Introduction: Global Melodrama

Notes Introduction: Global Melodrama 1. Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 2006): 29. 2. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). 3. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen (London: BFI, 1994): 1. 4. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narra- tion, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990). 5. Works such as Frederic Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) and Simon During’s “Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?,” Critical Inquiry 23.4 (1997): 808–833, are some of the first examples of cultural critics taking up the ques- tion of how film narratives shift in order to address the changes brought about by the new world system. 6. See Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, Italian Neorealism and Global Cin- ema (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007) and Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012). 7. Laura Mulvey, “ ‘It Will Be a Magnificent Obsession’: The Melodrama’s Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory,” in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, 121–133. 8. Take, for example, Barbara Klinger’s work on the films of Douglas Sirk. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Or other directors not working in Hollywood, some influenced by Sirk, who have prompted such analy- ses: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodóvar, Atom Egoyan, and Lars von Trier, to name a few. The films of David Lynch could be said to con- tinue this tradition within the American industry. Todd Haynes famously adapted three of Sirk’s films for his 2002 homage to the director, Far from Heaven. 9. See Nick Browne, “Griffith’s Family Discourse: Griffith and Freud,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987): 223–234. 150 NOTES 10. Steave Neale, “Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term ‘Melodrama’ in the American Trade Press,” Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall), 66–89. 11. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 42–48. 12. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 10. 13. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983): 19. Also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000): 95. 14. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 15. 15. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 44. See also the essays collected in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen. 16. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 101. 17. Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is. 18. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi. For them, though, sovereignty has shifted its domain to what they call “Empire”: it is now composed of “a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule” (xiii). “Empire” is in turn unlike imperialism in that “it establishes no ter- ritorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers” (xii). 19. Anderson, Imagined Communities, and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 20. See, in particular, the introduction to Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen,1–8. It states: “[melodrama] becomes the form both to register change and to process change, in particular mediating relations between a lost but prob- lematic past and the present” (3). And the links between melodrama and revolution: Peter Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, 11–24, and Daniel Gerould, “Melodrama and Revolution,” in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, 185–198. 21. Williams adapts this statement, which she attributes to Henry James, who was describing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. See Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001): 6, 12–13. 22. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 1. On the development of what Brooks calls melodrama’s “aesthetics of muteness” and its derivation from the pan- tomime form, see also pp. 62–68. 23. Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, 11–24. 24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): 13. On the link between the introduction of the guillotine, revolutionary ideals, and melodrama, an interesting film to ponder is Patrice Leconte’s The Widow of Saint-Pierre (2000). 25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25. NOTES 151 26. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination,xi. 27. This is something Brooks himself acknowledges in “Melodrama, Body, Revo- lution,” 12. 28. Michel Foucault’s “La naissance de la medicine sociale” in Dits et écrits,cited in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 27. 29. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” 1. 30. Bhabha, “Introduction,” 4. 31. Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011): 10. 32. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination,3. 33. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 23. Here, Williams refers specifically to the US context, but this is also true of melodrama as a global mode. 34. Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 47. 35. Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000): 226. 36. Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 70. 37. Bhaskar Sarkar, “Melodramas of Globalization,” Cultural Dynamics 20.1 (2008): 31–51. 38. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination,1. 39. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination,2. 40. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Con- texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), in particular chapter 3, “Sensationalism and Urban Modernity,” 59–99. [T]echnology was at [melodrama’s] core, both on stage and behind the scenes. On stage, sensation scenes showcased the latest marvels of the machine age, its mise-en-scène rendering (or whenever possible presenting in actuality) every conceivable emblem of the industrial era: locomotives, steamships, fire engines, submarines, automobiles, motorboats, subways, hot-air balloons, motorcycles, suspension bridges, steam hammers, pile drivers, spinning machines, etc. (12) 41. On digital special effects and a new verticality that has become an important feature in contemporary film, including an analysis of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, see Kristen Whissel, “Tales of Upward Mobility,” Film Quarterly 59.4 (Summer 2006): 23–34. 42. See Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in an Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 43. Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” 13. 44. See Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 45. Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 70. 46. See Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? (New York: Seagull Books, 2007). Butler is thinking together statelessness from an 152 NOTES American context: post-9–11 detention in Guantanamo, the displaced of Afghanistan/Iraq wars, and, even more centrally, the politicization of immi- gration rights in the United States—from where the title of the essay comes. 47. Singer, Melodrama and Modernity. Chapter 1 1. Though this is true stylistically speaking, it is not necessarily true thematically. Despina Kakoudaki has noted that the comparison to Sirk should be qualified, a point with which I agree: “In contrast to directors such as Douglas Sirk, who may use melodrama to produce distantiation or estrangement, Almodóvar’s melodramatic style often has the opposite result, a kind of enfolding of char- acters, audience, and even critics into a familiar circle of shared references and experiences” (221). See “Intimate Strangers: Melodrama and Coincidence in Talk to Her,” in All about Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema, eds. Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): 193–238. 2. In keeping with Almodóvar’s interest in citing and reviving a tradition of classical Hollywood film, it would be useful to trace a genealogy of these films back to the women’s films of the 1940s that dealt with, as Mary Ann Doane has described, a “clinical discourse.” See the chapter “Clinical Eyes: The Medical Discourse,” in The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987): 38–69. 3. Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Volume I) (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): 142–143. 4. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen (London: BFI, 1994): 7. 5. One of the earliest collections of essays to establish this line of inquiry was Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris, eds. Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). Also Marsha Kinder’s analysis of Almodóvar’s films in Blood Cinema: The Recon- struction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 6. The first of his films to explicitly address

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