We tend to have a much surer intuitive sense of when a movie is a comedy, but where do our dramatic movies fit in this array of genres? The answer is somewhat depressing. For example, despite the "epic" scale of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, a recreation of an inspirational historical anomaly, the movie’s narrative is structured around only three characters. In polar opposition there’s Itzhak Stern, a Jewish accountant and thus an allegorical figure of conscience (a man who knows objectively what things add up to, he’s the one who certifies during Schindler’s "I could have saved more" speech that 1,100 is enough), and Amon Goeth, the arbitrarily brutal Commandant of the Plaszow forced labor camp, who is, of course, pure evil. Stern and Goeth are engaged in a struggle, one to save as many Jews as possible, the other to exterminate them all. In movie terms Goeth is all the worse because he doesn’t allow Stern, as a Jew subject to Nazi racial oppression, to use his full capabilities in the struggle; i.e., Goeth doesn’t fight fair. In between them is Oskar Schindler, a charismatic businessman, "a dealer by temperament" according to Keneally, 1  who starts out morally compromised with respect to the Nazi regime, profiteering from the war, but who is then moved by the massacre in the Cracow ghetto, and by Stern’s shrewd prodding, to do what he can to save Jews, who but for him would end up in Goeth’s death camp.

Having stripped Spielberg’s mammoth movie to these bare bones, I noticed the similarity of the structure to that of Casablanca (1942), in which Rick, the cynical, apolitical businessman who gets along with the Vichy officials, is moved to facilitate the escape of the noble Czech resistance fighter Victor Laszlo by killing Major Strasser, the evil Nazi who arrives at the start of the picture and disrupts the tense balance maintained by Captain Renault, the Vichy prefect of police. Despite its lesser ambition as a quasi-propagandistic romantic melodrama, Casablanca actually has more central characters than Schindler’s List, though they all fit into the standard melodramatic categories of good and evil.

Surely it casts a shadow over the ambitions of the makers of Schindler’s List that its narrative form could be so close to a melodrama based on a mediocre stage play that was made before the Holocaust had happened. It certainly goes against any sense that the industrial efficiency of the extermination camps paradoxically combined with the resultant randomness of death to strike at the very core of what we think of as dramatic, i.e., the interdependence of character and fate. In Schindler’s List Goeth’s battered Jewish housemaid Helen Hirsch is given a speech to this effect, but Schindler soothes her by explaining why Goeth won’t kill her. He turns out to be right, which soothes us, but also cuts against the import of her speech and puts us in that diminished movie space where we hope against hope that this or that sympathetic victim will survive. You wouldn’t say the same of Keneally’s book, which unlike the movie doesn’t coordinate all the individual bits of information into a melodramatic entertainment superstructure. What does it mean that Spielberg could have learned at least as much that was relevant to his purposes from movies like Casablanca as from the Holocaust?

To answer this, you have to know what melodrama means in terms of narrative structure. Its overriding characteristic is the absolute, objective polarization of good and evil. (If it’s surprising that melodrama dates only from the time of the French Revolution this may be because of its close resemblance to medieval morality plays and, more fundamentally, to the Manichean battle between God and Satan. 2  ) According to Peter Brooks, the drama arises from a misperception by peripheral characters of these values 3 : the innocent protagonist, or someone nearly related to or associated with him or her, is suspected, accused, or condemned of a crime, while the villain, who may have framed the accused, and may have committed the crime himself, is ascendant, unjustly basking in power, position, wealth, reputation and/or fame. 4  (It is essential to the simplified moral scheme that the story equate innocence of the crime with virtue.) All these character types, along with the villain’s "demonic acolytes," 5  can appear in multiples in a single work.

The classic plot types include the false accusation which leads to the protagonist’s expulsion from the society of the good; an escape from unjust imprisonment; and an arduous journey to win exoneration for the unjustly accused character. 6  The villain’s actions drive the plot, which builds up pressure in the audience to exult in his violent overthrow in the last act, 7  when he is dispatched by the virtuous innocent or by his or her martial defender. Equally important is the public declaration at the climax of who was truly good and who truly evil, despite all appearances and rumor to the contrary. As Brooks points out, the "reward of virtue ... is only a secondary manifestation of the recognition of virtue." 8  (The recognition may be legal, as in an arrest or courtroom verdict, rather than violent, but analytically the two serve the same function.) You can’t take a step without tripping over examples 9  ; The Fugitive (1993) is a real pip, however, containing every one of these elements, including all three plot types.

