Hollywood films have long drawn upon the conventions of melodrama, going back to the silent era. Melodramas in Hollywood in the 1950s took a leap forward, with several directors turning the genre into a subversive art form that challenged the dominant American ideals that the melodrama supposedly upheld. Though many directors, including Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, and others made an impact in the melodrama genre, its foremost practitioner was Douglas Sirk.
Melodrama
According to Thomas Schatz in his book on Hollywood film genres, “in a certain sense every Hollywood movie might be described as ‘melodramatic.’ In the strictest definition of the term, melodrama refers to those narrative forms which combine music (melos) with drama.” For a more specific definition of the genre, Schatz offers the following: “‘melodrama’ was applied to popular romances that depicted a virtuous individual (usually a woman) or couple (usually lovers) victimized by repressive and inequitable social circumstances, particularly those involving marriage, occupation, and the nuclear family.”
Melodrama has often been something of a pejorative word, an insult used to diminish certain kinds of films as unimportant or distinguish them from more substantive, serious drama. Melodramas are often dismissed as riven with clichés and dependent on techniques that emphasize cheap emotion over thoughtful storytelling. Infidelity, forbidden love, sudden illnesses—these are the kind of storytelling conventions that motivate melodrama, but also characterize its even more low-rent descendant, the soap opera. Most melodramas focus on domestic spaces, the setting associated most often with middle-American families in the 1950s. Melodramas use the home and the small town to express larger ideas about society. According to Schatz, “Ideally, the family represents a ‘natural’ as well as a social collective, a self-contained society in and of itself. But in the melodrama this ideal is undercut by the family’s status within a highly structured socioeconomic milieu, and therefore, its identity as an autonomous human community is denied—the family roles are determined by the larger social community. The American small town, with its acute class-consciousness, its gossip and judgment by appearances, and its reactionary commitment to fading values and mores, represents an extended but perverted family in which human elements (love, honesty, interpersonal contact, generosity) have either solidified into repressive social conventions or disappeared altogether.” Social custom is put on trial, in other words, using the family as a metaphor for the larger societal repression, especially the kind that dominated in the 1950s. Conjure up your typical image of 1950s America for a moment: picket fences outside suburban houses, families and their cars, kids and the dog, gray-flannel suited husband coming home after work to a wife who’s already got dinner on the table. These images suggest conformity, stability, and unification of a country that has gathered around some very commonly held ideals. Melodramas express these values through their settings and narratives, often taking place among these very kinds of people. The images below from Home From The Hill (1960, Dir. Vincente Minnelli), The Lusty Men (1952, Dir. Nicholas Ray), and East of Eden (1955, Dir. Elia Kazan) illustrate the genre at work in its most prominent decade.
However, the story of melodrama in Classic Hollywood in the 1950s is not so simple. In fact, many critics have come to see the contributions of a number of directors working within the studio system as profound challenges to American society, finding deep critiques of power relationships and societal hierarchies embedded inside melodrama as a genre. This was not true of all melodramas of the 1950s, but those made by a few filmmakers, including Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli, and especially Douglas Sirk, are examples of films engineered by their directors to critique the very lifestyle they sought to depict on screen. Schatz argues that “The initial success of romantic tearjerkers reflected their collective capacity to stroke the emotional sensibilities of suburban housewives, but recent analysts suggest that the ‘50s melodramas are actually among the most socially self-conscious and covertly ‘anti-American’ films ever produced by the Hollywood studios.” Anti-American is quite a strong contention—reading these melodramas from this perspective requires some deep investigation. In essence, as a viewer, you have to read against the film as you watch it. Consider what the film is showing you on the surface, which many audience members may see as just another melodrama about families and small towns, and look harder at how the story is expressed through style. The style may contradict, and as a result, undermine your faith in the ideals that the melodrama supposedly endorses.
