Victimhood and Subjectivity in the Melodramatic Mode: Obfuscated Clarity

Melodrama is one of the most prominent discourses of victimhood in Western modernity. Its worldview focuses on the emotional suffering of a victim, conceived as virtuous and subjected to forces of evil, who can be rescued by forces of good. In melodramatic mode, victims function as a moral cipher, inasmuch as they understand the social world, profaned by secularization since 1750, through emotion, thus making the world ethically readable once again. Melodrama as a form of display alerts the heart to the essentials, and to what cannot be seen with mere eyes. The shortest and most poetic formula for the genesis of melodrama and its claim to validity comes in the words of the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince: “It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly.” In fiction, hope can be found, especially after the tears.

In the course of melodrama's history, the victim has passed through different figurations, each of which allows a reading of the prevailing socio-historical attitudes. Regarding recent developments in the light of melodrama's omnipresence in movies, television series, soaps and talk shows, Thomas Elsaesser notes that the victim figure fundamentally changes its meaning if the victim can no longer be interpreted as virtuous. If anyone can become a victim at any time and in return receive social recognition without ever representing and advocating the good, the role of the victim loses its morally privileged position.6 Rather, Elsaesser sees the classic Oprah Winfrey Show staging affects and victimhood for their own sake, with audience affliction (Betroffenheit) not aiming at social change, but instead at the medial performativity of emotions. This is not meant disparagingly; acknowledging that the Enlightenment's notion of universality has collapsed and that the idea of a multi-cultural identity has failed, the universal role of the victim is now to be understood as a license to speak, thus establishing the last remaining form of subjectivity that can report general failure and suffering at all.