Film Discussion - "Mildred Pierce" and Melodrama

[Note - For this piece, we were assigned to take an essay format (i.e. thesis driven) and discuss the viability of melodrama in the 21st century.  As such, it is less of a review of the film and more of a discussion using the film as a basepoint.]

Eating It

Poor Mildred simply can’t catch a decent enough break, and as she is repeatedly undermined, manipulated, and betrayed by those that she loves and provides for, her saga of suffering seems practically Jobian in scale, but it is very much the product of a passé culture with passé norms, which naturally begs the question of how well it, and by extension melodrama as a concept, reads in the contemporary cinemascape.  The film is practically anthropological; such films, and such naked and stylized bursts of emotion and anguish, are relics no longer indigenous to our collective appetites.  In the time since “Mildred Pierce” was released in 1945, the melodrama has been diluted into countless other genres, becoming less its own brand of story and more an increasingly present accessory to the more comparatively overwrought emotional style of contemporary film, and in this way melodrama as a concept, as an adjective, is alive and well.  The melodrama as a genre, however, no longer has a place in this century; modern audiences only know its watered down elements, and the pure product is simply too much for for the palate.

            “Mildred Pierce’s” increasingly convoluted, emotionally precarious intrigues of sex and betrayal may rightly be compared to those of the soap opera genre, the closest practitioner of melodrama today.  Both relish their naked emotion and heightened realities, and in purely formal terms their mechanisms are nearly identical. The two genres are divided along philosophical lines, though, as melodrama has always focused upon inspiring honest empathy in its audience through a careful presentation of externalized emotion, exaggerated situations, and expressive use of mise en scene elements including lighting, costuming, and set design.  Soap opera is a ten cent bastardization that holds empathy less as an artistic endeavor and more as a Pavlovian response to maintain a consistent viewership.  Character psychology is central to melodrama, but the very notion of soap opera psychology is a joke, as a character’s entire identity is fair game for renovation in order to maintain a grasp on viewers’ attention spans for another story arc or two. That worthless psychology, and its resulting lack of characterization with integrity, strips away the need for expressive mise en scene, and the sort of imposing architecture or brilliant, otherworldly shadows of “Mildred Pierce” are thus omitted entirely from the soap opera form.  Though such cheap television serials are the closest contemporary embodiment of melodrama, they are certainly not an extension of the same genre.

            Where melodrama does live on is in fragments and echoes, an extinct dinosaur that has long since evolved feathers and taken to other generic climates.  When melodrama was a genre of film, the typical motion picture lacked a heightened reality or an expressive mise en scene, or characters with such extroverted emotional states.  Now, almost any mainstream horror or action or romantic comedy film features all three.  The human needs and concerns that melodrama once served are thus alive and well and very much on our minds, but we have grown in a direction that is simultaneously more cynical and skeptical towards the excesses of the genre while embracing it with a more thorough slice of the yearly filmography than ever.  But the melodramatic trappings of contemporary films are just spare parts, scuttled from a ship that sank long ago.