In her essay "Melodrama Revisited" Linda Williams discusses cinematographic melodrama in America as a "persistent, dominant, and popular form" within which social and cultural values are negotiated. The melodrama "should be viewed [...] not as an excess or an aberration but in many ways as the typical form of American popular narrative in literature, stage, film, and television." According to Williams, it is “in ever modernizing forms of melodrama, not epic, not ‘classical realism,’ that American democratic culture has most powerfully articulated the moral structure of feeling that animates its goals of justice”. At first glance, Williams' thesis may seem counterintuitive. However, contrary to general opinion, might social conditions and conflicts be far more effectively staged in the emotionally charged and affective atmospheres of melodrama than in realism?

 

Situating itself at the interface of affect theory, cultural criticism and theories of the moving image, this project takes its cue from Williams' argument about the socio-political staging and affective analysis inherent in filmic melodrama. In particular, the project takes up the dramatization of questions of gender-positioning and -production. How do contemporary formats of the moving image use melodrama as an aesthetic formula to portray female experiences and empowerment. Through detailed cinematographic analyses, the project addresses questions such as: How do contemporary melodramas differ from the classic formula of female suffering, as in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows? Have contemporary moving-image melodramas dealt with female experiences that have not hitherto been expressed?

 

Ultimately, the analyses of specific films are used as local entries into a wider, more global analysis of what might be called the melodramatisms and melodramatizations in American popular art and culture (visible, for instance, in the emotional intensification of cultural debates and their representations in American media) and whether such melodramatization can be helpful, or are in fact detrimental as an “aesthetic mode” for a future feminist politics. Should these politics make use melodramatic means, especially in the light of melodrama’s tacit assumption of a shared, ultimately humanist and democratic agenda and subjectivity, and thus as a tacitly ‘humanist’ answer to gender constructions and organizations? In other words, are a politics of heightened, melodramatized affect a useful platform for advocating and bringing about social change, and what would this change look like? What happens when a stress on cultural affect replaces a stress on cultural analysis? Or might affect be the new analysis? Can the affective and emotional strategies that define melodrama and the overall, conspicuous melodramatization of America be regarded as useful tools for a future feminist politics? A careful analysis of American melodramatizations in their various artistic and cultural incarnations might be a necessary step towards the development of a melodramatic, or perhaps post-melodramatic, feminist politics.