Melodrama After the Tears

Melodrama After the Tears Amsterdam UniversityPress Amsterdam UniversityPress Melodrama After the Tears New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (eds.) Amsterdam UniversityPress Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: Man Ray, “The Tears” (c. 1930) © Man Ray Trust / 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam AmsterdamLay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 673 6 e-isbn 978 90 4852University 357 3 doi 10.5117/9789089646736 nur 670 Press © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Acknowledgements As part of the project entitled “Aesthetics of Irritation” (2010-2012), funding for this volume was generously provided by the “Kulturen, Institutionen, Märkte” (KIM) research cluster at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. Many of the contributions to the volume were first presented in November 2011 at the conference “After the Tears: Victimhood and Subjectivity in the Melodramatic Mode,” also hosted by KIM and the University of St.Gallen, with the support of the Haniel Foundation Duisburg. The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to the people who contributed to the project in various ways and helped to make this book possible. Thank you to Elisabeth Anker, Timon Beyes, Lisa Cartwright, Chicago University Press, Heinz Drügh, Ulrike Hanstein, Christoph Henning, Vin- cent Kaufmann, Ulrike Landfester, Tom Mitchell, Fatima Naqvi, Daria Olgiati-Pezzoli, Alan Robinson, Sophie Rudolph, Marion Schmaus, Annette Schüren, Ulrich Schmid, Franz Schultheis, Jörg Schweinitz, Marq Smith, AmsterdamJulia Straub and Margrit Tröhler. We would also like to thank the US Embassy in Berne, Peter Müller of the PHSG, Klaus-Detlef Müller and the “Melodrama” workshop at his Oberseminar at the University of Tübingen, our students from the MA courses “New CinemaUniversity Auteurism: A Survey of Contemporary Film Directors” and “Economies of Feeling: Melodrama as FilmPress Genre and Global Social Narrative,” the HSG Film Club and our bands “The Contextual Studies” and “From the Balcony.” Special thanks go to Rupert Antes and the Haniel Foundation Duisburg, Maximilian Schellman, Felix Seyfarth and Verena Witzig from our Contex- tual Studies team and Jeroen Sondervan and his colleagues at Amsterdam University Press. Special thanks also go to Sabrina Helmer and Roy Sellars, whose aid and dedication during the editing of the volume have been exceptional. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to express our deep gratitude to Thomas Elsaesser, to whom we are indebted for his path-breaking research in melodrama and film studies, for inviting us to publish in the AUP series Film Culture in Transition, for a glass of wine in Strasbourg one late November night in 2009, and for having been there to say it all: tout dire or not tout dire – that is the question! Just as melodrama seeks to express the unspeakable, words cannot express our gratitude to our families. Amsterdam UniversityPress Contents Introduction 9 Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann I. Cultures of Suffering and Cinematic Identities Melodrama and Victimhood: Modern, Political and Militant 35 Thomas Elsaesser When Is Melodrama “Good”? Mega-Melodrama and Victimhood 53 Linda Williams Melodrama and War in Hollywood Genre Cinema 81 Hermann Kappelhoff Race Interactions: Film, Melodrama, and the Ambiguities of Colorism 107 Christof Decker The Purloined Letter: Ophuls after Cavell 127 Ulrike Hanstein II. Modernity and the Melodramatic Self The Melodrama of the Self 157 AmsterdamEva Illouz Rousseau’s Nightmare 169 Vincent Kaufmann “Emotional Suffering” as Universal Category? Victimhood and the Collective ImaginaryUniversity 185 Jörg Metelmann Press III. Collective Traumas and National Melodramas III.1 Legacies of 9/11 Introduction to W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Abu Ghraib Archive” 205 Scott Loren The Abu Ghraib Archive 207 W. J. T. Mitchell The Melodramatic Style of American Politics 219 Elisabeth Anker Tears of Testimony: Glenn Beck and the Conservative Moral Occult 247 Scott Loren III.2 Holocaust Legacies The Cultural Construction of the Holocaust Witness as a Melodramatic Hero 263 Amos Goldberg Nation and Emotion: The Competition for Victimhood in Europe 281 Ulrich Schmid Perspectives Interview with Christine Gledhill 297 Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann Bibliography 311 Index of Film Titles 325 Index of Names 327 Amsterdam UniversityPress