “culture industries” for nationwide popular
consumption, and intimately connected with and inflected by global
flows of technologies, images and meanings’ (2006, pp. 4–5, emphasis
in original).
It has been noted above that prime time family melodramas draw
from sacrificial epics. Popular Bollywood films have also used the
trope of sacrifice for the attainment of a larger good through personal
sacrifice, where social duties and bonds of kinship outweigh personal
desires (cf. Thomas, 1995, pp. 164–166; Uberoi, 2006, pp. 150–152).
Thus, family melodrama heroines, in their avatars of ma, bhabi, bahu
aur patni (mother, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law and wife) are constantly
sacrificing their own personal interests – even going to jail or being
thrown out of the family home – parivaar ke bhalaai ke liye (for the good
of the family).
Peter Brooks theorizes that ‘the melodramatic mode organizes an
imaginative world constructed on the principle of terminal conflict
between polarized moral forces that run through the social fabric and
are expressed in personal and familial terms extending beyond the
biological family into all areas of social life’ (in Gledhill, 1992, p. 107).
Tulsi of Kyunki and Parvati of Kahaani, followed by Anandi of Balika
Vadhu, Akshara of Yeh Rishta and Ichha of Uttaran (Hand Me Downs),
are virtuous to the extent that they have never set a foot wrong. The
character of the lead heroine in family melodramas serves as the
70 Shoma Munshi

primary tool of identification for the audiences who idolize her calm,
level-headed and honest handling of family affairs, and aspire to her
sense of understanding in solving the never-ending conflicts of her fam-
ily. Tulsi’s and Parvati’s characteristics were derived from the hierarchal
textual authority of the Ramayan, and these two iconic heroines had all
the characteristics of Sita, dutiful and virtuous, the perfect example of
loyalty and morality – the ideal daughter, ideal wife and ideal mother.9
Patricia Uberoi calls this the ‘elision of the sacred and the secular’, in
referring to a peculiar and features of Indian TV and popular cinema
(Uberoi, 2006, p. 56). Thus, from Tulsi and Parvati to Anandi, Akshara
and Ichha, the lead heroine shines through the obligatory role that she
plays throughout the narrative, by being moralistic and upholding an
ideal Hindu way of life through the performance of rituals, service of
others, and sacrifice of self. Matrimonial advertisements in newspapers
in the early years of this century asked for their bahus (daughters-in-law)
to be like Tulsi and Parvati! The two actresses themselves who played
these roles (Smriti Irani as Tulsi and Sakshi Tanwar as Parvati) told me
during interviews that they were very careful about their deportment
even in public because they knew how much the public identified with
the characters they played on screen. In fact, it is on the back of Tulsi’s
upright image that Irani is currently a prominent politician in the main
Opposition party in India, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and is often
seen on news channel as a spokesperson for the BJP.

The influence of Bollywood

Bollywood films since the 1990s also foreground what both producers
and audiences see as ‘Indian culture, values and tradition’, or what I term
the parivaar aur parampara (family and tradition) phenomenon. The
emphatic assertion of an ‘Indian’ identity in these films may be consi-
dered as a response to a globalizing, ‘modern’ India by rejecting so-called
‘Western values’ and embracing ‘traditional Indian’ values. Television
executives emphasize that their research shows that ‘audiences of soaps
longed to see family relationships, not so much as they are now, but
more as they should be’. Writer of several soaps herself, Shobhaa De, told
me during fieldwork interviews, ‘what soaps tap into is something very
basic. There is a lot of nostalgia, life as we no longer recognize it. Some
of us may be wanting to turn the clock back because large families were
our security blanket. It is undoubtedly a highly idealized, romanticized
version of family life. But in the hurly burly of today’s world, it satiates
our own hunger because we no longer have it’. The audience response
 We Are Like That Only 71

division, at television channels and content production houses, archive

viewer letters praising self-sacrificing bahus and betis (daughters-in-law
and daughters) who ‘don’t act modern’ and know the value of ‘respecting
one’s family and elders and respecting tradition’.
Both Bollywood and US soaps such as Dallas, Dynasty and The Bold
and the Beautiful, with their high-end production values, have greatly
influenced prime time family melodramas. Kahaani and Kyunki opened
the door for lavish and opulent productions that more closely resem-
bled the Bollywood films of producer-directors Karan Johar and Aditya
Chopra, both scions of powerful Bollywood families who are known
for their grand sets, costumes and mise-en-scène. It is perhaps no coin-
cidence that Ekta Kapoor, also from a Bollywood family, is a childhood
friend of theirs. Kapoor’s father, Jeetendra, was a successful Bollywood
hero in the 1960s and 1970s. In interviews during fieldwork, screen
writer Kamelsh Pandey (who has also worked on Kapoor’s soap stories)
told me how Ekta repackaged her father’s films and put them out on TV:
‘What Johar and Chopra do in films, Ekta does on TV’. Rajan Shahi’s
sets for Yeh Rishta are the two lavishly appointed mansions of the two
families in the story, the Maheshwaris and the Singhanias, constructed
in Film City in Mumbai, four years ago. They are the most expensive
sets in television history, having cost INR (Indian rupees) 2 crores10
each five years ago. Similarly, Balika Vadhu is filmed on very expensive
sets owned by the production house of Sphere Origins Multivision Pvt
Ltd, in a separate location, at a distance from the city of Mumbai. The
badi haveli (big mansion) of Kalyani Devi, the matriarch, as well as the
heroine Anandi’s (current) in-laws’ family home, the family mansion
of the Shekhars, are both lavishly appointed. Furniture, décor and
upholstery are sourced both from India and overseas.11 The clothes and
jewelry worn by the actresses, in particular, are extremely expensive
and are outsourced. Producers have told me that one sari can cost up
to INR 50,000.12 And clothes are almost never worn more than once.
The fashions worn by soap actors have spawned an entire industry of
neighborhood copycat tailors in big cities and small towns.
An important point to note here is that Bollywood films since 1990
display a remarkably consistent pattern in producing an Indian identity
that is Hindu, wealthy and patriarchal in nature.

The terrain of who gets included in the signifier ‘Indian’ has shifted
significantly to include the wealthy among the diasporic Indian
community [who] now find a prominent place within that signifier
provided they conform to a particular articulation of Indian identity
72 Shoma Munshi

and traditions. Consequently, certain minorities like Muslims and

Christians find themselves excluded … from this terrain … this
cultural conflation (of Indian with Hindu and wealthy), the product
of particular socio-political and economic trends (Hindutva, global
capital flows and regressive gender politics) … marginalises and often
erases the experiences of religious minorities and the poor who do
not fit this constructed norm … (Malhotra and Alagh, 2004, p. 19;
see also Uberoi, 2006, especially chapter 6)

A similar trend can be discerned in prime time family melodramas where

all stories are set within a Hindu context, and usually a wealthy one.

Melodramatic excess

Central to melodrama is the notion of excess – ‘…whether that excess be

defined as a split between the level of narrative and that of mise-en-scène
or as form of hysteria …’ (Feuer, 1984, p. 8, italics in original). This
spectacle of lavish glamour and excess in family melodramas is a source
of pleasure for audiences. This has two important consequences. First,
family melodramas, as experienced in prime time programming in
India, have become objects of consumption and pleasure; and second,
the expensive sets and décor, where festivals and other celebrations
regularly take place, contribute to a sense of ‘Indian-ness’ (for details,
see Munshi, 2010, especially chapter 7).
At the level of emotions, excess abounds in prime time family melo-
dramas. Most scenes consist of ‘intense emotional confrontation between
individuals closely related either by blood or marriage’ (Feuer, 1984, p. 10).
Filmic shots and the repeated use of the zoom lens create moments of
high intensity. So when Anandi (Balika Vadhu) finds out that her husband
Jagdish is living with another woman, Gauri, in Mumbai while studying
to be a doctor, there were several weeks of supercharged emotional scenes
between husband and wife who had grown up together after their child
marriage. This is followed by every family member confronting Jagdish,
trying to make him see the error of his ways, cajoling, threatening, plead-
ing, scolding, with sometimes a resounding slap from his parents as the
camera zoomed around. Similarly, in Kyunki, the highly charged melodra-
matic scene where Tulsi shot her own son, Ansh, for marital rape, sent the
rating points zooming through the roof.
The overt display of emotions in melodramatic mode is accentuated
through the use of different types of shots. Ekta Kapoor made the ‘swish
pan shot’ famous in her K soaps – where any critical action was shown
three times, with the camera swishing in and out rapidly, accompanied
 We Are Like That Only 73

by loud music. And for an undetermined, mysterious reason, the faces

of the characters in that scene turned red and yellow, but the villain’s
face always turned green; with the faces of the characters witnessing the
event shown consecutively, frozen in black and white, registering shock
and horror. This is similar to what Feuer called an ‘intensifying tech-
nique’ in US soaps like Dallas and Dynasty with the ‘… use of zoom-in
of varying speeds and durations, with the fast zoom-in to freeze frame
being the most dramatic shot …. [F]or coding moments of peak hysteria
[these soaps will] employ repeated zoom-ins to close-ups of all actors in
a scene’ (1984, p. 11). But if these so-called ‘cliffhangers’ were used at
the end of a season in US soaps, Indian soaps are on air five nights a
week throughout the year without any season breaks, and moments like
this are thus used at the end of the week.
The ‘swish pan shot’ has now been replaced with the ‘ten second
shot’ where typically, the shot is held for a couple of beats after the dia-
logue has ended. This of course is another convention of melodramatic
television – the close up. The close up shot, as the camera moves, in
‘elegiac movement’ towards the character’s face, has ‘the effect of bring-
ing the viewer closer and closer to the hidden emotional secrets soap
opera explores: stylized expressions of pity, jealousy, rage, self-doubt’
(Timberg, in Hayward, 1997. p. 156). The two-shot, or shot/reverse shot
as it is sometimes called, allows viewers to see two characters in the
same shot and the actor’s locked gazes after their dialogues have ended.
Often, storms and rain outwardly manifest a character’s internal emo-
tional state. Strong, howling winds, windows flying open, and curtains
billowing are all common in soaps. There were innumerable occasions
in Kahaani when, in critical situations, the light from the diya (lamp) at
the altar flickered dangerously, and Parvati always rushed to cradle the
flame safely between her cupped hands. High emotion is also played
out by the emphasis on the functioning of characters in situations that
push their emotion to extremes. ‘In real life we are rarely called upon
to feel so intensely, and never in such neatly escalating sequences.
But the emotions dramatized by these improbable plots are not in
themselves unreal …’, says Thorburn about television melodrama (1976,
p. 83). In the ‘world of soap opera’ however, observes Ang, ‘characters
go through all kinds of calamities as though it were the most normal
thing in life’ (1985, p. 63). Grandiloquent dialogues come from the
mouths of soap opera characters. Tulsi and Parvati (Kyunki and Kahaani)
were known for their monologues when holding forth about sachhai
(truth) and bhalaai ki jeet buraai par (the triumph of good over evil). The
newer soap heroines like Anandi (Balika Vadhu) and Akshara (Yeh Rishta)
are equally adept at managing both their babul ka ghar (natal home) and
74 Shoma Munshi

sasuraal (in-laws’ house); they are always upright, and they speak out for
the truth and for upholding so-called ‘Indian’ values.

Family rituals

Family melodramas share a form with soap operas, in having multiple

plot lines and a (theoretically) never-ending narrative told in serialized
form. Since they provide continuous narratives, family melodramas
require a stable frame of reference, which is provided by the centrality of
the family ( parivaar). Melodrama thus needs to be read metaphorically
to understand its typical focus on the parivaar and the problems that
beset them. As Ien Ang put it in her landmark study of Dallas, ‘multiple
storylines revolve around the complicated mutual relations between
the characters and focus on emotive states of affairs and incidents that
are quintessential to soap operas: the struggles between love and hate,
loyalty and betrayal … the hub of the story – and the key anchor for the
intense audience involvement – [are] the “ordinary” human dimensions
of personal and family relationships, marked by age old rituals such as
births, marriages and deaths, the intimacies, disappointments of petty
jealousies of romance and friendship, and the moral dilemmas brought
about by conflicting interest and values’ (Ang, 2007, p.19).
Van Gennep’s rites of passage and rituals are to be found represented
in detail and over several weeks of telecast in Indian family melodra-
mas. Rituals in wedding festivities for instance send the TRPs (television
rating points) skyrocketing. Not only are weddings occasion for lavish
excess in terms of production values, but as The Times of India recently
reported, TV channels go as far as to hire ‘a real wedding planner to give
different themes for each ceremony to make the track look authentic’
(Patel, 2013). The author adds that ‘wedding tracks in daily soaps with
their high voltage emotional drama set in the backdrop of lavish sets are
sure shot TRP-trippers for Hindi GECs … [with] loads of drama’. About
the popularity of a wedding sequence amongst audiences, Prashant
Bhatt, programming head (fiction) of a Hindi GEC, says, ‘Indians love to
watch wedding tracks because this is when they get maximum exposure
to all kinds of festivities, celebrations of a number of rituals. A wedding
track has the potential for big surprises and high drama’ (Patel, 2013).
In addition to depicting all the rituals that mark the rites of passage
in a family’s life, Indian prime time family melodramas also mark the
passage of time with festivals, sometimes spread over several episodes.
For instance, Dussehra13 and Diwali14 – two of the biggest festivals for
Hindus – are shown in great detail. Not only is this a real and symbolic
 We Are Like That Only 75

triumph of good over evil, but (generally) the rich portrayed in these
celebrations ‘exceed the norms of their audience economically …
luxurious mise-en-scène objectifies such excess’ (Feuer, 1984, p. 9). Inte-
restingly, for a generation growing up now in India – when extended
families might no longer be the norm, especially in urban areas – whose
eyes are turned towards overseas and who are at home speaking American
English, the detailed ritualistic ceremonies and festivities provide them
with an education in their own country’s tradition ( parampara).
In India, melodrama gets an added dimension with the different
kinds of stories that are told – unique perhaps to the Indian market.
Examples of this are the stories associated with the matriarch Dadisa’s
character in Balika Vadhu. Surekha Sikri, the National Award winning
actress who plays Dadisa says that women like her character ‘exist in
little towns and villages and, to some extent, even in cities. They might
not be wearing dehati (colloquially, rural-style) clothes but their attitude
is the same towards their daughters-in-law. You read about people liv-
ing in high rises beating up their daughters-in-law for dowry’.15 The
character’s hard-hitting antics fit into the context of issues such as child
marriage or infanticide.
Due to different histories and thus the various sources they draw
from, family melodramas on prime time – in their production, presen-
tation, filmic conventions and narratives – are typically and uniquely
Indianized products – distinct from media texts in other countries.

Notes
The phrase ‘We are like that only’ is often used in India to denote an allegedly
Indian way of doing things, and it is commonly understood enough to be used by
well-known market strategist Rama Bijapurkar in the title of her bestselling book
We Are Like That Only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India, Penguin, 2009.

1. Personal interview with Purnendu Shekhar, August 2010.

2. TAM India (2010) TV Universe Estimates: Terrestrial, Cable & Satellite &
Digital Homes (January). See also Ernst and Young (2011) Spotlight on India’s
Entertainment Economy: Seizing New Opportunities, p. 10.
3. Ernst and Young (2011) Spotlight on India’s Entertainment Economy: Seizing
New Opportunities, p. 13.
4. Booth’s lucid and clearly argued article deals with the influence of the epics and
other folklore traditions on popular Bollywood cinema. The same argument
can be extended to cover prime soaps in India as well, particularly the K soaps.
5. For a fuller discussion of definitions and folklore traditions, see for example,
see Peter J. Claus, Sarah Diamond, Margaret Ann Mills (eds) 2003 South Asian
Folklore: An Encyclopedia – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, London: Routledge See also Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding
76 Shoma Munshi

Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and the Cinematic Imagination, 2008, Austin:
University of Texas Press, for an analysis of how Hindi films draw on a wide
range of South Asian cultural traditions.
6. I emphasize these two soaps in particular because, liked or disliked, there is
no denying that they have redefined prime time viewing in India; they have
also maintained the highest TRPs (television rating points) nearly eight years
running.
7. Further references to the elision of the sacred and secular, in particular for
the K soaps, are made throughout Munshi 2010.
8. See Mankekar, 1999, especially chapter 5, for a discussion on Draupadi’s rage.
9. Two important points need to be noted here. One, that this construction of
Indian femininity is almost always Hindu, and most often north Indian. The
point about conflating cultural tradition and the sacred with Hinduism has
been made, for instance, by Chakravarti, 1988; Uberoi, 2006; Pauwels, 2008.
The second point is that, apart from Tulsi and Parvati, soap heroines do not
have names laden with such (Hindu) religious significance. This is because
they were conceptualized by the respective creative heads differently.
10. At the exchange rate on June 8, 2013, 1 USD is the equivalent of almost INR
(Indian rupees) 57. Hence, INR 20000000 is the equivalent of USD 351481.
Website of the National bank of Kuwait (NBK) http://www.kuwait.nbk.com/
Personal/Default_en_gb.aspx# – accessed June 8, 2013.
11. Interview with Shobha Kapoor, August 2007.
12. INR 50000 is the equivalent of almost USD 879. See website of the National
bank of Kuwait (NBK) http://www.kuwait.nbk.com/Personal/Default_en_
gb.aspx# – accessed June 8, 2013.
13. Dussehra, also known as Vijaya Dashami, is celebrated on the tenth day of
the bright half of the Hindu month of Ashwayuja or Ashwina, and is the
grand culmination of the Navratras. The legend underlying the celebration,
as also its mode of celebration, varies by region; however, all festivities cel-
ebrate the victory of the forces of Good over Evil.
14. Diwali is the festival of lights, when lamps and lights symbolize the triumph
of good over evil. In north India, it is celebrated as the homecoming of Lord
Ram to Ayodhya after 14 years in exile, when the citizens of Ayodhya lit
lamps all along ram’s path to welcome him home.
15. Mili Swarnakar, ‘Interview with Surekha Sikri’, in The Telegraph ( January 6,
2009).

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78 Shoma Munshi

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Section II
Gender, Sexuality and Excess
in Contemporary US Television
Melodrama
5
On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’: Gory
Excess, Melodrama and Irony
in Nip/Tuck
Alexia Smit

On the FX cable television show, Nip/ Tuck (2003–2010), the interventions

of the show’s surgeon protagonists, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh)
and Christian Troy ( Julian McMahon), reveal to our eyes a range of
gory spectacles. Incisions are wedged open by surgical clamps; breast
implants are vigorously pushed through small cuts beneath the breasts;
noses are broken and reset and the blood pools and splatters. A promo-
tional slogan on the official website for Nip/ Tuck describes the show as
‘the scalpels edge of entertainment’ (Nip/ Tuck Official Site; 2007 par.2).
This phrase sums up Nip/Tuck’s dual appeal to viewers. The show relies
on extreme, graphic surgical content to distinguish itself from other
programming but, as this phrase also implies, Nip/ Tuck presents itself
as more ‘sophisticated’ than other television. The show appears to
celebrate its difference from forms of television considered lowbrow
or ‘feminine.’ Nip/ Tuck may seem a far cry from the soap operas and
traditional serials about which much critical writing on television
melodrama has been undertaken. However, in this chapter I want to
assert the importance of considering the complex ways in which the
melodramatic mode manifests itself in this program. A consideration of
Nip/ Tuck as melodrama provides a productive avenue for understand-
ing the sentiments about identity and masculinity articulated on the
show. In particular, this chapter explores the ways in which the surgical
body on Nip/ Tuck is melodramatically invested so that it constructs the
white male surgeons at the center of the show as victims. As much as
the term ‘on the cutting edge’ can be associated with sophistication,
the phrasing ‘on the edge’ can also be used to refer to a teetering into
crisis. Melodrama might be understood as the definitive mode of crisis
(see Mulvey, 2001). I would like to adapt the phrase ‘the scalpels edge’
to express the show’s repeated staging of a perceived crisis in normative
81
82 Alexia Smit

masculinity. This is a crisis which is played out on and though surgical

bodies. While there are indeed many elements of the plot and action
in Nip/ Tuck that might be described as melodramatic, in this article
I am focusing on the melodramatic role of the show’s surgical sequences
in expressing the internal suffering of the show’s central protagonists.
Nip/ Tuck is a weekly drama that focuses on the personal and pro-
fessional lives of two plastic surgeons who are partners in the plastic
surgery practice MacNamara/Troy. Each episode combines a focus on
the personal lives of these doctors with compelling and often strange
plastic surgery cases. The show ran for seven years and closed on its
100th episode in 2010. It was set in Miami Florida until the end of sea-
son four, when the doctors relocated to Los Angeles. Sean MacNamara is
characterized as the more moral of the two doctors. At the beginning of
the series he has a wife and two children but is facing marital problems,
and his relationship issues continue for most of the series. Christian is
characterized as an amoral womanizer, but though the course of the
series we learn of his troubled past and his capacity for emotional depth.
Throughout the series the surgeons’ multifold personal and professional
troubles are routinely dramatized in scenes featuring graphic surgery.
In a telling sequence from episode 1.03, ‘Nanette Babcock,’ Sean
McNamara is poised to perform a circumcision on his own son, Matt.
At this point in the narrative Sean’s marriage is in crisis and he is
struggling to keep control at work. The surgical scenes in this episode
dramatize, in visceral terms, both the pressure on Sean and his battle to
maintain a sense of control. As Sean lowers his scalpel to begin the
procedure, his fingers tremble. Noting this tremor, Christian tries
to persuade Sean to swap surgeries with him. Sean reluctantly answers
his partner’s pleas by passing the scalpel into Christian’s hands. A seam-
less cut takes us directly into Sean’s next surgery on another patient,
Mrs Grubman. Sean moves his skillful surgeon’s hand in perfect time
to the rhythms of The Blue Danube, which plays on the audio track as
he glides a scalpel into the flesh above his patient’s hip. We see the
torso from Sean’s point of view as a thin trickle of blood streams from
the incision. At first, this sequence seems to depict a sense of regained
control and mastery as Sean conducts his skillful work upon the inert
female body. However, the orchestration to music lends a sense of com-
pulsion to Sean’s movements.
This scene repeats a shot set-up from Sean’s point of view, each time
showing the abdomen marked with more blood and gore. Sean is still work-
ing in time to the waltz, but the images suggest an increasing dissonance
between the smooth, clean, upbeat tone of the music and the growing
 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’ 83

messiness of his surgery. Shots of Sean’s face, deep in concentration,

are intercut with images of his hands wiping away pooling blood.
Swabs are used to absorb the excess blood and red streams drip from
Mrs Grubman’s sides. Finally, after yet another shot of Sean’s knotted
brow, we are granted a close-up view of a piece of removed fatty tissue
on the end of Sean’s scalpel. As the music reaches its climactic notes,
Sean thrusts the chunk of flesh into a basin of water. It splash-lands in
time to the swelling music.
This is a stylish, self-conscious moment of television parading its
visual and visceral capacities. One might be tempted to dismiss such
a sequence as little more than stylistic excess. In addition, because this
sequence, like many others from the course of the show, celebrates
stylized violence performed on the bodies of women, one might also
understand it as an example of a broader sadistic or prurient fascination
with violence on Nip/Tuck. However there are elements of this sequence
which suggest it might better be understood as melodrama. First of all,
etymologically the ‘melo’ of melodrama refers to music and this musical
orchestration of the surgical sequences is the first clue to their opera-
tion as melodrama. The surgery is orchestrated to Johann Strauss’s Blue
Danube. The choice of nineteenth-century music here is significant.
Nineteenth-century music was typically used in 1940s women’s melo-
dramas to dramatize the inner feelings of the central female characters.
As Thomas Elsaesser (1987) explains, melodrama is a mode of expres-
sion in which the dramatic situation is given a degree of ‘orchestration’
or dramatic heightening through the expressive devices of the cinema
(or television in this case) such as lighting, editing or visual rhythm. But
it is not only music, editing and camera work that articulate Sean’s emo-
tions in this scene. Rather it is the interplay between music and gory
imagery that tell us how Sean is feeling. The cutting and camerawork
are timed to the smooth, gliding movement of the Waltz. This operates
in powerful contrast to the discomfiting images, as scalpel slices skin
and flesh is scraped out of the abdomen. As the surgery continues, the
images suggest an increasing discord between this music and the grow-
ing messiness of the surgery. The effect suggests a gulf between Sean’s
performance of control and power (the elegance and control suggested
by the Waltz music) and his inner vulnerability (the exposed flesh and
welling blood). In addition, the discordance between the Waltz music
and the uncontained blood which wells and soaks all of Sean’s swabs
dramatizes a contrast between the control that Sean would like to have
and the helplessness that he feels. In this sequence Sean is constructed
in a position of suffering and victimhood.
84 Alexia Smit

Melodrama and crisis

Melodrama is centrally concerned with displays of suffering and virtue.

The affective devices described by Elsaesser (1987) are often arranged to
convey the sufferings of an innocent protagonist or victim and the trials
of heroes. Peter Brooks (1985) describes melodrama as a response to the
conditions of modernity in which traditional structures of meaning were
faltering. Brooks focuses his analysis of melodrama on the ‘classic’ French
melodrama as it came to be established at the dawn of the nineteenth
century – ‘in the aftermath of the Revolution’ (1985, p. xii) – and exam-
ines these texts in relation to a sense of crisis and a grasping for meaning
that defines modernity (1985, p. xi). In what Brooks describes as a ‘post
sacred’ world melodrama becomes a tool for establishing a sense of truth
and moral certainty (1985, p. 15). Brooks writes that ‘[t]he melodramatic
moment of astonishment is a moment of ethical evidence and recogni-
tion’ (1985, p. 26) that produces what he calls a ‘moral occult’ (1985,
p. 5) in place of lost systems of meaning.
We might similarly understand the contemporary manifestations of
melodrama on television, especially in the excessive and visceral forms
that I describe, as associated with a perceived crisis in white hegemonic
masculinity. Nip/Tuck can be considered alongside a range of contempo-
rary cultural responses to the growing perception that white masculin-
ity is somehow under siege. To mention a ‘crisis in masculinity’ might
be seen to imply that at one point masculinity was a stable category of
experience. Such a moment of untroubled masculine power and iden-
tity has likely never existed. Furthermore, in the context of the United
States, where white men still enjoy greater social power than any
other group, the sense of white male disempowerment and crisis is not
grounded in real conditions of social and economic marginalization.
Rather this article addresses the perception of crisis or loss of power as a
feeling that defines many contemporary expressions of masculinity. David
Savran describes the perception of masculine crisis as a paranoid and
reactionary response among white men to relatively recent developments
in cultural and political activism such as feminism, multiculturalism
and the gay rights movement (Savran, 2006, p. 128). The melodramatic
expression of a ‘moral feeling’ emerging in the exhibition of suffering
and heroism can be seen in relation to the fragmentation of postmod-
ern culture since the 1960s and the apparent decentering of white male
subjectivity. However, as I shall explore in the next section, the handling
of this crisis on Nip/Tuck is complicated by irony and the influence of a
playful postmodern sensibility.
 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’ 85

Linda Williams extends Brooks’s thinking to consider the role melodrama

has played in articulating guilt and innocence in relation to questions
of race. Williams argues that ‘sympathy for another grounded in the
manifestation of that person’s suffering is arguably a key feature of all
melodrama’ (Williams, 2001, p. 16). For Williams melodrama is nota-
ble for a combination of ‘pathos and action’ (2001, p. 17). She relates
the displays of suffering, pathos and action so central to melodramatic
narratives to a need to establish what she describes as ‘moral legibility’.
The sensational features of melodrama, she contends: ‘are the means to
something more important: the achievement of a felt good, the merger –
perhaps even the compromise – of morality and feeling into empa-
thetically imagined communities forged in the pain and suffering of
innocent victims, and in the actions of those who seek to rescue them’
(2001, p. 21).
Because of melodrama’s tendency to favor powerless victims, the
mode can be used to demonstrate the suffering and thereby the virtue
and humanity of people oppressed on the grounds of race (Williams,
2001, p. 300). However, this feature, Williams cautions, ‘has not pre-
vented it from being employed by resentful whites whose own sense of
powerlessness is dangerously exaggerated by the perception of a black
threat to white hegemony’.(2001, p. 300) She continues:

Neither an inherently racist nor an antiracist form, melodrama has

effectively been utilized to both ends. Its key, however, is not sim-
plistic, ‘black and white’ moral antimonies, but what stands behind
them: the quest to forge a viscerally felt moral legibility in the midst
of moral confusion and disarray. (Williams, 2001, p. 300)

Williams suggests that in a society in which equal rights supposedly

prevail, race has become something we can no longer talk about in
order that we appear politically correct. For this reason it is necessary
to pay attention to the way otherwise-unvoiced sentiments about race
find expression through the demonstrations of suffering and virtue in
the affective mode of melodrama.
While melodrama has traditionally been associated with women,
and is frequently dismissed on these grounds, a number of theorists
have made strong cases for the existence of melodramas that articulate
particularly masculine dilemmas. Florence Jacobowitz (1992) describes
the film noirs of the 1940s as melodrama (p. 152). Jacobowitz applies
the term ‘Man’s Melodrama’ (p. 152) to describe films like The Woman
in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944) and Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945).
86 Alexia Smit

For Jacobowitz, the film noir’s expression of white male anxiety is

melodramatic because it operates by processes of displacement: ‘by
substitute acts, by parallel situations and metaphoric connections’
(p. 155). The existential despair and inner violence of the solitary and
repressed hard-boiled hero, finds outward expression in the excessive
style of the film noir genre. Nip/Tuck takes up this tendency and pairs
it with an increasingly popular televisual impulse toward revealing the
body through medical or forensic enquiry. Instead of long shadows and
smoke we have surgeries, corpses and blood-splatter. These gory images
are employed to express the anxieties of a white masculinity that per-
ceives itself as threatened.
The ‘sophistication’, knowingness and political correctness demanded
by this show’s positioning as ‘quality television’ means that ‘backlash’
sentiments about white male victimhood cannot be overtly voiced on
the surface of the text. However, it is precisely because there is gap
between what can be overtly stated and what is expressed through
heightened affect and excesses of the body that I have described this
tendency as melodrama. For Peter Brooks, melodrama is a ‘text of mute-
ness’ (Brooks, 1985, p. 56) in which sentiments that cannot be voiced
through official or everyday discourse find their expression. Often this
process involves the displacement of inner feelings onto what Elssaesser
calls ‘overdetermined objects.’ (1987, p. 56). As noted by Brooks, these
mute feelings often use the body as their mode of expression (Brooks,
1994, p. 18). The bodily viscera revealed in surgery on Nip/Tuck become
the ‘overdetermined objects’ for the ‘mute’ expression of a reactionary
sense of white male victimhood.

Melodrama and the ‘raced’ body

This expression of victimhood on and through the body becomes

intensified in episodes in which the main characters interact with the
bodies of differently raced men. The Pilot episode is a key example. In
this episode Sean and Christian, in an effort to bolster their struggling
business, reconstruct the face of a client who Christian knows to be a
Colombian drug dealer. They later discover that this client is in fact a
child molester who used their surgical skills to disguise his identity. At
the end of the episode, through their entanglement with the Colombian
drug dealers, both Sean Christian have their own surgical implements
turned on them. Sean is held at gunpoint during a surgery and forced to
be complicit in his patient’s murder while Christian is kidnapped by a
senior drug lord and tortured with his own Botox needles.
 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’ 87

At the beginning of the episode Sean and Christian meet, in their

Miami office, with a new Colombian client, Silvio Pérez (Geoffrey Rivas)
and his brother Alejandro (Raymond Cruz). Just as in the classic film
noir the detective is initially visited in his office by a client, typically
the femme fatale who incites a downward journey into corrupt criminal
worlds, Sean’s and Christian’s meeting with the Pérez brothers is the
beginning of a descent that will dramatize the sufferings of the two
white male protagonists at the hands of the Hispanic criminals they
encounter. In the course of the episode Sean and Christian find them-
selves increasingly entangled in the messy world of this criminal group
of Colombians. Ultimately, Christian is held captive and tortured by
Gallardo while Sean’s surgery becomes the site of a very gory murder.
I will examine two surgical scenes that feature in this episode in order to
demonstrate how a correspondence is set up between the volatile bodies
of racial others and a crisis in control. In my analysis of the final surgery
I consider how the body of the racial ‘other’ is rendered, through visceral
surgical exposures, as potentially contaminating, threatening and ulti-
mately ‘guilty’ of the white male suffering that the show puts on display.
The first full surgery we see on Nip/Tuck is undertaken on Latino
criminal Silvio Pérez, and the scene appears after two important scenes
that involve Sean in struggles over questions of language, race and class
identity. First, at a scene over the breakfast table, Sean is ridiculed by
his family and his Spanish-speaking maid who speak over him in Spanish,
so that he is isolated from the conversation and humiliated. Following
this, Sean meets with a poor Hispanic woman who pleads with him to
perform pro-bono surgery on her son’s severe burns. Sean is frustrated
that he cannot help the woman because of his need to make more money.
Sean and Christian then fight over the purpose of the practice and Sean
threatens to quit.
The surgeons enter the operating room bristling with tension, and
the surgery that follows mirrors their feelings of angst. Liz injects the
anaesthetic into the patient’s IV tube and comments in a sardonic tone
‘Hey boys our patient is comfortably in twilight, ready to be carved up
like a Christmas ham’. This comment is typical of Liz, who regularly
casts a critical eye on Sean and Christian’s behavior. Here she suggests
that their work is a form of butchery and makes fun of their cavalier
approach to surgery (and the associated moral decisions in general).
However, the comment also foreshadows some of the dark events that
are to follow in the plot, as both ham and murder come to play a role
in the harrowing set of events surrounding the Latino body that are to
emerge as the plot unfolds.
88 Alexia Smit

The opening moments of the surgery play out in a style similar to an

action sequence or a dual in a Western. Parallel cutting between the two
surgeons dramatizes the preparation for surgery as each doctor snaps on
gloves and lets the nurses put on their masks and surgical lamps. Sean
declares, ‘Let’s do it’. Then Liz presses ‘play’ on a CD player and the
opening guitar sounds of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’ sound in the
surgery. As the drumbeats of the song begin, the dialogue-based drama
between Sean and Christian gives way to kinetic, musical sequence.
From this point on, the men appear almost compulsively driven by the
rhythms of the song.
The fact that the surgical scenes are so closely associated with music
and that the music almost always corresponds the particular emotional
mood of the episode, is an important hint that the melodramatic mode
is in operation here. The choice of music, ‘Paint it Black’ by the Rolling
Stones, is significant, not only for the way it voices Sean and Christian’s
rage, but also because the unrelenting beats and diabolical tone of the
music create the sense that the mastery and skill of these men is being
used in service of evil. The pounding beats pair with rhythmic editing
to produce a sense of automatism. Extremely brief close-up shots of
Pérez’s face in different stages of the surgery are intercut with shots of
a black screen creating a jarring, mechanical rhythm. The effect mim-
ics the way in which crime scene photographs and slides are presented
on shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000-), through a
flashing effect and the clicking of slides in a projector. Thus, an aura
of criminality is lent to the sequence. Christian and Sean are drawn
into complicity with the activities of their patient as they take apart
his face. This montage presentation continues with multiple dissolves
between extreme close-ups of the minutiae of the surgical transforma-
tion. Technology is foregrounded in this montage, as the jump-cuts
emphasize the movement of hands and instruments around the face.
Sean breaks the patient’s nose in time with a climactic beat in the song
and blood sprays across his mask. False teeth are screwed into Pérez’s
mouth. The surgeons slice into the skin around his eyes and later cut
into the hairline to lift the skin. For each gruesome procedure that the
men undertake a shot featuring the surgical tools precedes any shots of
the surgeon’s faces as they undertake their work. This creates an impres-
sion that the tools are guiding the men rather than the other way
around. The end of the scene is indicated by a close-up in which we see
the surgeon’s bloody instruments hurled into a jug of surgical solution.
As the instruments land the liquid changes from clear and transparent
to bloody red. This image of the pure liquid turning sanguine is one of
 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’ 89

many metaphors on this show in which leaking bodily fluids are used
melodramatically to create a sense of contamination.

Considering irony

However, black humor and a certain ironic knowingness are also obvi-
ous features of this scene. Liz’s commentary about the nature of the
surgeons’ work and the well-known song accompanying the images
seem to suggest that the scene is adopting a critical attitude toward
the men rather than encouraging identification with them. Indeed,
the sheer excess and stylization of the scene could be considered
comic, and it draws attention to the show’s formal features, offering
the opportunity for it to be read from a position of critical distance.
This tendency can be compared to Paul Willemen’s description of the
processes at play in the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. For Willemen,
Sirk intensifies the stylistic features of melodrama to a point of excess
and ‘by stylising his treatment of a given narrative, he succeeds in
introducing ... a distance between the film and its narrative pretext’
so that the film style reflects critically on its ideologically problem-
atic narrative events (Willemen, 1971, p. 65). But Willemen also
understands that these are popular Hollywood films with a mandate
to appeal to as many viewers as possible. Thus, he thinks of them as
having a double address. They may appeal to the emotions of a ‘mass
audience’ while also addressing a ‘knowing, culturally sophisticated
viewer.’ (1971, p. 65) As Jane Feuer puts it, ‘following Willemen’s logic
one must conceptualise Sirk films as two films in one’. (1984, p. 6).
Nip/Tuck is also a popular text aiming to appeal to as many viewers as
possible, and its address could be considered as similarly doubled. The
pleasures on offer are not just those of irony and knowingness. Rather
the images and stylized sequences of the show invite viewers to engage
viscerally and emotionally with the heightened onscreen action.
Unlike Willemen, I am cautious about thinking these two levels of
engagement as strictly appealing to two different audiences. Instead of
aligning an engagement with melodrama with the naivety of a mass
audience and an inability to achieve critical awareness, I would sug-
gest that viewers are capable of moving between the two levels of the
text according to their own personal positioning and political views,
acknowledging levels of commentary and irony while still engaging
emotionally and physically in the melodramatic pleasures on offer.
In traditional accounts, irony has been understood as primarily a mode
of negation. Offering an alternative to this theory of irony, Rachel Giora
90 Alexia Smit

argues that ironic expression does not involve the direct cancelling of one
sentiment with another. Instead, ‘irony understanding involves process-
ing both the negated and the implicated messages, so that the differences
between them may be captured’ (Giora, 1995, p. 239). Where a speaker
could use direct and literal negative language, using ironic language is a
rhetorical choice, and it can be motivated by a desire to retain both mean-
ings and hold them in comparison. Irony thus allows us to hold both the
literal and indirect/implied meanings in tension. In ironic expression one
can both mean and not mean what one literally says. As Neill Korobov
argues, irony ‘achieves a kind of hedging – a “have your cake and eat
it too” equivocation that pivots on multiple levels of meaning’ (2007,
p. 227). Korobov points out that irony’s ‘pivoting’ between literal and
implied expression allows young men to simultaneously deny and affirm
aspects of hegemonic masculine identity in playful verbal banter (Ibid.).
For Korobov, the ‘sustainability and adaptability of hegemonic masculin-
ity may very well lie in its ability to be strategically ironized’ (p. 227).
Rather than seeing the ironic address of this programming as ‘cancelling
out’ or dampening the melodramatic force of the show’s excessive visuals,
it is perhaps possible to see these elements as held in dramatic tension.
That is, while the images of blood and gore express feelings of anxiety and
crisis, the ironization of this white male crisis does not negate the emo-
tional resonance. Instead, irony allows a reactionary expression of white
male masculine crisis to be both voiced and denied. The tension between
the melodramatic and ironic pleasures of Nip/Tuck highlights the sense
in which white male anxiety cannot be straightforwardly voiced without
being simultaneously denied by a ‘sophisticated,’ knowing and politically
correct discourse. In a sense, then, white male anxiety is doubly encoded.
It is firstly displaced from direct expression into melodrama’s ‘substitute
acts’ of bodily violence and fleshy exposure. Then the melodramatic
display of bodily suffering and heroism is ironized by the mechanisms
of the program in a way that allows these sentiments to be expressed
without leaving them open to critique. But while irony might encourage
a detachment and distancing from the emotional and visceral excesses on
display, it does not preclude the opportunity to engage with and enjoy
the melodramatic elements of such programming – the opportunity, in
Korobov’s words, ‘to have your cake and eat it too’.

Pathos and action

As the episode progresses there are fewer signals for an ironic mode of
attention (such as Liz’s comments discussed above). Rather the episode
 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’ 91

becomes increasingly and excessively melodramatic. The climactic

closing sequence of Nip/Tuck’s first episode demonstrates clearly the
regressive racialized dichotomies of good and evil set up by this show’s
use of bodies and melodramatic narrative. Before turning to a detailed
analysis of this sequence, I will briefly outline some plot points neces-
sary to an understanding of the action. In the course of the episode,
Sean realizes that Christian has misled him about the identity of Silvio
Pérez . He quits the practice and begins to start up his own business.
Christian, meanwhile, discovers that Silvio Pérez is not only a drug
dealer, but a child molester. His new, more attractive face allows him
to prey on little girls more easily. It is worth noting here that the rep-
resentation of Pérez as a child molester rehearses an old melodramatic
trope: the racially other as sexual assailant. Later, when Sean does a
post-operative consult with Silvio, he and his brother Alejandro offer
Sean 20,000 dollars to liposculpt Silvio’s abdomen. Sean, desperate for
money for his new practice, accepts. For an additional 5,000 dollars,
Sean allows Alejandro to sit in on the surgery. At the same time,
Christian sets off to do a Botox house call. This trip is a trap set by
the drug lord Escobar Gallardo in order to discover the whereabouts of
Silvio Pérez, and Christian is held captive at Escobar’s residence as Sean
prepares for surgery. The scene is now set for the episode’s dramatic
climax, which I discuss in detail below.
The camera tracks back from a medium shot of the seated Alejendro
to reveal, in a high-angle long shot, Sean’s new makeshift operat-
ing room. Liz monitors the anaesthesia and the unconscious Silvio is
sprawled out on the operating table, as Sean suctions fat from his abdo-
men. Hollow squelching noises accompany this image. The incision is
then shown in close-up, so that we can see, in detail, the cannula mov-
ing in and out of Silvio’s flesh, and yellow fatty fluid seeping from the
wound. Sean demands that Alejandro wear his surgical mask. He obliges
and the camera lingers on him then moves down his body as he pulls a
gun out of his pocket and conceals it in the surgical robe he is wearing.
From this cliffhanger moment, a cut transports us to Escobar
Gallardo’s residence where Christian is being held captive. This arrange-
ment of suspenseful parallel sequences is typical of the ‘pathos and
action’ and heightened drama of melodrama. Christian is almost naked,
sweating and tied to a chair in front of a fire as Escobar interrogates
him. Escobar questions Christian about the side effects of Botox and
while doing so pulls off his shirt to reveal a heavily tattooed upper body.
This scene is an interesting example of two racialized bodies at war with
each other. Escobar’s tattoos mark him as part of a gang culture that is
92 Alexia Smit

frequently associated with Latin Americans and low-income groups.

Escobar wields his body, marked as it is with the particularly racially
and socially conditioned imprints of suffering and manhood, against
Christian’s body. He knocks Christian to the ground with a punch and
reaching for a pile of syringes, questions Christian about Sean’s wherea-
bouts. Christian, in his first real display of heroism and loyalty, refuses
to give Escobar his answer. ‘I don’t know’, Christian declares as Escobar
brings the needles toward his face. Jabbing four botox needles into
Christian’s cheek, Escobar retorts, ‘well know this’, amid Christian’s cries
of pain. Here Escobar uses implements of body modification associated
with Christian’s own wealth and status to torture and disfigure him.
Escobar’s comment ‘know this’ also makes a connection between physi-
cal pain and moral certainty.
After this distressing moment, we are returned to Sean’s liposuction of
Silvio Pérez. The globular suctioning sounds continue over a high angle
shot of the room. In the corner of the frame Alejandro suddenly jumps
up, pulls out a gun and demands that they wake Silvio up from anaesthe-
sia. Liz screams girlishly. Sean remains composed but proceeds carefully,
trying to reason with Alejandro. Silvio’s face is revealed in close up as he
wakes. His skin is still yellowed and scarred from the recent surgeries. He
resembles, somewhat, a Frankenstein’s monster as his eyes roll back into
his head and he gags on the intubation in his throat. Alejandro begins
talking to Silvio and reveals his intention to kill his brother because he
too objects to the man’s pedophilic tendencies. But as Silvio begins to
understand what is going on he grabs in desperation at the cannula in
his abdomen, pulling it out and spraying mustard-colored ooze around
the room. Sean struggles to gain control of the instrument and then, in
close-ups, we see each of the characters in the room being sprayed with
fat: first Alejandro, who ducks away, then Liz, who screams as her gown
and the wall behind her are blotched with yellow fat. Notably, we see
a close-up of Sean’s hands struggling for the cannula, as he battles to
contain his panic, before the shot of him being splattered with fat. This
associates Sean with self-control and action rather than pure disgust and
dismay. Even as he is confronted with this abject human waste, Sean
displays calm resolve and actively tries to regain his command over
the scene. Sean is actively engaged in a battle with Silvio to control the
spraying fat whilst Alejandro ducks and Liz stands to one side shielding
herself. Sean is depicted as suffering but also as active and heroic. In the
midst of this chaos, Alejandro moves over to the anaesthesia controls
with the intention of giving his brother a lethal overdose. When Sean
and Liz try to stop him, he threatens to shoot Silvio instead.
 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’ 93

In the next scene, we see Christian being injected with yet more
Botox. With a needle, Escobar traces a path down Christian’s abdo-
men toward his crotch. He rests the needle here threateningly. The
two men stare each other down. Christian still refuses to give up his
friend. Escobar presses the needle into Christian’s groin – the very seat
of his masculine identity. Christian lets out tortured screams while
his assailant mimics and mocks his cries. After this extraordinary
spectacle of endurance Christian’s phone rings and Escobar answers a
call from Sean. With typically melodramatic pathos, Escobar discovers
Sean’s location despite all of Christian’s bravery. Most melodramas,
Linda Williams argues, involve a ‘give and take of “too late” and “in
the nick of time”’ (2002, p. 30). Through this tendency, Williams
argues that melodrama produces a sense of either loss, in the case
of ‘too late’, or the threat of loss, in the case of ‘in the nick of time’.
Melodramas, according to Williams, are imbued with ‘the sense that
something has, as one of our later racial melodramas will put it, “gone
with the wind,” and the imagination of a loss that implicates readers
or audiences is central’. (2002, p. 31) The suspense and timing of the
narrative arrangement becomes an important way in which the text
‘implicates’ the audience into this feeling of having lost something
(2002, p. 30). This pattern of suspenseful, parallel action and pathos is
very much present in the sequence I have described above. One might
argue that viewers are implicated in a sense of loss when, after view-
ing and empathizing with Christian’s bravery and endurance of pain,
in his refusal to give up his friend’s location, Gallardo discovers where
Sean is anyway.