Douglas Sirk
Let’s return to Douglas Sirk, whose work stands out even above his melodrama genre peers Minnelli and Ray. Sirk was a German immigrant who came to Hollywood in the late 1930s carrying with him a strong sense of the intellectual tradition of German cinema. He applied what he knew about German theorist Bertolt Brecht’s ideas to his film work, using his aesthetic approach to rupture the harmony between form and content that generally guided classical filmmaking in the studio era. Schatz argues that Sirk “subscribed to Brecht’s notion of audience ‘alienation,’ of creating distance between the viewer and the subject matter through stylization. […] The thrust of this strategy was to make the audience more acutely aware of the social conditions that are supported by the genre, and thus the tradition relies heavily upon the audience’s expectations. Because the audience has learned to accept the melodrama’s transparent, realistic celebration of romantic love and marriage (the cultural status quo), any calculated stylistic flourishes will cloud this perceptual transparency. As soon as the audience is reminded that they are watching a contrived reality, that only within this artificial world are ‘social problems’ worked out so neatly, the prosocial fiction is cast in doubt.” Here is how this works: Sirk depicts a straightforward scene, say, a conversation between two people about something relatively mundane. In the content of the film’s dialogue, everything seems ordinary. However, a close examination of the film’s lighting, set design, use of shadow, color, and other elements of mise-en-scene create a clash with the dialogue. In essence, there is inconsistency between form and content.
This differs from the kind of strategies that directors used in film noir, for example. For all of their challenges to the status quo and distortion of the American Dream, noir filmmakers essentially matched the dark content of the stories, which often focused on murder, crime, and violence, to the darkness of their settings. Shadowy back alleys and oppressive prison-bar patterns cast through windows were perfectly appropriate in noir worlds; the narratives and the style work together to create the impression of impending doom.
In Sirk’s world, the form and the content don’t match. So, the melodrama’s narrative plays out much as you might expect, with meaningful glances exchanged between star-crossed lovers that eventually give way to heated embraces. However, the world in which the characters live seems unforgiving, harsh, and strangely alienating. Sirk’s production design transforms ordinary spaces into nightmares; he places strange patterns on the walls in shadow, avoiding the Hollywood tendency to flatly light an entire set (especially in the 1950s); he introduces clutter into the frames that creates obstacles that divide his characters from one another, emphasizing their distance rather than their connections. Here is a gallery of images from various Sirk films that demonstrate how he uses mise-en-scene in such a critical way. Look closely at the sets, color, light, shadow, and other visual elements.
Schatz argues that “While most other filmmakers assumed that film melodramas, as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of existing social conditions, should be treated as realistically as possible, Sirk chose to shape his material in such a way that it repeatedly called attention to its own artifice.” That’s the totalizing effect of these stylistic elements; the world that Sirk creates is not at all realistic, and his visual approach highlights the ways in which American society in the 1950s was a ridiculous pageant for middle and upper-middle class white people who built palaces for themselves that quickly became prisons. The patterns on the wall, the intrusion of unmotivated or unnatural colors, the obstacles of furniture placed between characters as they speak, they represent all the things these people have tried to repress—namely, their deep, profound misery. The effect of Sirk’s films, if we follow the filmmaker’s intent, leaves the viewer considering their content “not as a celebration of the American Dream, but as an articulation and ultimately a criticism of it.”
While Sirk made a number of melodramas in this style while working in Hollywood in the 1950s, All That Heaven Allows (1955) is often considered to be one of his finest efforts. The melodramatic plotline adheres to Schatz’s basic definition of the genre, telling the story of two would be lovers who are unable to be together because of their class divide and the judgment of their snobbish neighbors who find Ron (Rock Hudson), the proto-hippie handyman, to be a weirdo. Of course, they really find him threatening because in many ways, he rejects the lifestyle that they have worked so hard to build and place so much importance on. Sirk’s treatment of Cary (Jane Wyman) demonstrates how she is subject to the community’s double-standards, especially in the form of her reprehensible children, who behave abominably and do everything they can to deny their mother the happiness she finds with Ron.