Our movies have found ways to make the contest a little less stark by using what can be called shuttle characters. For instance, the central character may be the one who misperceives the virtue of the innocent character--as Rick in Casablanca misperceives why Ilsa left him in Paris and as a result takes a position in the battle between good and evil that makes the audience uncomfortable. This lets the plot of the movie get beyond the villain’s diabolic machinations by focusing instead on the protagonist’s gradual realization and its results. (The shuttle figure doesn’t necessarily overcome a misperception but may undergo a moral revolution or change loyalties--any movement toward the light.) The more and less simple forms converge when the "enlightened" protagonist does something, usually violent (i.e., shooting Major Strasser), to set things right. This movement away from error complements the villain’s movement from public power and favor to exposure and eclipse, which has the most informational impact in a murder mystery.

Melodrama is actually far more pervasive in American movies than people think. If the movie is expensive enough and the villain represents a reactionary stance on a social issue, critics and educated audiences will take it as hard-hitting naturalism or even tragedy. Recently, The Contender (2000) got away with the antique model of a false accusation of "impurity" against Joan Allen as the innocent Vice Presidential nominee, maybe because they swaddled it to suffocation in up-to-the-minute speechifying about the sexual double standard. (Only the speeches are up-to-the-minute: the sexual slander is the same as in the superbland political wheezer The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), a dirty joke turned inside out.) Jeff Bridges as the President is the shuttle figure who learns that it’s not okay even to ask about Allen’s personal life and who drives villainous Gary Oldman out of the Senate chambers before her confirmation vote.

The Accused (1988) adapted the direct villainous threat to the heroine’s chastity 10  to the rape debate and was at least less coy about her sexual activity. Despite the frankness, however, the theoretic positions are laid out melodramatically. The obscene onlooker sporting the scorpion tattoo, who thinks Jodie Foster as the victim asked for it, is at the low end, and the rape counselor, who says to Kelly McGillis as the prosecutor that it shouldn’t make any difference that Foster was drunk and stoned, is at the high end. McGillis is the shuttle figure who initially compromises with evil by accepting a lenient plea bargain for the rapists because she thinks that Foster wouldn’t make a convincing witness. Later she learns better and gets around double jeopardy by prosecuting the onlookers, whose conviction will prevent the rapists from receiving parole.

In Philadelphia (1993) Tom Hanks’s homosexuality itself is the deceptive moral sign that has to be reinterpreted for the jury--and us. That is, "despite" being gay, he is a purely good character, and the managing partners who fire him once they realize he has AIDS but who underhandedly make him appear incompetent so he won’t have a discrimination complaint against them, are shown in a public courtroom to be sleazy bigots. Denzel Washington as Hanks’s attorney is the shuttle figure who overcomes his own homophobia in the course of working on the case. You can’t help but prefer Hanks and Washington--they’re surrounded by huge loving families while the firm partners, heartless, pampered old white men, maraud in a pack, telling politically incorrect jokes.

The Insider (1999) runs two interconnected games. First, Russell Crowe is the virtuous whistle-blower threatened, harassed, and smeared by evil Big Tobacco in order to cover up their nefarious doings. Then there’s Al Pacino as the courageous 60 Minutes producer who gets Crowe to break his confidentiality agreement and tell what his former employers have been up to, and who then has to blow the whistle on his own corporate employer, CBS, in order to get Crowe’s interview aired. The melodramatic scale is set up with "newsman" at the high end and "businessman" at the low end. Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace is the shuttle figure who supports corporate’s decision to shelve the interview out of vanity before coming around to Pacino’s clearly superior point of view. (It’s no rebuttal to say that the script is based on a piece of investigative journalism 11  because to the degree a work of reportage tells a story it’s as susceptible to melodramatic shaping as historical anecdotes have always been.)

The structural formula is so basic that certain techniques recur: in The Contender, The Accused, Philadelphia, and The Insider the shuttle figures are entrusted with making the victim-protagonists’ innocence known, in the public record, the courtroom, and/or the media. About the most moviemakers can do is to tweak the structure with gimmicks or ironies. Rebecca (1940) is a classic example: the villainess who gives her name to the title is dead from the outset and yet continues to wreak vengeance through her faithful attendants. The movie even swings it so that her villainy isn’t revealed to us until the third act. More recently, Primal Fear (1996) intertwines two murder plots, makes it appear that one of the villains is railroading the other, and then lets both escape punishment (a move in sync with its entertaining jadedness about big-city, big-stakes players).

More often, however, you feel that the makers aren’t quite aware of how limiting the structure is, even with a fancy curve or two. The Fugitive’s plot gimmick is that the falsely-accused Harrison Ford has to investigate his wife’s murder while on the run from Tommy Lee Jones as the U.S. Marshal who has to act officially as Ford’s nemesis at the same time that he increasingly doubts his guilt, and who is thus the shuttle figure. The apparatus is hokey and on such an enormous scale that only Jones’s commanding comic by-play with his investigative team makes it watchable.