Conclusion

The sequence described above involves drama, suspense and excesses

of the body that are heightened to the point of being potentially comi-
cal. The squirting liquids and screaming faces featured in the sequence
could potentially be read as screwball comedy. As in the surgical
sequence described earlier with reference to Willemen’s ideas, excessive
style and an intensification of its melodramatic features can allow for a
distancing from the narrative. While it is possible for the sheer excess
of the show’s style to call on a more critical engagement with the narra-
tive of racial threat evidenced here, this is not the only way that viewers
can enjoy the text. As in the popular melodramas of Sirk, there is still
the opportunity for viewers to enjoy and engage emotionally with the
melodramatic features of the episode. Engaging with the melodrama on
94 Alexia Smit

offer here involves engaging with anxieties about a threatened white

masculinity, and a threatening Latino body.
Identifying with Sean in this scene involves identifying with the
struggle to contain one’s immediate bodily responses to the revolting
situation depicted onscreen. This viscerally felt disgust intensifies
our sense of both men’s suffering and their feats of self-control. The
melodramatic pathos and action is economically cultivated here,
through Sean’s interface with Silvio Pérez’s body and its sprayings of
yellow goop, and through Christian’s display of suffering and bravery.
Interestingly, little attention is paid to the pain and distress of Silvio
Pérez, who must surely be suffering the most, and who ultimately dies
in the episode. The show suggests that, unlike Sean and Christian, Silvio
Pérez deserves to suffer. This sequence in which both Sean and Christian
lose command of their technology, presents a hysterical expression of
white male control compromised by a monstrous ‘other’. This crisis is
dramatized in the scenes featuring Sean, through queasy-making images
of gushing abdominal fat. Significantly, it is an unregulated Hispanic
body that contaminates Sean’s clean surgery; and, as the rest of the
season will show, Silvio’s death casts a dark shadow over Sean’s life
from this point onward. The sense of contagion is set up, not merely
symbolically, but as something that should be viscerally felt. Through
the relays between Sean, the tools of his trade and the ‘raced’ body in
this scene, concerns about money and about racial ‘others’ are brought
into intimate relation. Ultimately, this trauma is endured because Sean
and Christian need money that is in hands of Colombian villains. The
implication made here is that the ‘other’ is somehow to blame for the
white man’s perceived loss of agency, for the decline of patriarchal
mastery based on earning power and for various forms of perceived
white male economic disempowerment.
I have described Nip/Tuck’s graphic imagery as melodramatic as a way
of articulating the persuasiveness and some of the pleasure offered by
such material. As much as this show may gesture toward political cor-
rectness, liberal thinking and feminism, and however it allows itself
to be read as a humorous critique of two white men in crisis, on the
level of melodrama Nip/Tuck’s affective appeals to the heart and gut
dramatize the anxieties of a ‘beset’ white masculinity, articulating fears
of ‘contamination’ by and entanglement with racial ‘others’. The dou-
bling of melodrama and irony allows the show’s anxious sentiments to
be both voiced and denied so that it is possible to enjoy the pleasures
of being moved by this bodily melodrama, whilst simultaneously being
able to retain a sense of critical distance from the text.
 On the ‘Scalpel’s Edge’ 95

References
Brooks, P. (1985) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess, (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Brooks, P. (1994) ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution’ in J. Bratton, J. Cook and
C. Gledhill (eds) Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen (London: BFI).
Elsaesser, T. (1987) ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family
Melodrama.’ In C. Gledhill (ed.) Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in
Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI).
Feuer, J. (1984) ‘Melodrama, Serial Form, and Television Today’, Screen 25(1):
4–16.
Giora, R. (1995) ‘On Irony and Negation’, Discourse Processes 19(2): 239–264.
Jackobowitz, F. (1992) ‘The Man’s Melodrama: The Woman in the Window and
Scarlet Street’ in I. Cameron (ed.) The Movie Book of Film Noir (London: Studio
Vista,1).
Korobov, N. (2007) ‘Ironizing masculinity: How adolescent boys negotiate
hetero-normative dilemmas in conversational interaction’, The Journal of Men’s
Studies 13(2): 225 – 246.
Mulvey, L. (2001) ‘Between Melodrama and Realism: Under the Skin of the City’ in
J. Walters and T. Brown (eds) Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (London:
Palgrave Macmillan).
Nip/Tuck Official Website (2007) ‘About Season 1’ accessed at <http://www.warner
video.com/niptuck4/> [25/04/08] par.2.
Savran, D. (1996) ‘The Sadomasochist in the Closet: White masculinity and the
culture of victimization’, Differences. 8(2): 127–152.
Williams, L. (2001) Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from
Uncle Tom To OJ Simpson (New Jersey: Princeton University Press).
Willemen, P. (1971) ‘Distanciation and Douglas Sirk’, Screen 12(2): 63–67.
6
‘Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik’:
Unearthing Gay Male Anxieties
in Queer Gothic Soaps Dante’s
Cove (2005–2007) and The Lair
(2007–2009)
Darren Elliott-Smith

Academic studies of male homosexuality in horror film and television

have often been focused on gay masculinity as sub-textual and symbolic
and have often discussed the threat that queer, gay and lesbian sexu-
alities pose to an assumed heterosexual spectator. Scholars including
Robin Wood, Carol Clover, Richard Dyer, Ellis Hanson and Harry M.
Benshoff 1 have found that much of its representation has been sym-
bolic or implicit, whereby homosexuality must be teased out of its place
in the shadows via queer interpretation. In the vast majority of such
‘closeted’ Gothic texts, spectators must first make the leap of reading
the symbolic homosexual in the supernatural; few consider its explicit
presentation. Contemporary ‘out’ queer Gothic television’s representa-
tions of gay masculinity reveal more about gay male anxieties in the
early twenty-first century than heterosexual ones. More specifically,
recent queer2 Gothic soap operas such as Dante’s Cove (2005–2007,
Dir. Sam Irving) and The Lair (2007–2009, Dir. Fred Olen Ray) work to
foreground gay men’s anxieties about their judgment by heteronorma-
tive standards. Heteronormativity positions the gay man as feminine, as
the ‘abnormality’ of his gender (perceived as feminine-masculine) seems
to uphold the assumed deviancy of his sexuality and gives credence to
the heterosexual man’s performance of masculinity. If traditional mas-
culinity is conventionally impenetrable in a physical and sexual sense, as
opposed to the patriarchal view of the feminine subject as penetrable,
then heteronormative culture demands the gay man’s penetrability in
order to place him within the symbolic phallic order. My adoption of

96
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 97

terms such as normative/non-normative and heteronormativity and

later homonormativity refers to the regulating effect of the assumption
that biological sex dictates gender roles and sexual desire. Traditional
gender traits feed into heteronormative structures, ensuring the con-
tinuance of heterosexuality along binary oppositions of active-male/
passive-female.
This chapter discusses the aforementioned queer appropriations of
the Gothic melodrama, in the form of serialized Gothic television soaps
in which gay male subjectivities are often hypermasculinized in a des-
perate attempt to distance gay machismo from a shameful feminine
association. ‘Out’ queer Gothic television soaps, aimed at gay male audi-
ences, operate to summarize contemporary anxieties within gay male
culture surrounding an association with penetrability as feminizing
and traumatic. As a consequence, this leads to a phallic mimicry via the
shows’ exaggerated masculine performances and a gendered scripting
as ‘straight’ by the shows’ gay male characters that often foregrounds
impenetrability. Ironically, the homosexuality that is portrayed in such
texts is often shown to be both ‘straight acting’ and erotically infatuated
with a machismo that is coded heterosexual.
Queer Gothic soaps appropriate both horror film and melodramatic
conventions to foreground gay men’s anxieties that encourage a
homonormative aping of heterosexual culture – which, in turn, feeds
further anxieties surrounding the cultural conflation of gay masculinity
with a shameful femininity. These shows not only demonstrate a trend
of masculine performance, but a Gothic layering of gender and genre as
a method of masking feminine association. The merging of melodrama
and horror genre tropes in the Queer Gothic Soap also allows for a
simultaneous de- and re-masculinization of gay male subjectivities. The
gay male spectator experiences this re-tumescence of masculinity via
a masochistic suffering through Gothic conventions and identification
with the (passive) victims of horrific trauma and the genre’s monstrous
‘Others’. In direct correlation with this, anxieties arguably also arise
from the cultural stigma of the feminized gay male subject being sym-
bolically paralleled with the traditional conventions of the expressive,
emotional and female-centered (in terms of diegesis and target audience)
melodrama. Queer Gothic television soaps reveal a shared emphasis
upon non-specific sexuality, particularly regarding their male protago-
nists, giving rise to a trope within the camp Gothic soap that seemingly
imposes a more fluid and evasive bisexuality, over a feminized homo-
sexuality, upon its males.
98 Darren Elliott-Smith

Defining Gothic Queer/Queer Gothic Melodrama

Christine Gledhill’s (1987) study of melodrama considers the television

soap as an extension of the same themes, aesthetics and conventions
that inform its cinematic counterpart, often categorized as the ‘woman’s
film’. These include melodramatic soaps’ presentation of domestic issues/
spaces and their emphasis on feelings, both of which are coded feminine.
The genre allows also for the presence of women’s voices either vocalized
or symbolized via projection onto the mise en scène and in its ironic and
excessive use of emotive musical score (particularly in North American
soap). Despite melodrama’s longstanding associations with femininity,
Myra MacDonald (1995) argues that the ‘feminist romanticism about
soap opera’ (p. 72) frequently works to uphold essentialist gender divi-
sions that work to perpetuate the stigma of soaps as ‘women’s spaces’
and calls for a confrontation of such generalizations. Gothic melodrama
and soap’s queer potential, then, would seem to suggest a rejection of
heteronormatively imposed gender identities in their appeal for gay
male spectators.
Gothic television soap arguably finds its origins in the diffuse
generic borders of the melodrama; further, it frequently foregrounds
both Gothic’s and the melodrama genres’ penchant for excess, pastiche
and artificiality. It is no surprise, then, that Richard Davenport-Hines
suggests that, ‘television soap opera provides the twentieth-century
equivalent of Gothic novels’ (Davenport-Hines, 1998, p. 14), not only
in their content but also in the implied gender of their readership/
audience. Ellis Hanson (2007) comments on the Gothic genre’s often
queer treatment of ‘our [gay men’s] anxieties, our traumas, our panics
and our repressed desires’ ( p. 174). He continues that Gothic’s invest-
ment in ‘often paranoid and shame-addled pleasures … interrogates
the oppositions that have traditionally characterized sexual politics, in
particular such familiar oppositions as heterosexuality/homosexuality,
masculine/feminine, sex/gender, closeted/out, center/margin’ ( pp.
175–176). Though the Gothic succeeds in its traumatic engagement
with paranoid structures around sexuality and horror, Hanson argues
that ‘it can also [offer] a raucous site of sexual transgression that
undermines its own narrative efforts at erotic containment’ (p. 176)
for a queer audience.
Stacey Abbott’s (2013) analysis of the cult daytime serial Dark Shadows
(ABC, 1966–1971) clearly marks it out as a key queer influence on
HereTV!’s supernatural dramas in its fusion of tropes from Gothic litera-
ture and the long-running television soap. Dark Shadows centers on the
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 99

arrival of a young central female protagonist/heroine Victoria Winters

(Alexandra Moltke) in the isolated coastal town Collinsport, Maine
where she is beset by hauntings and visitations from all manner of
Gothic stock characters, ‘ghosts, werewolves, witches, alchemists, and
most famously, vampires.’ (Abbott, 2013, p. 205). Whilst appropriating
Gothic conventions, Helen Wheatley points out that Dark Shadows,
and indeed the ‘open-ended soap style narrative’ per se, ‘lends itself
well to the Gothic as a genre of uncertainty’ (Wheatley, 2006, p. 148).
Her conclusion that ‘Gothic Television is one of the most domestic of
genres on the most domestic of media’ (p. 25) further underscores the
parallel between the feminine and the domestic that can be seen in the
Queer Gothic soap’s appropriation of Gothic tropes.3 While Gothic soap
(such as Dark Shadows, Twin Peaks (1990–1991)) is shown to have queer
appeal in its camp fusion of stylistic and narrative tropes from Gothic
literature, both the horror film and the television soap/melodrama’s
historical representation of homosexuality are also often bound to the
symbolic and implicit. Queer Gothic soap on the other hand renders
explicit any sub-textual reference to homosexuality. This raises the ques-
tion: when monstrousness as a metaphor for the threat that homosexu-
ality poses to heteronormativity ceases to be coded and instead becomes
open, what does it mean?
Queer Gothic soaps are texts authored by gay male or queer identi-
fied writers and directors, for gay and lesbian audiences. They not only
demonstrate a distillation of the elements of the melodrama genre
that hold queer appeal (such as camp and histrionic acting, excessive
emotional display, torrid and complicated romantic storylines), but
they also reveal the genre’s malleability in fusing soap, not only with
Gothic horror tropes, but with soft-core erotica. Two such examples
can be seen in the recent success of US queer Gothic soap Dante’s Cove
and its spin-off The Lair. Dante’s Cove revolves around a supernatural
gender war between male and female witches and demons on an island
off the Pacific coast of California, while The Lair centers upon gay male
infighting and power struggles between queer vampires running a secret
sadomasochist’s sex club on the same island. Both of the sibling soaps
have a tendency toward a visual style and a narrative trajectory that is
more comparable to a low budget US long running series, than to the
soft-focused, endless fantasy aesthetic of the daytime soap. Dante’s Cove
is structured via hour-long episodes that resemble the multi-strand,
story-led queer Gothic-soap of HBO’s True Blood (2008–present), typi-
cally built around reaching an end of season climax cliffhanger episode
over the course of a four to five episode run. The Lair simply extends on
100 Darren Elliott-Smith

this format, but its 30-minute running time lends more to comparison
with shorter, soap opera style bites over a longer season (its third season
ran for 13 episodes). Here! TV’s Queer Gothic milieu fuses a sweaty, New
Orleans-style Southern Gothic setting with its elaborate tombs and cem-
eteries, its plush, but cavernous, darkly ornate mansions decked with
billowing drapes, with the eponymous small town resort’s sun (and
moon) kissed So-Cal beaches, abandoned lighthouses, white washed
villas and open-air gay bars. In both shows the Gothic past reaches
out into the sun-lit present in the form of fevered dreams, immortal
vampires, witches, werewolves and reincarnated demons, and does so
mostly undercover of night.

Guilty pleasures: gothic, guilt and gay shame

Extending on Dark Shadows’ camp appeal,4 Dante’s Cove’s spectatorial

pleasure emerges from an ironic appreciation of the show’s less realistic,
less successful elements such as its histrionic and amateurish acting, low
production values and often clumsy scripting. Dante’s Cove’s marketing
campaign ran with the tag-line ‘Your newest Guilty Pleasure’. Despite
its countercultural potential, the show is clearly infused with gay male
anxiety, guilt and shame. In his article, ‘Shame on You’ Leo Bersani refe-
rences the 2003 Gay Shame conference at the University of Michigan
at which academics remarked on the view that ‘gay shame serves as the
foundation for gay pride’ (Bersani, 2008, p. 35). He adds that gay-shame
theorists suggest that feeling shame is an inherent part of gay subjectivity
‘in a society that trains us from an early childhood to think of homo-
sexuality as unnatural and even criminal’ ( p. 32). He further concludes
that the AIDS crisis and potential contraction of disease via sex only
further reactivated ‘at least some of the shame that even the proudest gay
men probably felt when they first discovered their sexual tastes’ (p. 32).
Gay pride, Bersani elucidates, is a direct result of, and recognition of,
a still existing underlying shame in one’s homosexuality. Richard Dyer
has suggested that much of the feel of the apologia for homosexuality in
Gothic literature, whether written by gay men and lesbians themselves
or by others, has been a mix of distaste for homosexuality with a recog-
nition that it cannot be resisted – ‘I don’t know why I want to do these
disgusting things, but I do and I can’t stop myself and there’s no real
harm in it’ (Dyer, 1988, p. 63). One may then ask, to what ‘guilt’ does
the Dante’s Cove marketing refer? The guilt of homosexuality, the guilt
of shameful feminine association, the guilt in the cult appreciation of a
low-fi exploitation aesthetic, or indeed the guilt in what Pansy Duncan
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 101

calls ‘the “queerness” of the young man’s absorptive acceptance of

melodrama’s emotional petition’ (Duncan, 2011, p. 174)?
Dante’s Cove and The Lair are both produced by cable- and internet-
based television network Here!TV. Founded in 2002 and owned by
gay-oriented distributor Regent Entertainment, the network targets its
programming at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender audiences. It
markets itself as the alternative television channel for those discern-
ing viewers who wish to ‘live openly’, with ‘no apologies’, referencing
an assumed guilt within gay and lesbian culture. The channel’s name
apparently references the 1990s political slogan of protest group Queer
Nation ‘We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it!’ (Banks and McGee,
2010, p. 221). Yet both soaps’ presentation of a homonormative homo-
sexuality that foregrounds assimilation and conformity seems to work
against such marketed leanings toward the confrontational and the rad-
ical. Gay masculinity in Dante’s Cove and The Lair is oddly coy, creating
an inverted world in which homonormativity (not heteronormativity) is
assumed, but never explicitly referred to. A white, gay male, hypermas-
culine world in which men have sex with men, where gay male passiv-
ity is defended against for fear of feminine association which gives rise
to another form of gay shame.
The representation of gay masculinity in such soaps is often an
assimilative gay machismo. Lisa Duggan describes the recent rise of
homonormativity that ‘upholds and sustains … dominant heteronor-
mative assumptions and institutions … while promising the possibility
of a gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (Duggan,
2003, p. 179). Duggan argues that this process constitutes relationships
that are built upon ‘monogamy, devotion, maintaining privacy and pro-
priety’. The consequence is a hierarchy of ‘worthiness’, in which those
who identify as transgender, transsexual, bi-sexual or non-gendered
are deemed less entitled to legal rights than those in relationships that
mirror heterosexual marriage. According to Duggan homonormativity
idealizes homogenous ‘straight acting’ stable relationships founded
on shared property. In relation to this, the representation of gay mas-
culinity in Dante’s Cove is often assimilative and seemingly macho.
Here homosexuality becomes incidental to the plot, and characters’
sexualities become secondary to genre conventions. Femininity is also
disavowed via gay male characters’ adoption of heterosexual macho
performance, which merely replaces a stereotypical femininity with an
equally stereotyped gay masculinity.
Such representations of masculinity trouble the identification of
easily recognizable gay characters and suggest a contingent practice
102 Darren Elliott-Smith

of bisexuality rather than homosexuality. Often gay masculinity is

portrayed as indefinite, transmutable and fluid so as not to suffer the
‘shame’ of a fixed homosexual identity which is equated with the femi-
nine. Above all the lure of macho performance for the gay man simul-
taneously encourages a powerful, and shameful, erotic dis-identification
with gender while also highlighting its ‘performative’ qualities. Judith
Butler’s (1990) concept of the ‘performative’ nature of gender in Gender
Trouble posits that the supposed biology of binary gender is constructed
via the repetition of acts and behaviors where social performance cre-
ates gender, a performance which imitates culturally prescribed and
impossible ideals (Butler, 1990, p. 173). Focusing on the fragility of
gender performance, she asserts that the possibilities for a transfor-
mation of gender are found in a ‘failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a
parodic repetition’ (p. 192). The fragmented and parodic qualities of gay
masculine performance clearly highlight gender’s imitative elements.
However, while queer Gothic soap’s gender play can often challenge
supposedly ‘natural’ gender binaries, it can also function to repress and
cover up anxieties about failed masculinity and the stigma attached to
homosexual desire. Though Dante’s Cove and The Lair are gay-oriented
texts featuring homosexual relationships, the dialogue often presents
sexuality as incidental, often shying away from explicitly announcing
characters as ‘gay’ or ‘queer’.
Both series are highly parodic and satirical, with ‘exploitation’-style
features5. They are Gothic-camp television and multi-part soap operas
which borrow stereotypes and narratives from horror and combine
them with mini-series parody. Kamilla Elliot writes that Gothic parodies
‘play with Gothic conventions, film forms and audiences … modernize
them, position themselves as sequels … change character genders, sexual
orientations, nationalities, religions and species’. She continues that
‘the attention parody draws to film forms heightens awareness of their
constructedness and by extension, the discursive constructedness of the
Gothic’ (Elliot, 2007, pp. 223–224). The OED (2003) defines parody as ‘an
imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist or genre with deliberate
exaggeration for comic effect ... an imitation or version of something
that falls short of the real thing’ (p. 1281). However contemporary stud-
ies of parody contest ‘standard dictionary definitions’ (Hutcheon, 1985,
p. 5) suggesting that parody is no longer confined to a low mockery of
high art and no longer requires ‘ridiculing imitation’ (Hutcheon, 1985,
p. 40) and instead operates to deconstruct meaning.
The self-reflexive genre excesses of Dante’s Cove and The Lair extend
to a ‘covering up’ of gay male anxieties around their own problematic
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 103

masculinities via gender parody. The adoption of hypermasculine, or

‘straight-acting’ gender performance (and genre) in these soaps offers a
performative, a form of ‘dress up’ whereby a valorization of machismo
is adopted as a means of disavowing femininity. If the horror of Dante’s
Cove and The Lair exhibits any fear of passive feminine association,
then this fear is allayed by the ‘straight acting’6 über-masculinity of
their male characters. If, historically, gay masculine identity has been
conflated with the shameful aspects of femininity, then any feminine
traits are disavowed via their expulsion, their parody or indeed by
performing a hyperbolized version of an apparent binary opposite
(heterosexual masculinity). Though often parodic, I would argue that
such performance also consequently threatens to effect what Leo Bersani
(1995) warns is an absenting of difference in order to ‘fit in’, whereby
‘gays have been de-gaying themselves in the very process of making
themselves visible’ (p. 5). Thus the guilty pleasure implied in Here! TV’s
Gothic soaps may actually lie in their willing assimilation of straight-
acting masculine traits as an indicator of gay shame.

Dante’s Cove and The Lair: queer gothic erotic and

the hypermasculine

Dante’s Cove was initially marketed as soft-core erotica, with the tagline
‘Possessed and Undressed’ yet as its seasons have progressed, the show
has foregrounded its satirical and comedic value alongside its chaste dis-
play of naked male flesh and soft-core titillation. Yet such anodyne sex-
ual display essentially achieves only a flaccid eroticism, one that is not
designed to arouse, but merely to provide ‘eye-candy’, and essentially
becomes a source of comedy. Despite Dante’s Cove’s seemingly fresh
representation of ‘unapologetic’ homosexuality, its depiction of gay
masculinity is not without its problems. For while the characters’ sexual
preferences remain obvious, it is the continued adoption of macho pos-
turing and language and, at times, oddly contradictory straight-acting
behavior that subverts any ‘out’ and guilt free declaration of homo-
sexuality that the channel’s title, Here!, suggests. The representation
of macho masculinity in Dante’s Cove and The Lair is arguably based
on the language structures and heterosexual posturing of white male,
youth-based American culture. Yet, despite the series’ obvious parody of
both the horror and melodrama genres, its lampooning of macho mas-
culinity is less pointed. At surface value, the male characters of Dante’s
Cove appear as stereotypically (straight) masculine. Such ambiguity and
evasion of ‘obvious’ indicators of gay masculinity as defined by the
104 Darren Elliott-Smith

dominant heterosexist discourse (that is, effeminacy) is part of Dante’s

Cove’s appeal. In evading these effeminate indicators in favor of hyper-
masculine erotic tropes this then further feeds into the gay man’s erotic
conversion fantasy – to fuck traditionally masculine (straight or appa-
rently straight) men. It is telling that the show foregrounds stereotypically
heterosexual macho performances of young gay men who are played
largely by straight actors.7 It is via this performative fusion of straight
actors playing gay, yet effectively acting straight, that a certain type of
idealized macho and straight-acting gay masculinity is affirmed and feti-
shized. However, if ‘parody is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know
this’, as Leo Bersani argues (Bersani, 1987, p. 208), then can the appeal of
the parodic macho spectacle in queer Gothic soap remain erotic?
Dante’s Cove’s plot centers around its main protagonists, gay male
couple Kevin Archer (Gregory Michaels) and Toby Moraitis (Charlie
David). Kevin, a young blonde from the mainland, is in love with Toby,
an older, out gay man. Kevin comes out to his parents, confessing his
love for Toby, and they duly reject him. Invited to stay on the island
with his lover, Kevin is therefore cast, and subsequently feminized,
in the traditional Gothic melodrama role of the naïve, newly-arrived
young ‘heroine’, in the traditions of Ann Radcliffe’s Emily St Aubert in
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and
Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). In typical Gothic form Dante’s
Cove also begins with a flashback to 1840 in which Ambrosius Vallin
(William Gregory Lee), an attractive young suitor, is engaged to wed
a young witch, Grace Neville (Tracey Scoggins), in the island town of
Dante’s Cove. Stumbling upon an erotic but traumatic scene, Grace
discovers her fiancé in the throes of passion being sodomized by a
male servant. As punishment, she uses ‘Tresum’ witchcraft to kill the
servant and imprisons Ambrosius, having been magically aged, in the
basement of the mansion. The plot contrivance that the curse can only
be broken by the kiss of a handsome young man allows for a shift into
the present. In the present day, Kevin begins suffering hauntingly erotic
visions under Ambrosius’ spell, and, in a trance, he eventually frees this
‘imprisoned beauty’ with a kiss. Ambrosius in turn falls in love with
Kevin and strives to split him from Toby and to wage war with Grace
by using the power of ‘Tresum’. The show’s fictional witchcraft mythol-
ogy links feminine power with that of the moon and water (with Grace
as its avatar), and masculine power with the sun (with Ambrosius as
an aspiring avatar). Dante’s Cove’s gender war stages a struggle between
the power of feminine witchcraft and its masculine counterpart, the
metaphor is queered as the traditionally stronger power of the sun is
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 105

overwhelmed by the traditionally weaker feminine moon. The same

gendered binary can arguably be seen in its conflation of genre (melodrama
and horror) each with their own traditionally gendered associations,
feminine-melodrama and masculine-horror.
Given the imposed shameful disempowerment of the gay male in
western culture via feminine association, it is understandable that there
is a great deal of macho posturing in the show. The show makes appa-
rent from its opening episode that it valorizes a fluid, but essentially
macho, gay masculinity. When Kevin arrives at Dante’s Cove he is
shown around the hotel by Toby’s friend Cory (Josh Berresford) who
wanders around wearing only white boxer briefs and an open shirt that
reveals his sweat-slicked, muscled torso. The exchange between the two
young men, though flirty, reveals a language that further underlines a
stereotypical, macho coding. Cory explains that the hotel has ‘many
bitchin’ parties’, to which Kevin replies ‘sweet!’ in characteristically
‘jock-like’ fashion. Cory demonstrates the highly charged sexual fluid-
ity and, above all, macho, straight-coded posturing of many of Dante’s
Cove men when, remarking upon Van (Nadine Heimann), one of the
few female residents at the hotel, ‘she’s so hot, dude, if I wasn’t gay – I’d
jump her bones!’.
As a recently ‘outed’, gay youth, Kevin suffers the most in coming to
terms with this idealized masculinity. In contrast to his blonde, androg-
ynous prettiness, his partner Toby is an older, more hirsute, stubbled
brunette, with a successful business. Kevin’s status as ‘kept boy’ and the
younger of the couple further emasculates him. As Kevin struggles to
pay his way at the hotel, his love affair with Toby is fraught with anxie-
ties of powerlessness. This is countered by his overcompensating macho
language, clothing and heteronormative behavior and in his casting
of himself as a ‘Prince Charming’ figure in his fevered fantasy love
scenes with Ambrosius. Shot in soft focus against clichéd period Gothic
mise-en-scène (the ‘dungeon’ set illuminated with romantically diffused
lighting and dressed with velvet drapes and ornate candles) Kevin is
reimagined in period dress, complete with the flesh revealing, billow-
ing linen undershirt and figure-hugging breeches of the archetypal
romantic hero. Through this supernatural connection with Ambrosius,
he attempts to re-masculinize himself, but instead Ambrosius vampiri-
cally feeds upon his youth and masculinity in order to gain the power
to avenge himself on Grace. The series’ second season further develops
its rejection of a feminized gay male culture, Ambrosius’ character is
developed further into a macho stereotype. His name is shortened to
‘Bro’ and his long hair is cut into a shorter, slicked 1950s style, complete
106 Darren Elliott-Smith

with black leather jacket in an appropriation of a James Dean/Marlon

Brando inspired biker-fetish.
Dante’s Cove’s spin-off, The Lair (2007–2009), takes place in a sado-
masochists’ nightclub on the same island, which is run by a vampire
clan who remain alive and in business by peddling drugs and feed-
ing from human victims. It fuses the narratives from Oscar Wilde’s
A Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire
(1976), both queer commentaries on the attraction of youthful beauty,
the fear of ageing and the desire for queer companionship. The Lair’s
central storyline follows the central vampire Damian Courtenay’s (Peter
Stickles) erotic pursuit of journalist Thom Etherton (David Morretti), as
he is convinced the mortal is the reincarnation of his dead lover Richard
De Vere, a painter (in the same vein as Wilde’s Basil Hallwood), whose
portrait of Damian continues to age as the vampire remains young. The
show’s appropriation of layered Gothic iconography also extends to
Universal Studios’ catalogue of stock monsters from the 1930s–1940s.
And the soap can thus be viewed as a satire of stereotypical gay male
‘types’ existent within the subculture. Its presentation of a multiplicity
of ‘Others’, ranging from the plethora of vampires, a werewolf, Frankie
(Brian Nolan) a murdered, vengeful spirit, a Little Shop of Horrors-style
(Corman, 1960) poisonous plant and even a rare depiction of a male
gorgon (Steven Hirschi). The Lair’s frequent bed hopping between its
(largely male) cast sets it out as a musing on promiscuity versus mono-
gamy thus highlighting the attraction/repulsion of monogamous
homonormativity (as depicted in the reincarnated love between Thom
and Damian).
Duggan’s understanding of a homonormativity that ‘idealises homog-
enous “straight acting” stable relationships founded on shared property’
can be seen in the power struggle between the show’s warring vampire
heads Damian and his usurping assistant Colin (Dylan Vox) to take over
the island’s clubs. In his reading of Bram Stoker’s archetypal literary
vampire in Dracula (1897), Franco Morretti points out that ‘[the vampire]
is a true monopolist: solitary and despotic’ who desires ‘capital [as]
dead labor that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking labor and lives the
more, the more labor it sucks’ (Morretti, 2006, pp. 91–92). Gay vampires
Damian and Colin satirically represent a contemporary gay male culture
that is mired in capitalism and where the motif of possession (owning
property, hording treasures and people) takes on both a spectral and tan-
gible meaning. The show borrows and updates motifs from traditional
cinematic horror and melodrama. When Sheriff Trout (muscular porn
star Colton Ford) is blinded, his ‘failure to see’ appropriates from Sirkian
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 107

melodramas such as Magnificent Obsession (1954) and takes on both a

literal and symbolic value. Trout’s investigative failure into the show’s
many murders prefigures his actual blindness which then both saves
him from calcification at the hands of the male gorgon, and allows for
an overshadowing of his superficiality as he embarks on a relationship
with a young man who he fails to see is a werewolf.
While Dante’s Cove features a mixed gender cast, The Lair has a ten-
dency toward male exclusivity. Its valorization of hypermasculinity
is further augmented by its casting of macho hardcore gay porn
actors including Johnny Hazzard, Colton Ford and Michael Von Steel.
Mirroring the male-only nature of the club, The Lair turns the female
gorgon mythical figure into a male and features only one female char-
acter, Laura (Beverly Lynne), who is revealed to be the victim of domes-
tic abuse. Unlike Dante’s Cove, with its warring witches Grace (Tracey
Scoggins) and Diana (Thea Gill), the series offers no place for the
powerful female ‘bitch’ character that carries over from American soap
culture.8 Instead, the archetypal ‘bitch’ figure is supplanted in The Lair
by the effeminate male – Colin (Dylan Vox) a camp and untrustworthy
bleached blonde bent on taking over the queer vampire clan. Arguably
in The Lair, effeminacy displaces femininity – but it is equally vilified.
The show marks a distinct move toward a celebration of idealized mas-
culinity via the arguably implicit adoption of heterosexual masculinized
ideals. Unlike Dante’s Cove, which, in its earlier episodes, makes ‘coming
out’ as gay a narrative strand, The Lair bypasses the need for explicit
reference to homosexuality and instead presents a world in which most
men are gay but interestingly the word itself is rarely used.

Opening up: soapy tears, penetration and emasculation

Returning to Dante’s Cove, an analysis of a key scene from ‘Then There

Was Darkness’ (Season 1, Episode 2) demonstrates the show’s, and
gay men’s, anxieties surrounding passive homosexuality and a fear of
emasculation. It does so via an ironic appropriation of tears as a melo-
dramatic trope. After being reconciled with Toby, having been freed
from Ambrosius’ love spell, Kevin reveals to Toby that, in his youth, he
was a street hustler. He continues that he never let his customers anally
penetrate him and still has never let anyone do so. Kevin confesses,
‘I never let anybody fuck me, because – you know I had to love them
to ... let them do that’. Breaking down, he weeps, ‘I never let anybody
have that part of me! Nobody ever, ’til now’. Upon which Kevin kisses
Toby, and they begin to have sex. Via the setting sun, in a romantically
108 Darren Elliott-Smith

warm hued soft-focus, a cross-cut between Kevin’s confession and the

initial stages of their love making, shows Grace casting a spell on the
moon, turning it blue to affect the actions of the male characters. Her
voiceover chants, ‘The power of the moon frees us ... The power of
Tresum frees us!’. Freed by femininity Kevin has hysterically teary anal
sex with Toby, crying uncontrollably throughout in an outrageously
hilarious mix of relief, pain and guilt.
Despite the scene’s obvious comic nature, it is clearly indicative of the
central themes of Dante’s Cove, with gay male passivity being associated
with feminine passivity and a teleological inference to a social and a
cultural powerlessness. Queer poststructuralist Michel Foucault outlines
the view attributed to most homosexuals, which suggests that, ‘being
the passive partner is in someway demeaning’ (Foucault, 1982–1983,
pp. 10–24). Furthermore D. A. Miller also discusses the masculine para-
noiac tendency for men to ‘monitor and master what is fantasized as
the “woman inside them”’ (Miller, 1988, p. 156), as a result there is
a consequent projection of homoerotic desire between men into ‘an
often violent relationship between men and women’. However, while
Dante’s Cove’s portrayal of trauma surrounding male penetration takes
place in an explicitly homosexual environment, I want to suggest that
these penetration anxieties are not necessarily based upon a fear of sod-
omy per se, but of the feminine masochism9 that is implied in it and,
further still, the guilt and shame at one’s own homosexuality (as coded
feminine) and even the trauma experienced in sharing one’s body with
another. The show may well be attempting a parody of both genre
and gender binaries, but in perpetuating the erotic objectification of
machismo it effectively maintains them.
This same essentialist active/passive gender coding is further perpetu-
ated via its satirical interpretation of ‘tears’ as a genre convention. In
reference to the melodrama genre’s promotional label – the ‘tear-jerker’
Franco Moretti (1983) argues that ‘tears are always the product of power-
lessness’ (p. 162). Pansy Duncan recognizes the parallels that have been
drawn between the female and gay spectator of melodrama but suggests
that while ‘the female spectator of the melodrama emblematizes, for
much feminist theory, if not complete consent then at least a saddened,
reflective witness to the scene of female suffering … then the gay specta-
tor of melodrama [is] an icon for the subversive, recuperatory practice of
“reading against the grain”’ (Duncan, 2011, p. 174). She continues that
‘a man crying at a melodrama is, of course, as conspicuous as a woman
crying at a melodrama is banal’ which draws attention to the ‘queerness
of the young man’s absorptive acceptance of the melodrama’s emotional
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 109

petition’ (p. 174). Yet while queer theoretical approaches to the

‘spectatorial solicitation of tears’, it must be pointed out here that there
is little in Dante’s Cove that serves to provoke ‘authentic’ tears (apart
from tears of laughter perhaps). Here instead is the ‘conspicuous’ pres-
entation of a man crying in a melodrama that connects with Duncan’s
observation that, ‘the queer dimension of the melodrama lies … in what
is perhaps the most conventional “obvious” and politically intransi-
gent feature of the genre – its visual fascination with … tears’ (p. 175).
Kevin’s tears come as he opens up to Toby about events from his past,
but also as he is penetrated, to some extent this connects with Duncan’s
formulation of tears as ‘one of the body’s various confessions, in their
expressive force, tears resemble many other signifiers in the somatic
repertoire of sensibility: the blush, the palpitation, the sigh [the ejacu-
lation]’. However, Duncan continues that while tears may once have
existed as melodrama’s ‘liquid proof of emotion’ (p. 176), recent queer
interpretations and uses of the trope have questioned their authentic-
ity with suspicion. Dante’s Cove’s camp utilization of tears is indicative
of a feminine ‘opening up’, of confession and of past suffering and
shame but they can also represent queer celebration. Kevin’s weeping as
simultaneously joyous yet shameful, further problematizes the cultural
stigma around male penetrability, extending it from a heteronormative
to a homonormative discourse, one which also stigmatizes feminine
passivity. Kevin’s tears are celebratory so long as they remain temporary,
in effect this is similar to what Peter Hutchings (1993) declares is the
temporary feminizing experience for the male spectator of the horror
film. In ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film’, Hutchings argues that the
male spectator of the horror film is capable, at an emotional/psychical
level, of ‘shifting back and forth between victim (conventionally femi-
nine) and victimizer (conventionally male)’ (p. 86). This oscillation
opens up space for the patriarchal male to empathize with the victim’s
trauma and disempowerment and the suffering of the monster. The
excitement experienced by the male spectator of the horror genre is
understood as masochistic, and, further, the spectator exhibits a ‘willing
subjection’ to being scared. This understanding of the masochistic posi-
tion, whereby the spectator submits to cinematic fright, is useful for an
interpretation of the pleasures in temporary passivity that are offered to
the gay male spectator of the horror film. But Hutchings’ discussion is
somewhat limited to a conventional depiction of the victim-as-female
and the straight male viewer’s (over any significant discussion of gay
spectators) experience of a temporary feminization. Since femininity
is identified as ‘powerlessness’ (and, by extension, homosexuality is
110 Darren Elliott-Smith

associated with femininity), the male spectator must also suffer horror
as ‘a feminizing experience’ (p. 91).
Similarly, tears affect the same perpetuation of gendered binaries,
Duncan continues that, ‘while tears have been coded as feminine, and
while it is women who have most functioned as their vehicle … tears,
in other words, reproduce heterosexuality, by producing it as repressed,
beleaguered and endangered’ (Duncan, 2011, p. 180). Thus Dante’s
Cove’s representation of reciprocal monogamy, via the central love affair
between Kevin and Toby represents a homonormative domestication
of gay machismo that is perpetually threatened, but titillated by the
potential of promiscuous encounters with other men.10

Conclusion

It remains clear that one of the central tenets of Queer Gothic soap is the
valorization of a heterosexually coded macho masculinity. In addition,
the sub-genre opts to revere masculine femininity (powerful women)
over feminine masculinity (wanton, penetrated men). One might ask
then, does Queer Gothic melodrama’s conflation of the appropri-
ated symbols of heterosexual masculinity with the implied feminine
masochism of homosexual desire truly achieve a destabilization of the
traditional image of masculinity as Bersani insists? I would suggest that
in his overidentification with heterosexist machismo, straight-acting
stereotypes and traditional masculinity, the gay male spectator’s desire
for the erotic masculine object also becomes a desire to be it, via a
symbolic incorporation and assimilation of the heterosexual male love
object. Both Dante’s Cove and The Lair trade in the erotic tease of macho
performance, whereby the viewer can (dis)identify with ‘straight acting’
gay masculinity and they can enjoy the illusion of sleeping with ‘the
enemy’ (heterosexual oppressors) and the (similarly illusory) promise of
accessing phallic potency that it symbolizes.
While the sexual fluidity of Dante’s Cove’s and The Lair’s characters
is undeniable, it comes at the expense of any positive representation
of femininity. Similarly, the tropes of melodrama (coded feminine) are
often masked in genre and gender ‘dress up’ in more masculine forms
(Gothic horror) in an attempt to disavow shame. Upon closer analysis,
the satirical potential of the macho performance in queer Gothic soap
is often overwhelmed by the erotic potency of machismo, which seems
to function as a disavowal of shameful feminine association. If Dante’s
Cove and The Lair are haunted by gay male dis-identifications with both
female and male subjectivity, the same unstable oscillation occurs in the
 Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik 111

appropriation of both melodrama and horror’s stereotypically gendered

generic tropes.

Notes
1. See: Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film (1992); Sue Ellen Case, ‘Tracking the Vampire’ (1991), Richard Dyer,
‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as
Vampirism’ (1988), Ellis Hanson, ‘Undead’ (1991) and Judith Halberstam’s
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995).
2. I want to understand ‘gay’ as referring implicitly to gay male but recog-
nize that in wider contexts it can be used to refer to homosexual men
and women. Similarly, in recent adage, queer was not used colloquially
to define homosexuality until the late nineteenth century and has moved
from a pejorative term to a re-appropriation of it as a more celebratory
term of identification to non-normative sexuality. Currently, queer should
not be understood as an umbrella term for lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender identity, but more so as a politically infused rejection of nor-
malizing structures that refuses to fix identity on a subject on the basis of
biological sex.
3. The American soap, renowned for its immersion into ‘heightened reality’
(Eddie Robson, 2007: 244), has frequently flirted with the fantastic and the
supernatural. See for instance Days of Our Lives (NBC 1965–present), 1995
storyline in which Dr. Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall) became possessed by the
devil, Passions’ (NBC 1999–2007) Tabitha Lennox (Juliet Mills), the soap’s
300 year-old witch, and Sunset Beach’s (NBC 1997–1999) plentiful voodoo
curses and slasher-horror-style massacres.
4. See for instance, Harry M. Benshoff, ‘Secrets, Closets, And Corridors Through
Time: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Dark Shadows Fan Culture.’ In
Alexander, A. and Harris, C. (eds) Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subcultures, and
Identity. (Hampton Press, 1996)
5. Ephraim Katz defines exploitation cinema as ‘films made with little or no
attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye for quick profit, usually
via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensa-
tional aspect of the product’ (2001: 446).
6. By ‘straight-acting’, I refer to a gay sex advertisement term for traditional
masculine behavioral traits.
7. The only self-identified ‘out’ gay actors in Dante’s Cove are Charlie David and
Reichen Lehmkuhl.
8. See for example, Joan Collins’ Alexis Carrington from Dynasty (ABC 1981–
1989) and Stephanie Beacham from The Colbys (ABC 1985–1987). Dante’s
Cove further references the appeal of strong, bitchy female characters from
Dynasty in its paralleling of Grace’s dark haired witch with Diana (The
L Word’s Thea Gill), her sister, a blonde haired witch with access to the mas-
culine powers of Tresum.
9. Sigmund Freud further elaborates his understanding of masochism in
‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924) by defining three types of
masochism, one of which is ‘feminine masochism’ which he defines as an
112 Darren Elliott-Smith

‘expression of the feminine nature’ including a feminization of men which

places the subject in ‘a characteristically feminine situation’ ([1924] 1984: 421)
10. The claustrophobic imprisonment of monogamy is further visualized in the
final scenes of ‘Naked in the Dark’ (Season 3, Episode 5) as Toby and his ex-
lover Adam (Jon Fleming) are seen supernaturally locked behind a mirror,
screaming to be freed from this suggestively narcissistic cell.

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7
Don’t Stop Believing:
Textual Excess and Discourses
of Satisfaction in the Finale of
The Sopranos
Martin Zeller-Jacques

While every television program with a passionate following will attract

significant comment when it comes to an end, few endings have been
so prominently featured in public discourse as that of The Sopranos
(1999–2007). The historical importance of the show, which sat on the
cusp of a new generation of ‘quality’ television drama spearheaded by
the subscription cable channel, HBO, combined with its tremendous
critical and popular success, meant that the final episode of the series
received the kind of attention reserved only for shows that are seen
as part of the zeitgeist. Major newspapers and magazines covered the
ending, fans commented on blogs and message boards and produced
alternative endings that they posted on Youtube, and everyone from
television comedians to presidential candidate Hilary Clinton tried to
capitalize on the cultural moment by offering their own parodies and
homages. If this discursive deluge makes The Sopranos a poor case study
for those wishing to examine a ‘typical’ television ending, it also makes
it a goldmine for those wishing to explore the variety of discourses
that may circulate around any television ending. The public discourse
around the finale of The Sopranos provides an ideal mass of comment
from which to discern the more general discourses that shape comment
around television endings, furnishing ample examples of what I will call
the ‘platonic’, ‘melodramatic’ and ‘industrial’ discourses.
If we are to believe the hype, on June 10, 2007, almost twelve million
HBO subscribers simultaneously thought there was something wrong
with their televisions as the final episode of The Sopranos cut to black
in the middle of a family dinner at an ice-cream parlor. This abrupt
ending has already passed into television lore, though in truth, it seems
unlikely that anyone missed the accelerating rhythm of cuts or the
114
 Don’t Stop Believing 115

significant syncing of the music that suggested the approaching end.