In his melodramas, Sirk’s sympathies often lie with the female characters, who the melodramatic form tends to treat very harshly throughout the history of the genre. The stories still often punish the women more excessively than the men, but Sirk’s camera privileges their point of view by acknowledging the ways in which the cultural repression enforced on all the characters weighs particularly heavily on the women. All That Heaven Allows is really Cary’s story, and Ron is a useful catalyst towards reigniting the love she thought she lost when her husband died. Sirk’s melodrama keeps the two apart because of societal strictures and a tragic miscommunication that nearly results in Ron’s death, but he is miraculously brought back to life, seemingly on the sheer power of Cary’s love for him. The swell of music that rises as he lies in the bed in the abandoned millhouse that they restored together cinches the melodramatic climax—it is so exaggerated, so over the top, that it nearly rises to the level of ironic camp, especially when viewed today. However, a 1950s audience would have been familiar enough with the conventions of melodrama that some portion of them would have generally accepted the conclusion willingly; other, more critically minded audience members may have seen the irony in Sirk’s technique and appreciated the attack. Of the film’s ending, Schatz argues that “In the film’s ironic resolution, then, Sirk brings the lovers together even as he acknowledges the pervasive, dehumanizing, and ultimately destructive power of American middle-class ideology, of those entrenched values and attitudes which both sustain and suppress the society’s ‘silent majority.’”
I want to demonstrate how Sirk’s various elements of mise-en-scene work together in All That Heaven Allows to communicate this sense of disillusionment and alienation from domestic space. Watch the commentary at right, which explores Sirk’s technique in a scene set in Cary’s home.
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So, what is the point? Why take such pains to introduce these disruptive elements into the visual space captured by the camera, especially when they are included with a fair degree of subtlety? In other words, many audience members are likely to see right past Sirk’s critique. Many audience members will become lost in the melodramatic effect of the story and the characters, swept away by the emotion; Sirk’s contradictory stylistic approach may be lost on them altogether. Thomas Elsaesser, in an influential essay that led to a number of these deep analyses of Sirk’s technique, argues that the melodrama “often records the failure of the protagonist to act in a way that could shape the events and influence the emotional environment, let alone change the stifling social milieu. The world is closed, and the characters are acted upon. Melodrama confers on them a negative identity through suffering, and the progressive self-immolation and disillusionment generally ends in resignation: they emerge as lesser human beings for having become wise and acquiescent to the ways of the world.” These are complicated and potentially burdensome emotional hurdles for an audience to overcome, accustomed as they may be to identifying with characters who have clear goals and seem fated to achieve them. However, in Elsaesser’s opinion, “Hollywood directors have consistently criticized the streak of incurably naïve moral and emotional idealism in the American psyche, first by showing it to be often indistinguishable from the grossest kind of illusion and self-delusion, and then by forcing a confrontation when it is most wounding and contradictory.” In other words, filmmakers like Sirk use the melodramatic form and its audience’s expectations as a weapon against them; just when audiences expect to have their beliefs confirmed, Sirk attempts to undermine them through drawing attention to how flimsy those beliefs are.
In her book on melodrama and Sirk, Barbara Klinger argues that Elsaesser’s essay established the counterintuitive idea that “the sophisticated family melodrama realized the genre’s historical capability to act as a revolutionary form during times of cultural struggle.” Sirk is the foremost melodramatist of Classic Hollywood, and went on to influence a number of other filmmakers, including German New Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the American director Todd Haynes, who paid direct homage to Sirk with 2002’s Far From Heaven, and has elsewhere shown the director’s same affinity for using the images of domestic space to suggest something dark and uncertain about American life.
Sirk’s efforts working within the melodrama demonstrate how filmmakers increasingly attempted to turn the system’s dominance against itself. Overseas, however, filmmakers were rejecting the system almost entirely.