The Fugitive represents an aesthetic mistake of proportion on the part of moviemakers who don’t realize how flimsy their dramatic skeleton is. L.A. Confidential (1997) shows the way in which melodramatic structure impairs the substance of the drama. The movie also works a clever variation on formula: the three cops who bring down the villain within the department are good, functionally-but-not-knowingly corrupt, and knowingly-but-not-deeply corrupt, and the good one is the least appealing in movie terms. (Guy Pearce is quietly spectacular as that poison-tipped straight arrow.) The problem is that the view of corruption in L.A. as systemic, involving the D.A.’s office, the police department, vice lords, movies and television, and tabloid journalism, is diminished by making it all the handiwork of evil personified, hiding behind a badge. Melodrama turns exposé into symbolic ritual, the casting out of a devil in whose machinations we have no need to feel implicated. And if melodrama is inadequate for big-city corruption, it’s that much less able to tell us anything about Nazism.

Melodrama isn’t necessarily a question of specific intent; I imagine Spielberg didn’t realize how his movie was shaping the characters and incidents in Schindler’s List. But some of our more intellectually alert moviemakers have consciously resisted melodrama. In Sam Peckinpah’s masterful and relatively temperate early western Ride the High Country (1962), an impoverished, do-right marshal and his partner rescue a young bride after her wedding into a cretinous, oozily primordial clan of miners. (The ceremony is held in a brothel and it turns out the groom’s brothers expect to share her.) The partner gets her out of the mining camp by suborning a witness to the miners’ court; the brothers find out and face off for a gun battle against the "good" guys to get the girl back. As the lawman and his partner approach the brothers’ hold, one brother suggests an ambush, but the abandoned bridegroom says, "Ain’t you got no sense of family honor?" before heading out for a fair shootout in the open. Thus, the side we favor resorts to deception while the side we disfavor has more scruples than we expect. At one point the bride says to the lawman, "My father says there’s only right and wrong, good and evil, nothing in between. It isn’t that simple, is it?" and he replies, "No, it isn’t. It should be, but it isn’t," and Peckinpah finesses the plot and characters to demonstrate this.

Ride the High Country pushes melodrama in the direction of realism. Taxi Driver (1976), directed by Martin Scorsese from Paul Schrader’s script, is not formally a melodrama but lays bare the melodramatic imagination better than any American movie. In it, Travis Bickle, the pathologically alienated cabbie, sees Betsy, a cover-model blonde who works in the campaign office of a presidential candidate, and justifies his desire by saying in voice-over, "She appeared like an angel out of this open sewer." Travis talks this educated upper-middle-class girl into a date, but takes her to an "informational" Swedish medical movie, i.e., a "high class" porno, a mistake based not so much in class differences as in an alienation so extreme he can’t perceive, much less process, social information. Betsy naturally refuses to see him again, and Travis says, "I realize now how much she is like the others," the denizens of the open sewer. He has no other way to alter his feelings for Betsy than to downgrade her from angelically pure to his only other available category, evil.

Later Travis runs across Iris, a twelve-year-old blonde prostitute, but he doesn’t see her as contributing to the filthy modern city, which he expects to be washed clean by an avenging cataclysm, but as a damsel in distress, an imperiled angel. When Travis tries to talk Iris straight, she comes across as an example of ordinary, if precocious, corruption. We agree with Travis that she’d be better off back with her parents, but she doesn’t. Travis’s plan to avenge himself on Betsy by assassinating her candidate miscarries, and so he concocts a plan to save Iris, who doesn’t want to be saved. It isn’t that he’s wrong about Iris’s situation, but simply that he has only two categories into which women fit and this moral structure doesn’t correspond to actual experience. His view is distorted, yet simple and direct enough finally to serve as a conduit for the otherwise inexpressible rage building in him.

That’s the advantage of melodrama--it provides an outlet for high-pressure feelings. Putting it as positively as possible, what melodrama has going for it is sensationalism, the elemental appeal, in Eric Bentley’s words, of "identify[ing] oneself with angels, and blam[ing] everything that goes wrong on devils," 12  and the "spontaneous, uninhibited" way of heightening the conflict as well as the rhetoric and gestures of the characters engaged in the conflict. 13  Or as one 19th century defender put it, "We detest the cant of probability! If we go to the play, we desire not to see the dull old story of this working-day world grumbled over again; but to have our curiosity excited, our sympathy awakened, our eyes and ears feasted with stirring incidents and ravishing sounds." 14 

Schrader and Scorsese don’t let us enjoy such easy ravishment. In Travis’s final bloody rampage, the movie pushes us beyond melodramatic satisfaction that all the sleaze-bags involved in the prostitution network are getting theirs. We know Travis too well to think of him as a hero, as the newspapers describe him after the fact. Formally Taxi Driver is an ironic romance about a psychopath; the newspaper articles represent the outlook of melodramatic movies about lone men cleaning up the corrupt city, movies like Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974) that Schrader was writing against.