Like similar stories about people fleeing from the projected image of a
train at early Lumière brothers exhibitions, the apocryphal anecdotes
about the finale of The Sopranos are best read as an inadequate attempt
to express a shared feeling, powerful but difficult to describe – a feeling,
in this case, of unsatisfied narrative desire.
In Reading for Plot, Peter Brooks suggests that desire is what makes
us read, watch or otherwise consume narratives. In particular, the
desire for an ending: ‘the active quest of the reader for those shaping
ends that, terminating the dynamic process of reading, promise to
bestow meaning and significance on the beginning and the middle’
(Brooks, 1984, p. 19). Despite the modern and post-modern tendency
of endings to be more attenuated, less final, we continue to desire
an ending in order to provide us with a point from which to make
sense of what has come before. In Brooks’s terms ‘the anticipation of
retrospection’ is the ‘master trope’ of narrative, and ‘we read in a spirit
of confidence, and also a state of dependence, that what remains to
be read will restructure the provisional meaning of the already read’
(Brooks, 1984, p. 23). While Brooks’s comments arise primarily from
his studies of traditional prose narratives, they remain relevant for the
study of television narrative. Indeed, narrative desire is particularly
encouraged by the textual forms and modes of consumption associ-
ated with serialized television fictions. If we watch a show during its
normal broadcast run, we live with its narrative for years, integrating it
into the fabric of our daily lives. Even if we view it in the more contem-
porary fashion, bringing multi-episode discs or whole boxed sets, we
will have devoted entire days or weeks of our lives to the experience.
The deep emotional engagements encouraged by these methods of
reception often lead audiences to respond passionately to the endings
of favorite television programs.
Yet however much desire we invest in television narratives, they
remain likely to frustrate that desire. They are never the product of
an individual writer or director, and are subject to competing forces
of ratings pressure, broadcast restrictions on content and form, and a
strict production schedule, and thus the satisfaction of viewers’ narra-
tive desire is likely to be just one of a show’s many priorities. In fact,
in a commercial environment in which established properties are safer
investments than new ones, a show is more likely to be lucrative if it
attempts to maintain viewers’ interest by persistently deferring their
desire rather than satisfying it. Even if threatened with cancellation, tele-
vision narratives are just as likely to engineer a cliffhanger, in order to
116 Martin Zeller-Jacques

encourage viewers to lobby for their continuation, as they are to neatly

wrap up the loose ends.
Nevertheless, television narratives do eventually end, and those end-
ings come laden with all manner of expectations. In Jostein Gripsrud’s
words, ‘Endings are happy, or unhappy, abrupt or well prepared, logi-
cally satisfactory or unsatisfactory. But as long as an ending is there,
the text invites sense-making reflection’ (Gripsrud, 1995, pp. 248–9).
The search for narrative satisfaction, then, is part of the process of
sense-making reflection, through which audiences retrospectively read
a narrative’s ending back across its beginning and middle. Although
any individual reaction to the ending of a series is likely to be subjec-
tive, and to reflect the emotional investment and narrative desire of a
particular viewer, several discourses have developed to which popular,
critical and academic assessments of endings tend to refer.
The first of these discourses assumes that there is an ideal show and
assesses the success and satisfaction of the ending in relation to how true
it appears in relation to that ideal. From this ‘Platonic’ discourse come
comments relating finales to the endings of earlier episodes or narrative
arcs, often celebrating circularity rather than advocating the closing of
narrative hermeneutics. The second discourse, which we shall call the
‘melodramatic’ discourse, evaluates the success of an ending in terms of
the degree of dramatic resolution, closure or emotional reward it offers
to its viewers. Commentators who invoke this discourse expect endings
to function in the narrative tradition of melodramatic psychological
realism, with the characters meeting the ‘just’ fates merited by their
actions. In opposition to the Platonic discourse, which situates autho-
rity within the author and the text, the melodramatic discourse situates
authority in an ahistorical notion of what makes good storytelling. The
third discourse, the ‘industrial’, operates less emotively than the oth-
ers. In fact, it serves as a check on emotional engagement, qualifying
narrative desire with an understanding of the role of the narrative as a
commercial product subject to certain restrictions and created to fulfill
certain goals. In practice, comments upon television’s endings rarely
invoke one of these discourses to the complete exclusion of the others,
but the ways in which these discourses are used to evaluate and discuss
television’s endings reveals the expectations which current audiences
place upon television narratives. Moreover, through close analysis of
the ending of The Sopranos, I will suggest that television finales operate
an aesthetic of performative excess, in which crucial moments or even
whole final episodes, ostentatiously announce their significance and
invite viewers to engage with them in similar terms to those we find in
 Don’t Stop Believing 117

the platonic and melodramatic discourses. First, however, I will engage

with theories of closure and seriality, which underpin my analysis of
narrative satisfaction in The Sopranos.

Theorizing closure

Although the word has become overused in our culture, the ubiquity of
the concept of closure remains matched only by its vagueness. I have
already cited Brooks’ dictum that endings give shape and meaning to
the events of the narrative which precedes them. This view of end-
ings as a moment of primarily interpretative importance, the point at
which the threads of a plot are drawn together to be resolved, or at least
crystallized in their lack of resolution, represents one strong tradition
of ideas around closure. Intertwined with this conception of closure,
however, is another, exemplified for me by Catherine Belsey, who sees
the approaching ending of a realist narrative in highly emotional,
even eroticized terms. She describes the reader approaching the end as,
‘Breathless with excitement, thrilled, curious and fearful at the same
time ... transported out of time and place, immersed in the fictional
world and involved with increasing intensity in feelings of increasing
tension’ (Belsey, 1994, p. 35). Belsey’s affective approach to narrative,
which emphasizes the emotional pleasures and pains of reading, is the
other side of the coin to Brooks’s intellectual search for the solution of
narrative questions. Between them they draw attention to the concur-
rent, and potentially contradictory, desires of readers for endings to be
both logical and cathartic. Yet however much we desire closure, the
two poles of the experience elucidated by Brooks and Belsey, the causal
logic of sense-making on the one hand and the passionate experience
of narrative catharsis on the other, remain difficult to reconcile in the
concept of closure. In part, this may be due to the inherent artificiality
of closure itself. As Henry James would have it: ‘Really, universally, rela-
tions stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally
but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they
shall happily appear to do so’ (James, 1934, p. 5).
James’ comment draws attention to an often implied but seldom
explored relationship between authorship and endings, one which can
usually be safely assumed in examinations of the single-authored form
of the novel, but which becomes considerably more complex when
applied to television narratives, which are written and distributed in condi-
tions very different to those of the novel. Later in this chapter I exa-
mine the way attributions of authorship function in discourse around
118 Martin Zeller-Jacques

contemporary television drama; but for now it is chiefly important

to note that, whatever the identity (singular or plural, human or corpo-
rate) of the author of a television narrative, the sense of that author’s
responsibility to present an ending that will appear to be natural and
complete remains one of the fundamental criteria by which an ending’s
satisfaction, or lack of it, will be assessed.
And yet, as Frank Kermode has pointed out:

It would be very difficult to say with precision what a ‘responsible’

ending looked like. Any fiction of some length and complication
must contain parts that are ignored when any particular reader
thinks of the whole. … The impression that the case is otherwise will
certainly be dispelled by acts of attention that go beyond the sim-
plest. The satisfaction of the simplest forms of attention may accord-
ingly be achieved by going through certain familiar motions … Since
they give an impression of total closure … (Kermode, 1978, p. 145)

Kermode’s observation draws attention to the artificiality of closure,

since it must necessarily be partial and selective. Secondly, at the end
of the above quotation, he notes that an appearance of closure may
be manufactured by ‘certain familiar motions’. Borrowing from Victor
Shlovsky, Kermode calls this type of closure ‘illusory ending’ – in effect,
an ending inserted at an arbitrary point but justified with a rhetorical
flourish or formal device. Although Kermode’s examples are literary, the
same manner of techniques are frequently employed to create a sense of
closure within otherwise open television narratives.
For instance, Jane Feuer has argued, drawing on existing work on
soap opera and on Douglas Sirk’s film melodramas, that television
melodramas are structured around moments of excess. In particular,
she suggests, these ‘moments of melodramatic excess ... occur as a form
of temporary closure within and between episodes and even between
entire seasons’ (Feuer, 1984, p. 12). The melodramatic excess to which
Feuer refers frequently consists of focusing upon one or more charac-
ters’ reactions to a significant narrative event, a device which remains
prevalent in contemporary high-end television narrative. Jostein
Gripsrud’s analysis of Dynasty (1981–1987) goes further, examining the
array of devices the show employs in order to create a sense of closure,
including:

Music and (the other elements of ) a ‘supra-narrative’ structure of emo-

tional qualities suggest a completeness, second, that the repeated use
 Don’t Stop Believing 119

of particular ‘themes, ‘motifs’ … and formal devices … [along with]

the retained basic relations between central characters … provides a
sense of ‘overview’, and third, that narrative arcs tend to be brought to
a close either after several episodes or after a single episode, but always
in a way which allows the closure of at least some narrative possibili-
ties at an episode’s end. (Gripsrud, 1995, p. 249)

Gripsrud’s attention to the kind of formal devices used to signify closure –

over and above any actual closing of narrative hermeneutics – will help to
underpin my analysis of the ending of The Sopranos below. Contemporary
high-end television dramas continue to rely upon formal devices similar
to those cited by Gripsrud, particularly the reinscription of core relation-
ships and the employment of music, to signify closure. This is often
especially the case at significant moments in the larger narrative, such
as season and series finales, although these may be further marked by a
performative excess that is as much about self-conscious narration as it is
about eliciting melodramatic affect.
This kind of performative excess as a signifier of closure is rendered
necessary by the increasingly prevalent seriality of contemporary televi-
sion drama. It has often been argued that contemporary high-end or
‘quality’ TV displays a greater degree of seriality, and that its narrative
form has altered significantly as a result (Creeber, 2004; Mittel, 2006;
Nelson, 2007; McCabe and Akass, 2007). Relatively few studies have yet
attempted to parse the full extent of the development of new strategies
for serial narration, but some of the existing contributions have impor-
tant implications for the deployment of closure.
Greg Smith’s work, for example, draws upon Roland Barthes’ semic
and hermeneutic codes to analyze television narrative. Smith reconciles
the character-focused drama of long-running serial narratives with the
narratives of individual episodes by suggesting that the hermeneutic
codes within episodes – for example, the ‘case of the day’ plots which
are resolved in each episode of a police procedural – serve to inform the
slow accumulation of connotations in the overall semic, or character-
based, codes which drive an entire series. This allows the narrative of
a long-running series to achieve what Smith calls ‘resolution without
progress’, satisfying viewers’ narrative desire in each episode by clos-
ing one or more hermeneutics without fundamentally altering the
characters or situations which drive the series (Smith, 2006, p. 85). It
is Smith’s identification of the semic code as crucial to the structure of
long-running television narratives which I wish to develop here. For
Smith, it is not the hermeneutic code but the semic code which drives
120 Martin Zeller-Jacques

our narrative desire when we view a long-running serial – not so much

what will happen, but how the characters will enact it and respond to
it. As a result, a sense of closure can often be achieved by emphasiz-
ing the effect of the action on a character, through exactly the kind of
melodramatic excess or formal devices discussed by Feuer and Gripsrud.
The performative excess that characterizes many television endings thus
often takes the form of an elaborate celebration of the semic codes of
the series, revisiting beloved characters and locations and emphasizing
circularity rather than change.
Jason Mittell’s (2006) work on narrative complexity pushes in a dif-
ferent direction, suggesting that serial television endings often draw
attention to their own narration through their excessive presentation.
Mittel examines the use of narrative special effects that place characters
in elaborately constructed narrative culs-de-sac, in order to better allow
the viewers to marvel at the way they are extricated from them. This
operational aesthetic is also readily apparent in the performative excess
of television finales like that of The Sopranos. However, I would argue that
rather than pulling the viewer out of the text in order to examine the
intricate workings of its narrative, in high-end television narratives that
so often trade upon their own complexity, an elaborate ending can work
to reinforce the sense of textual and narrative continuity associated with
the platonic discourse.

Excess and performance in the finale

The textual analysis of a television ending in isolation is, of necessity,

a strange and somewhat arbitrary business. Discursively, The Sopranos,
like most television dramas, began its ending the first time anyone
spoke or speculated about its possible cancellation. By the airing of its
final tranche of episodes, officially billed as a continuation of the sixth
season, the show was ostentatiously marked as approaching its conclu-
sion, and it thus carried an extra weight of expectation that, by the
finale, things would wrap up neatly. Within the confines of this chapter,
it would be impractical to attempt a textual analysis of the whole of
this larger ending. Yet there are still specific points about the form and
structure of an ending that can usefully be raised by a close analysis of
a more specific ending. In particular, I will draw out some of the formal
devices used to signify closure and to engender a sense of melodramatic
excess surrounding the final moments of The Sopranos, in order to couch
more effectively my later discussion of the critical discourse around this
ending.
 Don’t Stop Believing 121

The final moments of the highly anticipated finale feature the

Soprano family meeting at a diner. Tony enters the restaurant first and
looks across the room, which we see centered in an unusually sym-
metrical composition, with the panels on the far wall even suggest-
ing something of the proscenium arch. A moment later, an unusual
shot-counter-shot shows us Tony, still standing in the doorway, and then
within the space of a single cut, sitting in the booth – the edit contriving
a slight suggestion that he is watching himself. Even in these first few
moments, the diner is being established as a space of performance. This
feeling only intensifies with the next sequence of cuts, which alternate
between Tony, selecting a song from the jukebox, and incidental details
around the diner. Each of these is invested with a surplus of significance
by the simple fact of its inclusion, an effect that is greatly heightened
for the viewer aware that he/she is watching the finale. Tony settles on a
song, and as the family members arrive, one by one, we are treated to a
montage sequence, set to the diegetic soundtrack of Don’t Stop Believing
by Journey. Tony’s wife Carmela enters first, an eyeline match timed to
coincide with the lyric ‘Just a small-town girl’, further emphasizing the
impression of these moments as heightened and performative. Each
time the bell on the door rings Tony looks up, the repetition suggesting
that he is nervous, perhaps expecting an assassination attempt in retali-
ation for some of his recent activity. This serves to draw our attention
to the unfamiliar characters in the frame, so that the arrival of Tony’s
son, AJ, seems almost incidental in comparison with our surveillance
of the shifty-looking man who enters just ahead of him. This character
remains the focus of a several further shots, which are intercut with
scenes of the family talking and Tony’s daughter, Meadow, attempting
to parallel park her car outside. Again, the focus on events which either
seem unimportant, or rather invested with importance of an uncertain
provenance, creates an impression of suspense, not with the asking of
specific narrative questions through the hermeneutic code, but through
the purest reliance upon Brooks’s ‘anticipation of retrospection’. Soon,
each further cut tantalizes us, all of this will make sense.
The verbal content of the scene, both in the lyrics of the song and
in the conversations among the characters, likewise works to mark
this as a moment of performative excess by reinforcing a sense of the
show’s essential qualities and by fostering a sense of circularity and
celebration. Obvious to the point of being on the nose, the repeated
chorus of the song, ‘Don’t stop believing’, seems designed to mimic the
feelings of dedicated Sopranos fans who desire the continuation of the
show. Yet other moments within the scene suggest a sense of circularity
122 Martin Zeller-Jacques

and celebration of what has come before – particularly the exchange

between Tony and his son, in which AJ recalls Tony’s advice from the
first season to ‘Try to remember the times that were good’. Here, again,
the scene seems to address viewers directly, and to exhort them to hold
onto their good memories of The Sopranos even as the show comes to
an end.
The final moments of the scene, and its famously ambiguous cut to
black, functions as an open ending, but does so within the highly struc-
tured dynamic that has been set out before. As a basket of onion rings
arrives at the table, we cut to Meadow, outside the diner and about to
enter. We return to Tony and the family, the bell on the door rings, and
Tony looks up, the song rising to another rousing ‘Don’t stop’ before the
scene cuts to black. In the context of the edits from earlier in the scene,
the bell on the door might signify Meadow’s arrival at the diner, the entry
of another suspicious character, or both. The final cut to black, then,
leaves us poised in the precisely generic balancing act that has motivated
The Sopranos throughout its run, with the possibility of the reconstituted
nuclear family hanging on Meadow’s arrival, and the promised threat
and violence of the gangster narrative the ever-present alternative. The
refusal to choose – either to offer Tony the salvation of a ‘normal’ family
life or the whole-hearted embrace of an unrepentant life of crime – allows
the final episode to remain in tension, just as every previous episode has.
If the final moments of The Sopranos lack either the moral certainty or
the affective power of conventional melodrama, they are nevertheless
excessive and performative in the way that they call attention to their
own construction and ask us to parse the significance of every image and
line of dialogue. They provide us with a spectacle that encourages ‘sense-
making reflection’, even if the sense remains, forever, just out of reach.
These textual strategies work to create space for discourse, to encour-
age discussion and speculation, and to allow the text to reward further
viewing and reviewing. An ending that can be all things to all viewers,
the final moments of The Sopranos derives its affective appeal less from
the manipulation of emotion in a specific direction than from exciting
emotion and then letting it loose. Hence we have a wealth of discourse
around the notion of satisfaction in relation to this ending which reveals
a great deal about the things we expect of a television finale.

Discourses of satisfaction

In soliciting engagement and interpretation from the audience in its

final moments, The Sopranos establishes some of the terms of its own
 Don’t Stop Believing 123

receptions. Through its appeals to its own essential character, both

textual, as cited above, and extra textual, it invites viewers to appreciate
it in the terms of the platonic discourse. In its employment of suspense
and emotive scenes of family reunion, it likewise invites melodramatic
engagement. Like most television dramas, however, it effaces the
industrial discourse, preserving the sense of the text as inviolate and
pre-determined – though this does not stop viewers and critics from
examining it for signs of industrial influence and qualifying their nar-
rative desire accordingly.
Given David Chase’s prominent status as the auteur behind The
Sopranos, the Platonic discourse at least inflects almost everything that
is said about the show. However, some commentators, especially those
attempting to speak from a position of authority themselves, rely more
heavily on it than others. Alan Sepinwall, the New Jersey Star-Ledger’s
dedicated Sopranos blogger, offers an emblematic example:

And yet the finale, both the first 55 minutes of it and that sadistic
last scene, fit perfectly with everything Chase has done on this show
before. Did we get the violent fireworks of last week? Absolutely not,
as the only deaths of the hour were Phil Leotardo … and A.J.’s SUV…
But that’s been the pattern of every season: the major action goes in
the penultimate episode, while the finale is saved for quiet reflection
and the odd whacking or two. (Sepinwall, 2007)

In this appreciative review written almost immediately after the finale,

Sepinwall validates the choice to end on a blackout based on its intrin-
sic Sopranos-ness. He invokes earlier season endings as precedents, but
importantly also appeals to David Chase as the figure of authorship,
and thus authority, behind the show. This combination of strategies
attempts to ally the ending with those qualities Sepinwall sees as the
most important to The Sopranos as a whole – just as the show itself does,
both textually, as discussed above, and extra-textually, in returning
David Chase to his role as writer and director for the only time since
the pilot episode.
Wholeheartedly embracing the platonic discourse, John and Maria
Corrigan have suggested that television finales may represent a space in
which televisual authorship comes to the fore, arguing that:

A series finale can be understood then as the one episode that poten-
tially offers the most artistic freedom for a production team, who no
longer need to concern themselves with getting viewers to return
124 Martin Zeller-Jacques

next week. Instead of pandering to the audience’s expectations, writers

may take the opportunity to crystallize the aesthetic characters of the
production or indicate some aspects of personal experience involved
in the series’ realization. (Corrigan and Corrigan, 2010, p. 1)

Yet the end of a series’ broadcast run hardly constitutes the end of a
series’ life as a commodity, and if the finale frees a series from the pres-
sure of trying to get an audience back the following week, it does not
free it from the pressure to reposition the series for future distribution
in syndication or for direct sale in the form of DVD boxed sets. Thus the
appeal to authorship which appears both in the finale of The Sopranos
and in comments about it must be understood as at least partially
motivated by the desire to preserve and repurpose the value of The
Sopranos as a commodity. Drawing upon an example from an earlier era
of television, John Caldwell has observed a similar recourse to authorial
intention in the finale of Quantum Leap (1989–1993), suggesting that
both press coverage around the finale and its narrative were constructed
in order to finish the show in a way which would encourage critical
re-watching of the series in syndication:

Choreographed by network press-releases, the media ran with the story

that this final destination was actually the childhood hometown of
series producer Donald Bellasario. ... viewers are taught not about Sam,
but about the origins of Quantum Leap’s producer and creative source.
What possible function could the exhibition of Bellasario’s authorial
backstory fulfill in this primetime science-fiction? As Quantum Leap
headed for syndication, this episode’s display of authorial intentional-
ity gave the series package a very lucrative spin – one that aimed to
motivate interest in the show’s afterlife. (Caldwell, 1995, p. 109)

Effectively, Caldwell suggests, the appeal to authorial intentionality at

the end of the series asks viewers to re-view what they have already
seen, and to reinterpret it in light of what they have learned – it
attempts to reengage viewers’ narrative desire by revealing the hand of
an author at work throughout the text. If this was an important aspect
of the production of Quantum Leap’s finale in 1993, when syndication
was the only substantive after-life the show could hope to enjoy, then
it has become much more important for shows like The Sopranos, which
are often viewed on-demand and on DVD, as well as in syndication,
and for which authorial intention is consistent part of their critical and
popular discourse, and passionate audience attachment a necessary
 Don’t Stop Believing 125

precondition of their existence. For The Sopranos, the sense of a consistent

style masterminded by a televisual auteur is a substantial part of the
series’ value. Furthermore, this ‘authorial intentionality’, as Caldwell
calls it, can work ‘as a textual force that allow[s] and justifie[s] extreme
forms of presentation: time travel, fantasy, daydream, parody’, or,
indeed, a sudden blackout (p. 110). It is not only in popular and critical
comment, then, that the platonic discourse works to justify or explain
the contentious narrative choices which characterize the finale of The
Sopranos; the use of Chase’s authorship as part of a platonic discourse
around the ending is both invited by and intrinsic to the text of The
Sopranos.
The dual reinforcement, from both producers and viewers, of this
platonic discourse around the finale is also visible in the melodra-
matic discourse. As already suggested, the melodramatic discourse
evaluates the success of an ending in terms of how successfully
it provides catharsis and/or answers the questions raised by long-
running hermeneutics. It is commonly evoked in relation to the desire
to see dilemmas resolved or else to see loved or loathed characters meet
‘appropriate’ endings. Viewers who engage with television endings
primarily through the melodramatic discourse, then, expect the text
to have precisely the role Peter Brooks ascribes to popular melodrama.
In Brooks’ view:

That we can go on entertaining ourselves day after day with the chase,
the shoot-out, the open-heart operation is evidence of our need for
fully externalized, personalized, and enacted conflict, and for its
clarifying resolution. ... Melodrama offers us heroic confrontation,
purgation, purification, recognition. ... A form for secularized times,
it offers the nearest approach to sacred and cosmic values in a world
where they no longer have any certain ontology or epistemology.
(Brooks, 1995, pp. 204–205)

Popular melodrama, then, makes sense – not just the ordinary narrative
sense common to all traditional realist narratives, but also, importantly,
moral sense. As a form, it encourages us to read its drama in terms of
cause and effect, right and wrong, good and evil. The role of endings
in allowing popular melodramas to fulfill this function cannot be over-
stated – as I’ve already suggested, only from the end can what has come
before be parsed for significance. Consequently, for viewers who engage
with television texts primarily as melodramas, narrative desire can only
be satisfied when the ending seems to explain or justify previous events,
126 Martin Zeller-Jacques

and when the characters have met the fates their actions have merited.
Mary McNamara’s response to the ending of The Sopranos in the LA
times offers a particularly cogent example of this discourse:

While it is one thing to flout the conventions of television, it’s

another to flip dramatic tradition, not to mention your audience,
the bird. No, he [David Chase] didn’t owe us any neat endings, nor
some sort of final word on the nature of good and evil. But after eight
years, he did owe us catharsis, some sort of emotional experience
that would, if not sum up the entire eight years, leave us with some-
thing more meaningful than instant panic and lingering irritation.
(McNamara, 2007, p. 3)

Particularly in her invocation of the emotional experience she expected

from the series’ ending, McNamara draws upon the melodramatic
discourse, foregrounding the need to have her narrative desire satis-
fied by an emotional experience engendered by the final moments
of The Sopranos. And yet the finale is hardly inconsiderate of viewers’
melodramatic expectations – hence the number of hermeneutics which
are closed at the end of The Sopranos. Phil Leotardo is dead and his
feud with the Soprano family effectively ended; Tony and Carmela
appear reconciled; Tony’s therapy with Dr Melfi comes to an end;
etc. Arguably, by providing an ending which offers some answers but
which also leaves future events open to interpretation, the finale of The
Sopranos attempts both to satisfy and further to tantalize the narrative
desire of its viewers. Kristyn Gorton (2009) has suggested that television
regularly functions through appeals to our emotions, and that in an era
of hybridized television narratives in which the traditional frameworks
of genre have become increasingly unstable, the moments in which
television makes a direct appeal to our emotions can reveal something
of the structure and purpose of television narratives. However, it is not
only the narrative structure but the industrial positioning of a text
like The Sopranos which plays upon the emotions of the audience.
This emotional appeal to viewers in the hope that they will maintain
their relationship with a particular media property is a characteristic
strategy in contemporary television, one which Henry Jenkins (2006)
has dubbed ‘affective economics’. A contemporary television series like
The Sopranos, which hopes to have a lucrative afterlife, walks a fine
line between satisfying its audience and yet leaving them with enough
residual desire to maintain their relationship with the text as it spreads
across ancillary markets.
 Don’t Stop Believing 127

The final, and least obviously emotive discourse is also at play in

discussions of television finales – one we might call the industrial
discourse. Primarily the province of savvy viewers and industry com-
mentators, this discourse offsets narrative desire with an awareness of
the conditions of production that may have had an effect on the ending
of a series. In the case of The Sopranos this discourse is made most visible
by the common assertion that the ending was left open to make room
for a feature film based on the series. It also appears in a more positive
light in Martin Miller’s column on the release of the Complete Series
DVD boxed set:

… an absence of upcoming ‘Sopranos’ stories on the small or big screen

hardly constitutes an end in the digital age. For years, individual-
season DVD sets of the show have rocketed to the top of the sales
charts, and there’s little reason to believe – despite its heavy price tag
at $399.99– that ‘The Sopranos: The Complete Series’ will be much
different. (Miller, 2008)

Whatever Miller’s personal response to the end of The Sopranos, then,

his narrative desire is qualified by his awareness that The Sopranos is
as much a commodity as a text – any sense of dissatisfaction around
the ending of the series’ narrative is attributed to this status. Like the
Platonic discourse, the industrial is often offered as a qualification
of, or signifier of superiority to, the melodramatic discourse – the
audience member who engages with an ending through the indus-
trial discourse displays his or her superior knowledge in the face of
the more emotional engagement of other viewers. In the case of The
Sopranos, Corrigan and Corrigan detail a strategy of intertextual refer-
ence throughout the finale, through which the text itself makes several
explicit appeals to the industrial discourse, overtly commenting on the
relationship between author and channel, narrative and commodity,
in a way which they suggest creates ‘an uneasy, subversive arena in
which the spectators may come not simply to question but to doubt
their relationship with the spectacles’ (2010, p. 2). Yet even this ques-
tioning remains yoked to the emotive project of the television finale,
flattering the televisually savvy viewer capable of picking up on these
moments of ostentatiously performed textual self-doubt. In essence, by
appropriating the doubts the viewer might already feel about the end-
ing’s legitimacy, satisfaction and emotive force, the text also attempts to
(re)appropriate those viewers on the point of ending their engagement
with the text.
128 Martin Zeller-Jacques

Critics, viewers and producers, then, have a strong stake in all three of
these discourses around television endings – the platonic, the melodra-
matic and the industrial. Through the performative excesses of the finale,
or of larger portions of the text marked as part of its ending, television
dramas facilitate a range of viewing positions from which audiences may
derive satisfaction. For viewers inclined to look for answers, or an emo-
tive sense of satisfaction, shows like The Sopranos provide the resolution
of particular arcs alongside a textual celebration of the semic code as the
characters gather one last time. For those already inclined to celebrate
the text, they provide a sense of circularity, of the reinscription of essen-
tial relationships and the display of a sense of indeterminacy that defies
ending. Yet for those viewers who are dissatisfied, or otherwise inclined
towards cynicism, the industrial discourse can still qualify the apprecia-
tion of the narrative. The result of this variety of discursive positions is a
text which remains living and mutable, a commodity which continues to
provoke discussion and narrative desire, and thus to maintain its value,
even after the story itself has long been over.

References
Belsey, C. (1994) Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Cambridge, MA and
Oxford: Blackwell).
Brooks, P. (1984) Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Brooks, P. (1995) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
Caldwell, J. (1995) Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television
(Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ).
Corrigan, J. M. and Corrigan, M. (2010) ‘Disrupting Flow: Seinfeld, Sopranos Series
Finale and the Aesthetic of Anxiety’, Television and New Media, XX(X): 1–12.
Creeber, G. (2004) Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI).
Feuer, J. (1984) ‘Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today’, Screen. 25(1): 4–16.
Gortyn, K. (2009) Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press).
Gripsrud, J. (1995) The Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media
Studies (Routledge: London and New York).
James, H. (1934) The Art of the Novel (London: Charles Scribner).
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New media Collide
(New York: New York University Press).
Kermode, F. (1978) ‘Sensing Endings’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 33(1): 144–158.
McCabe, J. and Akass, K. (eds) (2007) Quality TV: Contemporary American Television
and Beyond (London: I.B. Tauris).
McNamara, M. (2007) ‘Sopranos: What was all that about?’, LA Times. June
11th, 2007. Online: http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/11/entertainment/
et-sopranosreview11 [Accessed: 14th October, 2010]
 Don’t Stop Believing 129

Miller, M. (2008) ‘On ‘Sopranos’ Closure, Chase Resists the Mob’, LA Times.
November 9th, 2008. Online: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/09/enter
tainment/ca-davidchase9 [Accessed: 14th October, 2010]
Mittell, J. (2006) ‘Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television’,
The Velvet Light Trap, 58: 29–40.
Nelson, R. (2007) State of Play: Contemporary “high-end” TV drama Manchester:
Manchester University Press).
Sepinwall, A. (2007) ‘Sopranos Rewind: Made in America’, 10th June, 2007,
NJ.com, Online: http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/06/sopranos_rewind_made_in_
americ.html [Accessed: 27th June, 2011]
Smith, G. (2006) ‘A Case of Cold Feet: Serial Narration and the Character Arc’, The
Journal of British Cinema and Television, l3(1): 82–94.
Thompson, R. J. (1996) From Hill Street Blues to ER: Television’s Second Golden Age
New York: Continuum).
Warhol, R. (2003) Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press).

Teleography
Dynasty. ABC (1981–1987)
Hill Street Blues. NBC (1981–1987)
Quantam Leap. NBC (1989–1993)
The Sopranos. HBO (1999–2007)

• 6.21 ‘Made in America’ June 10th, 2007

Part II
Film Melodrama
Section III
Memory, Cultural Trauma and
Destiny in Contemporary Film
Melodrama
8
Melodrama as History and
Nostalgia: Reading Hong Kong
Director Yonfan’s Prince of Tears
Kenneth Chan

Transnational Chinese melodramas

Melodrama, like all filmic genres, has morphed and evolved throughout
cinematic history to meet audience expectations of the times. Paralleling
this evolution is the shifting critical and scholarly reception and under-
standing of the genre’s form and ideological status, as witnessed in con-
temporary film genre studies. Christine Gledhill’s work in Home Is Where
the Heart Is, in particular, has radically transformed the field, as she
argues that ‘[m]elodrama exists as a cross-cultural form with a complex,
international, two-hundred-year history,’ and that it is also ‘a specific
cinematic genre’ and ‘a pervasive mode across popular culture’ (Gledhill,
1987, p. 1; emphasis mine). Not only has this ‘pervasive’ modality in
cinematic presence enabled scholars to reclaim the melodramatic form
as a site for serious critical inquiry, but Gledhill’s focus on women’s films,
including familial and romantic melodramas, has necessarily raised the
stakes for feminist film criticism. As Linda Williams points out:

The two major strikes against melodrama were thus the related
‘excesses’ of emotional manipulativeness and association with
femininity. These qualities only began to be taken seriously when
excess could be deemed ironic and thus subversive of the coherence
of mainstream cinema. Thus, as Gledhill notes, melodrama was
‘redeemed’ as a genre in film studies in the early seventies through a
reading of the ironic melodramatic excesses located especially in the
work of Douglas Sirk. (Williams, 1998, pp. 43–4)

The feminist interventions of Gledhill and Williams, among many others,

have productively reshaped our conception of the often counterintuitive
135
136 Kenneth Chan

ways audiences consume melodramas, and the negotiations of the politics

of identification they engage in, as inflected by gender, race, class, sexual
orientation, nationality, and culture.1 These interventions have also forced
us to rethink the relationship between the melodramatic mode as a con-
temporary political aesthetic and the questions of historicity and moder-
nity, issues that constitute the emphases of this collection of chapters.
While the theoretical developments in the study of melodramas in
the West are significant, one must also be mindful that the melodra-
matic form and mode have evolved alternative cultural patterns and
formations in cinemas outside of the American and European spheres.
Chinese cinemas from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the
Chinese diaspora have developed their own culturally specific ver-
sions of the popular melodrama. The early Shanghai film production
and its subsequent transplantation into the prolific Hong Kong film
industry exemplify this phenomenon.2 When I was a boy growing up
in Singapore, I had a pop cultural diet consisting mainly of martial
arts and melodrama films and television shows from Hong Kong and
Taiwan. The melodramatic sensibilities articulated in these screen
cultures have permeated my cultural imagination and fantasy life, as
they have for many viewers in Chinese communities globally. In his
discussion of the mainland Chinese family melodramas of the early
1980s, for instance, Ma Ning notes that ‘[f]amily melodrama has been
one of the dominant forms of expression in Chinese cinema since its
beginning in the early years of this century. The centrality of the genre
in Chinese cinema derives to some extent from the position of the fam-
ily in Chinese society’ (Ma, 1993, p. 29). Inversely, the persistence and
popularity of the family melodrama have also reified the ideological
priority of the familial unit as a social organizing framework, thus
reinforcing the hegemonic place of the heteronormative family in
Chinese culture.
My purpose in gesturing toward the notion of cultural specificity
in reading filmic melodramas, in this case from a Chinese cultural
perspective, is multifold: (1) the genre is not inherently political in its
constitution but has the potential to be deployed to achieve a variety
of political goals, depending on the cultural and historical contexts.
(2) My invocation of Chinese cultural specificity is not to demand an
essentialist reading of Chinese cinematic melodramas, but to suggest,
instead, the formalistic malleability of the genre/mode as it travels glob-
ally and culturally. (3) There are complex intertwining and intersecting
lines of historicity and heterogeneity within the development of the
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 137

Chinese melodramatic genre/mode, especially in light of the different

ways Chinese (popular) culture have developed in the interconnected
yet divergent histories of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora in countries like Singapore, Malaysia,
Australia, Canada, Britain, France, and the United States.3
The confluence of these various flows has become more evident in
the last two decades of multinational co-productions, transnational cin-
ematic output, and the rise of convergent cultures. While transnational
Chinese cinemas have emphasized the martial arts film – Ang Lee’s
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is the quintessential instance –
thus overshadowing melodrama as a popular cross-cultural form, films
like Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Farewell My Concubine (1993), The
Joy Luck Club (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Happy Together
(1997), In the Mood for Love (2000), and Lan Yu (2001) have made their
mark on the film festival circuit. These romantic / family melodramas,
including other genres like the martial arts film that deploy melo-
dramatic elements, reconfigure and hybridize Chinese melodramatic
conventions not only to engage Chinese-speaking audiences but also
to attract global viewers. And in order to do so effectively, filmmakers
rework the genre form by maintaining sufficient historical elements
of Chinese melodrama while incorporating new registers of cultural
political identification to address globalization’s impact on current
and emergent versions of Chinese modernity. Wimal Dissanayake has
argued that ‘[m]elodrama has come to be recognized as containing
subversive potential for exposing bourgeois ideology and an enabling
vision to map the dialectic between ideology and desire’, and that
‘[t]he excesses and extremes in melodrama [can] become signifiers of
the alienation of their characters and useful openings through which
we can discern the play of ideology’ (Dissanayake, 1993, pp. 1–2).
The theoretical lesson we learn here, when applied to twentieth-first
century forms of transnational Chinese melodramatic cinema, is that
the reformulated aesthetics of melodrama have the potential to unveil
the anxieties and contradictions that plague contemporary Chinese
modernities, especially as cultural memories, national identities, and
traumatic histories collide with utopian global politics, transnational
cultures, and progressive ideas and desires. This unveiling can be a good
thing, in that it unleashes the ‘subversive potential’ that Dissanayake
has identified, a potential that aligns itself with the interventional
readings proffered by Christine Gledhill, Linda Williams, and other
feminist and queer critics.
138 Kenneth Chan

Yonfan’s melodramas and his Prince of Tears

As a case study of the cinematic phenomenon I have described above,

I turn to the work of Hong Kong-based director Yonfan and his latest
film Prince of Tears (2009). Yonfan’s cosmopolitan background bespeaks
the cross-cultural and transnational Chinese registers of his filmic
oeuvre. His biography in the DVD version of Prince of Tears traces the
global reach of his experiences, while demonstrating how the director
triangulates between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in his most pro-
ductive years of filmmaking:

Born in Hunan Province, China, Yonfan moved with his parents

to Taiwan in 1952. He grew up in Taichung and moved to Hong
Kong … in 1965. In the late 1960s he traveled and studied in Europe
and America. … He began directing features in 1984, often for his
own production company Far Sun Films, and has worked in Hong
Kong, Singapore and Japan. His international breakthrough came
with Bishonen, screened with great success in the Berlin Panorama in
1999. … Prince of Tears, his twelfth feature, is the first he has made
in Taiwan.4

Of course, Yonfan is no stranger to the genre conventions and traditions of

Chinese cinematic melodrama. His extensive filmography in the genre is
a testament to this fact. In his early work in the Hong Kong film industry
from 1984 to 1994, he focused mainly on melodramatic films, featuring
stars like Sylvia Chang, Carol Cheng, Jackie Cheung, Maggie Cheung,
Chow Yun-Fat, Chin Han, and Kenneth Tsang (whom he cast in the role of
General Liu in Prince of Tears). His turn to art-house fare in 1995 produced
a trilogy of queer films – Bugis Street (1995), Bishonen (1998), and Peony
Pavilion (2001) – all of which are melodramatic in their narrative core or
liberally reliant on melodramatic stylistics. It is critical to note here that his
films reveal how the director is willing to shape these genre conventions
innovatively in order to engage contemporary cultural issues that matter
to his audience. Prince of Tears is no different in this respect. It is a fasci-
nating culmination of more than two decades of immersion in cinematic
melodrama for Yonfan, not only bringing into play an expert manipula-
tion of melodramatic storytelling and aesthetics, but also bringing to bear
the genre’s sensibilities and effects on the depiction of a traumatic time in
Taiwan’s history that Yonfan himself experienced in his youth.
On its narrative surface, Prince of Tears, despite its plot twists and
surprises, is a relatively conventional melodrama, particularly for
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 139

audiences brought up on Chinese cinema and television. The story of

the Sun family opens with a meta-narratological self-awareness of how
melodramas function. The opening credit sequence begins with Hong
Kong veteran singing sensation George Lam crooning the Mandarin
version of the haunting Russian folk song ‘The Lonely Accordion’,
which offers the accompanying soundtrack to a lush forest sequence
where the incredibly handsome Han-Sun (Joseph Chang), radiant in his
Air Force uniform, plays the accordion, as his gorgeous wife Ping (Zhu
Xuan) looks on dreamily and their lovable kids frolic through the trees
in joyous play. This idyllic sequence of familial felicity and peace is
followed by an extreme long shot of the family gathering together and
making their way home, as the omniscient narrator (Yonfan) intones
in commentary: ‘The story begins. The handsome prince and his prin-
cess finally live happily ever after. They bring their lovely daughters to
this beautiful island named Formosa. They intended to build a happy
family, seeking a fairy tale-like life. However. …’5 The ominously trail-
ing conjunctive adverb ‘however’ functions as a pointed signal for
audiences to tap into their familiarity with the melodramatic formula
that such beautiful happiness resides only in fairy tales as part of their
ideological fantasy. It breaks the seamlessness of this fantasy to meet
the expectations of audiences in anticipating the melodramatic pun-
ishment of misery and suffering that the jealous gods will rain on this
beatific couple in their undeserving beauty and bliss. The horror and
trauma to be wreaked on this couple and their family oddly comfort
audiences – the melodramatic narrative commiserates with the audi-
ences’ personal experiences of sadness in their own lives, and in the
sadistic/masochistic processes of cathartic weeping of the audience on
behalf of these onscreen characters.6
And true to form, as the film’s narrative unfolds, we see Han-Sun’s
kindness to his good friend Ding (Fan Wing) go unrewarded. Instead,
jealous of his friend’s happiness, Ding betrays Han-Sun by not testifying
on his friend’s behalf when he is accused of being a spy by flying into the
Communist Zone in mainland China. Han-Sun’s actions had been moti-
vated by love for his elder daughter, Li, who was trapped on the main-
land when the rest of the family escaped to Taiwan. Because of Ding’s
refusal to help his friend, Han-Sun is found guilty, and is subsequently
executed by firing squad at the Dry River, a massacre that is witnessed by
his daughters Li and Zhou. Their mother Ping is also ‘accused of being
pro-Communist’ and is sent away for reeducation. When the children
visit their mother, Ping reveals (in classic family melodrama style) that
Li is actually her step-daughter, whom she momentarily blames for the
140 Kenneth Chan

tragedy that has befallen her husband: ‘I am not your mom. Because of
you, your dad snuck into the Communist Zone. Because of you, he is
now being accused of spying. You’re not born by me. I do not deserve
to be your mother. And you do not deserve to be my daughter.’ This
instance of maternal cruelty is part of Chinese melodrama’s emotive
structural tradition, to imprint on the daughter Li (and on the audience)
the tragic breakdown of the family and its impact on its members. Li and
Zhou are finally reunited with the mother, who then predictably takes
up with the ‘villain’ Ding in matrimony. On the day of their wedding,
Li confronts her stepmother on the impossible horror of the changed
familial circumstances:

Li: ‘Mom, everybody is talking behind us. They are laughing at us!
Because of you, Uncle Ding sent Dad to jail. And Dad was shot
dead. He killed Dad and now he wants to sleep in Dad’s bed.
I just can’t stand it.’
Ping: ‘What happened to you? … Li, come here! You know why I do
this? I just want you girls to live better. You think I know noth-
ing of the gossip? So what if this is true? It’s history. We have to
survive anyway. … Mom is just an ordinary woman. I just want
you girls to live better.’

The affective power of this demonstration of maternal sacrifice absolves

Ping from her initial cruelty toward Li, thus recalibrating the earlier
moment of cruelty as an exceptional and particularly human one of
emotional collapse and dutiful failure. Such a turnaround from failure
to sacrifice marks Ping as a classic maternal figure of Chinese melo-
drama. The maternal sacrifice is especially resonant with audiences, as
we have seen in our own lives how women have sacrificed immensely
and deeply for their families, at their own expense – for it matters not
that Ping does not love Ding and that she has to endure the indignity of
sleeping with the man who has supposedly caused her husband’s death,
as long as she does so for the sake of her children. This conservative nar-
rative convention is what makes the Chinese melodrama problematic
from a feminist standpoint.
The film ends with an even more complicated twist to the story
in the segment entitled ‘Story of Lost Lovers,’ a twist that is worthy
of the film’s soap-opera melodrama tradition. Ping reveals that her
confessions, while she was in custody, have led to the death of her
good friend Ou-Yang (Terri Kwan), who is also the wife of General
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 141

Liu. Ding, in a voiceover narration, explains to Ping his disability and

the ugly scar on the left side of his face, in a letter (a letter that the
film misleads us to believe to be another report of spying that Ding is
supposedly involved in):

I could never forgive myself for Han-Sun’s death. He urged me to

prove his innocence. Such a simple request, but I refused to do so.
When I found out the verdict, it was too late to reverse the judgment.
On that day, I accompanied him to the execution ground. I gave
him a last drink of wine. I didn’t see hatred in his eyes. Bearing an
unforgivable guilt, I tidied everything for him. I know Li has always
disliked me. But how can I tell her that I was burnt because of saving
her? That fire burnt my ambition and made me what I am.

Whether Ding is telling the truth is a matter the film leaves ambiguous.
But what is significant, here, is that Ding has shifted in complexity from
a rather flat, villainous character to one who is morally and ethically
complicated, not unlike the humanizing processes that cinema has
imbued iconic characters such as the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the
Phantom of the Opera. Ding’s ‘monstrous’ disability potentially belies
a humanity fraught with conflicts of desire and motivations. The film
traps us into a kind of complicity of which the character Han-Sun,
through the narrator, has warned his children (and us): ‘Dad said never
judge anyone by his appearance. Ding’s scar was a result of saving some-
one from the fire’. The denouement of the film opens up all sorts of
questions that remain unanswered: is Ding really such a bad character
as we are led to believe? Did he indeed betray Han-Sun and his family
in order to marry Ping himself? Has Ping chosen to marry him not only
for the sake of the children but also because she is thankful to Ding
for what he has done for Li? Is Han-Sun so forgiving of Ding because
he feels indebted to him for saving Li’s life? The melodramatic twists
and turns not only abide by genre conventions and expectations, but
also uncover the ‘excesses’ of human actions, motivations, desires, and
drives, hence accounting for the appeal that the melodramatic mode
has sustained in Chinese popular culture for so long.
Despite the intricate narrative maneuvers Yonfan has so adeptly
exhibited in this film, I must note that as filmic plot in the tradition of
Chinese melodrama, these maneuvers are in some senses predictable,
especially for audiences steeped in their experience and consumption
of the genre. What I find to be more critically intriguing, however,
142 Kenneth Chan

is the aesthetic modality with which Yonfan structures the narrative

and this modality’s intersection with history and nostalgia as nodes
of political critique. In the rest of this chapter, I will deal with each of
these critiques that I see the film capable of, as a means of demonstrat-
ing how the reconfiguration of (Chinese) melodramatic aesthetics can
serve to produce political interventions for contemporary audiences
in their negotiations with the ideological contradictions of (Chinese)
modernities.