Introduction Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann The first form of rulers in the world were the “tyrants,” the last will be the “martyrs.” Between a tyrant and a martyr there is of course an enormous difference, although they both have one thing in common: the power to compel. The tyrant, himself ambitious to dominate, compels people through his power; the martyr, himself unconditionally obedient to God, compels others through his suffering. – Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals1 Who will write the history of tears? – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse2 On Victimhood Inspiration for this volume is rooted in curiosity about the melodramatic forms that seem increasingly to characterize aspects of both the private and the public spheres in occidental and Western-oriented societies. Melodrama, it is said, has expanded beyond the borders of genre and fiction to become a pervasive cultural mode, with distinct signifying practices and interpre- tive codes for meaning-making that assist in determining parameters for Amsterdamidentification throughout a variety of discourses and mediated spaces, be it the public spectacle of personal suffering, the emotive coding of consumer practices, or the sentimentalization of national politics. If melodrama is so culturally pervasive and emotionally persuasive, then what is its political potential, both withinUniversity and beyond symbolic fictions, and what might its limitations be? Press This initial inquiry necessarily led to a reconsideration of the present state of theory in melodrama studies. Since the publication of seminal texts by Thomas Elsaesser and Peter Brooks in the early 1970s, there has been general consensus among scholars that melodrama is an inherently modern dramatic form. Its ability to address and articulate experiences of modernity in a manner accessible to the masses in various national contexts, at different times, has contributed to its widespread prominence. As a mode of representation and sense-making (that is, as an aesthetic form), its historical durability and transportable social resonance can be attributed 10 SCOtt LOREN AND JÖRG METELmaNN largely to its adaptability. However, while assessing melodrama’s current status as a cultural mode in particular, it quickly became clear that the position of the victim is functioning more than ever as a paradigmatic figure for identification in myriad debates on the social practices of legitimation. Thus, while Brooks and Elsaesser have provided a kind of ground zero for understanding melodrama as a cultural mode, the claim that melodrama concentrates “on the point of view of the victim” has also only gained cur- rency within a larger, extra-cinematic framework.3 The cultural history of victimhood’s capacity to induce sympathy and motivate identification can hardly be overestimated. Where primitive forms of victimhood are linked to sacrifice and the supplication of deities, the contemporary culture of victimhood has developed on the one hand in struggles against hegemonic power structures, and on the other as a form of social legitimation alongside the advent of the modern subject. From the rise of the confessional-style talk show (Eva Illouz) to Glenn Beck and the Tea Party’s conservative “cult of victimhood” (Thomas Frank), the spectrum of cultural artifacts evincing suffering and victimhood as powerful ontological categories in Western societies continues to expand. Their capacity as a mode of legitimation, though, has been a source of much debate. The over- arching trajectory of contributions to this volume reflect upon the demands and deficiencies of a “victim society” (Baudrillard’s société victimale) and the “cultural rhetoric of victimhood” (Fatima Naqvi), against the backdrop of the melodramatic mode qua modern social paradigm. This volume represents both a condensation and an expansion of melodrama studies. It condenses elements of theory on melodrama by bringing Amsterdaminto focus what it recognizes as the locus for subjective identification within melodramatic narratives: the suffering victim. Taking as its point of depar- ture Thomas Elsaesser’s claim that “[o]ne of the characteristic features of melodramas is that they concentrate on the point of view of the victim,”4 this volume providesUniversity an expansion by going beyond the methodology of examining primarily fictive works, whether fromPress the stage, the screen or the written word, for their

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