Although melodrama is limiting as a narrative form, I recognize that it is not in itself defiling. There’s no reason to resist the mannerist primitivism of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), for instance. The melodrama is standard: Welles, the self-preserving, evidence-planting, homicidal, racist cop, is bad; Charlton Heston, the Mexican cop who believes in just procedure, is good. You have Heston’s wife set up on vice and murder charges, and a shuttle figure in Joseph Calleia, Welles’s minion who finally has had enough and turns. The movie is fundamentally stern: not only are we glad to see Welles shot and set adrift in a sea of industrial waste, but Calleia, too, has to pay with his life. (Similarly, in L.A. Confidential the extent of the three cops’ wounds varies directly with their participation in the corruption they bring to an end.) The tweaking of the structure resides in the irony that Welles’s corrupt cop is a good detective--the boy he framed with planted evidence was in fact guilty of the crime. But what you go for is the bravura moviemaking, which is far too good for the material and so jacks movie lovers up in a way that Welles’s much greater Falstaff compendium Chimes at Midnight (1966) never has.

Currently, my favorite classic no-apologies melodrama is The Spiral Staircase (1946)--repressed sex and violence crackling like an electric storm inside the Gothic mansion while Dorothy McGuire as the mute servant girl goes upstairs and down with silent-movie body language learned from Conrad Veidt and Brigitte Helm. And I enjoyed the hell out of Primal Fear, The Juror (1996), and Conspiracy Theory (1997), while L.A. Confidential was as sleek as next year’s models and had that unconventional trio of artful, even cunning, male leads. But I also like some movies that might have been more but for the melodramatic structure: The Miracle Worker (1962) and Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), probably the best of all movies about progressive scientific or artistic geniuses battling uncomprehending philistines; The Music Box (1989), in which the austere handling of the courtroom testimony of the concentration camp survivors brings unusual dignity to the unmasking of the villain; and The Insider, which Michael Mann’s cool but slightly overcaffeinated style and Pacino’s powerhouse performance as the man on the ramparts take beyond its anti-corporate double whammy against Brown & Williamson and CBS.

1. a dealer by temperament: Keneally 30. (return to text)
2. Manichean battle: Commentators have described the Judeo-Christian roots of the villain in melodrama: "Historically the villains in our tradition stem from the archvillain Lucifer" (Bentley 201); the villain "was ... indeed the snake in the garden, the initial disrupter of innocence" (Grimsted 176). This survives in the rhetoric of melodrama, e.g., when Laurence Olivier reveals to Joan Fontaine Rebecca’s evil nature, he says, "It wouldn’t make for sanity, would it--living with the devil?" Yet at the same time, Grimsted could write that although 19th-century American stage "plays often respectfully introduced religious forms," "no melodrama developed a specifically religious theme" (Grimsted 225), and the cheesy piety of classic Hollywood movies featuring nuns and priests confirms that this carried right over into our movies. (return to text)
3. Peter Brooks: 33. (return to text)
4. the innocent protagonist: Brooks 30-1. (return to text)
5. demonic acolytes: Brooks 33. (return to text)
6. classic plot types: Brooks 29-30. (return to text)
7. villain’s actions: Brooks 32, 34. (return to text)
8. reward of virtue: Brooks 27. Maurice Willson Disher summed up melodrama’s "fundamental conventions" in less space than Brooks though more impressionistically: "the division of characters into black-and-white, the faith in Nature’s partiality to the good, the identification of virtue with poverty and simplicity, and vice with rank and culture, as well as ’the swamping of reason in emotion, the floods of tears, the complete insensibility to the absurd’" (29). (return to text)
9. examples:Of course, by this analysis Othello is open to attack as melodrama and if Shakespeare hadn’t depicted the dissolution of character in the medium of an overwhelming vice with both precision and poetry the charge might lie. Iago’s resemblance to a villain is equally deceptive--his mystery and drama are those of an allegorical medieval vice turning into a modern character. As the personification of Othello’s jealousy he must push Othello in the direction of suspicion. But Iago doesn’t just interpret the evidence, he plants it, which opens up the question of motivation. It’s an astonishing expansion of literary means, not a restriction that panders to popular taste. (return to text)
10. pure heroine’s chastity: Grimsted 175-6. (return to text)
11. Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair article is definitely a good guys versus bad guys story. (return to text)
12. Eric Bentley’s words: 261. (return to text)
13. spontaneous, uninhibited: Bentley 205-6, 216. (return to text)
14. We detest the cant of probability!: Dye 33. Drawing up the opposite line of defense, Dickens claims in Oliver Twist that the startling transitions of fortune and tone in melodrama are indeed true to life (124 (ch. XVII)). (return to text)