Melodrama as history

As the scriptwriter and director of Prince of Tears, Yonfan strategi-

cally chose to set his film in 1950s Taiwan, where the Kuomintang
(KMT) government had moved their headquarters upon losing the
civil war against the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong.
Yonfan confesses that he chose the temporal and geographical setting
because it ‘was a period … [he] had personally gone through’.7 This
was a time when Taiwan was under Martial Law and the paranoiac
Chiang Kai-Shek regime was subjecting the Taiwanese people to a
horrific era of political purges, killings, and torture, in order to guard
itself against Communist encroachments and, conveniently, to rid
itself of its political enemies and establish its political domination on
the island. Historian Jonathan Manthorpe describes the White Terror
period thus:

The responsibility for overseeing state security and dealing with peo-
ple held to be a threat to the Republic of China was with the Taiwan
Garrison Command. Its powers were almost boundless. People could
be arrested for real or imagined Communist tendencies, for advocat-
ing insurrection, criticizing the Chiang family, or questioning sacred
Kuomintang doctrines like Taiwan’s status as a province of China.
Arrests were made by military personnel and detainees were tried
in military courts. These trials were held in secret, and for several
years the accused were not allowed legal representation or contact
with their families. … The command’s campaign against Taiwanese
advocates of reform or independence [from mainland China] became
known as the White Terror and lasted from after the 1947 uprising
into the 1980s. Some analysts estimate that as many as 90,000 people
were arrested during the White Terror years. About 10,000 of those
were actually tried in military courts, but about 45,000 were executed
summarily. (Manthorpe, 2005, p. 204)
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 143

The trauma of this period is personalized through the often-untold

stories of many ordinary people, one of which constitutes the basis for
Prince of Tears, a story recounted by a friend of Yonfan’s:

My family was the victim of the White Terror of the Martial Law
period. … My mother and my elder sister … would never forgive
each other due to what happened to my family. My father was exe-
cuted. My mother would never forgive my sister, as my father died
because of her. On the other hand, my sister would never forgive my
mother; she is my mother’s stepchild. My mother was known for her
beauty and her stunning looks, which caused the death of my father.
(‘Making of’)

What is profound in the construction of Prince of Tears is that the nar-

rative on which the film is based did not need much embellishment
to be melodramatic in its structure. The historical truth of the personal
story Yonfan reworked provided the very melodrama that the film
needed – hence, history as melodrama, and melodrama as history. The
very personal story that Yonfan’s friend tells is now retold through
the visceral framework and aesthetics of the melodramatic tradition,
which in turn accentuate for the audience, visually and aurally, the
very real and material impact the White Terror persecutions had on the
average Taiwanese living in that era. The personal is always political,
just as the political ruptures, transforms, and sometimes disfigures the
personal.
But in a seemingly contradictory or counterintuitive fashion, Yonfan
appears to disavow the overtly incisive critique of the political that the
film is presenting as it embeds the melodramatic plotline: ‘Although
the film’s historical background is very political, I do not intend to talk
about politics through this film. I want to talk about human nature,
about human weaknesses, and the vanishment [sic] of ideals. I wanted
to depict a love that lasts forever, a regret that will never cease. A love
story that happens independent of era’ (‘Making of’). This disavowal
runs in counterpoint to the glaringly politicized aesthetics with which
Yonfan has layered the film. As a kind of visual prologue, an old
black-and-white film clip opens the Prince of Tears, explaining that
‘these visuals are from the only 1950’s surviving copy of the Republic of
China’s National Anthem, which was screened in every cinema before
every film in Taiwan’, not unlike the constructed ‘News on the March’
newsreel in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). This clip recounts in
summary Taiwan’s history as the Republic of China, and how in 1949,
144 Kenneth Chan

‘Chiang Kai-Shek took his army and people from Mainland China to
Taiwan with the dream that one day they would defeat the Communists
and return home’. This politics drives much of the narrative and its
characters: Zhou’s art teacher, Master Qiu, is executed on the spot by
KMT soldiers for daring to venture into the ‘restricted zone’ to paint
the stunning panoramic scenery. Han-Sun is similarly executed for
needing to go into the Communist Zone to rescue his daughter. Ding
works for ‘the Bureau of Political Security’ and, therefore, becomes
embroiled in the intrigues of internal surveillance and personal
betrayals. Ou-Yang’s participation in a progressive reading group and
her attempts to draw Ping into it result in the latter’s imprisonment
and unwitting betrayal of her friend and, consequently, in Ou-Yang’s
eventual suicide. The political history of Taiwan, hence, energizes
the crises that make the melodramatic narrative structure possible
in the film. The final credits include the biopic tradition of explain-
ing through titles the continuing real-life histories of the characters
on which the film is based, with juxtapositions of actual photographs
to authenticate visually the historicity of these accounts, thus driving
home one last time the film’s deep-rooted connections to the personal/
political histories of Taiwan and its people.
How then does one account for Yonfan’s attempt to depoliticize
Prince of Tears when the political resonances of the film are so blatantly
obvious? One could argue that film directors’ propensity to universa-
lize their works, to suggest their transcultural and human appeal, may
be motivated by box office concerns. However, to be more generous to
Yonfan, I want also to offer a more liberal reading of the performative
nature of his statement. By displacing emphasis from the political onto
the affective qualities of melodramatic aesthetics, Yonfan has unwit-
tingly (or intentionally) foregrounded the very political history he has
overtly dismissed – the notion that by forbidding and denying some-
thing, one is shedding light on the matter even further. Film scholar
Yuejin Wang’s conjoining of history and melodrama may extend my
argument in another related direction:

[A]ny melodramatic narrative attempting to capture history is actu-

ally a search for itself. Melodramatic representation of history is
essentially self-representation. And understanding history is essen-
tially to understand the generic pattern of melodrama, to understand
why we spin out this artifact/artifice on which is fixed both our rapt
gaze and our anguished and perplexed look, that is, our melodra-
matic mode of historical understanding. (Wang, 1993, p. 87)
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 145

Wang comes to this theoretical conclusion by asking ‘[w]hat … is the

difference between history’s materialization of a melodramatic conceit
and the theatrical/cinematic attempt at representation’ is, and, thus,
arriving at the notion that ‘[t]he problem seems not so much with exag-
geration or overdramatization as with the underdramatization’ – the fact
that ‘our anxiety will then be a distrust of any future film project to
capture fully this enacted melodramatic history’ (Wang, 1993, pp. 86–87).
Is Yonfan expressing a similar anxiety at the burden of representing
this traumatizing time in Taiwan’s history, when melodrama, even in
its emotional excesses, is incapable of embodying with any adequacy
the intensity of personal violations the Taiwanese people experienced
and carried with them from 1947 to the 1980s? Is any film ever capa-
ble of reproducing the horrors of history – colonial slavery, the World
Wars, the Holocaust, South Africa’s Apartheid, the Tiananmen massacre,
9/11, to name just a few – to enact a representational sense of justice
worthy of the suffering and deaths of millions? Yonfan’s disavowal,
consciously or subconsciously, unfolds the melodrama that is history,
while acknowledging the always already insufficient ‘excesses’ of which
cinematic melodrama has ironically been accused of perpetuating.

Melodrama as nostalgia

‘This is my first time shooting a film in Taiwan,’ proclaims Yonfan in

the DVD interview featurette, as he reminisces of his younger years
on the island and what it means for him to shoulder this responsibility
of filmic representation: ‘the life in Taiwan had a great impact on me.
This time I shifted all my attention to Taiwan, and shot the whole film
there, which was a challenge to me. Since those were my childhood
memories, if you could truthfully present them, it would be a great
memorial. However, if you mess them up, it would be a regret of a
lifetime’ (‘Making of’). Clearly, the director has unnecessarily imposed
on his film the burden of cultural representation, hence leading him to
scout for the perfect location that would resemble the ‘veteran villages’,
and ‘to spend … money and time, to rebuild the whole veteran’s village’
and to construct ‘the costumes, props, and the army uniforms, even
the military vehicles’ (‘Making of’). While he does obviously care about
the realism of the film’s period representation, he also strives for an
affective quality to that nostalgic realism, hence deploying melodra-
matic aesthetics to evoke the emotional and political sensibilities of
the era. I would like to identify three examples in the film that accom-
plishes this effect.
146 Kenneth Chan

First, the title of the film refers to a comic book that Zhou and her
friend Rainbow love to read. The book tells a story of a prince who,
as Ou-Yang interprets for the children, ‘saw the injustice and corruption
of the world’ and ‘he wanted to change it’. Because ‘he had no way out’,
‘he finally sacrificed himself’. As Yonfan explains, the storybook ‘does
not exist in reality. It is a prop we created. Why do we name him the
“Prince of Tears”? It’s because this prince, who was very upset by all the
inequalities in the world, wanted to reform it. Yet he felt powerless, so
he could not stop crying and in the end even sacrificed himself’. Yonfan
argues that ‘in everyone’s mind or in part of their character, there exists
a quality of [the] “Prince of Tears” temperament, which is very noble.
Yet, this noble temperament diminishes as one grows older. It may
deteriorate with the seduction of power and money’ (‘Making of’). The
melodramatic nature of the storybook and its melodramatic place in
the filmic diegesis reinforce the political critique that the melodrama of
tears enables – the storybook has a key role in the nostalgic memories
of and relationships between Ou-Yang, Ping, and Ding. The story of
the prince articulates a progressive politics that Taiwan needed during
the oppressive era of KMT rule under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek.
Ou-Yang’s political ideals parallel those of the prince, as does her even-
tual tragic fate. ‘She is a revolutionary, but can’t help being bourgeois’,
the narrator explains. ‘The decadence of beautiful things and the pain
of the truth, she wants them all. She desires too much. She started to
blame herself.’ Visualizing this commentary is a shot of Ou-Yang clutch-
ing a piece of silk cloth and pressing it to her face. Symbolically, she
hangs herself with a silk-like piece of red cloth, when she knows that
the KMT soldiers are storming her home to arrest her.
Secondly, on the evening of Ou-Yang’s death, Zhou and Rainbow head
out to watch a movie being screened outdoors. According to Yonfan,
the movie being projected on the outdoor screen is a real one entitled
Come Back, My Dear starring child actress Zhang Xiao-Yan. ‘This film was
released in 1958 or 1959 as I recalled, but it appeared in my film, which
was supposed to have taken placed in 1954 … As long as I felt it right,
then it’s right’, despite the anachronistic placement of the film within the
film. What Yonfan is conceptualizing here about filmic representation is
that ‘movie is an art. We are there not to copy but to create’ (‘Making of’).
The critical point that one should make here is that this nostalgic allu-
sion draws out powerful emotive connections. Not unlike the role of the
storybook, Come Back, My Dear plays out as a melodrama within a melo-
drama, developing the dialectical intertextuality occurring between the
film seen on screen by Zhou and Rainbow, and the death of Rainbow’s
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 147

mother Ou-Yang, which occurs simultaneously, as conveyed by the

parallel-action intercutting in that sequence. The death of the child
protagonist in Come Back, My Dear elicits tears from Rainbow, tears that
will correlatively follow when she finds out that Ou-Yang has died and
has left her the heirloom pearls. The tears that Zhou helps wipe from
Rainbow’s face, in her childlike way of comforting her friend, will be
the tears audiences wipe away from their own faces, as they confront
the pain of history of which Yonfan’s film nostalgically reminds them.
The third and final example of melodramatic nostalgia that I want to
highlight is the recurring musical theme of the Russian folk song ‘The
Lonely Accordion’. The cultural incongruence of having this Russian
folk song, sung by George Lam in Mandarin, to accompany images of
1950s Taiwan is to watch the filmmaker conjure a nostalgic atmosphere
by deploying cross-cultural referencing. Instead of using Taiwanese or
Chinese music of the period, Yonfan draws on his love for what he
describes as an ‘exotic sound’ with ‘a Slavic flavored score with a little
touch of Italian opera’, in order ‘to convey a very dramatic and grand
feeling’ (‘Making of’). Hence, nostalgia and its accompanying feelings
are not reliant on a simple backward turn to a culturally authentic
source, but it can be dependent on an affective recreation through the
various tools available to a filmmaker, even cross-cultural ones.
This last example allows me to segue to a more theoretical considera-
tion of melodrama as nostalgia. In her reading of Stanley Kwan’s roman-
tic melodrama Rouge (1988), Rey Chow posits the following analysis of
nostalgic formulations: ‘[I]nstead of thinking that nostalgia is a feeling
triggered by an object lost in the past (a mode of thinking that remains
linear and teleological in orientation), could we attempt the reverse?
Perhaps nostalgia is a feeling looking for an object? If so, how does it
catch its object? Could the movement of nostalgia be a loop, a throw,
a network of chance, rather than a straight line?’ (Chow, 1998, p. 135).
Chow’s remarkable re-conceptualization of nostalgia into an almost
Mobius strip-like structure is productive in its ability to challenge the
conventional notion of nostalgia within the restrictive terms of a tem-
poral past and move it forward, potentially, toward an interventional
mode of hope and a promising futurity. ‘Nostalgia links together the
otherwise diverse intellectual and artistic undertakings of the mainland,
Taiwan, and Hong Kong’, suggests Chow of the Chinese cinemas of the
1980s and 1990s. But for Taiwan, she believes that ‘nostalgia expresses
itself in the massive concern about the suppressed wounds of Taiwan’s
local history’ (Chow, 1998, p. 146). Chow is on the mark in her analysis,
even as a framework to understand melodramatic nostalgia in Prince of
148 Kenneth Chan

Tears. But I want to extend her argument further by suggesting that the
progressive politics of a nostalgic futurity is enabled in Yonfan’s film
by the rewriting of temporality through its cinematic imagery, thus
inserting a contemporary cultural politics to conclude, in an alternative
fashion, a film that is nostalgically set in the 1950s.
After the prologue segment, Prince of Tears is unevenly broken up into
two sections: much of the film is devoted to the ‘Story of the Children’,
while the much shorter concluding section features the ‘Story of Lost
Lovers’. While it is true that the final section unveils the motivations for
the character’s actions, troubles the characterization of the protagonists,
presents further twists to the narrative, and ties up loose ends, the film
technically could have ended with the final shot of the ‘Story of the
Children’, where Ping and Li meet Ding and Zhou at the door of their
house and walk out together as a family to partake of Ping and Ding’s
wedding, with the main gate magically closing on its own followed by
a fade to black. Ping has explained to her elder daughter Li her motiva-
tions for marrying the ‘villain’ Ding, and Li has accepted the immense
sacrifice that Ping is making for the sake of Li’s and Zhou’s future. Had
the film concluded at this point, it would still have made narrative
sense as a conventional Chinese melodrama, and the subversive quality
of the political critique of Taiwan’s White Terror era through melo-
drama consumption would have been sustained. However, Yonfan took
the melodramatic nostalgia one giant step further in the final ‘Story
of Lost Lovers’. This short but crucial section of the film ruptures the
family melodrama trajectory by incorporating a re-imagined romantic
melodrama that nostalgically captures its object of political futurity, by
allowing its key protagonists and the film’s audience to (re)experience
the affective possibilities of love and sexualities that might have been.
The ‘Story of Lost Lovers’ opens with the fantastical scenario of
ghostly return, as Han-Sun mysteriously appears at the doorstep of his
house to a seemingly unsurprised Ping, after Ping has married Ding.
Han-Sun and Ping make love in bed, an unexpected visual presenta-
tion of sexual intimacy that is only hinted at earlier in the ‘Story of the
Children’. During the moment of post-coital afterglow, Ping unburdens
herself to Han-Sun’s ghost by telling him of the letter Ding wrote to
her explaining the reason for Ding’s injuries and disability. She also
accounts for the intergenerational significance of the storybook ‘Prince
of Tears’, as told to her in Ding’s voice through his letter:

Do you remember Ou-Yang? When Han-Sun and I met you, you two
were best friends. Now, your children are too. One night I found
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 149

“Prince of Tears.” Zhou said it was a gift from Ou-Yang. I flipped

through the pages. It was a comic book from our youth. It survived
the Japanese invasion. It went through the Communists. Now, it
appears in our remote village.

The seemingly random function of the storybook as an object prop of

nostalgic mise en scène and political allegory now assumes a material
place in the personal history between Ping and Ou-Yang. With the sharp
editing cuts that signal a kind of cinematic stream of consciousness, the
film has Ping bring the audience, through a flashback, to the day that
she encountered Ou-Yang at the children’s school: ‘Because of this book
[“Prince of Tears”], Ou-Yang guided me to the “Progressive Reading
Society.” She wanted me to be progressive. And I was so attached to her.’
The chance meeting between Ping and Ou-Yang during Parents Day at
the school, which was only given brief cinematic time in ‘Story of the
Children’, is revealed in its full glory in this section. The awkward pas de
deux between the two women, as Ping lures Ou-Yang into the deserted
corridor and room of an abandoned school building, is reminiscent of
gay cruising.8 The facial expressions of desire is much more evidently on
display in this sequence where Ou-Yang circles Ping sensually, whispers
to her intimately, and plants a full-on kiss on the lips as a lover would.
When Ou-Yang reminds Ping of the significance of ‘Prince of Tears’, she
also remarks enigmatically that ‘tears are the beginning of the story.
Afterwards, everything will be changed’. Then, just as mysteriously, she
walks away and out of Ping’s life.
The homoeroticism in this flashback sequence registers the possibili-
ties of lesbian love that Chinese society and culture insist cannot exist
in 1950s Taiwan, a fact that led Ping to contain her tendencies within
the realm of memory and fantasy, and to displace these sexual energies
onto heterosexual love and sex with her husband Han-Sun. This point
is made evident, in the ‘Story of the Children’, where the briefer ver-
sion of the Ping and Ou-Yang encounter is immediately followed by
the garden scene where sexual desire is nuanced through the medium
close-up of Ping’s sunlit face smiling at Han-sun and the way she later
caresses his hand and suggests that she ‘roll … [him] a cigarette’ and
‘cook Lion’s Head meat balls tonight’ for him. Fran Martin, in her
excellent book Backward Glances, makes precisely this argument on
female homoeroticism in Chinese culture: ‘that a dominant modern
Chinese discourse on female homoeroticism has asserted the impossi-
bility of lesbian futures: sexual relations between women are culturally
imaginable only in youth; therefore same-sex sexual relations … between
150 Kenneth Chan

women have been represented as temporally anterior to the narrative

present and available principally through memory’s mediation’. This
cultural framework she sees as ‘an analeptic or backward looking mode
of representation’ (Martin, 2010, p. 6) depicts a ‘pain caused by the
renouncement of this love’; but it is a pain that ‘is frankly avowed, not
simply papered over to enable an air of triumph in the stories’ hetero-
sexual conclusions. The protagonists in these stories … openly revel in
the repeated, mournful narration of their treasured memories’ (Martin,
2010, p. 8). It is here that Martin pivots from a homogenizing theoretical
hermeneutics to one that opens up possibilities of reading that can be
politically liberating:

The analyses reveal the rich polysemy of the memorial discourse

on female homoeroticism; its capacity not only to close down the
possibility of a lesbian erotics but also to open it up; its tendency
simultaneously to naturalize adult heterosexuality and to foreground
the tragedy of its imposition. They show how these complex cultural
texts function not simply to seal the same-sex loving woman safely
in the past but also to cause her to appear and reappear, ceaselessly, in
the present. (Martin, 2010, p. 16)

I see this openness in the temporal loop of the flashback sequence

where Ping shuttles between her loves and their (im)possibilities. The
ghostly presence of Han-sun, all quiet in his return, suddenly speaks
the truth to Ping – the only words that he speaks in his apparitional
form: ‘You loved her [Ou-Yang]’. Ping’s apparently defensive response
of ‘I love only you’ may appear to be heteronormative overcompensa-
tion, but I want to argue that this response does not preclude her loving
Ou-Yang in another space and time, and that sexual love can be bigger
and more expansive than it is often thought of within the confines of
the traditional institutions of heterosexual marriage.
I conclude this chapter by reveling in this final story’s mobilization
of melodramatic, nostalgic, and fantastical fluidity, the shifts and sus-
pensions of cinematic temporality – of what Elizabeth Freeman has
envisioned as a form of ‘queer time’: ‘“queer time” appears haunted’;
‘queer time elongates and twists chronology’ (Freeman, 2010, p. x);
and ‘[q]ueer temporalities, visible in the forms of interruption ..., are
points of resistance to this temporal order that, in turn, propose other
possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and
future others: that is, of living historically’ (Freeman, 2010, p. xxii). In
the ‘Story of Lost Lovers’, the cinematic visualities of love are rhizomatic
 Melodrama as History and Nostalgia 151

in their interconnectivity,9 leaping from one temporal point to another,

vibrating from one affective moment to the next; as nostalgia loops and
re-loops to capture desire in its multifarious forms. Han-Sun returns
to haunt, to make love to, and to reveal the truth to Ping; just as Ping
confesses to Han-Sun her love for him, while exposing her desire for
Ou-Yang. Ping’s consciousness moves back in time to the moment when
they were about to be arrested and she proclaims the profundity of her
love into the camera: ‘I love your music. I love your simplicity. I love
your honesty. I love you … till the end of the world’. Her proclamations
of love, while diegetically directed at Han-Sun, could also be redirected
queerly to Ou-Yang and, even, to Ding. She catches and memorializes
that instant when Han-Sun turns slowly to glance at her one last time, as
the image shifts into black and white. Ping, now in the clothes that she
wears after she has married Ding, stands transfixed at the house’s inner
door, as the camera cuts to the main gate opening and Ding appearing
in her line of sight. The reverse shot has Ping telling Ding that ‘Han-
Sun returned today’, thus ending the film. These rapid cinematic shifts
in time and space signify the complex love quadrangle between Ping,
Ou-Yang, Han-Sun and Ding. I class these libidinal connections as queer
ones, embodying contradictions and resisting categorization. More
importantly, these queer relations in queer temporality characterize
Yonfan’s contemporary reformulation of melodrama to enable audiences
to rethink Taiwanese history and to forge progressive political futures for
the island that many call their home.

Notes
1. Apart from the important essays in Gledhill’s volume, see also Kaplan (2000),
Williams (1984; which is also reprinted in Gledhill’s collection), and Singer
(2001). For instances of the gay consumption of classical and contemporary
Hollywood melodrama, see Farmer (2000).
2. See Zhang (2005) for the Shanghai film industry and Teo (1997) for Hong
Kong cinema.
3. I am also suggesting here that cinema, as a cross-cultural and global commod-
ity, is a product of intercultural cross-pollination and hybridization, especially
between a dominant Hollywood and various national cinemas, a point of
analysis I have addressed elsewhere (Chan, 2009).
4. Prince of Tears, Yonfan, Far Sun Film Co Ltd, DVD, 2009. The biographical quota-
tion is taken from Disc Two’s special features, ‘Cast and Crew Filmographies’.
5. I have used the subtitles in the DVD version (see endnote 4 above) for all the
dialogue quotations in this chapter, while making occasional and necessary
changes with my own translations for clarity and grammatical / syntactical
correctness. On a separate historical note: Formosa is the former name of
152 Kenneth Chan

the island of Taiwan. See Manthorpe (2005, pp. 21–4) for an analysis of this
onomastic history.
6. As we watched Chinese melodramas together, my late maternal grandmother
used to regale me with sad stories of her own life, pointing out how art
mimics life.
7. ‘Making of Prince of Tears,’ special feature, Disc Two, Prince of Tears, Yonfan,
Far Sun Film Co Ltd, DVD, 2009. All future references to this documentary
will be parenthetically designated as ‘Making of.’
8. The cinematic equivalent of Chinese gay male cruising can be found in Tsai
Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003).
9. For this theoretical concept, see Deleuze and Guattari (1987, pp. 3–25).

References
Chan, K. (2009) Remade in Hollywood: The Global Chinese Presence in Transnational
Cinemas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press).
Chow, R. (1998) Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
B. Massumi (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Dissanakaye, W. (1993) ‘Introduction’ in W. Dissanayake (ed.) Melodrama and
Asian Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Farmer, B. (2000) Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships
(Durham: Duke University Press).
Freeman, E. (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke
University Press).
Gledhill, C. (1987) ‘Introduction’ in C. Gledhill (ed.) Home Is Where the Heart
Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute).
Kaplan, E. A. (2000) ‘The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in
Vidor’s Stella Dallas’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.) Feminism and Film (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Ma N. (1993) ‘Symbolic Representation and Symbolic Violence: Chinese Family
Melodrama of the Early 1980s’ in W. Dissanayake (ed.) Melodrama and Asian
Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Manthorpe, J. (2005) Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan).
Martin, F. (2010) Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female
Homoerotic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press).
Singer, B. (2001) Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press).
Teo, S. (1997) Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute).
Wang, Y. (1993) ‘Melodrama as Historical Understanding: The Making and
Unmaking of Communist History’ in W. Dissanayake (ed.) Melodrama and
Asian Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Williams, L. (1984) ‘Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the
Maternal Melodrama’, Cinema Journal 24(1): 2–27.
Williams, L. (1998) ‘Melodrama Revised’ in N. Browne (ed.) Refiguring American
Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Zhang Z. (2005) An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema,
1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
9
Vincere: A ‘Strikingly Effective’
Contemporary Film Melodrama
Anne Gailly

Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2009) reconstructs the broken destiny of Ida

Dalser, Benito Mussolini’s alleged first wife, in one of the darkest politi-
cal events of Italy in the last century. These events form the background
of the movie, as the couple’s biography intersects along this histori-
cal thread, a trajectory that led Mussolini from Socialism to Fascism.
In a complex stylistic gesture, Bellocchio weaves several threads until the
last knot: the diverse registers of newsreel footage and cinematographic
archives as well as the rich texture of the rhetoric of melodrama. In so
doing, the filmmaker not only pieces together the paradoxical portrayal
of a woman whose uncompromising, borderline suicidal courage and
determination intimately moved him, but also the cruel fate that befell
this harsh yet passionate woman in love. This leads him to develop a
keen, insightful approach to Il Duce’s biography – as yet unexplored
in the cinematographic landscape – as well as to make a profound
commentary on Italian society. However, over half a century after the
dictator’s execution and Dalser’s demise, Bellocchio’s focus – the inti-
mately personal obscured by historiography – is daring, as it refuses
didactic and transparent enunciation. The formal choices and dialectics
result in a baroque, impetuous, disconcerting melodrama.
It is indeed disconcerting since, with this film, Bellocchio ‘tr[ies] and
invent[s] a new language on the movie screen that could express in
an extremely tight nutshell some of the most exciting events in our
history’ (Harris, 2010). At the crossroads between the biopic and the
archive, the new language with which the director experiments is an
inventive solution to the challenges inherent to historic reconstitu-
tion and to the obvious need to condense the plot, which is imposed
by the subject matter. This chapter supports the view that Bellocchio’s
language is endowed with a metatextual value, and communicates
153
154 Anne Gailly

the carnal and mystical fascination exerted by Il Duce (Gentile, 2002,

pp. 252–287) as the sacralized figure of an ideology that considered
itself a religion (Gentile, 2002; Mosse, 2003, pp. 75–6) and formed the
basis of totalitarianism and its irrational cruelty.
As the active framework of Vincere, this double problematics (trans-
lating and deconstructing) governs the coexistence of implicative
and distanciative strategies, which will be analyzed here from several
perspectives. As it is melodramatic, the implicative dynamics will be
worked up from the vantage point of the theoretical framework offered
by two seminal texts: Poetics of Melodrama by Russian formalist Serguei
Balukhatyi (1926, in Gerould, 1991, pp. 120–9) and The Melodramatic
Imagination by Peter Brooks (1976). These key elements will foster reflec-
tion on the contemporary texture of the movie through distanciative
devices such as the diversion of generic and rhetorical codes, reflection
based on enunciation, its substance, and its medium, or the artistic
syncreticism that operates at the crossroads of cinema, opera, tragedy,
literature, painting and philosophy. The rhetorical force of Vincere
will also be broached through its ability to encapsulate polysemy
within transtextual strategies, stylistic devices, and Derrida’s deferred
analogy (Derrida, 1967a). This ability contributes to giving the movie
its oneiric and poetic coloration while generating vast interactive
semantic networks.

At the roots of Vincere

Arguably, nothing seems as antinomic to melodrama as fate crushed by

the state or the typecasting of Dalser as a tragic heroine; in interviews
he has compared her to Antigone and Medea. In this respect, the bio-
graphical option, which entails a strict adherence with personal and
collective history, does not seem to favor as melodramatic a treatment
as the material of the historical foundation on which the structure of
the film has been erected.
It is worth noting in this regard, that it is through a documentary that
Bellocchio discovered Dalser and her son Benito Albino, as well as their
ties with Mussolini. Mussolini’s Secret (Fabrizio Laurenti and Gianfranco
Norelli, Rai, 2005) made him realize immediately ‘the possibility of turn-
ing it into a movie which would show Mussolini as a young man. What
interested [him] was not only this woman’s story but also … the history
of Italy which was being written through her’ (Delorme and Tessé, 2009,
p. 34). In addition to this ‘trigger’, which sidetracked Bellocchio from
another work in progress, the movie derives its inspiration from two
 Vincere 155

books about Dalser and her son: Mussolini’s Secret Child (Alfredo Pieroni,
2006) and Mussolini’s Marriage (Marco Zeni, 2005). Bellocchio went on
to complement his research with collaboration with historian Sergio
Luzzatto, documentary maker Gianfranco Norelli, journalist Marco
Zeni, and the co-scriptwriter of Vincere, Daniela Ceselli. With the latter,
Bellocchio researched and investigated the topic in the truest sense, in
search of new facts (Gili, 2009, p. 10).
Considering the facts, Vincere’s central motif – the relationship
between Ida Dalser and Benito Mussolini – is truly tragic, even sor-
did, in essence without any need to rework any of its aspects. Dalser
forms a passionate affair with Mussolini in 1914. When Mussolini
takes Interventionist positions and is banned from the Socialist party
and from the direction of his daily newspaper, Avanti!, Ida liquidates
her assets to donate her fortune to him. She thereby contributes to
the launch of her lover’s political ascension, through the foundation,
in November 1914, of the daily newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, which
spearheads the Fascist movement. At that point, she is still unaware
of Mussolini’s long-standing affair with Rachele Guidi, whose daugh-
ter Edda he has already fathered five years earlier. In August 1915,
Mussolini’s departure for the front signals the end of his relationship
with Dalser, then pregnant with their son. Benito Albino is born in
November of the same year – barely more than a month before his
father’s marriage with Rachele. From then on, Ida battles ceaselessly to
have their respective legitimate statuses as wife and son recognized. She
protests that she had actually been joined with him through holy mat-
rimony prior to his civil marriage with Guidi. Neither Mussolini’s rise
to power nor the Fascist regime’s rapprochement with the Church can
afford to acknowledge to Dalser’s constant demands to government and
Church officials. As a result, Ida is arrested and committed to an asylum,
where she dies in 1947 without having abandoned the assertion of her
rights and without ever having seen her son again. After his mother’s
committal, Benito Albino is placed in a boarding school and put under
the guardianship of Giulio Bernardi, one of Mussolini’s lieutenants. As
an adult, he works in the Italian navy as a telegrapher but is later also
institutionalized and dies there at the age of 27.
Clearly, beyond its dramatic dimension, Vincere’s very substance
contains ingredients worthy of inspiring Bellocchio’s strong political
consciousness and his proposed modeling of madness as a vector of
expression of institutional dysfunction (the family, society, religion,
politics) through his interest in the anti-psychiatry movement. He is
struck by Ida Dalser’s ‘experience as a political prisoner’. For him, she
156 Anne Gailly

is a ‘Fascist woman … who involuntarily became a political opponent

of sorts’ at a time when ‘most political prisoners were men and [when]
mental hospitals were hardly ever used to silence opposition. Her case
is … exceptional’ (Renzi, 2009, p. 15).
Still, Bellocchio invests in the melodramatic register, which might
come across as unexpected and disconcerting considering the sub-
ject matter as well as his filmography. This choice actually deliv-
ers his subject matter from the explicitness of ‘the overly engaged
and didactic biopic: Vincere … does not seek to explain the rise of
Fascism through a dialectics based on its direct political opposition.
The opposition rather arises from inside and from other registers:
the unexpected ones of melodrama, opera, dreamlike drift, and the
history of film’ (Beghin, 2009, p. 29). Bellocchio therefore diverts
the tragic essence of his topic and in so doing gives new life to the
melodramatic form.

Vincere: from classical melodrama to

‘futuristic melodrama’

The concept of ‘striking effectiveness’ is borrowed from Serguei

Balukhatyi (in Gerould, 1991). His analysis of theatrical melodrama
demonstrates that, even if one accounts for all of its national and
sub-generic variants, the genre is invested with a stable form gener-
ated by a repertoire of expressive and striking elements whose goal is
intensely to move, even overwhelm, the audience. The formalist views
this as the foundation of melodrama’s program. Under the generic
term ‘emotional teleology’, Balukhtyi is one of the first theoreticians to
fully analyze the rhetorical and structural vectors of the melodramatic
emotion.
The vectors listed by Balukhatyi are fundamental to Vincere. They are:
the theme of the plot relying on a violation of everyday norms and
values (the imprisonment of an innocent or the staging of devastat-
ing passions) and on the transposition of features of everyday reality
(lies); the exploitation of striking situations at key moments (the
separation of a mother and her child); intense and brutally interrupted
interpersonal relationships (lovers forced to part ways; the loss of one’s
offspring). These elements are part of a structure which emphasizes
these dramatic features: the division into acts and the accumulation
of obstacles that augment dramatic tension, or the structuring princi-
ple of the contrast between the different narrative materials (here, the
 Vincere 157

alternation between biographic reconstitution and the diverse materials

of archive and the intrusion of the grotesque into dramatic elements,
conveyed in newsreel footage of Il Duce’s facial expression and gestures).
In addition to the pathology that is consubstantial with the crux of
the intrigue and its dramatic consequences, the implicative texture of
the narration also resorts to the foundational role of the prologue and
its latent threat (the attraction Mussolini holds for Dalser, during their
first encounter, and his challenge to God to prove His existence); the
principle of partial (at the end of an act) or total (at the end of the
narration) denouement; and the unidimensional feature of the charac-
ters who are in charge of generating dramatic situations through their
actions and of revealing a pure and intense emotional tonality through
their words. The impact of intense and pathetic situations is amplified
by the dramatic expressiveness of the sets and music or even of natural
elements (for example, the narrative stasis showing Dalser clinging to
the railings of the asylum as she throws letters which mingle with snow-
flakes in the night). By its nature, the historical coloring of the movie is
also meant to impress the audience and reinforce the absolute character
of the drama. The narrative dynamics of Vincere also take advantage of
what Balukhatyi designates as ‘the thing’ (any element used by melo-
drama to complicate or restore, through its appearance or disappear-
ance, the normal order of events), here the missing official documents
proving Dalser and Mussolini’s matrimony. The formulation of the title
and the actors’ performance will be analyzed later in this chapter.
Set against the touchstone of Balukhatyi’s analysis, Vincere thus testi-
fies to its profound roots in the original generic pattern. However, it is
simultaneously deliberately and knowingly diverted from these canons
by the filmmaker’s will to make an ‘anti-melodramatic melodrama, i.e.,
one which goes against doloristic and nostalgic melodrama [and which]
rather [tips the scales towards] cruelty’ (Delorme and Tessé, 2009, p. 35).
One can easily understand Bellocchio’s rejection of the nostalgic tona-
lity of melodrama, which, through its reverberation on the historical
events and material of the biopic, might entail a nostalgia for Fascism
which is far removed from his intent. Indeed, the fundamentally doloristic
option of the genre is precluded by Dalser’s very temperament: as a Fascist
woman, she is also, according to Bellocchio, a woman of action who
refuses to wallow in resignation (Delorme and Tessé, 2009, p. 35).
On the other hand, the radical integrity of melodrama seems incom-
patible on a conceptual and aesthetic plane with the filmmaker’s chal-
lenge to provide an ‘anti-melodramatic melodrama’. However, Peter
158 Anne Gailly

Brooks’s analysis demonstrates that classic melodrama contains the keys

to implementing this project. The genre’s ambitions – to be exhaustive,
to represent the power games between antagonistic forces, to reveal con-
cealed truths which reside above common sense – exploit three recurring
rhetorical devices: hyperbole, antithesis, and oxymoron. These devices
are meant to translate a signified (ideas or emotions) whose span
exceeds that of the signifier and generates in turn an excessive signi-
fier (Brooks, 1976, p.  199). As a result, Bellocchio’s project should be
considered – lest one should negate its generic allegiance – according
to the terms of a melodramatic metastructure that is determined by the
emphatic logic (hyperbole), antinomic logic (antithesis), and paradoxi-
cal logic (oxymoron) of the genre’s rhetoric and which provides access
to a higher degree of meaning and understanding. This metastructure
governs and justifies the consistent coexistence of parameters that
belong to classic melodrama and to ‘anti-melodrama’. For instance, at
the heart of this structure, the function and the impact of these figures
are diverted, no longer to translate moral universals working under the
surface of the visible (designated by Brooks under the term moral occult)
but to reflect their decay within Fascist Italy.
This diversion is not the only device that testifies to the filmmaker’s
approach. Bellocchio’s programmatic antithesis also results from the
intrinsic antagonism that separates melodrama and futurism. Both
poles are taken to task by a citational and referential strategy, which
bears, at the same time, on representation and remembering – both
dynamics forming the very lifeblood of Vincere. At the very heart of
the montage, Bellocchio applies a direct opposition between a vehe-
ment, aggressive, referentially futuristic rhythm and the operatic nature
of the montage, which fully derives its roots from the lyrical origins of
the melodramatic matrix (Delorme and Tessé, 2009, p.  35). Moreover,
the reference to opera is actualized through excerpts from Verdi (Aida,
Rigoletto), Puccini (Tosca), and Philip Glass (Akhnaten), through Carlo
Crivelli’s orchestral composition, and through the staging of sequences
pertaining to the burning down of the Avanti and the violent confronta-
tion between warmongers and pacifists in a movie theater.
‘Melodramatic musicality’ thus collides with futuristic ‘turmoil’,
which emerges from the insertion of fragments from Stramilano
(D’Errico, 1929) after the prologue. The prologue ends abruptly, under-
mining the logic of its exposition, and in visual terms which illustrate
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s manifesto (radical low-angle shots which
favor factory chimneys in opposition with the spires of the cathedral
of Milan; urban sets lit by neon lights; train; duplication; speed and
vertigo…). Futurism is clearly present in the evocation of the exhibition
 Vincere 159

of 1917, but also in the aesthetics of the slogan and in the spectacle
of these ‘great crowds agitated by … pleasure’ (Marinetti, 1909) when
hearing Il Duce’s speeches (Luce archive) or the ‘polyphonic backwashes
of revolutions’ (Marinetti, 1909), illustrated by fragments from October
(Eisenstein, 1927). The duality between melodrama and Futurism is
also expressed by more explicit strategies, such as the composition of
the set in the duel scene opposing Mussolini and Treves in dialectics
between foreground and background of which Bellocchio is fond. The
confrontation between the duelists in the foreground refers to the regis-
ter of melodrama while ‘the factories suspended from the clouds by
the plumes of their smoke’ praised by Marinetti (1909) (and integrated
during the postproduction) stand out in the background.
The exploitation of these two registers generates a paradoxical style
marked by the oxymoron; Bellocchio himself dubs Vincere a ‘futuristic
melodrama’ (Delorme and Tessé, 2009, p. 35). This architectonic oxymo-
ron, which appeared to the filmmaker as an imperative need, conditions
the film’s form in that it enables Bellocchio to draw parallels between
the flames of private passion and of history (Delorme and Tessé, 2009,
p. 36). It imposes the narration with a double tempo, which adheres
to these two perspectives: the establishment of the dictatorship and
Dalser’s committal, in the second part of the film, coinciding with the
release of a futuristic repertoire to the benefit of a more assertive melo-
dramatic register. The latter articulates ‘a whole space of (mental and
physical) claustration, which is so important in melodrama from the
beginning’ (Brooks, 1976, p. 50) and which correlates, in Vincere, with
that of terror, cruelty and totalitarianism.

A ‘cruel’ melodrama: performance, moral teleologies/

aesthetics

Several parameters sustain the cruelty towards which Bellocchio intends

to direct his melodrama; thus, the antithesis between the semaphoric
tonality of Filippo Timi’s performance (as Mussolini and Benito Albino)
and Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s internalized one (as Dalser). At the heart
of melodrama, semaphoric performance, according to Brooks, gives a
mediation to what cannot be expressed because it is ineffable, superior.
Thus, this mediation grants Timi’s Mussolini a stature that elevates him
not only above the other characters but also above common sense.
What is more, semaphoric performance associated with the actor’s
powerful physicality displaces upon this character the diva option,
which Italian melodrama originally associated with the female figure
in the 1910s. This translation thus roots in the character of Il Duce a
160 Anne Gailly

diva-like charismatic aura, which seduces and subjugates, sometimes

to the extent of enslaving morally or affectively. De facto, his transfer-
ence carries off its course the specific cruelty of the oxymoron that
was originally associated with the diva, namely, the notion of offering
(one’s body to the gaze, to possession) without giving (oneself). Visually,
this oxymoron asserts itself in the second half of the movie, through
the actor’s disappearance and replacement by newsreels of Mussolini.
This method reveals this space of ‘absent presence’ where the character
fascinates because he is both close and unreachable. He is consequently
overwhelming to the gaze and desire of the onlooker who would like to
possess him and make him their own, which generates the frustration
of a satisfaction that cannot be fully satisfied.
On the moral level, Vincere deliberately keeps open a gap that is hidden
from the substrate of melodrama. Both Balukhatyi and Brooks ascribe
to melodrama an intrinsically moral project. For the former, its raison
d’être is to impose on the denouement the rectification of the violated
norms and thereby grant the plot solutions derived from the moral ideal
(moral teleology); the latter rather views the key as lying in the revelation
of occulted moral values (moral occult) which determine a theater dedi-
cated to the recognition of virtue. In this respect, the epilogue of Vincere
seems to remind one of collective memory in the form of a restoration
of norms, which a superficial analysis might view as fulfilling the moral
ideal (a dictator’s downfall symbolized by the destruction of his statue).
However, one would have to disregard callously the victims of history
and obscure the inevitable paradigmatic rupture inflicted on this ideal
and these norms by World War II – as well as the ethically questionable
execution of Il Duce and the humiliation inflicted to his mortal remains.
Furthermore, the ending brings the fates of Dalser and her son no
(re)solution based on the moral ideal and the dynamics of recognition.
Denied and disowned until the end of their lives, they not only retain
their victim status but also stay profoundly alienated from Mussolini
in the fullest sense. The fundamental cruelty of Vincere therefore lies in
the concrete, historical impossibility in which Dalser’s fate places melo-
drama’s potential for reforming the nature of its characters, embattling
denial, rehabilitating the victim, chastising iniquity, and negating the
utopia of the word ‘Justice.’
Unlike contemporary melodrama, the metastructure of Vincere is able
to absorb and exploit this violent fracture inflicted to the cohesion of
moral and emotional teleologies. This ‘break in codes, [this] disrup-
tion, [imposes] a heterogeneous reading towards the original language’
(Derrida, 1972, pp. 374–5) and truly makes Vincere a ‘deferred’ melodrama.
 Vincere 161

This fracture marks the culmination in the crescendo to which the codes
and strategies of emotional teleology submit the audience. Deprived
of its moral alter ego, this teleology ultimately only contributes
to inflicting a profound frustration on the spectator. Such an insidious
unsettling has existential ramifications that cannot easily erase the
consolations of the affect. Shedding frustration and a sense of loss thus
implies letting go of the sway of emotions. In other words, it means
maturing from the passiveness of an infantile object-vessel position
to seize an active position as a subject who can rearticulate meanings
through the reworking of and emotional distancing towards the devices,
which characterize enunciation and its contents. Bellocchio arms this
reflection through a defragmentation of enunciative strategies, sup-
ports and contents, which associates cinema as a ‘mass’ medium with
private and collective history of the ‘masses’. This operation paves the
way to a higher degree of capturing and comprehension of the real in
that it unifies the spatio-temporal realities and heterogeneous mental
spaces. An example of this is given in the scene where Ida watches
newsreel footage in a movie theater. By the mise en abyme of the cin-
ematographic device and its spectatorship, Bellocchio attributes to the
audience of Vincere the omniscient view that enables one to perceive the
similarities which interact between one’s own position when watching
the biopic, the protagonists’, and through them, Mussolini’s contem-
poraries, when watching the Fascist leader’s image projected onto a
screen – in terms reminiscent of Plato’s allegory of the cave (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Vincere (2009)

162 Anne Gailly

The ‘[viewer-]-subject is [thus] produced as relationship to one’s self in

the difference of with one’s self, in the movement of deferral’ (Derrida,
1967b, p. 92), understood not as ‘a concept, but [as] the possibility of
conceptuality, the movement of which produces differences’ (Derrida,
1972, p. 11).
The image thus crafted not only refers back to the plot in the strict-
est sense, it also becomes the Image, a discursive venue endowed with
a force field which, on the one hand, is centripetal and implicative,
yet, on the other hand, centrifugal and detached. This stems from its
characteristics as both object and subject of a reflection that not only
interrogates history, but also broadens its terms onto the riveting power
of images, onto its medium, and onto its collusion with last century’s
dictatorships.
Realizing the illusory or even unrealizable character of melodramatic
ideals is accompanied by an aesthetic corollary, also ‘deferred’ in the
line of a break in the Platonic intimacy between Beauty and Truth, and
unveils the moral emptiness intrinsic to the image. By contaminating
the fragments from the archive and from newsreel footage, this break
shakes the very grounding of Fascist aesthetics, where ‘the definition
of beauty as that which is “good, true, sacred” served as a background
to Fascist worship’ (Mosse, 2003, p. 76). At the heart of this reason-
ing, the director thus posits two types of rhetorics belonging to two
distinct registers but which, through this very coexistence, reveal their
analogy. Firstly, the melodramatic one instrumentalizes the narration
and the personal. Secondly, the Fascist one summons collective his-
tory through the substance of newsreel footage. The relevance of this
analogy is based on the common taste of these two forms of rhetoric
for excessive formulation, striking staging, tableau aesthetics, and
the emotional sway on the spectators. It also rests on the remark-
able orchestration granted by a new emergent language in the early
twentieth century: that of cinema. This orchestration is revisited by
Bellocchio, who puts into melodrama ‘the very same visual language
as futurism, or Fascism, but in a completely different sense’ (Delorme
and Tessé, 2009, p. 36).
The intent is sustained by a profound penetration of the generic codes
as well as by the mastery over the use of the very essence of cinemato-
graphic language: montage. The keen, precise and persistent imposition
of montage strategies on the audience’s consciousness and the constant
pressure this montage exerts over the (filmic1 and historical) archive
through internal cuts, as well as the often scathing confrontation of the
archive with the reconstruction, shows that the image, devoid of any
 Vincere 163

‘natural’ ethical force, is fundamentally dependent on the intentional-

ity of its author and of its appropriation by the audience.

