Mega-Melodrama

In a recent essay I have argued that, since the late eighties, we have been witnessing a huge expansion of the dimensions of movie and television melodrama. The movie screen has expanded spatially. Where it once grew wider in competition with television, it now grows deeper – with 3-D certainly, but also through a new dynamization of the vertical space of the screen. By contrast, the television serial melodrama has expanded temporally as stories go on and on. Both of these “mega”-melodramas suggest that, in an era of theatrical blockbusters and prime-time and cable serials, we need to rethink the very nature of the melodramatic space and time of the mass-market moving image.

I will not say much here about the blockbusters of big-screen melodrama, except to note that what Kristen Whissel has referred to as the “new verticality” of digitally enhanced movies, defined by “extreme heights and plunging depths,” has expanded exponentially in films with titles like VERTICAL LIMIT (2000), DIE HARD (1988), THE DARK KNIGHT (2008), AIR FORCE ONE (1997), THE MATRIX (1999, 2003), AVATAR (2009) and INCEPTION (2010). Such films enlist remarkable special effects that defy or succumb to gravity. She argues that this new verticality of the blockbuster screen is well suited to an era defined by “economic polarization and new forms of political, religious, and military extremism, all of which seem to have had the effect […] of evacuating previously available middle grounds.”

The absence of a middle ground has been a hallmark of the popular stage and screen melodrama ever since the early nineteenth-century dramas with music that gave the mode its name. Peter Brooks, for example, calls melodrama the very “logic of the excluded middle.” If traditional “patterns of moral order” have become confused in a modern era in which good and evil are no longer clear, then it has long been the job of melodrama to reveal, either through the recognition of a Gothically-tinged villain or an innocent victim, a moral legibility with no gray areas in between. Melodrama is the spectacular way in which popular culture has reassured its consumers that we are good and that those who threaten us are evil.