Memory and trauma: isotopy and performativity

‘Vanquishing’ entails the co-existence of a victor and a victim, of a vic-

tory and a defeat, and a relationship of domination and submission.
Within a few letters, ‘Vincere’ configures much more than its powerful
isotopy with a programming that has made its own the lessons of classi-
cal melodramas, as enunciated by Balukhatyi (in Gerould, 1991, p. 126),
and thus refers to the dramatic situation, the setting, the prime mover
of the drama, or a character’s motive. At the heart of history, ‘Vincere’
stands for more than the personal motto of a power-hungry young
political activist or the motto of a dictator determined to crush any
form of adversity. Through the exploitation of newsreel footage, Fascist
rhetoric also culminates through the narrative stasis imposed by Il Duce’s
speeches and the isotopic echo of the (in)famous war declaration
launched from Palazzo Venezia on 10 June 1940. According to Bellocchio
(Festival de Cannes, 2009), ‘Vincere’ also constitutes the very watchword
of any dictatorship.
At the heart of melodrama, ‘Vincere’ lays out an itinerary which, along
with the heroine’s generic predestination, seals the dramaturgy of the
genre according to Brooks. This title configures Ida Dalser’s quest for
recognition and rehabilitation. As it is isotopic, ‘Vincere’ also proves to
be endowed with a performative value bearing on contemporary Italy
in the sense that it exploits melodrama’s ability to abstract a general
problematic from the personal sphere, to reveal the object of collective
obliterations and traumas, to take part in mourning work, and to adhere
to the values of its time.
When asked about the reception of his movie in Italy, Bellocchio
admits that he was dismayed by the absence ‘of debate or confronta-
tion with our history. I was very surprised by this. I expected some
discussion around Mussolini at the very least. There was complete
silence. Including from today’s political class, those who evolved in the
context of the nostalgia of Fascism. … There was also silence from the
old Communists. So either Fascism doesn’t interest anyone in Italy any-
more or it’s an outdated issue’ (Delorme and Tessé, 2009, p. 36).
This status quo silence does not fail to astonish or raise the question
of its deeper reasons. Rather than ‘uninteresting’ or ‘outdated’, the issue
of Fascism and of the fascination exerted by its leader – as Bellocchio
positions it in terms of coalesced urges, sensual submissiveness, and a
164 Anne Gailly

genuine amorous fascination operated by the seductive power of the

image – seems to shed a very sharp light on the notion of collective
denial: the denial of an amorous fascination with narcissistic connota-
tions, since ‘a major part of Italy contemplated itself [in its leader] as
in a mirror’ (Cazzullo, 2007). Egotistical fascination mediated by the
image, as if Fascist Italy as a spectatorial body had invested ‘two bodies
at the same time: a narcissistic body lost in the nearby mirror, and
a perverse body ready to fetishize not the image itself, but precisely
what exceeds it’ (Barthes, 1975, p. 106). This absence of debate may be
consubstantial with this mechanism and betray a genuinely visceral
surrender – in that common language, contrary to the rhetoric of melo-
drama, can’t express what exceeds the signifier – with regards to the
brutal resurgence of the repressed drive through the specular device of
cinema. ‘Brutal’ because, from 1945 onwards, Italian cinema was careful
not to oppose Mussolini’s figure,2 and privileged the representation of
(active) resistance over that of (lascivious) adhesion. Indeed, the latter
‘weighs heavily on the conscience of the Italian nation: Mussolini
was erased from its collective imagination’ (Bonsaver, 2010, p. 32).
Transgressive, too, since ‘in Italy, it is … still today much more politi-
cally bold to represent the population’s mass adhesion in the thirties
than to stroke Italians’ egos with the self-celebration of the Resistance’
(Bertilotti, 2010). Considering the propagandistic images, which had
subjugated Italy, the representation of Mussolini in film from his
demise onwards also demonstrates, between the lines, a genuine lack of
re-presentation(s). This absence of counterpoints supports the predomi-
nance of the dictator’s image as it was glorified by the Luce and relayed
by the documentary genre, traditionally in charge of such sulphurous
topics as Mussolini’s biography or the history of the Fascist regime.
Through the child born of Dalser and Mussolini’s psychotic union,
Vincere also directs its gaze on the traumatic impact of Fascism. Before
extending its scope to the collective, Bellocchio establishes the growth
of this trauma through the aesthetics of ‘striking’ tableaux, which pro-
vide a plastic representation of Benito Albino’s deteriorating mental
state. This degradation starts with the child’s confrontation with his
father’s marble statue, then involves the young adult’s caricaturing
of Il Duce’s mottoes and gestures, and, finally, shows the insane man
blurting out fragments from his father’s speeches (first pay off of the
narration). Through the interweaving of sound and visuals between
Mussolini’s speech, deployed by newsreel footage, and the demented
son’s repetition, the montage unifies mental spaces and stigmatizes,
through the mirror of mental alienation, the face of Fascism, its leader
 Vincere 165

and national fervor. The notion of hubris posited by the prologue then
reaches its full tragic dimension and encounters the merciless sanction
of nemesis through apocalyptic images of World War II (second pay off)
and the metaphor which seals the dictator’s execution and the end
of Fascism (third pay off ). The performative value of Bellocchio’s title
gathers all of these parameters: it takes place within denial and shame,
irrationality and fascination, silence, vacuity and trauma.
By its creator’s own admission, Vincere also results from a politi-
cal reflection that diagnoses the long-term crisis from which Italian
Socialism suffers. Bellocchio locates its origin in the party’s failure
to counter Mussolini’s abrupt conversion to Interventionism in 1915
and in its leaders’ underestimation of the massive support that Italy’s
youth gave to the Fascist leader, as they wanted to witness a renewal of
the political class. This crisis perpetuated itself in the Italian Socialist
Party’s (ISP) inability to assert itself after the Liberation while faced
with Communist hegemony or Christian democracy (Cazzullo, 2007)
or even, in the last twenty years, with Berlusconism (Ayad, 2009).
While film critics have tended to notice the presence of a political
subtext, they have not attained insight into its intentions and they
have therefore positioned Vincere’s political import as a questioning of
Berlusconism. Such reviews have sometimes included parallels between
Ida Dalser and Veronica Lario – Silvio Berlusconi’s ex-wife.
Bellocchio has often resisted the charge of having one intention or the
other, as he is very aware of the sharp distinction between Mussolini’s
Fascist dictatorship and Berlusconi’s ‘authoritarian democracy’ as well
as between Dalser’s and Lario’s respective situations and contexts.
However, a posteriori, he admits the existence of a common feature in
the two leaders’ political exploitation of the media, although they have
different goals.
One of the visionary intuitions of Mussolini and of Fascist propa-
ganda was the exploitation of the added mediation of the gaze and of
the image to keep his contemporaries in an attitude of ‘subjugation’ – in
other words, of ‘seduction’ and ‘submissiveness’. And, while opponents
of the Fascist regime (like Matteoti or the brothers Rosselli) were ostra-
cized or eliminated, it is no longer, under the contemporary modalities
of this media-political culture, ‘necessary to slaughter or lock up oppo-
nents: you just need to make them invisible, to erase their image and
their words from every form of communication and simultaneously
propagate your own image everywhere … so that it obsesses people.
This is what the Prime Minister [Silvio Berlusconi] has understood’
(Aspesi, 2009).
166 Anne Gailly

In this respect, the resolute echo of the title at the end of the epilogue
achieves several effects. Firstly, it prolongs the antithesis based on the jux-
taposition between images of the suffering and destruction of the Italian
people and Mussolini’s ‘Vincere e vinceremo!’ (‘To win, and we shall
win!’). Secondly, in the same antithetic and cruel register, it seals Dalser’s,
Mussolini’s and their son’s respective ‘defeats’. Thirdly, beyond this, it
salutes the collective victory over Fascism and resonates as an (universal)
exhortation to triumph over antidemocratic machineries and dictator-
ships. As it assimilates and links each of these themes and layers of analy-
sis, the rhetoric of Vincere truly establishes itself as an interrogative premise
and a demonstrative synthetic mode: it is alternately a question about and
an answer to a dialectic that ultimately proves to be that of History.

At the crossroad of arts: metaphor, analogy, and allegory

Beyond Vincere’s known matrices (melodrama, opera and tragedy), the

movie’s architectural principle reveals its affinity with certain modali-
ties of Proustian stream-of-consciousness. Between the prologue and
the epilogue, Bellocchio inserts a narrative within which the intimate
(Dalser’s and Mussolini’s affair) – which is insignificant from the vantage
point of the history summoned by memory – gives meaning to memory
work and the relationship between artistic subjectivity and reality. In
this sense, Ida is to both Il Duce and Italy – the country that elected him
by overwhelming majority – what the madeleine is to the narrator of
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: a sensory and cognitive modality
as well as the vector of evocation. She stands as the nodal pretext for a
multi-sensory revisiting of the past through multiple time frames, for
an inference of the general from the singular and for a reflection on the
matter and manner of evocation.
The semantic charge attributed to the character of Dalser clearly rests,
in Brooksian terms, on melodrama’s genetic determination to reveal a
concealed meaning by means of significant elements as well as on its
remarkable ability to generate and exploit stylistic devices relying on an
excessive mode in order to ensure the full readability of an ‘excessive’
signified. From this perspective, Ida Dalser not only functions as a mode
of (com)prehension of feverish Italy as it is (being) overcome by its
leader’s destructive charisma, she also constitutes the literal metaphor
of Il Duce’s quotation comparing the crowd to a woman (‘The crowd
loves a strong man. The crowd is a woman!’ – Mussolini).
Ida embodies the assimilation between the collective paradigm
and the ‘woman as object’ and ‘senses over reason’ stereotypes. Such
 Vincere 167

associations express the sexual nature of the relationship of seduction

and domination that Mussolini maintained towards Italy, and they
belong to the typology of the ‘charismatic dictator’ according to
psychosociologist Eugène Enriquez (1994, p. 43–6). This metaphor is
extended through the radio voiceover presenting Mussolini’s arrival at
the signing of the Lateran Accords as a sensual, orgasmic event: ‘a thrill
running through the crowd, illuminated by an invisible light. She
moves, undulates. Bells are ringing. … The signing has taken place!’
It is also asserted proleptically by the montage that juxtaposes young
Mussolini’s nudity – as he is planted on his mistress’s balcony after an
urgent embrace – with the first occurrence of the mob (fragment from
newsreel footage) which will acclaim him several years later under the
balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. It is also present, through an oxymo-
ronic articulation pertaining to ‘possessing without having’, in a nun’s
answer to Dalser’s despair upon being separated from her son: ‘What are
you complaining about? You have a son from a man all women would
like to have as a husband or as a lover. Be content with that. You have
beautiful memories’. These articulations actualize the perspective of fas-
cination but also of frustration induced by the diva-like shift operated
on Mussolini’s character.
The exploitation of the futuristic paradigm associated with melodrama
also serves as a metaphor that corresponds with Il Duce’s psychic universe
as well as with his political choices. Indeed, the references and tempo
first act as analogical features with Mussolini’s revolutionary and destruc-
tive energy, his turnaround towards warmongering, the rapidity of his
rise to power. Then, they mirror his return to more traditional values,
such as his opportunistic about turn with regard to the Church, his holy
matrimony with Rachele, his attachment to the image of a ‘good family
man’ or le culte de la romanité as a bedrock of national greatness. Under
the same logic, the metaphor encompasses Fascist aesthetics, ‘traditional
in its forms and dynamic in its movement’ (Mosse, 2003, p. 82), in that it
translates the very spirit of Fascism and its desire to ‘defend tradition and
symbolize a revolutionary dynamic supposed to lead to a better future’
(Mosse, 2003, p. 83).
Besides the references to Futurism, the pictorial register makes its mark
through the power of Daniel Cipri’s perfect command of chiaroscuro and
contrasts; these devices evoke Caravaggio’s lines in some cases and
are buttressed in expressionist radicalism in other cases. Furthermore,
the pictorial register is remarkably assimilated and exploited through
the citational interlocking of the Pietà in Giulio Antamoro’s 1916 movie
Christus, which is screened in a church, itself decorated with frescoes,
168 Anne Gailly

stained glass and statues. In a sweeping gesture, which combines

classicism and modernity, the director is not altogether content with
this process: as he cites Antamoro’s fragment (which, in turn, cites
Michelangelo), he modifies its enunciation (cuts, re-editing) and aes-
thetics (inversion, distorting of images, reframing), and the parameters
of its spectatorial reception. At the same time, he duplicates Antamoro’s
approach in a more elaborate and distanced way, by reconfiguring in
turn this great classic of religious iconography around the characters of
Guidi and the wounded Mussolini. This treatment creates an analogy
between Christ’s tormented body on the one hand, duplicated by the
projection of Antamoro’s excerpt above the cross in the church’s choir,
and Mussolini on the other hand, as he undergoes, in his own words,
‘a torment’. By displacing the latter, the (cinematographic) image, and
its spectacular nature to one’s relationship with the sacred, with liturgy,
and with religious iconography, the filmmaker posits the paradigm of
the ‘sacred’ cult of personality and the mythologizing strategies which
were later associated with Pope Pius XI’s ‘uomo della provvidenza’. In par-
allel to this, at the core of purely melodramatic strategies, martyrdom
and Mater Dolorosa put Dalser’s fate into perspective; as part of their
motif, they announce the matricial crescendo of a suffering that has
only gone through the first half of its own Stations of the Cross-like
martyrdom.
The counterpoint brought by the intrusion of the parable of the
blind is just as remarkable, and it strikes through the conclusion
which it brings to the aspirations of grandeur and revolution outlined
by Mussolini to Ida at the beginning of their relationship. This alle-
gory is reminiscent of the illustration of Biblical verses in Bruegel the
Elder’s eponymous painting and its precise study of a specific move-
ment: namely, that of falling. This figure is prophetic in its ability to
foretell the trajectory both of the couple and the nation – underlined
by the use of the superimposed animated images and the analogy
made between the blind and the ranks of a marching army. It also
puts into perspective the subject matter of the biopic and the film-
maker’s intent; this perspective is later confirmed by the last images
of the movie through what has become the classical metaphor of the
end of political regimes since the opening sequence of Einsenstein’s
October.
These two examples illustrate the way in which Bellocchio positions
stylistic devices (hyperbole, antithesis, oxymoron, allegory and metaphor)
at the core of an enunciative strategy, which associates transtextuality and
the principle of ‘deferred’ reiteration. Used in this way, the reiteration
 Vincere 169

Figure 9.2 Vincere (2009)

solicits a dynamics of remembering –of re-cognition– in that it transposes

images and signifiers from one context or symbolizing register to another,
and imposes a de facto detachment by turning reflection to the notions of
difference, transfer and diverting.
In conclusion, the last sequence worth noting is the scene in which
Dalser faces the psychiatric evaluation commission. Here, she clearly
confirms the reconfiguration of her fate through melodrama and
outside of the tragic paradigm suggested by the Shakespearian trope
of the skull intentionally placed in front of her (Figure 9.2). Thus, the
hypothesis of a sacrificial fatum is replaced by the ontological terms of
free will and of individual resistance, which nourish melodrama’s pro-
grammatic: Vincere.
Translated from French by Sylvie Vranckx

Notes
1. Le avventure straodinarissime di Saturnino Farandola (Fabre, 1913), Christus
(Antamoro, 1916), Maciste Alpino (Pastrone, 1916), The Kid (Chaplin, 1921),
October (Eisenstein, 1927), Vecchia Guardia (Blasetti, 1934), Vom Thron und
Liebe-Sarajevo (Karther, 1955), Seconda B (Alessandrini, 1934).
2. Paola Bertilotti (2010) found the following exceptions: Il processo di Verona
(The Verona Trial, Carlo Lizzani, 1962); Mussolini: Ultimo atto (The Last Days
of Mussolini, Carlo Lizzani, 1974); Claretta (Pasquale Squitieri, 1984). Guido
Bonsaver (2010) further underlines that ‘Vincere is only the second feature film
devoted entirely to the life of Mussolini. Its precursor is 1974’s The Last Days of
Mussolini’ (Mussolini: Ultimo atto).
170 Anne Gailly

References
Aspesi, N. (2009) ‘Il Duce di Bellocchio: Con Radio e cinema cambiò la politica’,
La Repubblica, 29 May.
Ayad, C. (2009) ‘Les jeunes ont pour seule culture la télé de Berlusconi’,
Libération, 20 May.
Barthes, R. (1975) ‘En sortant du cinéma’, Communications, 23: 104–107.
Beghin, C. (2009) ‘Toujours de l’audace’, Les cahiers du cinéma, November, 650:
29–30.
Bertilloti, P. (2010) ‘Le fascisme au cinéma: Vincere de Marco Bellocchio’,
Histoire@Politique.
Politique, culture, société [online], 12, September-December. Available at: <www.
histoirepolitique.fr >.
Bonsaver, G. (2010) ‘The Great Seducer’, Sight and Sound, May, pp. 32–4.
Brooks, P. (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
Cazzullo, A. (2007) ‘Il Duce e il film sulla “moglie ribelle”’, Il Corriere della Sera,
18 March.
Delorme, S., and Tessé, J.-P. (2009) ‘Un mélodrame futuriste. Entretien avec
Marco Bellocchio’, Les cahiers du cinéma, November, 650: 34–6.
Derrida, J. (1967a) L’écriture et la différence (Paris; Seuil).
Derrida, J. (1967b) La voix et le phénomène (Paris: PUF).
Derrida, J. (1972) Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Ed. Minuit).
Enriquez, E. (1994) ‘Personnalité et régimes politiques’ in C. Crispa (ed.) L’identité
politique (Paris: PUF).
Gentile, E. (2002) La religion fasciste (trans. J. Gayrard) (Paris: Perrin).
Gerould, D. (1991) ‘Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama’ in M. Landy (ed.)
Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press).
Gili, J. A. (2009) ‘Entretien avec Marco Bellocchio: Un antifascisme presque fou’,
Positif, November, 585: 10–14.
Harris, B. (2010) ‘Marco Bellocchio, Vincere’, Filmmaker Magazine [online] 17 March,
Available at: <http://filmmakermagazine.com/5588-marco-bellocchio-vincere>.
Marinetti, F.-T. (1909) ‘Fondation et Manifeste du futurisme’, Le Figaro, 20
February, 51. Available at: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica, <http://
gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2883730.langFR>.
Mosse, George L. (2003) La révolution fasciste. (trans. J.-F. Senné) (Paris: Seuil).
Renzi, E. (2009) ‘Esquisses’, Les cahiers du cinéma, May, 645: 14–15.
Press Conference, 2009, ‘Vincere,’ Festival de Cannes [online] 19 May, Available at:
http://www.festival-cannes.com/fr/festival/2009-05-19/theDailyVideos.html
10
Vienna to Beijing: Xu Jinglei’s
Letter from an Unknown Woman
(China, 2004) and the Symbolic
Simulation of Europe
Sarah Artt

Melodrama has often been seen as a genre with a tendency to look back,
and in this sense Stefan Zweig’s novella Briefe von einen Unbekannte/
Letter from an Unknown Woman and its cinematic adaptations are exem-
plary. Zweig’s novella deals with the individual’s memory of a romantic
attachment during a significant historical period. The story concerns
two characters: a woman with a detailed memory of events and a man
for whom memory is fragile and the past fleeting. Annette Kuhn (2010)
has argued that ‘Cinema ... is peculiarly capable of enacting not only
the very activity of remembering, but also ways of remembering that
are commonly shared; it is therefore peculiarly capable of bringing
together personal experiences and larger systems and processes of cul-
tural memory’(p. 303). This is precisely what is on offer in Xu Jinglei’s
2004 adaptation of Letter from an Unknown Woman where the recollec-
tion of the individual constitutes a recapturing of cultural memory.
Letter is a film about the recent Chinese past (the 1930s and 1940s) but
like many melodramas and woman’s films, it centers on a single female
protagonist.
Letter from an Unknown Woman concerns a woman who has written to
a man who was once her lover. The letter announces the death of their
son, the product of a single night they spent together approximately ten
years before. The letter recounts the woman’s lifelong obsession with
the man, whom she has admired since she was a child, when she and
her widowed mother lived next door to him. The young girl admires the
man for his learning and talent, and she covets the things with which
he surrounds himself, these objects that are close to him as she cannot
be. The girl grows to womanhood, and one day she meets the man
again. They talk and share a meal, and in the evening they go to bed
171
172 Sarah Artt

together. Shortly thereafter, the man’s work takes him away, out of the
city, and when he returns, he has forgotten the young woman. Soon,
she finds herself pregnant, but rather than demand her lover support
her, the woman goes away, to another part of the country to have her
child. Years elapse, and the woman becomes a high-end prostitute, in
order to support her son in style. When she meets her lover again by
chance, he still does not remember her, although they share another
night together. Some years after this, the letter arrives, to reveal all. Xu
Jinglei’s film is an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella, rather than
a remake of the well-known film by Max Ophuls from 1948, but she
sets the story in Beijing between 1938 and 1948, during the ten years
just prior to the creation of the People’s Republic of China under Mao
Zedong in 1949. Like Zweig, Jinglei does not really introduce her char-
acters and their names are very rarely used. She also maintains Zweig’s
original occupations for the two lovers: the man, Xu Ai-You is a writer
and the woman Miss Jiang, is at first a student and then a high-class
escort.
In a deliberate re-framing of the source text’s hysterical, obsessive
narrative, the heroine of Jinglei’s film, Miss Jiang (played by director
Jinglei), operates, as Christine Gledhill suggests, as a ‘symbol [that] can-
not be owned, but is [instead] contested’ (1987, p. 37). As a text that
deals explicitly with the fragility of memory and the past, Letter has
always made ideal melodrama. The device of the woman’s voiceover
places her at the center of the narrative even on the occasions when
she is off-screen. The all-encompassing quality of the voiceover allows
for a certain agency, even in relation to scenarios where the woman is
seemingly led by male desire. Xu’s film also uses Letter’s framework of
memory and the central position of the woman to comment on the
place of women and the ideology of what it means to represent the
Chinese past in 2004. While Gledhill has argued that ‘melodrama’s
search for something lost, inadmissible, repressed, ties it to an atavistic
past’ (Gledhill, 1987, p. 32), Xu’s film offers a reclaiming and revaluing
of the recent Chinese past, presenting an elegant visual image of aspects
of Beijing society in the late 1930s as refracted through the central
figure of the protagonist, the unknown woman Miss Jiang.
In her discussion of Xu’s film E. Ann Kaplan comments that the film
is both an adaptation of Zweig’s novel and a remake of Ophuls’ film:

... if in setting his 1948 film at the turn of the century in Germany,
Ophuls saw that earlier period as the foremost generator of our cur-
rent sensibility, perhaps Xu was doing something similar. In her case,
 Vienna to Beijing 173

she perhaps saw 1930s China as the generator of China in 2004 ...
[w]hile in the 1930s women still had fewer choices than men ... Xu
possibly sees Jiang’s cultural freedom as a model for women in the
China of 2004 who sought more artistic, sexual and aesthetic pos-
sibilities. (Kaplan, 2011, pp. 166–167)

Elsewhere in the same collection, Jingyuan Zhang comments ‘the

implausibility of Miss Jiang’s character is a serious problem for the film.
Many feminists, including myself, find Xu Jinglei’s rendition of Zweig’s
story painful to watch, as she reproduces without any irony the logical
extreme of the traditional value that a woman must live through her
man as his selfless slave and still call it love’ (Zhang, 2011, p. 302). This
chapter will offer a re-gendered appraisal of Xu’s film in light of recent
theories of melodrama in a more global context.

Melodrama in China

Many writers on Chinese cinemas have acknowledged the overarch-

ing importance of melodrama as a mode in both early Chinese cinema
(such as Wu Yonggang’s 1934 silent film The Goddess) and amongst the
vaunted Fifth Generation filmmakers. Andrew Grossman even suggests
that,

the splendiferous depictions of melodramatic female suffering

advanced by the Fifth Generation filmmakers ... [and] the persistence
of this aesthetic in film has submerged any kind of gendered politics
beneath a commodifiable aesthetic of cinematographic prettiness,
in which the systems critiqued are paradoxically presented romanti-
cally, nostalgically and, in a word, sexily. (Grossman, 2009, p. 139)

This corresponds to Zhang’s comments about the troubling position of

Jiang’s character for feminists. However, Zhang (2011) also indicates that
this response was not universal and that many women college students
in China who saw the film ‘saw something attractive in the independ-
ence of Miss Jiang’ (p. 302). While Zhang sees the film as essentially
glorifying an outdated mode of gender relations, younger female viewers
seem to have identified a point of resonance and desirable identification.
If we consider globally successful films like In the Mood for Love alongside
Xu’s Letter from an Unknown Woman or Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution then per-
haps Grossman has a point. Both In the Mood for Love and Lust, Caution
are visually sumptuous films where the melodramatic suffering of the
174 Sarah Artt

female protagonists is seemingly part of that decorative and frequently

eroticized aesthetic. However, it is also important to consider the context
of both the place of women’s liberation and women’s subjectivity within
recent Chinese history alongside the place of melodrama as a distinct
genre and mode. As Zhou Xielin indicates, during the rule of Mao
Zedong and particularly during the period of the Cultural Revolution
(1966–1976), ‘woman’s emancipation became absorbed as a component
of proletarian liberation ... with the image of the female body becoming
utterly invisible in the decade of the Cultural Revolution’ (Xielin, 2009,
pp. 128–129). In addition to this, with the near absence of any filmmak-
ing during this time in China, apart from the eight filmed revolutionary
model operas instigated by Mao Zedong’s last wife Jiang Qing, narrative
scenes of romance and adornment were considered ‘decadent’. With the
end of the Cultural Revolution and the resumption of state-sponsored
filmmaking (and some evidence of independent production and distri-
bution via international film festivals) melodrama as a mode and a genre
was set to make a return. Stephen Teo notes that,

wenyi pian [is] the name which denotes the melodrama in Chinese
cinema [but] the term is deliberately imprecise and can refer to
conventional melodramas in terms of a highly sentimental and
exaggerated story usually with song numbers thrown in, as well as
love stories and women’s pictures focusing on female protagonists as
long-suffering heroines. (Teo, 2006, p. 203).

So melodrama in China it seems is a term whose origins and meanings

are perhaps as broad as those for European melodrama. It can certainly
be encompassed by Thomas Elsaesser’s ideas about British and European
melodrama:

In its dictionary sense, melodrama is a dramatic narrative in which

musical accompaniment marks the emotional effects. This is still
perhaps the most useful definition, because it allows melodramatic
elements to be seen as constituents of a system of punctuation,
giving expressive colour and chromatic contrast to the storyline,
by orchestrating the emotional ups and downs of the intrigue. The
advantage of this approach is that it formulates the problems of mel-
odrama as problems of style and articulation. (Elsaesser, 1985, p. 172)

Noting the observations of Teo and Elsaesser, we can see that melo-
drama as a genre or mode has clear transnational common ground
 Vienna to Beijing 175

and therefore an examination of the transformation of a melodramatic

European text, into an Asian melodramatic text is worthy of further
study. The style and articulation of European and Chinese melodrama
within Jinglei’s film in relation to images of the past and women is what
will concern me in this chapter.
Teo notes that wenyi pian were particularly prevalent between 1946
and 1949 (which evokes the latter part of the period in which Xu’s film
is set). Teo (2006) also notes ‘after the Japanese occupied Shanghai,
the Chinese film industry relocated to the “Orphan Island,” referring
to those zones of the city unoccupied by Japan and administered by
Western powers from 1937 to 1941. During this period, the term wenyi
pian referred to adaptations of Chinese and foreign novels’ (p. 205). So
it is interesting to note that Xu Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman
fulfills many of these aspects of melodrama within the Chinese context:
a literary adaptation of a foreign text, a love story, and very arguably
a ‘woman’s picture’. In turn, Ophuls’ film has long been considered as
both melodrama and woman’s picture, as Tania Modleski articulates
in ‘Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film’, where she asserts that the
experience of watching Ophuls’ film offers the feminized image of
Stefan alongside the ‘basic pleasures of melodrama ... events that do not
happen: the wedding that did not occur; the meeting in the park that
was missed; and, above all, the word that was not spoken’ (Modleski,
1986, p. 261). These basic pleasures can easily be applied to numerous
transnational examples (as can be seen elsewhere in this collection)
including Jinglei’s Letter.
Teo notes that Wong Kar Wai’s global art house success In the Mood
for Love (2000) is part of ‘a wenyi revival ... Wong endows his film with
a mnemonic, nostalgic quality to evoke a past embedded with wenyi
references ...’ (2006, p. 209) such as male leads who were ‘unconven-
tional, libertarian, but still talented men of letters’ (Teo, 2006, p. 207).
Tony Leung’s Mo-wan in both In the Mood for Love and its sister film
2046 plays an office worker turned writer who, in 2046, leads a glamor-
ous, playboy lifestyle that is reminiscent of Zweig’s womanizing, writer
protagonist in Letter. Xu Ai-You, the writer who fills this role in Jinglei’s
film is also marked out as a wenyi pian lead in the style Teo describes:
Xu is unconventional in his preference for Western dress and the hybrid
style of his lodgings, filled with books in both English and Chinese
and populated with furniture and art that belies an interest in both
Europe’s and China’s classical pasts. The wenyi pian heroine is one who
though she displays cultivated good taste, may also ‘suffer the impact of
conservative social conventions but [who] take[s]care to observe them’
176 Sarah Artt

(Teo, 2006, p. 206). This description of the heroine fits the situation
of Miss Jiang in Letter, who takes care to dress with refined elegance,
who ensures her son is educated and well-cared for, but who earns her
money as a high-class prostitute or mistress to powerful men. Su Li-zhen
(Maggie Cheung) in In the Mood for Love is also meticulously elegant; she
is profoundly hurt by the discovery of her husband’s affair, and yet she
fears the consequences of divorce, or even of embarking on an affair
of her own with Chow Mo-wan. Lise Berndl in Ophuls’ film is a dress
model when she meets Stefan Brand the concert pianist as an adult.
Under the Hollywood Production Code, Lise could never be explicitly
portrayed as a prostitute and therefore the veiled but socially marginal
work of dress model acts as an implicit evocation of Lise’s sexual avail-
ability. Where Su-Lizhen and Lise Berndl are essentially conservative
and familiar expressions of the heroine of the melodrama, I would like
to argue that Miss Jiang embodies a transgressive seizing of desire that
is also expressed by the protagonist in Zweig’s novella.
This desire to observe social conventions that is so important to the
wenyi pian heroine is momentarily overturned in both Zweig’s text and
Jinglei’s film. On her second meeting with her lover, the unknown
woman tells us ‘I had no wish to sacrifice the hour with you that I had
longed for years, so I didn’t hesitate for a second’ (Zweig 2009, p. 181).
She immediately places her own desire above security, and it is notable
that only in her incarnation as prostitute can the unknown woman
character act in this way. The fact that Jinglei includes this passage in
the film’s voiceover is significant. In the dancehall, within clear view of
her current lover Captain Huang, a man who has offered to marry her
and help care for her son, Miss Jiang casually and abruptly leaves with
Xu Ai-You for their second and final night together. This sentence from
Zweig’s novella appears in the film as Mandarin language voiceover and
subtitled English translation. It is this open seeking out of pleasure that
sets Jiang apart from the suffering protagonist of traditional melodrama
and the heroine of wenyi pian who is conscious of observing social con-
ventions. As a prostitute with independent means, Jiang appears to be
totally unconcerned with bourgeois convention as it governs sexuality.
While Jiang does still suffer, she chooses this final pleasure, the final
night with Xu, for herself. Here, she is not forced into the decision
because of financial, social or political pressure – it is a wholly indi-
vidual pleasure. More recent readings of Lise Berndl (see Aaron, 2007,
pp. 58–59) have also suggested that there is a rich and individual pleas-
ure in the masochistic denial and deferral of pleasure that characterizes
Lise’s relationship to Stefan Brand. Miss Jiang seems to operate under a
 Vienna to Beijing 177

similar framework, taking pleasure in the idea that she has never asked
her lover for financial support or made other demands on him. Her por-
trayal as a desirable and well-dressed figure with her own independent
household (where we see her caring for her son, or relaxing by herself,
a realm where she is not portrayed in a domestic relationship with
Huang or any other man) evokes the independence that young Chinese
college students found so attractive.

The idea of Europe and the fragility of memory

In Jinglei’s film, Europe is evoked through the figure of Xu Ai-You,

his clothing and the objects that surround him. Jonas Fornas (2012)
discusses the origins of the myth of Europe in relation to the story of
Europa and the bull and indicates that ‘eroticism, strength and smart-
ness’ may be associated with the masculine figure of the bull, (p. 11)
while at other times the ‘the Europa myth has been activated to support
efforts of peaceful unification, with elements of (courtly) love and desire
as crucial elements’ (Fornas, 2012, p. 13). In addition, Fornas notes that
Europe is increasingly seen ‘as an eccentric culture constituted by a
series of divisions ... with a sense of self-defining dislocation, deriving
its self-image from the outside’ (2012, p. 16).
In Jinglei’s film, Xu Ai-You embodies the qualities of the wenyi pian
male lead while he also evokes the allure of Europe as a site of pleasure
and difference. He is a sophisticated womanizer, with no memory for
the women he seduces and it is only through his work and his posses-
sions that women can relate to him. In the array of objects we see in his
apartments, Europe is symbolized as intellectual and social playground
and the various elements of dress, books, furniture and decorative
objects signify Xu’s unconventionality and sophistication. We can also
consider how Xu’s hybrid space and indeed the cityscape of 1930s and
1940s Beijing with its clear Western influences represent a comment
on China’s cultural isolation during the Maoist period. On the one
hand, Jinglei’s film presents Xu Ai-You as ‘exotic’ to Jiang through his
European trappings; when she first witnesses Xu moving into their
hutong, it is clear that no one else in the neighborhood dresses in the
same way as Xu, who appears in a plain, beige overcoat, in contrast
to the traditional clothing of his servant and indeed of Jiang and her
mother, all of whom wear variations on the padded tunic with trousers.
This alone marks Xu off as potentially eccentric, a figure who crafts his
self-image drawing on influences external to China. From the begin-
ning, Jiang is an obsessive, fetishistic heroine who worships her lover
178 Sarah Artt

from afar, and comes to know him through his work and the objects
which surround him. When she first gains access to Xu’s house, invited
by his servant to help bring in a heavy quilt of embroidered silk, she
notices that his rooms are filled with a mixture of foreign and Chinese
books; his furniture is upholstered in Chinese fabric, but structured in a
European style. She is particularly fascinated by a porcelain figurine of
an eighteenth-century European woman that stands on an occasional
table. She caresses this figure when she returns to the house as an adult
on the night Xu seduces her. Xu himself never wears traditional Chinese
clothes, in marked contrast to the numerous women he brings home.
These women, who often wear the long qipao dress paired with luxuri-
ous Western accessories such as fur stoles, handbags, and European
styles of jewelry are the models for Jiang’s later transformation into an
elegant woman.
Throughout the film, we witness Jiang’s sensual relationship with
European objects for their proximity for her lover. On the night of her
seduction, the camera lingers on Jiang’s fingers brushing the fabric of
an upholstered chair, the spines of the leather-bound books and the
porcelain figurine. This tactile worship makes these objects into totems
for Jiang, objects that remind her of her devotion and hint at the world
beyond what she has experienced. The presence of these objects in the
frame also acts as a clear acknowledgement of the increasing presence
of European luxury goods in China as desirable objects for the emerg-
ing middle classes. The possession of European clothing and decorative
objects, as well as mastery of English, signifies a new global mobility in
twenty-first-century China, echoing Kaplan’s assertion about the func-
tion of 1930s China as the ‘generator’ of twenty-first-century China as
a globalized and increasingly cosmopolitan power.
Just as clothing marks out Xu Ai-You, it also plays an important role
in terms of Jiang’s characterization. When she meets Xu for the first
time, she is still a student, and wears a padded winter tunic and bobbed
hair, essentially the same styles she wears as a child; and these paral-
lels are very deliberate, marking out Jiang’s seeming innocence in spite
of her determination to follow through on her erotic obsession. Years
later, when Jiang meets Xu again for their second sexual encounter, it
is as a sophisticated woman in an elegant evening gown, her hair is
elaborately arranged and she sports a luxurious white fur coat and muff.
Jiang has transformed herself into the kind of woman she has seen
typically accompanying Xu, but she is also represented as visually open
to European influence. Jiang is portrayed as a woman who takes great
pleasure in adornment and who embodies an active sexuality. She is the
 Vienna to Beijing 179

instigator in her own seduction and sexual initiation, a stance which

contrasts with the largely passive role of the woman (with whom we are
meant to sympathize) in many Fifth generation melodramas. Kaplan
(2011) also notes this quality, that Jiang ‘is in charge of the film’s dis-
course throughout’ (p. 167). Miss Jiang’s story allows her a considerable
degree of freedom in contrast to the female protagonist of a film like In
the Mood for Love. Jiang ostensibly has more in common with the virtu-
ally unseen wife of Chow Mo-wan, the woman having an affair with her
neighbor’s husband, than with the tragic Su Li-zhen who cannot bring
herself to consummate her attraction to Chow Mo-wan. Jiang via Zweig
is therefore a fascinating departure in her desire for physical pleasure
and even the pleasure she seems to take in her obsession with Xu. On
these terms, Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman marks something
of a departure for the Chinese melodrama.
Letter is a story with a complex relationship to the idea of memory and
the past. For Jiang, as for the nameless protagonist of Zweig’s novella,
memory is not fragile, unlike Xu, who forgets so easily; memory is the
thing she clings to. Jiang’s relationship to the objects she associates
with her lover, like the gift of white roses sent anonymously each year
on his birthday,1 help to maintain the memory: ‘on the writing table
was the vase with the roses – my roses, the ones I had sent you the
day before as a memento of the woman who you did not remember’
(Zweig, 2009, p. 114). Every detail of each encounter with her lover is
carefully remembered, preserved and finally revealed in the letter she
sends him – the letter that forms the basis of the title. As Belen Vidal has
commented, the device of the letter in cinema often helps to construct
and maintain ideas of romance: ‘The voiceover of the sender projected
over the close-ups of the addressee, engrossed by the reading, or the
parallel editing containing both, construe the idea of correspondence
as perfect encounter’ (Vidal, 2006, p. 423). This idea of ‘correspondence as
perfect encounter’ conforms to the utopian vision of both the past and
the love affair displayed in the film. The letter functions as the record
that permits Jiang’s ‘performance of memory’ (Kuhn, 2010 p. 298). The
combination of letter and voiceover offers the film as Jiang’s idealized
narrative – it is all told from her memory, her version of the story. She
is remembering her own past and in doing so she constructs a definitive
version of that past. This can be seen to constitute the practice of what
Kuhn terms memory work:

memory work is an active practice of remembering that takes an inquir-

ing attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction
180 Sarah Artt

through memory. Memory work undercuts assumptions about the

transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, taking
it not as ‘truth’ but as evidence of a particular sort: material for
interpretation, to be interrogated, mined, for its meanings and its
possibilities. Memory work is a conscious and purposeful staging of
memory. (Kuhn, 2010, p. 303)

In turn, the film itself engages in a purposeful staging of the past and the
woman’s place within that past. In this sense, the memory work of Letter
from an Unknown Woman offers a powerful counterpoint to the invisibil-
ity of the female body during the Cultural Revolution. While memory
itself may be a fragile entity, it is through symbolic objects that we can
come to know and understand the past. In this case, it is the letter that
acts as the document that finally witnesses and records the events of the
past. In this sense, Xu Ai-You’s flawed individual memory is not impor-
tant, because the letter is the object that defines and makes real the
details of the past. The letter and the roses also form part of Elsaesser’s
idea of melodrama as a system of punctuation, a style. He argues that
some Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s operate within
a framework of ‘... what one might call an intensified symbolization
of everyday actions, the heightening of the ordinary gesture and a use
of setting and decor so as to reflect the characters’ fetishist fixations’
(Elsaesser, 1985, p. 178). Chinese melodrama also places importance on
significant objects, and Jinglei’s film works in this way in part because
it participates in this tradition and because Zweig’s highly melodramatic
source text shares these qualities. The deployment of significant objects
can be closely linked to melodrama’s engagement with memory and
Kuhn’s notion of how cinema can engage in memory work. Often, it is
the preserved token of the lost lover that serves to recall past pleasures,
as in Ennis’ tearful caress of Jack’s shirt at the end of Ang Lee’s Brokeback
Mountain. The shirt is both the fetish and the emblem of the literally
closeted love that cannot be revealed except to the film viewer, just as
the private letter addressed to Xu Ai-You becomes the revelatory object
that consolidates Miss Jiang’s memory and past.
In Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman the past is presented as
highly desirable. All violence and awkwardness is glossed over and we
are presented only with moments of pleasure and melancholy. If, as Jean
Baudrillard asserts ‘the island of utopia stands opposed to the continent
of the real’ (Baudrillard, 1991, p. 122). Europe and its trappings seen
within the framework of Beijing in the 1930s and 1940s, are presented
as a utopian ideal in this screen adaptation. Through these talismanic
 Vienna to Beijing 181

objects, Europe and its trapping are a sign of the desire to look beyond
the borders of China and can be seen to signal the China of 2004 as a
globalized presence. Vidal argues that letters on screen can both bring
the past to life and emphasize the constructed quality of the past that
is being portrayed: ‘The letter’s play with memory thus highlights the
impact of the narrative as present-in-the-past: a moment of potentiality
and loss that ultimately reinforces the self-enclosed quality of the world
represented’ (Vidal, 2006, p. 425). If the past is constructed then it is
important to note that it is also a past constructed by a single woman
about her own life. While romance still plays a key role, Jiang offers an
image of glamorous independence and a reveling in personal desire that
offers something different from the silent, suffering and often erotically
unfulfilled heroine of the more traditional melodrama and wenyi pian.
In a pivotal scene at the opera, Jiang realizes the distance between
her ideal love for Xu and the reality of her current life, yet she chooses
to continue in the ‘perfect correspondence’ of her obsessive love for Xu
until the final intrusion of reality that cannot be negated or glossed over,
the death of her son. In this sense, the fantasy of the perfect correspond-
ence of letter as memory work object can be viewed as a metaphor for
the fantasy of the past – it may be carefully varnished and reconstructed
up to a point, until the harshness of reality intrudes. The past can be
both the narrative of the individual and the narrative of the group, but
there will always be splinters, cracks and differences in these accounts.
Letter from an Unknown Woman demonstrates that difference in accounts
of the past can be a valid approach. To contrast with a more recent and
controversial example, Lou Ye’s Summer Palace alludes to but does not
recreate the famous images of student protests in Tiananmen Square.
Instead it focuses on how the aftermath of these events provide a criti-
cal turning point in the lives of the main characters. Summer Palace uses
news footage of huge crowds of student protesters flooding into Beijing,
alongside extended sequences of the main protagonists as excited stu-
dents being bussed into and then returning from the site of the protests.
The depiction of the crackdown on student freedoms post-Tiananmen
square is depicted in detail in the film, with night-time raids by military
personnel and student sit-ins. Ye’s film, in spite of the absence of the
still provocative image of protesters in Tiananmen Square, nonetheless
fell foul of the Chinese authorities as the events that took place in 1989
are still extremely contentious in China. In the case of Summer Palace,
the recent past has proved completely un-filmable, even in fictional
terms. As with many national cinemas, China’s cinema seems to oscil-
late between two poles: the past as a total fantasy, a dream of the grand
182 Sarah Artt

and majestic former empire that is not seen to touch on the present,2 or
the past as evidence of the real, a cinema that is interested in exploring
the events of the recent past through the experience of the individual
as well as revalidating and making real those events and experiences. In
this sense, Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman occupies a fascinating
middle ground between the lavish spectacle of the ancient or mythic
past and the preoccupation with real events of the more recent past.

The Past as site of origin of contemporary instabilities

Jinglei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman also presents us with European

fragments through the representation of clothing and decorative objects
within the mise-en-scène. Xu in particular offers up traces of Europe
through clothing, furniture and books. Here, Europe is a fusion of parts,
a dreamscape, based on memory and a series of objects that signal an
exotic world beyond China. Rey Chow writing about the larger issue of
what is seen by some as China’s ‘westernization’ offers some illuminating
comments that may be applied to Letter from an Unknown Woman:

unlike what Oriental things still are to many Europeans and

Americans, ‘Western things’ to a Chinese person are never merely
dispensable embellishments: their presence has for the past century
represented the necessity of fundamental adaptation and acceptance.
It is the permanence of imprints left by the contact with the West
that should be remembered even in an ethnic culture’s obsession
with itself. (Chow, 2006, p. 191)

This argument for ‘remembering imprints left by contact with the West’
would have been tantamount to heresy under Maoist rule. Now, since
the softening of Communism in China, there is room for some reap-
praisal of the Chinese past, particularly the past just before the advent
of the Cultural Revolution. China’s relationship with its past has not
always been easy and the scars and absences left by the vociferous
destruction of the Cultural Revolution are still very visible. Therefore,
it seems that Letter from an Unknown Woman may represent something
radical in terms of China and melodrama – it is indeed, as Baudrillard
would say, ‘a desperate rehallucination of the past’ (1991, p. 123). Some
might argue that this film represents an attempt at the kind of heritage
cinema so often seen and produced in the UK. However, rather than
representing an ostensibly conservative, museum aesthetic, China’s
heritage industry is often forced to rely on rebuilding, revarnishing or
 Vienna to Beijing 183

recreating the physical traces of its past. In China, it is not uncommon

for historical sites to be entirely rebuilt from the ground up. A lavish
recreation of the period just prior to the Communist Revolution necessi-
tates shooting inside hutongs, the traditional narrow alleyways populated
by siheyuan, the courtyard building with four or more small dwellings
that form much of the key interior locations for the first part of Jinglei’s
film. Both hutongs and the residences that populate them have become
increasingly rare in Beijing as many were demolished to make way for
improvements that led up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. While many
Chinese prefer more modern accommodation, the destruction of vast
areas of historic architecture makes their representation on film increas-
ingly rare, and potentially very difficult in the future. However, I would
argue that Jingelei’s Letter from an Unknown Woman is less a film about the
preservation of physical locations, then it is a film about the roles and
possibilities open to women in China in the twenty-first century.
As Virginia Wright Wexman suggests ‘... the significance of such set-
tings goes beyond the purely pictorial; they express a vision of the past
not as an escape from the restlessness and unreliability of the present
and future, but as the origin of these instabilities’ (Wright Wexman,
1986, p. 4). Writing about Xu’s film, Shelly Kraicer suggests that

[w]hile acknowledging an irretrievable loss, Xu’s film demands a

regendered reappraisal of that era, just before the Chinese Communist
revolution in 1949 that seemed to hold the most promise for its
future. Rather than nostalgia, Letter demands an active reconstruction
of a not-so-distant past, as a prerequisite, perhaps, for any possible
future. (Kraicer, 2004)

What this film embodies is an approach to the mise-en-scène as a rich

symbolic repository for the evocation of the idea of Europe, as equated
with Baudrillard’s notion of the utopian past, a concept which is also
extended to romance, in the particular case of the story Letter from an
Unknown Woman. With the brutal repressions of the Cultural Revolution
still evident (in terms of physical and cultural absences with regard to
art, literature and even within heritage sites such as the Forbidden
City), a desperate rehallucination of the past may be all that is pos-
sible in Chinese cinema for the time being. But Xu’s Letter is markedly
different in attitude from what we might term the Chinese ‘heritage
industry’ where the past is constantly rebuilt, revised, revarnished and
reconstructed because it has to be. Letter is concerned about re-creating
a vision of the past as desirable, as worthy of both preservation and
184 Sarah Artt

closer examination. Jiang simultaneously occupies the role of devoted

mother and prostitute (harkening back to a similar central figure in
The Goddess) but this is combined with a privileging of female desire.
In many ways, the sensual abandon Jiang embodies proves a precursor
to the deployment of sexual desire as a tool of awakening and consola-
tion in Ye’s Summer Palace. In line with Gledhill’s earlier suggestion that
Miss Jiang is ‘a symbol that cannot be owned’ the trope of sexual desire
as a tool of self-discovery can be seen in a continuum with the radical
possibilities of pleasure displayed in the work of new queer cinema
auteurs such as Pedro Almodovar. The importance that Letter from an
Unknown Woman places on feminine subjectivity, romance and adorn-
ment is a powerful method of conveying or suggesting a different
attitude in China towards both the past and reaffirms melodrama and
wenyi pian as style that can contain powerful possibilities for critique.

Notes
1. Max Ophuls’ film adaptation from 1948 also showcases this important symbol.
2. As exemplified by Zhang Yimou’s more recent efforts Hero (2002), House of
Flying Daggers (2004), and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). These are spec-
tacular action romances set in the ancient Chinese past.

References
Aaron, M. (2007) Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower).
No Author (1992) ‘China Lifts Three Year Ban on Films of Zhang Yimou’,
Chicago Tribune [online] 13 July. Available at: <http://articles.chicagotribune.
com/1992-07-13/features/9203030368_1_films-of-zhang-yimou-chinese-for-
eigners> [accessed 15 October 2012]
Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulation and Simulacrum (trans. S. Glaser) (Michigan:
University of Michigan Press).
Chow, R. (2006) ‘Seeing Modern China: Towards a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship’
in D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham (eds) Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Dongya, Z. (2012) ‘Banned Filmmaker Lou Ye Returns’, Beijing Today. 30 March
Available at: <http://file.ynet.com/3/1203/30/6962508.PDF> [accessed 15 October
2012]
Elsaesser, T. (1985) ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: observations on the family melo-
drama’ in B. Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of
California Press).
Fornas, J. (2012) Signifying Europe (Bristol: Intellect).
Foster, P. (2009) ‘Epic Film: The Founding of a Republic marks 60 years of
Chinese Communism’, The Telegraph [online] 17 September. Available at:
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/6197946/Epic-film-
The-Founding-of-a-Republic-marks-60-years-of-Chinese-Communism.html>
[accessed 16 October 2012]
 Vienna to Beijing 185

Gledhill, C. (ed.) (1987) Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the
Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute).
Grossman, A. (2009) ‘Beyond the Western Gaze: Orientalism, Feminism, and
the Suffering Woman in Nontransnational Chinese Cinema’ in P. Feng and
G. Marchetti (eds) Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity
and Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).
Harris, K. (2008) ‘The Goddess: Fallen Women of Shanghai’ in C. Berry (ed.)
Chinese Film in Focus II (London: British Film Institute).
Kaplan, E. A. (2006) ‘Problematizing Cross-Cultural Analysis: The Case of Women
in the Recent Chinese Cinema’ in D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham (eds) Asian
Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Kuhn, A. (2010) ‘Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of memory in
and with visual media’, Memory Studies (3)4: 298–313.
Kaplan., E.A. (2011) ‘Affect, Memory and Trauma Past Tense: Hu Mei’s Army
Nurse (1985) and Xu Jingle’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004)’ in
L. Wang (ed.) Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (Chichester and
New York: Columbia University Press).
Kraicer, S. (2004) ‘Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Beijing Film Culture in 2004’
in Cinema Scope [online] Available at: <http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs21/
fea_kraicer_beijing.htm> [Accessed 16 January 2007]
Lu, S.H. (2010) ‘Emerging from the Underground and the Periphery: Chinese
Independent Cinema at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century’ in D. Iordanova,
D. Martin-Jones and B. Vidal (eds) Cinema at the Periphery (Detroit, Michigan:
Wayne State University Press).
Ma, N. (2006) ‘Signs of angst and hope: history and melodrama in Chinese
fifth-generation cinema’ in A. Kuhn and C. Grant (eds) Screening World Cinema
(London and New York: Routledge).
Modleski, T. (1986) ‘Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film’ in V. Wright Wexman
with K. Hollinger (eds) Letter from an Unknown Woman (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press).
Needham, G. (2010) Brokeback Mountain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Teo, S. (2006) ‘Chinese Melodrama: the wenyi genre’ in L. Badley, R. Barton
Palmer and S. J. Schneider (eds) Traditions in World Cinema (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press).
Vidal, B. (2006) ‘Labyrinths of Loss: The Letter as Figure of Desire and Deferral in
the Literary Film’, Journal of European Studies, 36(4): 418–436.
Wright Wexman, V. (1986) ‘The Transfiguration of history: Ophuls, Vienna and
Letter from an Unknown Woman’ in V. Wright Wexman with K. Hollinger (eds)
Letter from an Unknown Woman Max Ophuls, Director (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press).
Xuelin, Z. (2009) ‘From Behind the Wall’: The representation of Gender and
Sexuality in Modern Chinese Film’ in T. See-Kam, P.X. Feng and G. Marchetti
(eds) Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity and Diaspora
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press).
Zhang, J. (2011) ‘To Become an Auteur: The Cinematic Maneuverings of Xu
Jinglei’ in L. Wang (ed.) Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts
(Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press).
Zweig, S. (2009) ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ in Selected Stories (trans. Eden
and Cedar Paul) (London: Pushkin Press).
186 Sarah Artt

Films
2046, 2004 [film/DVD] Directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Hong Kong: Jet Tone Films/
Tartan Video.
Brokeback Mountain, 2005. [film/DVD] Directed by Ang Lee. USA/Canada. Focus
Features/Entertainment in Video.
Farewell my Concubine. 1993. [film/DVD] Directed by Kaige Chen. China/Hong
Kong: Beijing Film Studio/Infinity Entertainment.
In the Mood for Love, 2000 [film/DVD] Directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Hong Kong: Jet
Tone Films/Tartan Video.
Letter from an Unknown Woman. 1948. [film/DVD]. Directed by Max Ophuls. USA:
Universal Pictures/Second Sight.
Letter from an Unknown Woman. 2004. [film/DVD] Directed by Jinglei Xu. China:
Asian Union Film/Deltamac.
Lust, Caution. 2007. [film/DVD] Directed by Ang Lee. USA/China/Taiwan/Hong
Kong: Haisheng Films.
Summer Palace 2006. [film/DVD] Directed by Lou Ye. China/France: Centre
Nationale de la Cinématographie (CNC)/Dream Factory/Flying Moon/Palm
Pictures.
11
Deconstructing Melodramatic
Destiny: Late Marriage (2001)
and Two Lovers (2008)
Robert Lang

In Le Mélodrame américain (Lang, 2008), I argue that ‘destiny’ in the

Hollywood melodrama of the studio era – the way things turn out for
characters, the explanation given by the narrative of why things happen
the way they do – can be seen very broadly to have evolved in approxi-
mately three phases: the religious, the social and the psychoana-
lytic. In the teens and twenties, most representatively in the films of
D. W. Griffith, the destiny of characters was understood to be directed
ultimately by a divine force, i.e., a Christian God. Things turned out the
way they did because, in the final analysis, it was God’s will. A charac-
ter’s fate might be understood to some extent in social and psychological
terms, but the trajectory of his or her narrative would be shaped by a
Christian logic, in which the struggles between Good and Evil would
be Manichean. In the 1930s, with ordinary Americans increasingly
faced with problems such as poverty, crime and unemployment, the
discourse of the Hollywood melodrama becomes more social. Evil may
still be personified, but characters’ problems are more frequently under-
stood in economic terms, or are perceived to be caused by the unequal
development of industrial capitalism. A character’s sufferings are caused
not so much by an evil person, as by economic factors brought into
play by a new class system based on economic power, and villainy has
to be redefined. This period of the melodrama is best understood in
Marxian terms. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, the melodramatic
discourse in Hollywood cinema shifts once again. Characters’ identities
and destinies become intertwined with class issues and psychosexual
considerations – the discourse becomes psychoanalytical, as it becomes
understood that the essential struggle is one for individual identity
within a familial context.

187
188 Robert Lang

Melodrama, tragedy and trauma

Linda Williams’s essay, ‘Melodrama Revised’, sets out the terms of a revised
theory of a melodramatic mode, rather than the more familiar notion of
melodrama as a genre. Moreover, Williams explains,

We should not be fooled, then, by the superficial realism of popular

American movies … If emotional and moral registers are sounded,
if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims,
if the narrative trajectory is ultimately more concerned with a
retrieval and staging of innocence than with the psychological
causes of motives and action, then the operative mode is melo-
drama. (Williams, 1998, p. 42)

What interests me most about these comments is Williams’s focus

not on the causes of motives and action but on melodrama’s ultimate
concern with the retrieval and staging of innocence. If melodrama,
as Williams notes, wants us ‘to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset
victims’ (p. 42) – then this, I will argue, is crucial to an understanding
of how melodrama functions ideologically. We need to ask why it is so
important that the victim be shown to be innocent. This is where the
notion of destiny comes in – for melodramatic characters are, in a sense,
understood to be victims of their destiny. In the struggle between des-
tiny and free will, which is the essential struggle of every melodrama,
we see destiny triumph, every time. This is counter-intuitive, or para-
doxical, if we consider that it is destiny, precisely, that is the hallmark
of tragedy.
Tragedy, Roland Barthes writes (Robbe-Grillet, 1965), ‘is merely a
means of recovering human misery, of subsuming and thereby justify-
ing it in the form of a necessity, a wisdom, or a purification’ (p. 49).
He believes we should ‘refuse this recuperation’ and instead ‘investigate
the techniques of not treacherously succumbing’ to tragedy’s ‘insidious’
logic (p. 49). Susan Sontag echoes this view that tragedy seeks to justify
human misery. Tragedy, she writes, ‘says there are disasters which are
not fully merited, that there is ultimate injustice in the world’ (Sontag,
1966, p. 137).
Unlike tragedy, melodrama recognizes that human misery is not
inevitable. Melodrama challenges human suffering, and tries to find a
means, not of justifying human suffering, but of coming to terms with
it, of questioning its necessity. In so doing, the melodrama in effect
performs an analysis – although its method is not analytical in the
 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny 189

conventional sense of the term – of what we have been calling destiny.

The perennial notion of destiny in melodrama is a deeply philosophi-
cal question around which nearly every mainstream film’s meanings
continue, more or less explicitly, to be organized. To further examine
destiny in melodrama, I turn now to a recent American film, Two Lovers
( James Gray, 2008), and the Israeli film of which it is a sort of remake,
Late Marriage (Dover Koshashvili, 2001). Both films try to challenge
the idea that our lives are ruled by an unfathomable destiny, and then,
before film’s end, retreat from the challenge in fright and confusion. In
these two tales, the young Jewish hero falls in love with a non-Jewish
woman, and wants to marry her; but, in the end, fate, or his destiny as
a Jew, determines that he will not/cannot/must not marry her.1 Both
films stage a struggle between the young man’s free will – his desire to
marry the woman he loves – and his destiny: to marry the woman of his
parents’ choice. The question, at the final outcome, is whether he ever
had any real choice in the matter – that is, in Williams’s terms, whether
he is an innocent victim, or whether he submits to the familial law of
melodrama and is therefore complicit with his destiny. In both films,
the hero is revealed at the end to have internalized a Jewish destiny,
according to which marriage to a non-Jew is unthinkable, or, at best,
extremely ill advised. In both films, also, the hero is defeated. He is
overwhelmed by the dictates and values of his parents, and is unhappy
at the end.
The fate of Zaza in Late Marriage and Leonard in Two Lovers is that
they were born Jews, and in the ambivalent manner of melodrama,
the films both insist on and undercut the notion that the hero cannot
escape his destiny to marry within the tribe. However, the question
of destiny in these two movies is revealed to be constituted by a com-
plex of factors that cannot be reduced to a single force, least of all the
mystificatory, catch-all category implied by the term destiny. Both Late
Marriage and Two Lovers pose the question: what is Jewish identity? And
implicit in both films is the related question of whether this Jewish
identity is worth preserving at any price. Destiny, after all, is a deliber-
ately mystifying term that seeks to hide the fact that it is ideologically
determined. The films insist that the hero is free to make his own
destiny – then they show, or suggest, that he is a victim of destiny, in the
form of a tribal imperative.
The melodrama, we know, is above all a drama of identity, and for
the two films under discussion, we might consider the part played by
trauma in the construction of personal (and national) identity, since
Jewish identity, most especially – as Late Marriage and Two Lovers
190 Robert Lang

acknowledge – is grounded in trauma. In my volume on The Birth of

a Nation in the Rutgers University Press ‘Films in Print’ series, which
appeared in 1994, I examined how Griffith’s great film consolidated a
trend in cinematic technique and an approach to dramatic narrative
that define American cinema to this day. I considered the film as an
historical melodrama; and by examining Griffith’s historiography as
ideological practice, I traced the way in which fears and fantasies of
miscegenation are bound up with the bloody, traumatic reality of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, to become melodramatic myth.
E. Ann Kaplan (2005) takes up and expands upon this question of
cultural trauma in her book, Trauma Culture, and notes how politics
intervenes in an attempt to manage such trauma. She believes that
‘the political context was not right for 1970s and 1980s film theorists
to see trauma in what they were discovering about the cultural forma-
tion and functioning of melodrama’, and suggests that ‘the appropri-
ate political context appears to be in place in the millennium, so that
the relevance of trauma studies to melodrama emerges’ (pp. 70–71).
Bringing several threads of melodrama theory together, and seeking
to highlight what was already implicit in early theorizing about melo-
drama, she observes:

At certain historical moments aesthetic forms emerge (sometimes

in a useful way) to accommodate fears and fantasies related to sup-
pressed historical events. In repeating the trauma of class struggle,
melodrama, in its very generic formation, may evidence a traumatic
cultural symptom. (p. 73)

Kaplan acknowledges that the argument for trauma as a cultural symp-

tom was made several years ago by Kaja Silverman (1992) in Male
Subjectivity at the Margins, in which Silverman studies films made in the
context of the Second World War. Kaplan argues, however, that it is in
the Hollywood melodrama – with its familiar repertoire of traumatic
phenomena, such as flashbacks, phobias, and dreams – that we see
most clearly the impulsion ‘to repeat the rent in the dominant fiction
occasioned by historical trauma while at the same time seeking uncon-
sciously to repair and reveal that rent’ (Kaplan, 2005, p. 74).
Kaplan’s argument echoes Peter Brooks’s in his ground-breaking
study, The Melodramatic Imagination, in which he identifies the French
Revolution of 1789 as the historical trauma that gave rise to the melo-
drama. The specific historical trauma to which all the meanings of
Late Marriage and Two Lovers indirectly refer is the Holocaust, and the
 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny 191

centuries of Jewish persecution that preceded it. Yet to many people in

the world today, profound sympathy for past Jewish suffering is bal-
anced by the uneasy awareness that the State of Israel currently rules
over many Palestinian Arabs without their consent in ways that mimic
the worst features of colonialism. It is against this background that
these two films struggle to uncover, demonstrate and make operative
an essential moral universe. When Brooks writes that the melodrama
‘comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth
and ethics have been violently thrown into question’ (Brooks, 1976,
p. 15), we can see how, in the manner of melodrama, Late Marriage and
Two Lovers not only seek to question the traditional identity of the Jew
as victim, but are concerned also ‘with a retrieval and staging of [his]
innocence’ (Williams, 1998, p. 42).

Late Marriage

Late Marriage begins with a scene clearly establishing that not all
arranged marriages are happy. Zaza’s aunt and uncle, immigrants to
Israel from Soviet Georgia, appear to have lived their entire married
life together in a state of mingled mutual hostility and affection – or,
more specifically, hostility on his part and exasperated resignation
on her side. Zaza’s aunt has found a girl whom she believes will
make a suitable bride for her sister’s son. Zaza’s parents, Yasha (Moni
Moshonov, who will play the same role, the protagonist’s father, in
Two Lovers) and Lili (Lili Koshashvili – the filmmaker’s own mother),
drag their son to meet the girl and her extended family. It is obvious
that Yasha and Lili have coerced their son in this manner many times
before:

Zaza: I’m sick and tired of doing this. I told you, let me be. I do fine
on my own.
Lili: Admit that your life’s a mess.
Zaza: I run my life as I want to.
Lili: [Turning to her husband, incredulous.] Did you hear his tone?

From the beginning, thus, the film establishes that the hero is in con-
flict with his family, with whom he is locked in a struggle for control
of his destiny. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi) is a ‘modern’ man – a doctoral
candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University – but
his parents, to use one of Lili’s phrases, ‘respect traditions’. Lili’s sister
gives her a fetish to hide under the bed of the girl (Ilana) whom they
192 Robert Lang

hope Zaza will marry, but Lili protests: ‘I don’t believe in love charms!’
Her sister nevertheless is insistent:

Sister: A famous Egyptian rabbi made this especially for Zaza. The fore-
skin of an eight-day-old baby boy. This is responsible for all the
marriages in Haifa!
Lili: That may be, but not for my son. His fortune will change on his
own.
Sister: This is no time to play around. You might be right, but this rab-
bi’s blessing can’t be rejected. The mother must carry it against
her skin.

In the event, Lili will take the love charm, and on the occasion of their
visit to meet Ilana and her family, will surreptitiously kick it under the
girl’s bed. Here and elsewhere, the film is suggesting that Jewish tradition –
and by implication other national/traditional identities that stake their
legitimacy on religious grounds – is little more than superstition dressed
up as divine truth. When Zaza and Ilana conduct their interview in the
privacy of Ilana’s bedroom, the discussion resumes this debate about
belief, and the way in which it is manipulated first by parents and then
by rabbis and other politicians for purposes of social control:

Ilana: What do you do?

Zaza: I ask myself if God exists. I’m working on my doctorate in
Philosophy.
Ilana: And the answer?
Zaza: [He leans forward, and beckons her to come closer.] If, suddenly …
a monster came out of the ocean and said: ‘I am God’, would you
believe it?
Ilana: It depends on how much he paid me.
Zaza: [He seems satisfied with this answer, or at least, by her honesty.]
Everybody has his own God. Objective truth is hard to find.
Ilana: Who’s your God?
Zaza: If that monster was able to convince my mother that love exists,
I’d believe in him.
Ilana: [Coolly.] You’re on the wrong track, waiting for that miracle.

Eventually, when sadly it is too late, Lili will come to see that love does
exist. But in the meantime, she and her husband remain convinced that
it is their responsibility to direct Zaza’s destiny. At the very moment
that her son is realizing he would never be happy with Ilana, Yasha
 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny 193

is explaining to Ilana’s uncle Bessik why their son is a great catch:

‘My Zaza has it all!’ he brags. ‘A five-room apartment, a big-screen TV,
a brand-new refrigerator, a Sony CD player, a bedroom, a living room,
a brand-new Lancia. What more could one ask for? A doctor at Tel Aviv
University. A really smart boy!’ Bessik responds with the obvious ques-
tion: ‘So, why isn’t he married, yet?’ Yasha pauses for a long moment,
then replies enigmatically: ‘Fate! I don’t expect anything. Give her to
me as she is. I’ll take her in that dress alone.’ Bessik seems satisfied:
‘In that case, dear Yasha, we needn’t say more. We’re not shady dealers.’
He puts an arm around Yasha’s shoulders, and lifts his glass in a toast:
‘To changing Zaza’s fate!’2
The biblical story of ‘The Binding of Isaac’, illustrating the Judaic
command that the son submit to the authority of the father, is
re-enacted in the film when eight members of Zaza’s family storm his
lover Judith’s apartment, in an attempt to intimidate the couple and
force them to bring an end to their relationship. According to the
Hebrew Bible, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac; Abraham sets
out to obey God’s command – he binds Isaac to an altar, and prepares
to cut his throat. At the last moment, however, seeing that Abraham
is willing to obey his command, God has his angel stay Abraham’s
hand, whereupon Abraham sees a ram caught in some bushes nearby,
and sacrifices the ram in Isaac’s stead. The story is usually approvingly
interpreted as an illustration of Abraham’s unquestioning submission
to God’s authority, and likewise, of Isaac’s absolute submission to the
authority of his father.
Crucial to the meaning of the story as a parable that is meant to rein-
force the patriarchal dimension of filial identity – as in its re-enactment
in Late Marriage – is the fact that the son is not a boy, but a fully-grown
man: that is, the son has internalized this law of submission to the
father and is not coerced by force of physical strength. According to
Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, Isaac in the biblical story
is 27; according to the Talmudic sages, he was even older. Zaza is 31,
which not only renders quite remarkable the spectacle of his parents’
hectoring attempts to make him submit to their will, it threatens to
undermine Zaza’s plausibility as a character – until one remembers that,
like Isaac, he is an allegorical figure, and we should not interpret him
too literally; or, to echo Williams’s phrase, we should not be fooled by
the superficial realism of the situation.
When Zaza’s family enter Judith’s apartment, uninvited, Zaza’s uncle
Simon grabs from the wall a sword that belonged to Judith’s ex-husband.
Shoving her against the wall and holding the sword against her neck,
194 Robert Lang

he screams: ‘All the cocks in the world, but not Zaza’s!’ ‘I’m not afraid’,
Judith replies coolly, ‘You’re not the first to wave that thing.’ Whereupon,
Simon becomes nearly hysterical, and still pinning her to the wall, turns
to Yasha in disbelief: ‘The bitch doesn’t care! She wants me to kill her!’
Zaza leaps from the couch, where his father has pushed him and has been
slapping his son’s face, while shouting: ‘You choose her over us? You’re
going to leave this whore! Shitty bastard! A real man doesn’t break his
mother’s heart like this! I’ll carry you out dead, if I have to! But I’ll separate
you from that woman!’ Zaza grabs the sword from Simon and hands it
to his father: ‘Here! Go on! Cut off my head!’ he shouts. Kneeling before
Yasha, as Isaac did before Abraham, and guiding the sword in his father’s
hand towards his neck, he repeats: ‘Go on, do it for me! Go on, do it, so
I’ll be rid of her!’
Eventually, after Zaza agrees to give Judith up, the family leaves.
When he returns to his apartment, waiting for him are his mother and
father, who have their own keys. Yasha ventures a final, sententious
remark: ‘Now you can’t see. You’re blind. Believe me, you’ll thank me
one day.’ Although Zaza has conceded defeat, he retorts sarcastically:
‘As long as you’re happy. You should have cut my head off.’ This sets
Yasha off again, who shouts: ‘What’s wrong with you? What do you
want with another man’s kid and a divorcée?’ Zaza makes a final, half-
hearted attempt to defend Judith: ‘Your woman is better, having raised
only your children?’ At this, Yasha becomes nearly uncontrollable, and
moves to strike his son: ‘You’re a disgrace! I thought you were a man!
You’re as worthless as a dead dog! I’ll kill her first. She’ll never be your
wife. I’ll let no one take advantage of my son!’
After Lili persuades Yasha to leave the room, one of the film’s most
darkly comic scenes follows. Lili gives Zaza a card with a telephone num-
ber on it: ‘Her name is Lea’, she explains. ‘Her father is a goldsmith. She
works with him. She’s 23. Naziko says she’s pretty. She hasn’t married yet
because she’s been studying. She wants to see you first, before her parents
get involved. I promised her mother you’d call. You might like her. Don’t
let yourself forget, I promised her mother you’d call. Don’t shame me.’

Melodrama’s trap

The coercive logic of the family melodrama is thus revealed to be a

labyrinth from which there is no escape. Melodrama is trapped in its
own myth, the myth of Oedipus – it cannot see or understand any other
logic. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their seminal work, Anti-Oedipus,
the oedipal myth informs us that, ‘if you don’t follow the lines of
 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny 195

differentiation daddy–mommy–me, and the exclusive alternatives that

delineate them, you will fall back into the black night of the undifferen-
tiated’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 78). The psychoanalytical myth
in which Late Marriage is inscribed is presented as having life-or-death
stakes. We see how Zaza’s family bully and intimidate him, and just in
case those techniques of coercion prove to be inadequate, they resort
to emotional blackmail as well. They are hell-bent on making him
‘admit’ – as his mother so sweetly puts it to him at the beginning of the
movie – that ‘[his] life is a mess’. The darker implication of her remark
is that anything that lies outside of the binary logic of difference is unim-
aginable, horrible. Oedipal logic, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, is
circular: it ‘creates both the differentiations that it orders and the undif-
ferentiated with which it threatens us’. As they see it, Oedipus ‘forces
desire to take as its object the differentiated parental persons’, but then
prohibits the satisfaction of that desire by brandishing the threat of
the undifferentiated. We are told to resolve Oedipus by internalizing
it, or we will ‘fall into the neurotic night of imaginary identifications’
(pp. 78–79), which, Deleuze and Guattari remark, is like telling us that
we can only get out of the labyrinth by re-entering it.
The triumph of this logic is staged in the film’s final scene of Zaza’s
wedding to Lea, the goldsmith’s daughter. A very drunk Zaza grabs the
microphone and announces: ‘If anyone thinks that he has a woman more
beautiful than mine, let him come up here, and we’ll compare …’ One
of the brothers of the bride tries to force Zaza to leave the stage, but
he continues: ‘If one of you has a wife more beautiful than mine … and
I know that’s not possible … well, I have a woman even more beautiful
than my wife!’ He drags his uncle Simon to the stage, and to the extreme
discomfiture of the wedding guests, continues his maudlin rant: ‘I don’t
see her here. But he will tell you about her – Simon, don’t I have a woman
more beautiful than my wife? Yes or no?’ ‘Of course’, says Simon, in a
sudden moment of inspiration. ‘Didn’t you find her? She’s actually here.’
Zaza now looks confused. ‘Do you want me to get her?’ Simon persists.
As his uncle walks off the stage, the camera cuts to a close-up of Zaza’s
worried face. In long shot, we see Simon leading Zaza’s mother Lili to the
stage. When she arrives at the spot where Zaza is standing, mother and
son embrace, as Simon says jokingly, ‘Easy does it! She’s not exactly yours.’

Two Lovers

The paradoxes of oedipal logic – principally that, because of the taboo

on incest, the son cannot marry his mother, but that he will, therefore,
196 Robert Lang

marry a woman like his mother, whose image he has internalized – are
made even more explicit in Two Lovers, which, as we have said, is a kind
of remake of Late Marriage. David Lane’s brief synopsis of Two Lovers is
one of the more accurate of the many that circulate on the Internet:

Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard, a charismatic but troubled young man

who moves back into his childhood home following a recent heart-
break. While recovering under the watchful eye of his parents (Isabella
Rossellini and Moni Monoshov), Leonard meets two women in quick
succession: Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a mysterious and beautiful
neighbor who is exotic and out of-place in Leonard’s staid world, and
Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the lovely and caring daughter of a business-
man who is buying out his family’s dry-cleaning business. Leonard
becomes deeply infatuated by Michelle, who seems poised to fall for
him, but is having a self-destructive affair with a married man. At the
same time, mounting pressure from his family pushes him towards
committing to Sandra. Leonard is forced to make an impossible deci-
sion – between the impetuousness of desire and the comfort of love – or
risk falling back into the darkness that nearly killed him. (Lane, 2009)

As always, however, a synopsis cannot tell us what a film is really

‘about’. This one cannot tell us why the young man is troubled, or
explain the nature of ‘the darkness that nearly killed him’. As in Late
Marriage, the woman with whom the young man is in love is clearly
coded as not-Jewish.3 Leonard’s parents are alert to his every movement,
especially his mother, who, despite Leonard’s habitual secrecy, figures
out very quickly that he has fallen in love with Michelle. Their pres-
sure on him to conform to the Jewish tradition of cultural endogamy
is every bit as intense as the pressure on Zaza in Late Marriage, but it is
accomplished less confrontationally. They want him to marry Sandra,
the daughter of the couple who is buying their dry-cleaning business;
and they pressure him into accepting a dreary job working for Sandra’s
father, despite Leonard’s stated wish to pursue a career as an artist/
photographer. The ‘darkness that nearly killed him’ is explained as
the mental depression that followed Leonard’s discovery that both he
and his (former) fiancée possess the Tay-Sachs gene, which would have
resulted in any children they might have had together being born with
the gruesome, infantile variant of Tay-Sachs disease. Leonard was forced
to give up his fiancée, who promptly disappeared completely from his
life, and has been troubled ever since.
 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny 197

The disease, of course, is the film’s central metaphor, just as the taboo
on incest is central to the logic of Oedipus. There is a sense in which
Leonard’s parents, effectively his tribe, with its traditions and taboos,
are making him sick. Their watchful eye is the very cause of Leonard’s
illness; he must not be allowed to relapse – which, on the story level,
means he must be prevented from trying again to kill himself, and on
the metaphorical level, means he must be prevented from falling in love
with a woman outside the tribe (i.e., who is not Jewish). The majority
of reviews of Two Lovers that seek keys to the film’s meanings by refer-
ring to the purported inspiration for the script, refer to Dostoyevsky’s
White Nights, or to the 1957 Visconti film of the same title, based on
the novella;4 but in one interview, worth quoting from at length, Gray
reveals an explicitly autobiographical source that is, and precisely is not,
a red herring:

I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then
finally it accumulates into a movie. It got its foundation really [when]
I got my wife pregnant, intentionally, and we had to go get genetic
testing. My wife is not Jewish. I am an Ashkenazi Jew and there are a
whole host of genetic disorders that only Ashkenazi Jews have. I don’t
know if you know this, but [there are] 16 or 17 disorders that we carry
the gene for. This is a pretty interesting thing because Ashkenazi Jews
are essentially descended from the same four women, apparently,
so we have essentially inbreeding diseases or disorders. I was tested
positive as a carrier for three diseases. My wife was negative for all
of them … I asked the genetic counselor, ‘What happens if couples
are both [positive] to carry the gene?’ and she said, ‘Well, I have some
Jewish couples that come in here and let’s say they both have the
Tay-Sachs gene, then their children have a very good chance of not
making it past the age of four.’ I thought, ‘My God, what a tragedy
that is’, and she said, ‘Yes, it has destroyed relationships.’(Gray, 2009)

Gray goes on to explain that he then read Dostoyevsky’s White Nights,

which he thinks is ‘a beautiful novella of great tenderness about a per-
son who tried to deal with love, but was ill-equipped and didn’t have
all the tools to live really’, adding the remark that Dostoyevsky wrote at
a time before it was discovered that depression could be treated phar-
maceutically. Gray combined the two stories: ‘I used the back story of
Tay-Sachs to form a kind of heartbreak for the character, then I used the
Dostoyevsky as a kind of a springboard’ (Gray, 2009).
198 Robert Lang

There is no doubt that a gene – that genetics – constitutes a kind of

destiny. It is most interesting, then, in light of his choice to make Two
Lovers as a melodrama, that Gray acknowledges a particular genetic
destiny of Ashkenazi Jews (the ‘host of genetic disorders that only
Ashkenazi Jews have’), but in his own life chose to defy the Jewish
cultural prohibition on Jews marrying non-Jews. In a paradox that
would seem to confirm his point, in Two Lovers the Jewish insistence
on endogamy results in tragedy – Leonard loses his fiancée. And at the
end of the film, when he presents Sandra with the ring he had bought
for Michelle, we understand that he has been unable to escape or defeat
the destiny wrought for him by his parents and the Jewish tradition into
which he was born.
Lane at first seems correct when he writes that ‘Leonard is forced to
make an impossible decision – between the impetuousness of desire
and the comfort of love – or risk falling back into the darkness that
nearly killed him.’ But the film is not about a choice. It is about the pres-
sure Leonard’s and Sandra’s parents bring to bear on their children. If
Leonard’s feelings for Michelle can indeed be described in terms of the
impetuousness of desire, and if we can say that we understand what is
meant by the comfort of love, then, surely, Leonard’s decision is not so
impossible after all – the question becomes one about Leonard’s matu-
rity, one in which the mature individual understands the necessity of
compromise.
Melodrama, we know, refuses the tragic vision. It challenges the neces-
sity of human suffering. But the endings of the best melodramas – for all
the efforts of the form to render the moral stakes with absolute clarity – are
never without irony or ambiguity. For all its yearning, melodrama cannot
think outside the box of familial logic. Melodrama, as we have noted,
remains trapped in the myth of Oedipus. In Mark Poster’s (1978) phrase,
‘Oedipus reduces and shrinks the individual to the family’ (p. 26):

The internalization of the father as super-ego prevents the individual

from participating in collective myth. Oedipus privatizes myth, emo-
tion, fantasy and the unconscious, centering the psyche forever on
Mama/Papa … Far from a general law, Oedipus is the special law
of the modern psyche. It is bound up with the nuclear family, not
with kinship, and it goes far in revealing the psychic dynamics of
modern families. The neuroses analyzed by Freud are private myths,
individual religions; they are the fetishism, the magic of the nuclear
family, the myth of people without collective fetishes to relieve guilt.
As long as Freud maintains the universality of Oedipus there can be
 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny 199

no real history of the family since this requires above all an account
of the change from kinship to private families.5 (Poster, 1978, p. 26)

Gray represents Leonard’s dilemma – his bind – in the terms of melodrama,

which is to say, the terms of familial logic, which are the same as those
in which Jewish identity is inscribed. The choice is this: the son must
marry a woman like his mother, crucially, a Jewish woman, or he will
fall back into the darkness that earlier nearly killed him. The choice in
both films is a false one, because its premise – Jewish identity – goes
unexamined: it is presented as his fate, as something about which he
has no choice. His destiny follows his fate to be a Jew.
In the reviews of Two Lovers and in the many interviews about the
film given by its director, only one that I have read makes mention
of Late Marriage. Susan Kandell of www.popsyndicate.com tells Gray
in her interview with him that she recognizes Moni Moshonov as the
actor who plays the father of the protagonist in both films. She then
immediately says: ‘Let’s talk about the concept of bashert – destiny. Isn’t
this what this film is all about? Lenny thought he found his beloved
once but it wasn’t meant to be … [W]hat were you trying to say here?’
(Kandell, 2009). Early in the interview, Kandell establishes that she
‘spent [her] formative years’ in a Jewish neighborhood much like the
one in which Leonard lives with his parents in Two Lovers; and when
she urges Gray: ‘Let’s get the Jewish geography going!’ he offers: ‘I’m a
Queens boy myself. I grew up in Flushing’. Kandell seems to be only
half aware that she identifies Leonard as having a specifically Jewish
destiny. According to Wikipedia, bashert is a Yiddish word that means
destiny: ‘It is often used in the context of one’s divinely foreordained
spouse or soul mate, and thus has romantic overtones. Jewish singles
will say that they are looking for their bashert, meaning they are looking
for that person who will complement them perfectly. However the opi-
nion has been given that whomever one marries, whether the marriage
is perfect or not, is by definition one’s bashert because the marriage
was foreordained by God, who controls the universe by default’
(Wikipedia, 2009). Gray’s response to Kandell’s suggestion that the film
is about Leonard’s ‘bashert’ is interesting, in that he at once demysti-
fies the notion of destiny as an unfathomable force, that often goes by
the name of God, and decisively confirms its nonetheless sometimes
overwhelming power:

I was just trying to say that the world is a complicated place and
sometimes we don’t have complete control of what we say or do.
200 Robert Lang

Sometimes we have no control over the circumstances. I think too

much is made of free will in our country. The idea that you pull your-
self up by your bootstraps and that stuff is so nonsensical in a way. So
much of who we are is based on our surroundings, our culture, our
ideology – who our parents are, and what they said to us when we
were young. So many things are out of our control. (in Kandell, 2009)

Gray goes on to mention the popular book, Outliers: The Story of Success,
by Malcolm Gladwell, which he says confirms his experience that ‘the
degree to which we can achieve success is … due to factors that are
not considered on a daily basis’. He finds Gladwell’s observations ‘very
disquieting because it makes you realize that you are not the master
of your own destiny, but rather there is a universe out there that, to a
certain extent, controls our fate’.6 That ‘universe out there’, Gray sug-
gests rather vaguely, contains ‘certain elements of social class and our
behavior’, and includes ‘our parents and their traditions’. These tradi-
tions, he adds, ‘can divide or unite us’. But if we see them for what they
are, he says – in other words, if we can be more analytical about what
we mean when we refer to destiny – ‘the healthier, as a culture, we’ll be’
(Gray, in Kandell, 2009).
The superficial realism of the American film, Two Lovers, unlike its
Israeli counterpart, Late Marriage, which is not so much a melodrama
as a very dark comedy, has the effect of occulting the question of the
extent to which, in Gray’s phrase, its main character is master of his
own destiny. In the United States today, where Gray’s characters live,
72 per cent of non-Orthodox Jews intermarry. And yet Jewish identity
remains a largely unexamined category in American film melodramas
in which Jewish characters figure.7 Two Lovers’ invitation to feel sympa-
thy for the virtues of its hero, one of melodrama’s beset victims, and
its concern with ‘a retrieval and staging of [his] innocence’ (Williams,
1998, p. 42), speaks to the trauma – most especially in the United States,
a society committed to a plural identity – that continues to surround
the question of a Jewish identity that, at least in theory, is based on an
ethnic determinism.

Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Nathan Reneaud for urging him to see Two Lovers
when it was first released in France, and for inviting him to participate in a journée
d’étude: ‘Le Mélodrame au présent: Quelle place pour le genre dans le cinéma
contemporain?’ held at the Université de Michel de Montaigne – Bordeaux III
 Deconstructing Melodramatic Destiny 201

on 9 June 2009. An earlier version of this essay was written for that occasion;
and the author would like to thank Trudy Bolter and Françoise Zamour for their
comments following its presentation, and to thank Melvyn Stokes and Michael
Stewart for their generous help and guidance in the preparation of this chapter
for publication.

Notes
1. In Late Marriage, Zaza’s lover Judith, despite her name (which means Jewess),
is coded as not-Jewish. The vigorous opposition of Zaza’s parents to his rela-
tionship with Judith is based, they claim, on the fact that she is three years
older than he is, and that she is a divorcée. It is possible to interpret the
whole of their objection to her as exactly what they say it is; but we infer that
their antagonism towards Judith has ethnic roots: she is a Sephardic Jew (of
Moroccan ancestry), while Zaza’s family are Georgian Ashkenazim.
2. The English subtitle uses the word ‘fate’, although, regardless of the Hebrew
or Georgian original, it should probably be ‘destiny’.
3. Nevertheless, like all art that seeks to avoid being didactic or overly schematic,
Two Lovers gives Gwyneth Paltrow’s character an ambiguous quality: a sur-
name (Rausch) that is German/potentially Jewish. But Rausch is also related to
the German word Rauschgift meaning a drug or narcotic. Director James Gray
piles up evidence to suggest that Leonard never stood a chance: his infatuation
with Michelle is just that – when the effects of the drug wear off, he will return
to his senses and his destiny, and marry the Jewish girl, Sandra.
4. The sense that Leonard’s world is an enclosed one, from which there is no
escape – because it is a world ‘written’ by the director of the film – is rein-
forced by details such as the intertextual fact that Isabella Rossellini’s first
American film was called White Nights (Taylor Hackford, 1985), though it bore
no relation to Dostoyevsky’s story.
5. One is also reminded of Hannah Arendt’s remark in her Introduction to a
collection of writings by Walter Benjamin that, ‘if Freud had lived and carried
on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish
milieu which supplied his patients, we might never have heard of an Oedipus
complex’. Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940’,
in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 26.
6. Michiko Kakutani, in his New York Times review of Gladwell’s book, remarks
that ‘Mr. Gladwell’s emphasis on class and accidents of historical timing plays
down the role of individual grit and talent to the point where he seems to
be sketching a kind of theory of social predestination, determining who gets
ahead and who does not.’ Kakutani adds that: ‘Much of what Mr. Gladwell
has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent
alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, tim-
ing and luck play important roles as well.’ ‘It’s True: Success Succeeds, and
Advantages Can Help’, The New York Times, 17 November 2008: http://www.
nytimes.com/2008/11/18/books/18kaku.html.
7. Prime (Ben Younger, 2005) is an exception; but the film is a comedy, which
allows its melodrama to dissolve into laughter.
202 Robert Lang

References
Brooks, P. (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Gray, J. in Edward Douglas, ‘Exclusive: James Gray Talks about Two Lovers’ 13 February
2009 (http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=52642).
Kandell, S. (2009) ‘Torn Between Two Lovers in Sheepshead Bay’: Interview
with writer-director James Gray, 27 February 2009: (http://www.pop
syndicate.com/site/story/torn_between_two_lovers_in_sheepshead_bay_inte
view_with_writer-director_j).
Kaplan, E. A. (2005) Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).
Lane, D. (2009) ‘5 Movie Clips from Two Lovers’ (2/8/2009) http://www.collider.
com/entertainment/news/article.asp/aid/10838/tcid/1.
Lang, R. (1994) ‘The Birth of a Nation: History, Ideology, Narrative Form’ in
R. Lang (ed.) The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1994).
Lang, R. (2008) Le Mélodrame américain: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli, trans. Noël Burch
(Paris: L’Harmattan).
Poster, M. (1978) Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury Press).
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1965) For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove
Press).
Silverman, K. (1992) Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and London:
Routledge).
Sontag, S. (1966) ‘The Death of Tragedy’ [1963], reprinted in Against Interpretation
(New York: Dell Publishing Company).
Williams, L. (1998) ‘Melodrama Revised’ in N. Browne (ed.) Refiguring American
Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press).
Section IV
Rethinking Melodrama and
Realism in Contemporary Film
12
Anticipating Home: The Edge
of Heaven as Melodrama
Michael Stewart

Awakening from a fugue

David Gramling (2010) describes The Edge of Heaven’s form as ‘fugue-like’

(p. 357). This description is accurate and suggestive. It speaks immedi-
ately of parallels – parallel worlds, experiences, states of being. As its
German title (Auf Der Anderen Seite) suggests in various ways, this is what
The Edge of Heaven is all about. Partly, or in one version of parallelism and
fugue-ness, the film is a series of calls and not-quite-matched responses.
The opening scenes exemplify this and also introduce a number of
The Edge of Heaven’s themes.
As Thomas Elsaesser (2008) notes, the movement between a rural
petrol station and an urban political rally in the film’s first four minutes
ostensibly produces a sharp contrast. This, it seems, is melodrama of
pointed, metaphorical contrast, rather than loosely and thematically
linked episode. The petrol station is out of time and devoid of purpose:
moribund. The arrival of a battered car appears momentous. From this
scene, we cut to the center of Bremen and to purpose. The editing is fast,
and the band, the sprightly old man and history are moving forward.
This is the affectivity of urban life, modernity with a project. There
seems little room for a fugue here among the bright notes of the march-
ing flutes. These sharp contrasts, however, as Elsaesser (2008) indicates,
are not all they seem.
For all his apparent connectedness and beaming purpose, for exam-
ple, it is the old man, Ali (played by Tuncel Kurtiz), who might best be
described as running away, like a fugue, like a fugitive. It is he who seeks
refuge in a parallel, liminal world: refuge from proud, loud history in
which he can only be a tourist – a ‘guest’ – at best. Free of the drums
that seemed to impel him, he slows his pace and seems more at ease with

205
206 Michael Stewart

this – the ghetto of brothels – version of civic-ness. Inside Yeter’s boudoir,

Ali’s performance – as proud German and international operator – ends.
He seems to recognize Yeter’s liminal den as home, a place he’s trying
to forget: ‘Now I’m ashamed,’ he says, revealing the repressed romance
of his half-life. He experiences, argues Naiboglu (2010), ‘a moment of
oedipal guilt, ashamed to desire a Turkish woman who … [he associates]
with maternal virtue and honour’ (p. 88). Ali’s purpose now, beyond
emptying his loins, seems vague.
Nejat’s (played by Baki Davrak) dream-like state is marked when con-
trasted with his father’s (as we soon discover) beaming face. Typically,
Nejat’s face signals vagueness and uncertainty – a dim, dawning aware-
ness that he’s not quite in the right place, not quite heading in the
right direction. This, to an extent, is the conceit of The Edge of Heaven’s
opening scene. For while Nejat looks as tired, confused and purposeless
as he has for most of the film, it is now, in what turns out to be this latter
scene, that he has found direction. Nejat’s face, though, still wavers,
trying to settle on its bearing; and the exchange with the garage owner
seems to play on this fine balance: Recognize this song, the garage keeper
says, with its deep roots to your culture?; and recognize too, he contin-
ues, that nothing is certain or immune to the fallout of globalization.
However near Najat is to the end of his journey, then, his re-education,
the film suggests, is just beginning. And this brief lesson from the garage
keeper is only one in a series of awakenings of Nejat that have preceded
this scene and given shape to the film. These awakenings do not proceed
or unfold in a linear, teleological fashion, as a brief examination of a
couple of them will indicate.
The first scene I’ll examine isn’t an awakening as such, but is part
of this general process. It is the scene where we’re first introduced to
Nejat ‘proper’ (i.e. in the fabula), which in the first instance establishes
him as a university professor – as a second generation Turkish-German
who appears entirely settled (as his father did in the opening Bremen-
political-rally scene) in German society and culture, lecturing to students
at Hamburg University about German history. The cut to this scene
from the preceding one can be characterized as moving from imme-
diacy to distance, if not quite from life to death. We move from Ali
and Nejat at a busy train station entrance to Nejat delivering a lecture
at Hamburg University. The lecture theatre is flatly lit and a model of
utilitarian 1970s architecture. The browns and greys of the brick and
paneled walls blend with the uncompromising wooden seats, the lec-
tern and Nejat’s brown linen jacket. The scene is established through,
as it were, Nejat’s back and the back of his head. This and the general
 Anticipating Home 207

stillness of the scene effectively remove life from Nejat’s lecture, and
this is underlined in the final moment of the scene by a cut to a young
woman at the rear of the theatre, asleep (only later do we discover who
she is – Ayten (Nürgul Yesilçay) – and why she’s asleep).
The words of Nejat’s lecture, nonetheless, are heavily freighted:
‘Goethe was opposed to revolution. Not on ethical grounds, but because
it seemed to him to be too uncontrollable. Two quotes illustrate this:
“Who wants to see a rose bloom in the depths of winter? Everything to
its own time. Leaves, buds, flowers. Only a fool could want this untimely
intoxication.”’ Forty minutes later in the syuzhet the film repeats this
quotation and gives us the second one: ‘Secondly: “I am opposed to
revolutions, for they destroy as many good old things as they create
good new ones.”’
Given that Akin has already used the conceit of discontinuity bet-
ween historical national narrative and historical lived experience at
the start of The Edge of Heaven (Ali’s touristic relation to the political
rally in Bremen), we might expect a complex or ironic link between
Nejat’s lecture and the path he then follows. However, this lecture as
a point of departure is less certain or more ironic still. As Silvey and
Hillman (2010) indicate, not only are the two quotations not directly
attributable to Goethe; there is also no clear evidence that Goethe was
against revolution (p. 106). The lecture scene thus becomes profoundly
‘ambiguous in its intention’ (p. 106). But regardless of whether Akin is
aware of this mistake (Silvey and Hillman suspect he is not), it remains,
Silvey and Hillman argue, in keeping with The Edge of Heaven’s general
project of questioning historical and national certainties.
For all his talk of revolution, Nejat’s face in this lecture scene is dispas-
sionate to the point of somnambulance. In the scenes with Nejat which
follow this one (exchanges with his father; meeting Yeter; his father’s
heart attack and ensuing visits to hospital), his face is almost completely
trance-like, hesitant if not quite confused. Ali’s return home from hos-
pital, however, prompts a brief change to Nejat’s face. It explodes, to
paraphrase Higson (1986, p. 128), melodramatically in Ali’s small flat
when Ali accuses Nejat of using his property (i.e. sleeping with Yeter),
and also abuses Yeter’s kindness. When Nejat leaves Ali’s flat in disgust,
Yeter and her gift of börek (and consequently her death) send Nejat on
his journey, which in a sense is to meet Yeter’s wish (to save Ayten for
a secure, educated future) and in so doing to atone for her death at the
hands of his father. This, The Edge of Heaven shows, proves misguided,
and it is not Nejat, in the end, who saves Ayten. Fugue-like indeed,
Nejat moves in and out of certainty, clarity and harmony, unsure of his
208 Michael Stewart

melodramatic destiny. The film’s most ironic and affective scene in this
respect is Nejat’s happy discovery of a German bookshop in Istanbul.
Nejat’s trance-like state becomes a reverie. His face (wondrous), his
movement (ethereal), the mise-en-scène (a fetish and warmth of books
seem almost to embrace him) and the diegetic music (Bach on the banjo)
all suggest harmony, arrival, recognition: This is me and where I’m
meant to be. This continues until he is seated with the bookshop owner
who underlines this idea in dialogue – at which point, Nejat’s face stops
short of agreement and again, typically, looks hesitant and meditative.
It is as if this arrival is too predestined, this homecoming too neat, and
that this, vaguely, is dawning upon him.
This ineffable moment of recognition/misrecognition is confirmed, it
seems, later in the film (fabula and syuzhet) in Nejat’s second and last
melodramatic outburst of anger and frustration. His cousin sits with
him in the bookshop, telling him that he saw his father, Ali, last night
and helped him onto the bus to Trabzon. He tells Nejat that Ali assumed
Nejat would not want to see him. As the cousin leaves, he points to
the ‘missing’ poster of Yeter and asks if anyone ever called the phone
number on it. Nejat doesn’t reply. After the door has closed, Nejat sits
alone staring into space. Without warning, and accompanied by a cut
to a long and narrow shot of him so that the books seem to be closing
in on him, he punches a pile of books off the table in front of him. He
is trapped and impotent, an echo to some extent of Ali in his prison
cell. As he leaves the shop his face is tearful and bitter, and in a final
gesture of defeat, he removes the poster of Yeter (ironically, we’ll reflect,
in that soon, when Nejat is in Trabzon, Ayten will visit the shop) from
the noticeboard.

Typed and trapped

This is the second and last moment of heightened emotion exhibited

by Nejat in The Edge of Heaven. Despite or because of this, Naiboglu
(2010) describes Nejat as someone who seems ‘not even meant to be a
character’ (p. 88). This judgment is understandable, but misses Nejat’s
meditative and fugue-like function. However, Naiboglu is not alone
in considering The Edge of Heaven’s other characters to be more or less
clichéd or typed. Turkish critic Vecdi Sayar describes the film and its
characters as schematic and replete with ‘the well-known clichés of the
cinema of the West’ (in Dönmez-Colin, 2008, p. 78). And Richard Porton
(2007) considers The Edge of Heaven’s characters to be ‘little more than
spokespeople for pre-digested positions’ (p. 72).
 Anticipating Home 209

These criticisms have value, albeit they tend to privilege a familiar

realist desire for rounded and psychologically plausible characters.
The Edge of Heaven doesn’t eschew realism, but my primary interest is
melodrama. I’m interested in characters’ psychic and oedipal identities;
in their confused attempts at rescue and escape; their difficult search
for refuge and home. The work of Heidi Schlipphacke (2006) is helpful
in this respect, and I’ll consider it in more detail shortly. For now, all
of The Edge of Heaven’s characters, by Schlipphacke’s terms, are trapped.
The icons of enlightened modernity seem to be closing in on Nejat in
what should be his paradigmatic settings: the lecture theatre and the
bookshop. The bookshop scene referred to above seems to cut short a
fantasy of rediscovery, making the bookshop not a new start, but the
‘museum’ it was felt to be by its previous owner. And the way in which
Nejat is framed during his lecture, argue Silvey and Hillman (2010),
makes him appear confined (p. 108, n. 14). His visions, his raisons d’etre
seem increasingly unsure – indicated, for example, by a mistaken lecture,
the dismissal of his new project (the rescuing of Ayten for education) as
a middle-class indulgence by a policeman in Istanbul, and his complete
rejection of a father he’d previously loved. Ali too has moved quickly
from ageless virility and purpose on his march to the brothel, to arm-
dangling impotence on the stool at his tiny prison window.
Ayten, Lotte and Susanne are also trapped. Ayten on first analysis
may seem particularly typed. As Ball (2008) indicates, within some
nationalist-gendered representations it is commonplace for nationally
committed or politically engaged women to appear butch or seductive
(p. 26). Moreover, by Steele’s (2010) terms, Ayten represents the exotic
other, or queer diaspora. Ayten certainly is The Edge of Heaven’s most
beleaguered character, hunted, monitored and trapped for large parts
of the film. Lotte is trapped in at least three ways, which in The Edge of
Heaven become one: a disapproving mother, a suffocating home, and a
stifling sense of German history and convention.
This sense of entrapment comes to a melodramatic head in a heated
bedroom scene with Lotte and Susanne. Lotte is leaving dramatically,
urgently to go to Turkey to fight for Ayten’s freedom. She’s near-
hysterical, accusing Susanne of hiding her passport, lashing out and
sweeping books violently from their shelf (a gesture of frustration and
entrapment, as we’ve seen, to be repeated later in the film by Nejat).
The two women are tightly framed, on their knees in a small, dark, now
chaotic bedroom, when Susanne hands Lotte the passport from the desk
beside her, saying, ‘Look how blind you are’. The house in this scene is
doubled in size, in a sense, but made no less suffocating – that is, the
210 Michael Stewart

scene is overlaid by the voice of the German state and another female
housekeeper, Ayten’s appeal judge, sending down her judgment. Her
words, against the distressing images of Lotte and Susanne’s domestic
war, have a depthless and deathly quality that heightens their multiple
echo: ‘not in my house’, and ‘things will improve when you join the
European Union’ (part of the judge’s decision is based on the belief that
Turkey no longer poses a great threat to activists like Ayten because of
its imminent entry to the European Union). They are reminiscent of
Nejat’s lifeless Hamburg lecture and Susanne’s kitchen words (below),
and they have the same historical redundancy and falseness as both
those speeches.
Regarding Susanne’s entrapment, ostensibly she the woman at the
window of melodrama and the woman’s film – waiting, looking, con-
fined, and setting in play a host of signifiers of the ‘social and symbolic
positioning of the woman’ (Doane, 1987, p. 288). In this respect, she
appears joined on a stage with and no less typed than Nejat, who
repeatedly is framed by and looks out of the window of a moving train –
romantic, enigmatic and mobile: modernity’s knowledge-seeking male
traveler. The source of Susanne’s troubled state is unclear, like that of
Nejat. But her narrative journey is shorter and more direct than his – so
much so that it seems like a series of staged episodes – swansong, grief,
awakening, rebirth. Each of these scenes is highly oedipal, maternal and
excessive.
What I’ll call the kitchen-swansong scene (the heated exchange
between Ayten and Susanne in the kitchen of Susanne’s home) is
particularly problematic for critics of The Edge of Heaven. Naiboglu
(2010) considers it a gloss and disavowal of Turkish–Kurdish politics
(pp. 90–91); and Sayer (in Dönmez-Colin, 2008) again finds it clichéd
and staged (p. 78). I want to suggest, however, that there is value in
thinking of the kitchen-swansong scene as precisely staged, excessive
and melodramatic. The framing in this scene is tight. Ayten’s entrance
and the tension between the two women is anticipated. Ayten’s ‘Guten
Morgen’ (it’s midday and Ayten does not speak German) increases the
frisson. Ayten squeezes past Susanne. She’s defiant, youthful movement
and barely covered flesh to the older woman’s sitting stillness and judg-
ment. Ayten’s reply to Susanne’s question – ‘And what exactly are you
fighting for?’ – seems pat:

A: We are fighting for one hundred percent human rights, and one
hundred percent freedom of speech, and one hundred percent social
education. In Turkey, just people with money can get education.
 Anticipating Home 211

S: Maybe things will get better once you get into the European Union.
A: I don’t trust the European Union.
S: And why not?
A: Who is leading the European Union? England, France and Germany
and Italy and Spain. These countries are all colony countries. It’s
globalization and we are fighting against it.
S: Maybe you are a person who just likes to fight.
A: You think I am crazy?! (No reply from S. A stands up and camera
moves to C-U on her defiant face.) If a country kills the people, the
folk, just because they look different, or think different, or protest
to have work, and energy and schools, you have to fight back.
S: Maybe everything will get better once you get into the European
Union.
A: Fuck the European Union!
S: I don’t want you to talk like that in my house. You can talk like that
in your house. Okay? (Composed, but visibly upset.)
A: (Cowed.) Okay (Leaves kitchen to dress upstairs and leave house.)

As I’ve suggested, this scene is a swansong of sorts. It’s Susanne’s final

and failed attempt to hold onto and believe in ‘our way’. Our way is my
settled house: the peace of my daughter and me, and the German way.
But Lotte and Susanne, we know, are not at peace; and Lotte apparently
despises all that stands for the German way. Moreover, for all Susanne’s
(dead) conviction, soon she will leave her house and Germany for a new
start in Istanbul.
Shortly after she arrives in Istanbul, Nejat takes Susanne to Lotte’s
bedroom, the room she rented in his apartment. From a box of Lotte’s
possessions, Susanne takes a diary, lies on Lotte’s mattress and begins to
read. Her face is shot in close-up and she is enveloped in warm light.
We hear words from the diary, spoken by (the deceased) Lotte: ‘…I find
myself taking paths very similar to hers (Susanne’s). Perhaps it’s that.
She sees herself in me’. This is one of a number of The Edge of Heaven’s
woman’s film moments. It is a heightened moment of what Linda
Williams (1987) calls mother–daughter doubling (p. 300). If Susanne
in this moment is re-finding her sympathetic maternal self, then it
follows that her previous self, her previous mothering self was lacking
or inferior. In this process, Williams argues, motherhood is simultane-
ously debased and sanctified (p. 300). In this respect, in this bedroom
scene, both Lotte and Susanne are re-valued by the text. Susanne now
sees in Lotte not only her double – in that she now understands that
Lotte was not rejecting her after all, but walking in her footsteps – but
212 Michael Stewart

her superior; and this, Williams argues, is typical to mother–daughter

doubling, where the mother’s sense of inferiority is compensated for by
a ‘superior creature … she regards as her double’ (Williams, 1987, p. 300,
quoting Simone de Beauvoir). In this respect, Susanne is not only
melodramatically destined to be saved by Lotte, but also, as Williams
indicates, to lose her (p. 300).
Lotte’s death is Susanne’s re-birth. This is confirmed when she visits
Ayten in prison to tell her of Lotte’s death and make it clear to her that
she blames her in no way. In this tearful scene, Susanne is no longer
numb and aimless (the living dead) as she was in her Hamburg home.
She is a mother again, and in a sense has become Ayten’s mother, rather
than her judge and jailer. Susanne is no longer trapped by the past nor
confined behind a window. The film’s later window scene tries to make
this clear.
This window scene, in Nejat’s Istanbul flat, near the film’s conclusion,
both crystallizes The Edge of Heaven’s key themes and sets them into
flight again. Susanne and Nejat are back at a window. But it’s not the
woman’s private window of domestic entrapment, nor is it the window
of the displaced romantic traveler’s railway carriage. The scene opens up
this symbol, metaphorically and in the arrangement of the mise-en-scène.
The window is long and open, light and airy. The perspective is fore-
shortened so that the framed scene seems both public and private.
Susanne and Nejat are framed so that they are together in this public and
private scene. The spoken exchange extends this idea: Susanne is ready
to re-enter history and culture; Nejat is ready to recognize his father.
At the start of the scene, Nejat is again the teacher, Susanne his will-
ing student. But as the scene progresses, Nejat becomes the analysand
and son, Susanne his therapist and mother. We can read this, as Silvey
and Hillman (2010) suggest, as the making of a new covenant (p. 100),
as well as a form of oedipal and cultural reciprocity. This is how
Naiboglu (2010) reads the scene, negatively: Akin, she argues, attempts
to reterritorialize oedipal relations in this scene, carving out a ‘third
space of universalized family affection’ (p. 93). But this well-meaning
effort, Naiboglu argues, only serves to disavow historical and cultural
difference and re-institute entrenched oppositions.

Competing systems

Silvey and Hillman (2010) read the film’s characters and narrative
differently. Much in the film, they argue, is welcome in its apparent
arbitrariness and under-development (pp. 109–110). Moreover, Nejat’s
 Anticipating Home 213

reconciliation with Ali is by no means certain (just as Susanne and

Ayten’s unchronicled trajectory is unclear). Silvey and Hillman also read
The Edge of Heaven as multiple and at points contradictory (I’ve already
referred to their identification of Nejat’s lecture as mistaken). Regarding
the final window scene, they argue that Susanne’s response to Nejat
that the two religious stories are the same elides the ‘fundamental dif-
ferences between the two systems’ (p. 100) that attest to a parting rather
than confluence of ways. But alongside this, Silvey and Hillman remind
us that ‘several of the parishes receiving the letters of what is now the
Christian New Testament are located in what is now Turkey’ (Follesdal,
quoted in Silvey and Hillman, 2010, p. 102).
In the window exchange, then, as in other parts of the film, it’s not
clear what the historical lesson may be. At a broad level, Susanne and
Nejat may be looking back in order to re-think the present; and this
seems clearest at the level of oedipal relations: where Susanne, in the face
of a stream of men going to the mosque, mothers Nejat and reinstalls
the father; but where the film’s oedipal trajectories are complex and its
rescues multiple. The exchange at the window is perhaps least equivocally
what David Gramling (2010) calls ‘phatic’ (p. 367). Contrary to Naiboglu
(2010), Gramling (2010) sees little effort at transparent, universal mean-
ing in The Edge of Heaven. Instead, he argues, the film exhibits a ‘rhetorical
commitment to antilogy’ (p. 368). In a linguistic and historical analysis of
The Edge of Heaven, Gramling refers to a number of key scenes to support
this argument – polyglot, fragmented exchanges, for example, between
Ali and Yeter, Nejat and Ali, and Ayten and Lotte. These scenes, Gramling
argues, typify a film that ‘presents an ethics of opaque simultaneity, of the
possibility of co-present, unresolvable, contradictory domains of meaning
in an era of globally trafficked, rapidly produced translational equiva-
lences’ (p. 368). This opaque simultaneity, or ‘aphasic call-and-response’
(p. 369), is variously manifested – for example, in the complex, contradic-
tory exchange between Susanne and Nejat at the window, and perhaps in
The Edge of Heaven’s status as a migrant and therefore ‘double occupancy’
(Elsaesser, in Berghahn, 2006, p. 144) film.
The Edge of Heaven has been described as dialectical, and this is how
B. Ruby Rich describes the experience, inescapably, of exiled citizens
(in Williams, 1987, p. 317). Linda Williams also draws a parallel between
exiles and women spectators: ‘The female spectator’s look is thus a dia-
lectic of two (in themselves) inadequate and incomplete (sexually and
socially) differentiated subject positions’ (Williams, 1987, p. 317). I will
return to the idea of The Edge of Heaven as a womanly text. Now, though,
I want to suggest that Linda Williams provides a (melodramatic) bridge
214 Michael Stewart

between Gramling’s theory of The Edge of Heaven as a post-international,

polyglot text to Agustin Zarzosa’s re-theorizing of film melodrama.
Zarzosa (2010) follows Brooks (1976) to argue that melodrama can be
conceived as a battle between two competing systems. These systems
for Brooks are historical and can be characterized as the sacred and the
post-sacred. For Brooks, the key losses that melodrama compulsively
and impossibly tries to retrieve are the sacred and transcendent value.
For Zarzosa, this is a confusion of melodrama’s form with specific histor-
ical content (p. 398). The sacred and transcendent, Zarzosa argues, have
not been lost. In melodrama they endure in the form of the individual.
This is clear, argues Zarzosa, when we recognize that the key tension in
melodrama is between two conflicting systems of exchange (p. 398).
Moreover, it is not the inadequacies of language and the loss of the
moral occult that engenders muteness in melodrama. Rather, muteness
in melodrama points to the inequities of exchange: ‘Melodrama leaves
us speechless because it is premised on the exchange of a transcend-
ent. And the realization of this error is best expressed as a cry’ (p. 405).
Zarzosa extends this argument:

This ineffability represents the … construction of a parallel realm

that the actual world cannot accommodate; this parallel realm must
remain unarticulated precisely because it only exists as the nega-
tion of the actual world, that is, as a longing and a demand for an
unspecified elsewhere. (Zarzosa, 2010, p. 401)

In the reflective face and fugue-like journey of Nejat – but evident in

all the film’s characters – there is a palpable longing and demand for an
unspecified elsewhere. Moreover, with its two key sacrificial deaths, the
transcendent value of the individual is clear in The Edge of Heaven. The
tears shed by Susanne and Ayten in prison result from the realization
of the error that a transcendent (Lotte) has been fatally caught up in
competing systems of exchange. And Zarzosa’s ideas are especially appli-
cable regarding the nature of Yeter’s death. In the Yeter–Ali narrative,
the competing systems of exchange are sex-economy (prostitution) and
sex-economy (domestic kinship). Kinship is complicated to the extent
that Yeter is invited to recognize Ali as kin along interconnected lines
of ethnicity and family. Oedipally speaking, Ali is at once a father and
a husband. Ethnically, he is both father and brother. In any case, fol-
lowing Zarzosa (2010) and Williams (1987), it’s clear that both systems
present themselves as incomplete and unsatisfactory to Yeter. But when
a ‘corresponding absolute’ (Zarzosa, 2010, p. 410) enters the realm of
 Anticipating Home 215

exchange – that is, the religious fundamentalists who threaten Yeter

on the bus – the value of kinship is inflated, falsely, but typically of
melodrama, as Zarzosa indicates. Yeter re-enters the familiar but unequal
sphere of oedipal kinship relations. And when Ali cries after her death,
it is indeed the start, at last, of the recognition of his error: that the
individual has no place in systems of exchange.
Ayten’s future in The Edge of Heaven is unclear, but she is now driven
by the desire to make good a cost – a debt, typically, immediate and
more deep-rooted. Ayten, by the terms of The Edge of Heaven, is a key
historical figure. She stands in for the next generation of Turkish women,
a reminder that her freedom comes at the cost paid by the preceding ones,
especially those women who migrated to Germany from Turkey in the
1960s and 1970s as guest-workers.

Melodramatic debt

As Gramling (2010, p. 369) indicates, Ayten’s protective pseudonym,

Gül, makes this clear. It is the same name as the protagonist in the
novel that Nejat gives to Ali at the start of The Edge of Heaven, and
over which Ali sheds tears near the close of the film. The novel is Die
Tochter des Schmieds (The Blacksmith’s Daughter), by a German author of
Turkish decent, Selim Özdogan (2005). Its Turkish title, as it appears in
The Edge of Heaven, is Demircinin Kizi. The book has not been translated
into English. Briefly, and based on English-language reviews and short
extracts, the novel is the story of Gül, a young Turkish woman whose
life is defined by domestic work, traditional kinship ties, sacrificing her
own desires for the needs of others, and suffering. She has chances to
break free of the social and familial strictures of rural Turkish life, but
forgoes them in favor of reputation and duty. At the age of 15, she
marries a man (her uncle, a drinker and gambler) she does not love,
and when she’s 20 she travels with him to Germany for a new start as a
guest-worker: ‘There, in Germany, she will stay for the rest of her life, in
a resigned acceptance of her life, captured in a kind of tolerated unhap-
piness’ (Anon, 2006).
The novel is not devoid of joy, however, and its ‘small moments of
happiness’ (Kjd, 2009) are expressed in the discovery of literature as a
form of escapism, in Gül’s love for her father, and in the strong rela-
tions, especially, between the book’s female characters. In this respect,
the novel begins with a focus on Timur, the blacksmith (Gül’s father),
but shifts and is mostly told from Gül’s perspective. It is a woman’s
story. It is a technology, as Gramling points out (2010, p. 370), of
216 Michael Stewart

historical reflection. And it is a project of historical retrieval. It seeks to

uncover a hidden history: the personal histories of the huge number of
women guest-workers who in so many ways built post-war Germany.
For all the brevity of its appearance in The Edge of Heaven, Die Tochter
des Schmieds is important to an understanding of the film. The novel
parallels the film in various ways. More than this, the film is the novel,
in that it is inseparable from the novel and also represents its next chap-
ter, or a continuation. At the risk of reduction, The Edge of Heaven is a
woman’s film and a man’s fantasy. The second half of the film is told
mostly from the perspectives of Ayten and Susanne, the death of Lotte
providing the ‘solution’ to their respective suffering and unhappiness.
The Edge of Heaven is also driven generally by a sense of debt – and this,
vaguely, is what compels Nejat. He appears indebted to Yeter, a woman
he barely knew. But early in the film he’s also clearly moved by the
novel he repeatedly advises Ali to read. This is a melodramatic as well
as historical compulsion. And in this respect, The Edge of Heaven rep-
resents a particularly vivid example of what Thomas Elsasser calls ‘the
oedipalisation of history’ (in Schlipphacke, 2006, p. 127). This is clear if
we consider the multiple dimensions of debt in the film.
Nejat’s desire to repay Yeter is oedipal, but also extends the oedipal
into the rescue fantasy (Freud, 1962). The rescue fantasy, as Robert
Burgoyne (1994) indicates, is a recurring feature of film melodrama, and
it frequently lends complexity or ambivalence to oedipally gendered
identities – or masculinity at least (p. 233). In its earliest theorizations
by Freud, the figure of the son is compelled to repay his mother, and
also to save a woman ‘of bad repute sexually’ (Freud, 1962) – the two
female figures becoming one under oedipal relations. These two figures
are joined in Yeter, a ‘fallen woman’ (prostitute) and symbolic mother
to Nejat. The rescue fantasy then falters in The Edge of Heaven in that
Yeter cannot be saved. The debt to the symbolic mother, however,
remains; and in a sense Ayten becomes the wayward woman in need of
saving, albeit more for than from something. And in this latter respect,
Nejat becomes Freud’s secret benefactor, who appears in later versions
of the rescue fantasy (Gillman, 1992).
Indeed, Nejat is on an implicit quest, a hidden historical journey
to save and repay women generally. The presence of Die Tochter des
Schmieds points to this, as I’ve suggested. And at the level of the film’s
diegesis, Nejat saves and/or repays not only Yeter and Ayten, but also
Lotte and Susanne. The bookshop and his Istanbul flat are not only
tenuous homes for fugue-like Nejat. They are also important sources of
refuge for Lotte and Susanne – to an extent, following Mutman (2009),
 Anticipating Home 217

re-invoking the ancient mythology of Istanbul as a place of passage and

refuge (p. 328). Lotte’s room in Nejat’s flat, as I’ve indicated, is invested
with almost magical restorative powers for Susanne. And the same may
be said of Nejat when he first meets Susanne. When Susanne enters
the bar of the Istanbul hotel where she has arranged to meet Nejat,
she is hesitant, dazed with grief. In the background of the shot, Nejat
spots her immediately and goes to greet her. ‘How did you know it was
me?’, Susanne asks. Nejat replies, ‘You are the saddest person in the
room.’ This moment is poetic, but also authoritatively diagnostic. Nejat
becomes here, following Doane (1987, p. 290), the doctor and inter-
preter of the suffering woman, Susanne. His characteristically impassive
face lends his diagnosis manly wisdom. And he seems to have travelled
some distance since Yeter had to explain to him what was meant by
‘lady of easy virtue’ (her description of herself when the two first meet).
At this point, The Edge of Heaven appears to be firmly within a mas-
culine and historical fantasy of repayment. It’s tempting to suggest that
this fantasy belongs at once to Nejat, Akin and Selim Özdogan. It is also
tempting to consider that this perception of debt (at a stretch, guilt)
is distinctively European as well as masculine. This certainly is Sayer’s
reading of The Edge of Heaven, a film, he says, ‘crafted to appeal to the
guilt complexes of the Western intellectual’ (in Dönmez-Colin, 2008,
p. 78). And to paraphrase Daniela Berghahn (2006), in this hotel scene
Nejat may be read as a stereotypical returned Turkish son whose essen-
tial values have survived the potential corruptions of modern German
life (p. 150). This argument is supportable; and some of my analysis of
the film, above does support it. My analysis also indicates, though, that
The Edge of Heaven is less masculine in orientation than at least this logi-
cal extension of Freud’s rescue fantasy would suggest. The film is also
less dependent on binary oppositions. As Berghahn (2006) notes, Akin
is aware of and tries to exceed familiar oppositions in his most recent
films (p. 154). In this respect he is joined by other German filmmakers,
perhaps most notably Tom Tykwer.

Un-homely melodrama

In her excellent analysis of Tykwer’s films, Heidi Schlipphacke (2006)

argues that, generally, they succeed in moving beyond the traditional
family and oedipal structures (pp. 128–131), beyond the concept of a
united Europe (p. 134), and beyond ‘the space of melodrama’ (p. 129).
This is not a seamless process, and Schlipphacke also notes that Tykwer’s
films ‘evoke nostalgia … [and] look not only backward but also forward’
218 Michael Stewart

(p. 115); and that his oeuvre ‘might be located in the space between the
oedipal struggle and a point after Oedipus’ (p. 127).
However different the two directors’ films may be, much of
Schlipphacke’s analysis is applicable to The Edge of Heaven. The film
breaks with traditional family structures in various ways, but is also
profoundly oedipal at points. This is clear, as I’ve noted, in the figure
of Yeter; and Susanne might easily be described, in the prison scene
especially, as ‘a maternal figure who functions as an icon of forgiveness
and understanding’ (Burgoyne, 1994, p. 227). Moreover, in its latter
scenes The Edge of Heaven not only reaches out to the spurned father,
it also seems unable to resist a particularly ‘folkloric’ (Ball, 2008, p. 4)
and nostalgic evocation of Turkey en route to its closing scene. But as
Rings (2008, p. 30) and others argue, the meanings of home and Turkey
are ambiguous in Akin’s most recent films. Indeed, Mahmut Mutman
(2009) describes the return to Turkey in Akin’s films as ‘the impossible
solution that keeps coming back … the ethical and political enigma of
Akin’s film(s)’ (pp. 326–327).
Mutman, like Schlipphacke in her thesis on Tykwer’s films, conceives
of Akin’s films (specifically Head On) as existing somewhere in the antici-
pation of transition (Schlipphacke, 2006, p. 136). His argument also
connects with Zarzosa’s (2010) theory of a parallel ‘unspecified elsewhere’
(p. 401) and gives it a specific historical content. The Turkish-Germans
in Akin’s films, Mutman (2009) argues, are the children of guest-worker
immigrants previously invisible to German culture. Directors like Akin
(and we might add, authors like Özdogan) bring these new young
Germans and their legacy onto the social stage:

These people, born into a world divided between the strong commu-
nal code of the immigrant working class – a class … subjected to the
strict conditions of a separatist state policy for almost 50 years now –
and the deterritorializing forces of the most advanced sectors of the
society, carry the immense force of a future to come; a force whose
movement is as undecidable as their insecure socio-economic condi-
tion and unstable lives. This is why we find their speed unbearable,
their energy fascinating, and shocking when they turn it against
themselves, not simply because they are desperate from oppression
and alienation, but rather because the energy they carry exceeds
them. (Mutman, 2009, p. 323)

This is a persuasive combination of theory and history, which is highly

specific but also suggests an uncertain productivity and, like Zarzosa’s
 Anticipating Home 219

theory of melodrama, a coming into legibility. It is applicable to The

Edge of Heaven. But it also shows that The Edge of Heaven is indeed the
next chapter – of Akin’s trilogy, of Özdogan’s novel. Because there are no
‘“new” new Germans’ (Mutman, 2009, p. 322) with this impossible
energy in The Edge of Heaven. The closest figures are Lotte and Ayten,
one of whom is a new old German, and one of whom only briefly
sought refuge in Germany. Most directly or historically, Nejat is
Mutman’s ‘new’ new German. But not only is he a settled middle-class
German, he seems considerably less caught and desperate than the
Turkish-German protagonists of Head On.
Nejat does exhibit uncertainty and a productive, restless energy that
exceeds him, however. This is true of all of the characters in The Edge of
Heaven. Lotte and Ayten are closest to Mutman’s unpredictable, compul-
sive self-destruction. Ali experiences a void that needs always to be filled by
drink or sex. And, following Mutman (2009, pp. 329–331), until the death
of her daughter, Susanne seems haunted by an irreconcilable past. All
of the film’s characters are figured as trapped and in need of escape. All are
both rescuers and rescued. All feel vaguely cheated and betrayed. All are
figured as indebted and suffering from an ‘imaginary deficit’ (Eleftheriotis
et al, 2007, p. 5).
One of the clearest deficiencies is home. The Edge of Heaven continues
Akin’s and melodrama’s fixation with home. It continues to engage with,
to amplify and to suppress the anxieties and ‘transcendental homeless-
ness of modernity’ (Lukas, in Schlipphacke, 2006, p. 122). The search for
home, as Berghahn (2006) indicates, can be deeply regressive (p. 152);
and melodrama frequently is characterized as a handmaid in this process.
Moreover, this fantasy can be a particularly vexed one in the context of
German history and film, where ‘Heimat seems to correlate in numerous
ways to the generic category of melodrama’ (Schlipphacke, 2006, p. 124).
Akin, undoubtedly, is aware of this. But The Edge of Heaven arguably takes
as great an interest in European mythology and unheimlich as it does in
questions of Germany and home.
That is, The Edge of Heaven takes an interest in Freud’s unheimlich
in the way in which it has been theorized by Eleftheriotis, Pratt and
Vanni (2007). These scholars revisit some of the earliest inscriptions
of ‘Europe’ in order to re-think its meaning and think of it once more
as without a cultural home, as ‘un-homely’ (p. 4). This leads them to
Freud’s influential and variously applied etymology of Heimlich:

‘(H)eimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas,

which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the
220 Michael Stewart

one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other
what is concealed and kept out of sight. (Freud, in Eleftheriotis, Pratt
and Vanni, 2007, p. 4)

This Freudian ambiguity in Eleftheriotis et al.’s analysis allows not only

for regression or a repression of the past, but also for the possibility of
looking again at that which is familiar but forgotten, in a process of
defamiliarization and refamiliarization: ‘(W)hat [has] the EU … forgot-
ten in the push toward ‘shared cultural values’(?) What are the stories
that seem to vanish at the margins of Europe when constructed as a
successful brand, and what is this Europe’s constituent imaginary?’
(Eleftheriotis, Pratt and Vanni, 2007, p. 4).
This can be connected to Zarzosa’s (2010) theory of melodrama – of
negation as simultaneously the construction of a realm not yet able to
be accommodated by the actual world (p. 401). It can also be linked
to the other great influence (along with Özdogan) on The Edge of
Heaven, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Destruction is an abiding theme in
Fassbinder’s films. This is one reason they are read frequently both as
unremittingly bleak and as a form of betrayal. This misses the difficult,
reflective nature of Fassbinder’s work, which is no less consistently
evident in his films. It is this spirit, I think, that the ‘made up’ Goethe
quotes in Nejat’s lecture try to capture: a rejection of change without
history, of destruction shorn of construction.
Silvey and Hillman (2010) argue that in its relative ambiguity and
in its parallel and cyclical movement, The Edge of Heaven strives for
‘the re-emergence of the human’ (p. 105). Fassbinder likewise, argues
McCormick (1991), sought to re-humanize historical change: ‘Love
is, for Fassbinder, the utopian moment in the process of change, both
political and personal, the impossible which must be made possible …’
(p. 578). This is what Nejat says – silently, obliquely, enigmatically –
when he places Özdogan’s novel on Ali’s kitchen table and advises him
to read it. Moreover, in a film with a paucity of utopian moments, it is
indicative that three of its out-of-time, liminal and highly affective uto-
pian moments are expressions of love: Lotte and Ayten falling in love at
a Hamburg nightclub, the glowing vision of Lotte beaming love toward
her mother in Nejat’s flat, and a rare moment of levity and love between
Ali and Nejat in Ali’s warmly lit and verdant backyard.
Melodrama, Steve Neale (1986) notes, is populated by characters who
want to be loved (p. 17). Melodramatic tears, from this perspective, are
narcissistic and part of a nostalgic fantasy of childhood ‘characterised
by union with the mother: a state of total love, satisfaction, and dyadic
 Anticipating Home 221

fusion’ (p. 17). Neale’s arguments are clearly applicable to The Edge of
Heaven. When Ayten leaves Susanne’s kitchen upset and confused from
their argument, it transpires that what she wants more than ‘100%
equality’ is love. She collapses in tears into the arms of Lotte, telling her,
‘I need to find my mother’. Ali’s tears late in the film are the familiar
pathetic tears of realization that comes too late (Neale, 1986, p. 10).
They may also be, following Neale, tears for a romantic fantasy of a
maternal homeland, evoked first in Yeter’s boudoir, prompted again by
Özdogan’s novel, and lost now in Ali’s mind forever. Or they may also
be tears for Nejat’s childhood, when Ali was both father and mother to
the child, and their love, now lost, seemed complete. It is precisely this
childhood fantasy that Nejat presents to Susanne at the window of his
Istanbul flat – of a time and truth he had forgotten: that his father’s love
for him transcended all.
Nejat sheds no tears here. But he wants to make good a lack, and he’s
no different from the film’s other characters in this respect. Perhaps most
acutely, Nejat makes plain the desire of all of The Edge of Heaven’s char-
acters not only for love, but for ‘a fusion of self and world’ (Neale, 1986,
p. 18). This fantasy, as Neale indicates, remains narcissistic. But it is not
driven by narcissism alone. Desire, as Fassbinder shows, is implicated
in, not separate to history. What melodrama tries to make legible is the
contingency of unsatisfactory social arrangements. In this way, the tears
of melodrama can be read not only as sentiment, but as a ‘demand for an
unspecified elsewhere’ (Zarzosa, 2010, p. 401). This, argues Neale, char-
acterizes film melodrama regardless of the status of its ending. Because
melodrama knows best that ‘the founding object of any wish is always
already elsewhere’ (Neale, 1986, p. 21).

References
Anon (2006) ‘Book of the Month Review: Die Tochter des Schmieds’ (anonymous
reviewer), Goethe Institut at: http://archive.is/7WLn
Ball, A. (2008) ‘Between a Postcolonial Nation and Fantasies of the Feminine: The
Contested Visions of Palestinian Cinema’, Camera Obscura 23(3): 1–33.
Bayrakdar, D. (2009) ‘Turkish Cinema and the New Europe: At the Edge of
Heaven’ in D. Bayrakdar (ed.) Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the
New Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars).
Berghahn, D. (2006) ‘No Place Like Home? Or Impossible Homecomings in the
Films of Fatih Akin’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4(3): 141–157.
Brooks, P. (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama
and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press).
Burgoyne, R. (1994) ‘National Identity, Gender Identity, and the ‘Rescue Fantasy’
in Born on the Fourth of July’, Screen 35(3): 211–234.
222 Michael Stewart

Doane, M. A. (1987) ‘The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address’ in C. Gledhill (ed.)
Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI).
Dönmez-Colin, G. (2008) Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging (London:
Reaktion).
Eleftheriotis, D., Pratt, M. and Vanni, I. (2007) ‘Unhomely Europes’, Portal:
Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4(2): 1–12.
Elsaesser, T. (2008) ‘Ethical Calculus’, Film Comment 44(3): 34–37.
Flitterman-Lewis (1994) ‘The Blossom and the Bole: Narrative and Visual
Spectacle in Early Film Melodrama’, Cinema Journal 33(3): 3–15.
Freud (1962) ‘A Special Type of Object Choice Made By Men’, Standard Edition
(London: Hogarth Press).
Gillman (1992) ‘Rescue Fantasies and the Secret Benefactor’, The Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child 47: 279–298.
Gramling, D. (2010) ‘On the Other Side of Monolingualism: Fatih Akin’s
Linguistic Turn(s)’, The German Quarterly 83(3): 353–372.
Higson, A. (1986) ‘Film Acting and Independent Cinema’, Screen 27(3–4): 110–132.
Kjd (2009) ‘Review: Die Tochter des Schmieds’, Love German Books (4 January 2009) at:
http://lovegermanbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/die-tochter-des-schmieds.html
McCormick (1991) ‘Fassbinder’s Reality: An Imitation of Life’ in M. Landy (ed.)
Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press).
Mutman, M. (2009) ‘Up Against the Wall of the Signifier: Gegen die Wand’ in
M. Christensen and N. Erdogan (eds) Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in
European Context (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars).
Naiboglu, G. (2010) ‘“Sameness” in Disguise of “Difference”? Gender and
National Identity in Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite’,
German As a Foreign Language 3: 75–98.
Neale, S. (1986) ‘Melodrama and Tears’, Screen 27(6): 6–22.
Özdogan, S. (2005) Die Tochter des Schmieds (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag).
Porton, R. (2007) ‘Communiqués: The Cannes Film Festival’, Cineaste 32(4): 71–73.
Rings, G. (2008) ‘Blurring or Shifting Boundaries? Concepts of Culture in
Turkish-German Migrant Cinema’, German As A Foreign Language 1: 6–39.
Rothman, W. (2004) ‘Pathos and Transfiguration in the Face of the Camera:
A Reading of Stella Dallas’ in W. Rothman The ‘I’ of the Camera (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Schlipphacke, H. (2006) ‘Melodrama’s Other: Entrapment and Escape in the
Films of Tom Tykwer’, Camera Obscura 21(2): 109–142.
Silvey, V. and Hillman, R. (2010) ‘Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven)
and the Widening Periphery’, German As A Foreign Language 3: 99–116.
Skvirsky, S. A. (2008) ‘The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven
Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven’, Cinema Journal 47(3): 90–121.
Steele, J. (2010) ‘Diasporic, Exilic and Accented Cinema: The Case of The Edge
of Heaven’, Cultural Zeitgeist blogspot, 23 October 2010, at: http://cultural
zeitgeist.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=the+edge+of+heaven#!/2010/10/diasporic-
exilic-and-accented-cinema.html
Williams, L. (1987) ‘“Something Else Besides a Mother”: Stella Dallas and the
Maternal Melodrama’ in C. Gledhill (ed.) Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in
Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI).
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New Review of Film and Television Studies 8(4): 396–411.
13
Framing a Hybrid Tradition:
Realism and Melodrama in
About Elly
Taraneh Dadar

Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 film Darbareye Elly/About Elly starts with a strip
of light on a pitch-black screen. The small fissure of light at the top
center of the screen is repeatedly obstructed, while the film’s credits
appear in the lower left corner of the frame. The fissure then morphs
into the light at the end of a tunnel, through which a group of friends
are driving fast and shouting exuberantly, ahead of a weekend holiday
by the Caspian Sea. The fissure of light, we later learn, is a money slot
in a roadside charity box, into which Elly, the eponymous character of
the film, inserts some bank notes in a bid to keep the group safe during
their trip.1 Elly, however, goes missing in the sea early on the film, and
never returns.
The mischievous interplay of light and darkness perhaps foreshadows
the tragedy to come, but more importantly, it provides an apt opening
for a film that is thematically and stylistically obsessed with the ambiva-
lent nature of truth, and with the pervasiveness of ambiguity. We are
ushered into the narrative from the limited view inside a charity box,
and the film’s insistence on recording the vagaries of life, even during
emotionally charged scenes, does not always provide a much clearer
view. The film’s obsession with the ambivalence of truth, I suggest, com-
plicates the melodramatic potential of the narrative despite its affective
power, and is partly communicated through the film’s objective real-
ism. The film provides a space where the two modes of realism and
melodrama meet and coexist. This space, I argue, is characterized by the
moral ambivalence that governs the narrative’s universe despite its crea-
tion of highly charged emotional states and situations; this hybrid space
also thrives on Farhadi’s creation of a realist excess that accommodates
and mobilizes the affective power of the narrative. This chapter sets out
to examine this realist excess, tracing it in the film’s mise-en-scène, spatial
223
224 Taraneh Dadar

and temporal construction and use of sound. I argue that movement

and dialogue are central to the film’s realist excess.
The idea of excess has been at the heart of studies of melodrama; Peter
Brooks (1995) famously termed melodrama the ‘mode of excess’ in
his seminal study of nineteenth-century melodramas, which has been
extremely pertinent to issues around the mode in film theory. Brooks
located this melodramatic excess in the mode’s fundamental ‘desire to
express all’ (p. 4) and argued that such excess sought to ‘make the world
morally legible’ (p. 5). This chapter retains the focus on the notion of
‘excess’ within the melodramatic mode in which About Elly functions,
but locates it in the film’s objective realism. The chapter argues that
the idea of expressivity in About Elly manifests itself in the film’s realist,
rather than melodramatic, excess. In its articulation of the moral and
ethical complexities of modern Iran, the realist excess of the film under-
mines the moral legibility typically associated with the melodramatic
mode, while functioning to incite and accommodate pathos.
This chapter argues that About Elly emerged from, and moved beyond,
a tradition of social realist melodramas in Iran, which have complicated
a perceived dichotomy of art/popular cinema within the country. It will
highlight how About Elly borrows, but also distances itself, from the
neo-realist project associated with New Iranian Cinema, by operating
within the melodramatic mode, as well as a shift in class focus. I will
situate this give-and-take process within a strong tradition of social
realist melodramas in post-revolutionary Iran, where the realist tradi-
tion of New Iranian Cinema has come into dialogue with the dominant
melodramatic mode governing the majority of the cinematic output of
the country.2 The realist-melodramatic mode that Farhadi mobilizes in
About Elly is a continuation of his earlier work in Shahr-e Ziba/ Beautiful
City (2004) and Chaharshanbe Soori/Fireworks Wednesday (2006), and one
that he perfected in Jodayi-e Nader az Simin/A Separation (2011), a film
that won him, and Iranian cinema, a much-celebrated first Oscar.
Inside Iran, About Elly won massive critical acclaim and did extremely
well at the box office – a success that some critics attributed to its melo-
dramatic elements. Outside Iran, the film found appreciation only after
the huge success of Farhadi’s later film, A Separation (2011). Both films
were welcomed for the break they offered from the classical examples
of New Iranian Cinema, particularly in terms of Farhadi’s approach to
issues such as gender and class. While the above-mentioned tradition
of social realist melodramas had scrupulously examined both issues,3
examples of such films were relatively rare at international film festi-
vals, which partly explains the freshness of Farhadi’s subject matter to
 Framing a Hybrid Tradition 225

Western film critics. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (2012), for example,
wrote that Farhadi’s challenging of the sexual politics of contemporary
Iran sets him apart from the older generation of Iranian (male) auteurs,
namely Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami. Perhaps more
significantly, though, Farhadi changed the class horizons of Iranian
cinema as represented internationally. As Nicholas Barber (2012) argued
in a review of About Elly in The Independent, ‘after a run of Iranian films
that presented the country’s inhabitants as essentially medieval, Farhadi
draws attention to those comfortable liberals who wear Nike tops and
carry Louis Vuitton bags’. A detailed examination of Farhadi’s explora-
tion of class and gender is beyond the scope of this chapter, but this
study remains mindful of how the film’s negotiation of gender and class
has contributed to its general social verisimilitude.

Melodrama, realism and the New Iranian Cinema

What is now known as the New Iranian Cinema in Western film circles
gradually established itself by the end of the 1980s as a solid national cin-
ema with strong counter-cinema and neo-realist tendencies. Many early
post-revolutionary Iranian films celebrated in international film festivals
were supported by the state-run Institute for the Intellectual Development
of Children and Young Adults. These films had strong formalist preoc-
cupations and a realist agenda. Some of the salient stylistic features of
New Iranian Cinema included natural, mostly rural, locations, non-
professional actors, blurring lines between reality and fiction, abundant
use of long-shots, real-time durations, freeze frames, lack of P.O.V shots,
repetitive structures and an allegorical language which was adopted to
circumvent state censorship (Chaudhuri and Finn, 2003; Mottahedeh,
2006). Authorial commentary, distanciation and reflexivity were also com-
mon traits of New Iranian Cinema, particularly in the works of perhaps
the best-known auteur of this cinema, Abbas Kiarostami (Tasker, 2013).
New Iranian Cinema has thus frequently been compared with Italian
neo-realism, in particular, as well as with other modernist and naturalist
cinemas. Iranian cinema, consciously or unconsciously, embraced many
of the stylistic devices of Bazanian neo-realism to cope with the Islamized
cinematic language that it was expected to adopt following the 1979 revo-
lution (Chaudhuri and Finn, 2003; Mottahedeh, 2006). It is important
to remember that this post-revolutionary Islamization project imposed
state control on Iranian cinema, but also offered it financial support for
growth and experimentation (Naficy, 2002). Women were at the heart of
this Islamization project, and imposed veiling comprised a central tenet
226 Taraneh Dadar

of the post-revolutionary Islamized aesthetic, which posed serious threats

to the objective realism of Iranian films. While films on the popular end
of the spectrum tended to opt for the ‘unrealistic’ option of showing
women veiled at the middle-class home, those on the art house side of
the spectrum – read New Iranian Cinema – transported their narratives
to rural locations, where veiled women in long-shots were objectively
realistic (Naficy, 1994; Mottahedeh, 2004). A narrative focus on children
also helped New Iranian Cinema directors cope with the modesty codes of
post-revolutionary cinema.
New Iranian Cinema is also overdetermined by its position as the
successor of the Iranian New Wave of the late 1960s (Poudeh and
Shirvani, 2008; Gow, 2011). Many of the stylistic features character-
ized with New Iranian Cinema had already been developed by its
predecessor Iranian New Wave, and, as Chris Gow suggests, the Islamic
revolution could be seen as an ‘interruption’ of the creative renaissance
that had begun in the Iranian cinema since the 1960s, rather than a
‘catalyst’ (2011, p. 3).
It is important, however, to note that New Iranian Cinema comprises
a minority of the annual film output of Iran. According to Hamid
Naficy (2012), in the first decade after the Islamic Revolution, art films
comprised ‘perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the national output’ (p. 173).
Very little scholarly attention has been given to the vast majority of
mainstream films produced in Iran, most of which have traditionally
functioned within the melodramatic mode (Solhjoo, 1999).
This chapter is informed by an understanding of melodrama as a
modality rather than a distinctive genre, as proposed by a number of
scholars in their revised views on melodrama (Gledhill, 1987; Williams,
1998; Gledhill, 2000; Neale, 2003). According to Gledhill, melodrama in
Hollywood cinema functions as ‘a culturally conditioned mode of per-
ception and aesthetic articulation’ (Gledhill, 2000, p. 227). The notion
of modality, Gledhill argues, ‘defines a specific mode of aesthetic articu-
lation adaptable across a range of genres, across decades, and across
national cultures’ (2000, p. 229). This chapter adopts a similar approach to
Iranian cinema, and understands melodrama as a mode of expression
that operates across a variety of productions in Iranian cinema, rather
than a distinctive genre. The frequently overlapping realms of comedy
and melodrama in Iranian cinema, both before and after the revolution,
serve as evidence for the value of this approach. Such an approach shifts
the focus away from specific generic forms towards an examination of
pathos across genres.
 Framing a Hybrid Tradition 227

Deeply intertwined with discussions around the realism of New Iranian

Cinema, are debates over its status as art cinema. In a critical account
that calls for a more inclusive view of New Iranian Cinema, Chris Gow
(2011) posits that post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been deemed
as ‘quintessential art cinema’ in Europe and North America, and as such
has frequently been compared to various post-war cinematic movements
in Europe. This, he suggests, is partially justifiable as in Iran, just like
in Europe after the Second World War, social and political upheavals
led to artistic revival. But, as he explains, this should not gloss over the
traditions and influences that preceded these cinemas. Gow examines
how Abbas Kiarostami’s work exhibits the stylistic devices and narrative
principles of art cinema, vigorously theorized by David Bordwell (2002).
Bordwell identifies realism, authorship and ambiguity as three main
characteristics of art cinema, and Kiarostami’s work in particular has
traditionally displayed an investment in all of these areas.
Eleftheria Thanouli (2009), however, criticizes the fact that New Iranian
Cinema frequently gets identified as a renaissance of art cinema, arguing
that the label art cinema glosses over a number of Iranian cinema’s dis-
tinctive qualities.4 In fact, she uses the example of New Iranian Cinema to
challenge David Bordwell’s conceptualization of art cinema as a histori-
cal mode of narration (1985). She contends that critics are ‘misled by the
objective realism of these films (location shooting, natural sound and
lighting etc.) as well as the lack of dialogue that can easily pass off as
“ambiguity”’. She also points out that Iranian films that traditionally
make it to Western film festivals exhibit a ‘monumental lack of dramatic
intensity’, an observation that the recent success of Iranian realist melo-
dramas will challenge.
This chapter is not concerned with whether or not New Iranian
Cinema should be classified as ‘art cinema’. It merely intends to use the
space opened up by the above debates to locate the dialogue between
realist and melodramatic modes that characterizes About Elly. Of course,
one has to address the ambiguities of the term ‘realist’ before proceeding
to a discussion of this hybrid space. Discussing narration in art cinema,
David Bordwell (1985) differentiates between the realism of a classic
film where ‘reality is assumed to be a tacit coherence among events, a
consistency and clarity of individual identity’ and the dedramatizing
realism of art cinema, where different aesthetic conventions capture
the ‘aleatoric world of “objective” reality and the fleeting states that
characterize “subjective” reality’ (p. 206). The art film’s reality, Bordwell
suggests, roughly corresponds to neo-realism, as articulated by André
228 Taraneh Dadar

Bazin (1967), who favored stylistic devices such as deep focus and the
long take to indicate the continuum of space and time:

The mise-en-scene may emphasize verisimilitude of behavior as well

as verisimilitude of space (e.g., location shooting, non-Hollywood
lighting schemes) or time (e.g., the temp mort in a conversation.
(Bordwell, 1985 p. 206)

Bordwell does not prioritize any of these realisms over the other; he
merely states that they are ‘two different canons of realistic motivation’,
two different ways of justifying ‘particular compositional options and
effects’ (p. 206). While realistic motivation in the classic film upholds
compositional motivation through cause and effect, realism in art
cinema prompts a loosening of causal relationships. He proposes that
while classic realism is interested in situations and plots, art cinema
realism invests in observation and character psychology.
There are however a number of problems with such a binary under-
standing of realism. One, as Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment
(2000) have pointed out, is that both of these assumptions depend on a
model of realism predicated on a Hollywood paradigm. What is at stake
in these processes of critical differentiation is a relatively large number
of films that fall into the grey area between the two realisms – texts
that invest in detailed observation of location and character, while also
maintaining compositional motivation. The realist excess that I am
arguing for in About Elly falls into one such grey area that holds the
seeds of melodrama. This realist excess entails an obsessive investment
in objective verisimilitude, while still displaying an interest in causal
relationships. The verisimilitude of behavior on the one hand mobilizes
the film’s affective power, while on the other hand it diminishes the
excess associated with the melodramatic mode.

The story of a disappearance

About Elly narrates the story of a group of young middle-class Tehranis,

all friends from their university days, who plan to take a weekend
holiday by the Caspian Sea. The group consists of three couples and
their children, a young divorcee called Ahmad who has just returned
from Germany, and a female kindergarten teacher called Elly, who is
the outsider of the party. Elly has been invited by Sepideh, the mother
of her pupil and one of the wives, who hopes to set her up with
Ahmad.
 Framing a Hybrid Tradition 229

Throughout the film, Elly remains an enigma. Little is known about

her beside her profession, and the fact that that she has a sickly mother
about whom she is worried. Elly is rather shy when the rest of this lively
group giggle and joke about her and Ahmad, but when the two go out
to run an errand, she coyly talks about her family and asks Ahmad
about his divorce.
The first day of the trip is spent in jovial carelessness: by the first
night the friends all seem to like Elly, a fact that they voice in individual
private conversations. Almost one third of the way into the film, the
jovial mood changes after one of the children nearly drowns in the sea.
Following a highly affective suspense scene in which the group searches
and finally rescues the missing child, the friends realize that Elly is miss-
ing. The rest of the film has the characters speculating about Elly, the
nature of her disappearance, and later her moral status.
Trying to find Elly’s relatives, the group finds a number on her mobile
phone, which turns out to belong to Elly’s fiancé. In a society deeply
invested in the values of female modesty, this discovery leads to the char-
acters changing their moral perceptions of Elly, even while they are still
unclear about her fate. Throughout the film’s many conversations, the
characters frequently lie to each other and to outsiders, and concoct new
lies when the old ones are exposed. It is revealed that Sepideh was aware
of the fact that Elly had a fiancé, but she chose not to tell anyone about it.
Sepideh tells the group that Elly intended to leave her fiancé, but he had
been persistent and refused to let go. Sepideh also tells the group that she
had had difficulty convincing Elly to join them, and that Elly had accepted
only after Sepideh told her that Ahmad was leaving for Germany soon,
and this would be their only chance to make an initial acquaintance.
When Elly’s fiancé shows up at the villa, the party is faced with a
moral dilemma over what version of truth to present him with. Mostly,
they are concerned about their own moral image, should the fiancé
accuse them of trying to set up Elly with a man, despite the knowledge
that she was engaged. In the end, coerced by everyone else in the group,
Sepideh tells the fiancé that Elly had not mentioned him before decid-
ing to join the party and meet Ahmad. The opaque ending of the film
involves the fiancé being shown the body of a dead woman whom he is
asked to identify. The face of the dead woman is half covered, and she
has some resemblance to Elly, though we are given no assurances. The
fiancé looks at the dead body, refuses to say anything and merely cries
and walks away, indicating that the body belongs to Elly. The final scene
has Sepideh sitting alone in the villa kitchen, while the rest of the group
try to push a car that is stuck in coastal sand.
230 Taraneh Dadar

About Elly’s realist excess: movement, dialogue

and ambiguity

As the friends embark on what later proves to be a disastrous holiday,

the camera observes and records their movements with obsessive objec-
tive realism. This realism sometimes manifests itself in the occasional
scrutiny of details, while at other times it conveys a sense of simply
passing by the characters and recording their interactions. In his review
for The Independent, Nicholas Barber (2012) points to the film’s recrea-
tion of the ‘untidy detail of real life’, an observation to which I will
return in my discussion of the film’s realist excess.
I would like to argue that movement is a key part of this realist aes-
thetic, both movements within the frame, as well as those of a restless
camera, constantly moving from one character to another, and setting
its pace with that of the narrative. Even on the few occasions where the
characters are still, the camera records movements in the background:
those relating to nature or of objects. Early on in the film, the group
stops to have lunch on the way. As Elly takes the children away to wash
their faces, the adults make inquiries about her. Farhadi’s hyperactive
camera alternates between long takes of characters walking and speak-
ing to each other, and fleeting pauses on single characters, mostly on
Sepideh, the unacknowledged leader of the group. One such pause
shows Sepideh laughing, almost still, against a background of trees.
Here, the movement of the leaves in the wind subtly replaces human
movement to maintain the film’s overall kinetic energy.
Examples of this type of kinetic energy within the shots are abun-
dant. Slightly later in the film, the group stops at the house of a local
family, to get the keys to the villa they usually book for their weekend
getaways. It turns out that the villa is full, and that Sepideh was well
aware of this, but was optimistically hoping that something would
work out, a tendency that she displays at various other occasions in
the film. Sepideh goes into a room with the local family to discuss the
possibility of renting another villa. Here, deep focus reveals layers of
movement, with Sepideh and the locals in the foreground, and her
friends visible through a window in the background. When Sepideh
gets the key to another villa, she and the local women leave the shot.
Here, the background is brought into sharp focus, revealing another
layer of movement, that of the friends conducting a heated debate
behind the window, although their voices are not heard clearly. Such
use of the deep focus, famously favored by Bazin (1967) as a means of
creating greater objective realism, occurs on several other occasions
 Framing a Hybrid Tradition 231

in the film, and is used as a means of maintaining the kinetic energy

within the shot.
A large part of these movements in the background are not really
significant for the plot and seem merely to contribute to the film’s
realist aesthetic, its ‘untidy detail of real life’, to borrow Barber’s term
again (2012). Far from the freeze frames of New Iranian Cinema, the
camera in About Elly is hyperactive, invested in a documentary-like
recording of the events. Much of the action happens in the long-
shot, a technique reminiscent of New Iranian Cinema, and one that
particularly features in the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Most shots are
populated with several characters, the majority of whom are film stars
in Iran. However, the camera rarely closes in on these stars ( Jahed,
2011). Rare close-ups suit the aesthetic economy of a film that is
populated with so many actors, all of whom play a significant role in
driving the plot forward. Elly herself features in a few medium shots,
but is mostly framed together with a group, or is only marginally in
the shot. An exception to this, however, is the sequence just before
she disappears, where the camera closely follows her running along
the coast flying a kite.
A large chunk of the film is shot on hand-held camera. In an inter-
view with Iranian critic Amir Pouria, published in E’temad newspaper
(2009), director Asghar Farhadi speaks about how his camerawork
mirrors the narrative mood. While the film’s initial scenes of carefree
joy were shot on tripod, Farhadi says, the subsequent scenes of uncer-
tainty and distress, particularly after Elly’s disappearance, were shot
on hand-held camera (E’temad, 2009). This careful use of hand-held
camera has functioned to add immediacy, energy, tension and urgency
to the film, and enhanced its documentary-like investment in details,
thus contributing to its realist excess. Particularly in the breathtaking
rescue sequence, the sense of immediacy that the hand-held camera
creates, coupled with fast cutting, massively enhances the film’s affective
power. Elsewhere, as the camera follows the characters in their endless
discussions around the beach house, the urgency and tension of the
hand-held camera has a suturing effect. In fact, my own experience of
viewing the film compared to that of becoming embroiled in family
drama unfolding around a dinner table.
In a departure from the self-reflexivity of the New Iranian Cinema,
About Elly shows no inclination to create any aesthetic distance between
the filmic text and the viewer. Emotional identification created with
fictional characters is rather hybrid, it moves from one character to
another as the camera follows them around the rooms of the villa and on
232 Taraneh Dadar

the beach. A general lack of shot/reverse-shots has further contributed

to this hybridity.
Most of the film is set in a battered villa by the Caspian Sea, which
Sepideh finally manages to rent after her negotiations with the locals.
In his earlier mentioned interview with E’temad newspaper (2009),
Farhadi notes that he wanted the film’s location to be ‘bare’, in order
to not shift the focus away from the characters. In achieving this, he
insisted that the color of the walls be as neutral as possible,

I wanted it to be very bare. I did not want it to convey any particular

sense of a warm or lively place, or a cold and soulless one. I wanted
it to be bare, so that you could see the people better and more.
(E’temad, 2009)

Writing in 1994 about Iranian Cinema, Bill Nichols noted a ‘laconic,

almost biblical form of dialogue’ in the Iranian films that made it to
Western film festivals at the time (1994, p. 26). In a departure from such
laconicism, About Elly utilizes an abundance of dialogue to advance its
realist excess. This sonic realism is further intensified by the film’s reli-
ance on background sound, often of the sea, and by its lack of extra-
diegetic music. In discussing American family melodrama, Thomas
Elsaesser (1987) argues that sound gives an ‘illusion of depth’ to the
moving image. He notes:

Sound, whether musical or verbal, acts first of all to give the illusion
of depth to the moving image, and by helping to create the third
dimension of the spectacle, dialogue becomes a scenic element, along
with more directly visual means of the mise-en-scene. (Elsaesser,
1987, p. 51)

I would like to argue that such scenic function of the dialogue becomes
particularly pertinent to the realist-melodramatic space created by About
Elly. The characters are constantly talking, either to each other or all at
once. Similar to the constant movement of characters within the frame,
the profuse dialogues are also not always crucial to plot development,
but rather serve the film’s realist excess.
The only piece of extra-diegetic music in the film comes just before
the closing credits; it is played over the sound of the sea and a long
shot of the characters trying to push the car out of the sand, away from
the water. In the absence of any kind of extra-diegetic music, abundant
dialogues complement the film’s realistic mise-en-scène, and contribute
 Framing a Hybrid Tradition 233

to its melodramatic tension. Throughout the film, dialogue creates an

impression of chaos, a restlessness heightened by the sound of the sea
often heard in the background. This chaos is punctuated in the begin-
ning and the end by two moments of hysteria. The film starts with a
continuous jubilant scream, which, seconds later, we learn is coming
from the passengers of a car. From one moment of ineffable hysteria,
the film moves, through the chaos of its constant dialogues, to conclude
in another moment of ineffability: Having identified a woman’s dead
body as Elly, her fiancé drives back to Tehran carrying Elly’s bag and
mumbling to himself. The audience has not been shown the face of the
deceased woman clearly, and so the narrative has not reached closure.
This final moment of ineffability articulates the ambivalence govern-
ing the narrative, thus further contributing to the realist-melodramatic
project of the film.
Yet despite the abundance of words, much of the narrative revolves
around the unsaid, and remains evasive about answering many of the
questions that it poses. Peter Brooks (1995) argues that a fundamen-
tal characteristic of the melodramatic mode seems to be a ‘desire to
express all’ (p. 4). ‘Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid’,
Brooks notes (1995, p. 4). About Elly’s expressivity, its over-investment
in dialogue, however, rather seems to strive to gloss over the inherent
reticence of the narrative. Ironically, the abundance of dialogue only
advances the ambiguity of the film.
After Elly’s disappearance, the narrative takes a keen interest in the
‘truth’ about her. The quest to find this truth starts with the question
of what actually happened to her: whether she really drowned, or
whether she just left the villa, given her insistence on leaving early.
This becomes more complicated, and more driven by moral judgment,
when it emerges that Elly was engaged. From then on, presenting Elly
in moral terms becomes the central preoccupation of many characters
in the film. Peter Brooks writes:

One of the most immediately striking features of melodrama is the

extent to which characters tend to say, directly and explicitly, their
moral judgments of the world. (Brooks, 1995, p. 36)

On the surface, About Elly is teeming with such moral judgments:

characters are quick to voice – and voice again – their ever-changing
views of Elly. But despite all the noise, a certain ineffability lingers
throughout the narrative, an evasiveness shared by the characters and
the narrative in general. The conversation below, between Sepideh and
234 Taraneh Dadar

Elly’s fiancé, is symptomatic of the narrative’s evasiveness despite the

abundance of dialogue. Toward the end of the film, Elly’s fiancé wants
to know whether Elly had mentioned him to Sepideh, after the latter
asked her to meet her single friend, Ahmad. The audience knows from
earlier discussions among the friends that Elly had indeed told Sepideh
about her fiancé, but had agreed to join them only because of Sepideh’s
persistence. The group, however, asks Sepideh to lie about her prior
knowledge of the engagement, in order to save face. In the scene, the
two characters are alone in a kitchen. Elly’s fiancé (EF) is standing close
to the door, towering over Sepideh (S), who is almost pushed to a corner
of the kitchen, seated and forced to provide a straight answer.

EF: When you told her to come and meet your friend, did she not say
anything?
S: Can I say something beforehand? Elly ...
EF: Look, Ma’am, I just want to know one thing. Please sit down.
Either Yes or No. When you told her to come ...
S: Look
EF: When you told her to come, did she not say no? Did she not say
I have a fiancé, I have someone? Did she or did she not?
S: Look, really, she too …
EF: Look, Ma’am. This is really important to me. I have spent three
years of my life on this. I have spent everything I had …
S: Could you also sit down for a moment?
EF: Did she not say no? (He is crying)
Sepideh looks away and refuses to answer.
EF: Did she or did she not?
S: No, [she pauses slightly] she did not, (looking away).

Sepideh’s last sentence is made up of two words in Persian, which trans-

late as ‘No’ and ‘She did not say’, with a pause between the two words.
When translated into English, this two-word sentence seems flat and
loses the double-edged quality of the original Persian. The ambiguity of
Sepideh’s response is more pronounced in Persian, where her response
could alternatively be read to say: ‘She did not say No’.
Despite the evasiveness, About Elly is primarily driven by enigma,
and thus fascinated by questions and answers. In the jubilant first
night of their stay in the villa, the friends play a game of charades.
Organized around a series of shot/reverse-shots, the characters panto-
mime various clues in order to string together sentences or phrases. As
one of the few occasions where the viewers and the characters within
 Framing a Hybrid Tradition 235

the film receive the answers to their questions, the game foregrounds
the textual preoccupation with the question–answer narrative, and
draws attention to the narrative’s refusal to adhere to this model in
many other occasions in the film.5 The scene also consciously draws
attention to the problematic relationship between the film’s expres-
sivity, and its inherent ineffability. Discussing the metaphoricity of
gesture in nineteenth-century melodrama, Brooks writes:

We may already be struck by the seeming paradox that the total

expressivity assigned to gesture is related to the ineffability of what is
to be expressed. Gesture is read as containing such meanings because
it is postulated as the metaphorical approach to what cannot be said.
(Brooks, 1995, pp. 10–11)

The moral universe of About Elly is constructed not just as ambivalent,

but also as highly temporal. Questions about Elly’s moral values drive
the film toward a polarity of good and evil, a dichotomy that has
tremendous melodramatic potential; but the film’s construction of a
melodramatic polarity remains highly equivocal. The characters concoct
one little lie after another, to each other and to outsiders, while they
continue to offer contradicting moral judgments about Elly. But even
as the moral positioning of the characters becomes a dominant theme,
particularly in the second half of the film, the narrative consciously alters
the melodramatic vision by structuring an ambivalent world, where the
character’s reactions to events are constructed as highly temporal. Each
new revelation about Elly shifts the characters’ moral position on her,
highlighting the temporality and transience of the text’s morality, and
thus complicating its melodramatic potential.
The ambivalent melodramatic world of the film is highlighted and
reinforced by its ending, where the narrative only provides an oblique
answer to the question driving the plot forward. Earlier in the film,
Ahmad uses a German expression to explain the reason for his divorce
to Elly. Translated into English, the expression reads: ‘It is better to
make a painful break than to continue with the agony’. About Elly’s
opaque ending leaves it to the viewer to decide which one of those two
routes they, and the characters in the film, want to take.
About Elly celebrates a hybrid place where realist and melodramatic
modes intersect and come into dialogue. This chapter has argued that
the film creates this realist-melodramatic space through a mise-en-scène
of realist excess, one that relies heavily on movement and dialogue.
While the film’s realist excess is distinctive, it can be situated within
236 Taraneh Dadar

a tendency in Iranian cinema to employ a social realist melodramatic

mode. This mode, developed through the work of the likes of Rakhshan
Bani Etemad, Rasoul Sadr Aameli, Ali Zhekan, Jaffar Panahi and Daryush
Mehrjui, was defined by the reforming drive of these filmmakers.
Their project combined an urge to explore the complexities of modern
Iranian life, with a determination to push the boundaries of what is
representable within the limits of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.

Notes
1. Donating money to a roadside charity box is a cultural habit in Iran believed
to keep individuals safe from various mishaps.
2. Particularly in the late 1990s and 2000s with the relative liberties that the
reformist era (1997–2005) offered Iranian cinema, a brand of social realist
melodramas emerged that focused on women, youth and the previously
absent realistic representation of a variety of urban problems. The works of
Daryush Mehrjui, Rakhshan Bani Etemad, Asghar Farhadi can roughly be
placed in this category. An earlier example of this dialogue between realism
and melodrama could be located in Ali Zhekan’s Maadian/The Mare (1986).
3. Examples of academic attention to this category includes Michelle Langford’s
study of filmmaker Tahmineh Milani’s Fereshteh trilogy (2010), and Laura
Mulvey’s exploration of realism and melodrama in Rakhshan Bani Etemad’s
Under the Skin of the City (2010).
4. Quoting Nichols (1994), Thanouli points to an austere style and inferential
form of storytelling as some of the distinctive qualities of Iranian cinema.
5. Noel Carroll’s ‘erotetic’ theory of narrative (1996) posits a question–answer
model in the narrative form of films, whereby succeeding events answer
questions raised by preceding events, and pose further questions for the nar-
rative; in other words, the narrative is driven forward by constant raising of
questions, answering them, and raising further questions. Carroll is of course
quick to acknowledge exceptions, among them modernist exercises, to his
narrative theory. Carroll also makes a distinction between macro and micro
questions, as a way of organizing the narrative. He suggests that a sense
of closure is achieved when all the macro-questions in the film have been
answered. While About Elly provides all but an opaque response to its macro-
question, it also throws a number of micro-questions, only some of which are
answered by the narrative.

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Solhjoo, T. (1999) ‘Melodrama: the Main Genre in the Iranian Cinema’, Film
International: Iranian Film Quarterly, 7 (1): 49–52.
Tasker, Y. (2013) Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (London: Routledge).
Thanouli, E. (2009) ‘“Art Cinema” Narration: Breaking Down a Wayward
Paradigm’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, 14.
Williams, L. (1998) ‘Melodrama Revised’ in N. Browne (ed.) Refiguring American
Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Index

A Bellochio, Marco, 153–169, see also Vincere

Abbott, Stacey, 98–99 Belsey, Catherine, 117
About Elly, see Darbareye Elly/About Elly Berlusconi, Silvio, 165
advertising revenues, 66 Berresford, Josh, 105
aesthetics of television drama, 42–44 Bersani, Leo, 100, 104
Akin, Fatih, 207, 212, 217, 218, 219 Bhatt, Prashant, 74
Albino, Benito, 154, 155 Bildungsroman, 35
Almodovar, Pedro, 184 ‘The Binding of Isaac,’ 193
American film melodrama, Biopic, see Vincere
see also Two Lovers Bishonen, 138
superficial realism of, 200 The Blacksmith’s Daughter, see Die
Anderson, Gillian, 32 Tochter des Schmieds
Ang, Ien, 13, 74 Blakley, Claudie, 47
Ang Lee, 137 Bleak House (2005), 28, 30–34
Antamoro, Giulio, 167–168 The Blue Danube, 82
anti-melodramatic melodrama, Boddison, Martin, 46–47
157–158 Bollywood films, 70–72
Anti-Oedipus, 194 Bolygo, Balazs, 46, 49
Armitage, Richard, 38 Bordwell, David, 227–228
art films, Iranian cinema, 226, Bradshaw, Peter, 225
227–228 Brecht, 2
Ashkenazi, Lior, 191 Briefe von einen Unbekannte, see Letter
Ashkenazi Jews, 198 from an Unknown Woman
astrology, 62–63 British television drama, see Lark Rise
Auf Der Anderen Seite, see The Edge of to Candleford
Heaven Brokeback Mountain, 7–8
Austen, Jane, 27 Brontë, Charlotte, 27, 104
authorship, televisual, 123–125 Brooks, Peter, 3, 12, 29–30, 84, 115,
Avanti!, 155 157–158, 190, 224
Bugis Street, 138
B Buniyaad, 62
Backward Glances (Martin), 149 Burgoyne, Robert, 216
Balaji Telefilms, 62 Butler, Judith, 102
Balika Vadhu, 63, 68, 71, 75
Balukhatyi, Serguei, 154, 156–157 C
Barber, Nicholas, 225, 230, 231 cable and satellite (C&S) TV
Barthes, Roland, 119, 188 connections, 65–66
bashert, 199 Caldwell, John, 124–125
Baudrillard, Jean, 180 Camera Obscura, 7
Bazin, André, 227–228, 230–231 Candleford Green, 50
BBC production, see Lark Rise to Caughie, J., 44
Candleford Centre for the Intellectual Development
Bedi, Kiran, 65 of Children and Young Adults, 225

239
240 Index

Ceselli, Daniela, 155 Darbareye Elly/About Elly, 223–225

Chaharshanbe Soori/Fireworks camerawork, 230–232
Wednesday, 224 dialogues, 232–235
Chan, Kenneth, 9–11 extra-diegetic music, 232
Chang, Joseph, 139 moral universe, 235
Chase, David, 123, 125 question-answer narrative, 234–235
Chiang Kai-Shek, 142 realist excess, 230–236
Chinese diaspora, 136 set/location, 232
Chinese film melodrama, 135–151, story, 228–229
171–184 Dark Shadows, 98–99
cultural specificity, 136–137 Darshan, 67
family melodrama, 136 Davenport-Hines, Richard, 98
martial arts film, 137 David, Charlie, 104
transnational, 135–137 Davis, Phil, 30
Chopra, Aditya, 71 Davrak, Baki, 206
Chow, Rey, 147–148, 182 De, Shobhaa, 70
Christus, 167–168 Deleuze, G., 194–195
chronotopes, 43–44 Denby-Ashe, Daniela, 38
The Cinema Book (BFI), 1 Desai, Santosh, 64
Cipri, Daniel, 167 destiny, 189, see also Late Marriage;
citational and referential strategy, Two Lovers
158 Dickens, Charles, 27, 28–29, 30, 34,
Citizen Kane, 143 35, 40
classical television serials, 27–41 Die Tochter des Schmieds, 215–216
Bleak House (2005), 28, 30–34 Dissanayake, Wimal, 137
Little Dorrit (2008), 32–34, 36, 40 Diwali, 74, 76n14
North and South, 29, 32, 37–40 Doane, Mary Ann, 8–9, 53
Wives and Daughters (1999), 34–37 Don’t Stop Believing, 121
Clinton, Hilary, 114 Doordarshan, 61, 62, 64–66
Collins, Pauline, 30–31 Dostoyevsky, F., 197
Come Back, My Dear, 146–147 Douglas, Mary, 50
Corrigan, John, 123–124, 127 Dracula, 106
Corrigan, Maria, 123–124, 127 Duggan, Lisa, 101
Courtenay, Tom, 32 Du Maurier, Daphne, 104
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 137 Duncan, Pansy, 100–101, 108–110
Cultural Revolution of China, 174, Dussehra, 74, 76n13
182–183 Dye, William, 5
Dyer, Richard, 100
D Dynasty, 118
Dagleish, John, 48
Dalser, Ida, 153, see also Vincere E
Dance, Charles, 30 East Palace, West Palace, 137
Dante’s Cove, 99, 100–110 Eat Drink Man Woman, 137
emasculation in, 107–110 The Edge of Heaven, 205–221
eroticism in, 103–107 criticisms, 208–209
guilt and gay shame, 100–103 family structures, 217–221
hypermasculinity in, 103–107 fugue-ness, 205–208
penetration in, 107–110 kitchen-swansong scene, 210–211
tears in, 107–110 melodramatic debt, 215–217

mother–daughter doubling,
211–212
narratives, 212–215
rescue fantasy, 216
themes, 205–208
typed and trapped characters,
208–212
window scene, 212
egotistical fascination, 164
Elliott, Kamilla, 102
Elsaesser, Thomas, 83, 174–175,
205
emotional teleology, 156
emotions, rhetorical and structural
vectors of, 156–157
epic stories, 68
F 36, 37–40
Fading Away, 48
familial logic, 199
family melodramas, 62–63
Farewell My Concubine, 137
Far From Heaven, 7
Farhadi, Asghar, 223
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 2, 220
female homoeroticism, 149–150
feminist approach, 1–2
feminist film, 135
Feuer, Jane, 89, 118
film melodrama, 1–2
Chan on, 9–11
Darbareye Elly/About Elly, 223–225
Doane on, 8–9
The Edge of Heaven, 205–221
excesses, 2
Late Marriage, 189–195
Letter from an Unknown Woman,
171–184
modernist and globalized, 9–12
Neale on, 3–4
Needham on, 7–8
Peucker on, 11–12
Pidduck on, 7
Prince of Tears, 138–151
Singer on, 5
Two Lovers, 189–191, 195–200
Vincere, 153–169
Williams on, 4–5, 188
Zarzosa on, 5–7
Index 241
film noir, 85–86
Fleeing By Night, 9–10
Ford, Colton, 106
The Forsyte Saga, 56
Foucault, Michel, 108
Foy, Claire, 32
Freeman, Elizabeth, 150
French, Dawn, 47
Freud, Sigmund
on Heimlich, 219–220
on masochism, 111n9
on rescue fantasy, 216, 217
G
Gallagher, Bill, 46
Gandhi, Indira, 65
Gaskell, Elisabeth, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35,
Gay male anxieties, 96–110, see also
Dante’s Cove
Gay Shame conference, 100
Gender Trouble, 102
Geraghty, Christine, 28, 47
German film melodrama, see The Edge
of Heaven
Giora, Rachel, 89–90
Gladwell, Malcolm, 200
Gledhill, Christine, 28
on melodrama, 2–3, 135
on modality, 226
on soap opera, 13–14, 16
globalization, 9–13
Gothic soaps, see Queer Gothic soaps
Gow, Chris, 226, 227
Gramling, David, 205, 213, 214, 215
Gray, James, 197, 198, 199–200,
see also Two Lovers
Gripsrud, Jostein, 116, 118–119
Grossman, Andrew, 173
Guattari, F., 194–195
Guidi, Rachele, 155
H
Hallam, Julia, 228
Hallinan, Olivia, 44
Haneke, Michael, 11–12
Hanson, Ellis, 98
Happy Together, 137
Hard Times (Dickens), 35, 37
242 Index

Harrington, Richard, 30 realism of, 225–228

Harrison, M., 28–29 traits and features of, 225
Harwood, Kate, 45 irony, 89–90
Haynes, Todd, 8–9 Islamic Revolution, 226
HBO, 114 ISP, see Italian Socialist Party (ISP)
Head On, 219 Israeli film, see Late Marriage
Heimann, Nadine, 105 Italian melodrama, see Vincere
Heimlich, 219–220 Italian Socialist Party (ISP), 165
Here!TV, 101
heritage industry, of China, 182–183 J
hermeneutic codes, 119–120 Jacobowitz, Florence, 85–86
Higson, A., 207 Jane Eyre, 104
Hillman, R, 207, 212–213, 220 Jeetendra, 71
Hindu identity, 65 Jewish identity, 189–190, 199,
Hirschi, Steven, 106 see also Late Marriage; Two Lovers
Hogg, Sue, 45–46 Jiang Qing, 174
Hollywood Production Code, 176 Jingyuan Zhang, 173
Holocaust, 190 Jodayi-e Nader az Simin/A Separation,
Home Is Where the Heart Is, 135 224
homoeroticism, 149–150 Johar, Karan, 71
homonormativity, 101 John, Juliet, 40
homosexuality, see male The Joy Luck Club, 137
homosexuality Joyrich, Lynne, 14
Hong Kong film industry, 136
The Hours, 7 K
human suffering, 188 Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii, 62, 66–67
Hum Log (We People, 1984-85), 62 Kandell, Susan, 199–200
Kaplan, E. Ann, 172–173, 190
I Kapoor, Ekta, 62–63, 66, 71
Ideological State Apparatus, 42 Kermode, Frank, 118
ideology, 137 Kerr, Paul, 11
Il Popolo d’Italia, 155 Kiarostami, Abbas, 225, 227, 231
Indian family melodramas Kleinecke, Iris, 56, 57
Bollywood films on, 70–72 Korobov, Neill, 90
distinctiveness of, 66–70 Koshashvili, Dover, 189, see also Late
Doordarshan, 64–66 Marriage
emotions in, 72–74 Koshashvili, Lili, 191
excess in, 72–74 Kozloff, S., 43
rituals in, 74–75 Kraicer, Shelly, 183
international film festivals, 224–225 Kuhn, Annette, 171
Interview with the Vampire, 106 Kuomintang (KMT) government, 142
In the Mood for Love, 137, 173–174, 176 Kurtiz, Tuncel, 205
Iranian Cinema, 223–236 Kwan, Stanley, 147
art films, 226, 227–228 Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, 62
international film festivals and,
224–225 L
neo-realism and, 225 The Lair, 99–110, see also Dante’s Cove
post-revolutionary Islamization, Lam, George, 139
225–226 Lancashire, Sarah, 44, 47

Lan Yu, 9–10, 11, 137
Lario, Veronica, 165
Lark Rise to Candleford, 43, 44–58
HD cameras, 49
painterly quality, 47–51
rural England, 44–47
sets and locations, 44–47
topographies, 56–58
Late Marriage, 189–195
filial identity, 193
story, 191–194
trap, 194–195
Lawson, Denis, 30
Ledger, Sally, 29
Lee, William Gregory, 104
Le Mélodrame américain, 187
Letter from an Unknown Woman,
171–184
adaptation, 172
Europe in, 177–182
feminist character in, 173–174
plot, 171–172
rehallucination of Chinese past,
182–184
voiceover, 172
Little Dorrit (2008), 32–34, 36, 40
‘The Lonely Accordion,’ 139, 147
Lou Ye, 181
Lust, Caution, 173–174
Luzzatto, Sergio, 155
M Naiboglu, G., 208, 210, 212
MacDonald, Myra, 98
Macfadyen, Matthew, 32
Magnificent Obsession, 107
Mahabharat, 62, 65, 67, 68
Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 225
male homosexuality, 96–110,
see also Dante’s Cove
Male Subjectivity at the Margins
(Silverman), 190
Ma Ning, 136
Manthorpe, Jonathan, 142
Mao Zedong, 142, 174
Marshment, Margaret, 228
martial arts film, 137
Martin, Anna Maxwell, 30
Martin, Fran, 149–150
Mary Barton (Gaskell), 37
Index 243
McMahon, Julian, 81
McNamara, Mary, 126
melodrama, see specific melodrama
‘Melodrama Revised,’ 188
The Melodramatic Imagination (Brooks),
154, 190
Mezzogiorno, Giovanna, 159
Michaels, Gregory, 104
Miller, D. A., 108
Misra, Neelesh, 63
Mittell, Jason, 120
Modleski, Tania, 13
modulating system, 5–6
Moltke, Alexandra, 99
morality, 12
moral occult, 160
moral polarization, 34
Morretti, David, 106
Morretti, Franco, 106, 108
Moshonov, Moni, 191, 199
Mulligan, Carey, 30, 31
Mulvey, Laura, 1–2, 43
Mussolini, Benito, 153, see also Vincere
Mussolini’s Marriage (Zeni), 155
Mussolini’s Secret, 154
Mussolini’s Secret Child (Pieroni), 155
Mutman, Mahmut, 218–219
The Mysteries of Udolpho, 104
N
Naficy, Hamid, 226
Neale, Steve, 3, 220–221
Needham, Gary, 7–8
Nelson, R., 56
neo-Marxist approaches, 1
Nicholas Nickleby, 29
Nichols, Bill, 232
nineteenth-century melodramas, 224
Nip/Tuck, 81–94
climactic closing sequence of, 91
crisis in masculinity, 84–86
identity and masculinity, 81–82
ironic expression, 89–90
moral feeling, 84
pathos and action, 90–93
plot, 82
raced bodies, 86–89
scene sequences, 82–83
244 Index
Nolan, Brian, 106
Norelli, Gianfranco, 155
North and South, 29, 32, 37–40
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 1
Nukkad (Street Corner, 1986-87),
64–65
O Queer melodrama, 7–9
October, 168
opera, 158
Ophuls, Max, 172
Outliers: The Story of Success
(Gladwell), 200
Özdogan, Selim, 215, 217, 219, 220,
221
P of art film, 227–228
Pandey, Kamelsh, 71
parampara (tradition), 63
parivaar (family), 63
parody, 102
Paterson, Bill, 35
pathos, 31
and action, 4, 5
of distance, 8–9
in queer melodrama, 7–9
Peony Pavilion, 138
Peucker, Brigitte, 11–12
A Picture of Dorian Gray, 106
Pidduck, Julianne, 7, 57
Pieroni, Alfredo, 155
Pius XI, Pope, 168
Poetics of Melodrama (Balukhatyi),
154
Porton, Richard, 208
Poster, Mark, 198–199
Pouria, Amir, 231
prime time melodrama, see Indian
family melodramas
Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian
Television (Munshi), 62
Prince of Tears, 138–151
DVD version of, 138
historical background of, 142–145
narrative, 138–142
nostalgic realism of, 145–151
sections of, 148–151
Puranas, 66
Purton, V., 29
Q
Quantum Leap, 124
queer films, 138
Queer Gothic soaps, 96–110
authors of, 99
Dante’s Cove, 100–110
defining, 98–100
R
Radcliffe, Ann, 104
Raise the Red Lantern, 137
Rajani (1985-87), 65
Ramayan, 62, 65, 68
Reading for Plot (Brooks), 115
realism
of classic film, 227, 228
of Iranian cinema, 225–228
realist excess, 223–224
Rebecca, 104
Recchio, Thomas, 29
Regent Entertainment, 101
Rem, Tore, 28
Remote Control: Indian Television in the
New Millennium (Munshi), 62
rescue fantasy, 216
Rice, Anne, 106
Rich, B. Ruby, 213
rituals, in Indian family melodramas,
74–75
festivals, 74–75
wedding, 74
Rivas, Geoffrey, 87
Robinson, Henry Peach, 48
Rofel, Lisa, 15–16
Rouge, 147
Rowe, K., 49–50
S
sacrificial epics, 68–69
Sawalha, Julia, 44
Sayar, Vecdi, 208
scalpels edge of entertainment, see
Nip/Tuck
Schlipphacke, Heidi, 209, 217–218
Scoggins, Tracey, 104
Second World War, 190
semic code, 119–120
 Index 245

Sepinwall, Alan, 123 television melodrama, 13–16,

Shahi, Rajan, 71 see also US television melodrama
Shahr-e Ziba/Beautiful City, 224 aesthetics, 42–58
Shekhar, Purnendu, 63–64 classic, 27–41
Shlovsky, Victor, 118 Indian, 61–75
Sikri, Surekha, 75 Joyrich on, 14
Silverman, Kaja, 190 prime time family melodrama,
Silvey, V., 207, 212–213, 220 61–75
Singer, Ben, 5 topographies, 42–58
Sirk, Douglas, 118 television narratives, 115–117
Smith, Greg, 119–120 televisual authorship, 123–125
soap opera ten second shot, 73
Gledhill on, 13–14, 16 Teo, Stephen, 174–175
melodrama and, 13–14 Thanouli, Eleftheria, 227
Sontag, Susan, 188 Thompson, Flora, 44
The Sopranos, 114–128 The Times of India, 63, 74
authorship, 123–125 Timi, Filippo, 159
discourses of satisfaction, 122–128 tragedy, 188–189
ending, 114–115, 117–120 Trauma Culture (Kaplan), 190
final moments of, 120–122 True Blood, 99
historical importance of, 114 Turkish-German film, see The Edge
industrial discourse, 127 of Heaven
intertextual reference, 127 Turner, Victor, 51
narrative desire, 125–126 Two Lovers, 189–191, 195–200
performative excesses in, disease as metaphor in, 197
120–122 plot, 195–196
platonic discourse, 123–125 synopsis, 196
success of, 114 Two-shot (shot/reverse shot), 73
verbal content of, 121–122 Tykwer, Tom, 217–218
stage melodrama, 3
Star Plus, 62 U
Stickles, Peter, 106 Uberoi, Patricia, 69
Stoker, Bram, 106 Udaan (Flight, 1989-91), 65
Stoneman, Patsy, 29 US television melodrama
striking effectiveness, 156 Dante’s Cove, 99, 100–110
Summer Palace, 181, 184 Joyrich on, 14
Swish pan shot, 72–73 The Lair, 99–110
Sylvia’s Lovers (Gaskell), 29 Nip/ Tuck, 81–94
The Sopranos, 114–128
T Uttaran, 69
tableau vivant, 48
taboos, 197 V
Taiwan, 142 victimization, 33–34
TAM, see Television Audience victims, 34
Measurement (TAM) ratings Vincere, 153–169
Tamas (Darkness, 1987), 65 allegory, 168
Tay-Sachs gene, 196 analogy, 168
Television Audience Measurement anti-melodramatic melodrama,
(TAM) ratings, 62 157–158
246 Index
Vincere – continued
cruelty, 159–163
emotional vectors in, 156–157
female figure in, 159–160
futurism in, 158–159
isotopy and performativity,
163–166
metaphor, 166–168
metastructure of, 160–161
moral and emotional teleologies,
160–162
music, 158
prologue and its threat, 157
semaphoric performance, 159
Vox, Dylan, 106
W 71, 73
Walsh, Dylan, 81
Watching Dallas, 13
Welles, Orson, 143
wenyi pian, 175–176
Wexman, Virginia Wright, 183
Wheatley, Helen, 53, 54, 57, 99
White Nights, 197, 201n4
White Terror, 142–143
Wikipedia, 199
Wilde, Oscar, 106
Willemen, Paul, 89
Williams, Linda, 4–5, 85, 93, 135,
188, 211–212, 213–214
Williams, Raymond, 29, 37–40
Wives and Daughters (1999),
34–37
women-oriented serials, 65
women’s films, 135–136
Wong Kar Wai, 175
X
Xu Jinglei, 171–184, see also Letter
from an Unknown Woman
Y
Yearnings, 15–16
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai, 67, 69,
Yesilçay, Nürgul, 207
Yonfan, 138, see also Prince of Tears
Yuejin Wang, 144
Z
Zarzosa, Agustin, 5–7
Zeni, Marco, 155
Zhang Xiao-Yan, 146
Zhou Xielin, 174
Zhu Xuan, 139
Zweig, Stefan, 171