Watching a melodrama it can seem as if that’s all that American moviemakers understand drama to be. Romance, however, may be even more central and is nearly as problematic. For example, just as Schindler’s List structures history as melodrama, John Singleton’s Rosewood (1997), a dramatization of an actual pogrom against an African-American community in Florida in 1923, structures history as romance. When a mysterious stranger named Mann, who rode into town just before the outbreak of violence and has been followed around by an entranced little boy, saves a contingent of women and children from the murderous white mob, you know you’re not watching a reenactment of history but of George Stevens’s Shane (1953). The key difference is that in Singleton’s world the color coding has been reversed: black is good while white, if not evil, is at least inherently suspect. (It’s a mere reversal of the racist stereotype: here the whites are moral simpletons, likely to err without the salutary, and at times corporal, guidance of blacks.) The baleful incident happened, just as the Holocaust did, but Singleton processes it for consumption in a way all too familiar from earlier movies.

Ordinarily, you don’t have to apologize for responding to romance as you do for responding to melodrama. It’s a far more venerable genre, and more complicated to nail down as well. In terms of its narrative elements, Northrop Frye has written: "[A]s soon as romance achieves a literary form, it tends to limit itself to a sequence of minor adventures leading up to a major or climacteric adventure, usually announced from the beginning, the completion of which rounds off the story. We may call this major adventure, the element that gives literary form to the romance, the quest." 1  The quest may involve seeking a specific object, such as the holy grail, and at the same time it may involve an ordeal, an initiation, a rite of passage, or some test, such as Parzival undergoes when he fails to ask the Fisher King about the grail and the spear carried in procession at the banquet.

Along the way to fulfilling the quest, the hero will typically be tempted to stray from the quest, the pursuit of which is entirely bound up with his virtue, by characters who may to a greater or lesser extent be identified allegorically with the temptations that humans face in the quest of life. Temptation is usually what supplies the drama in the series of adventures, but it’s not just a suspense technique. C.S. Lewis has written that "to fight against ’Temptation’ is also to explore the inner world; and it is scarcely less plain that to do so is to be already on the verge of allegory." 2  Allegory, which may or may not appear in a work we recognize by other formal elements as a romance, involves characters more-or-less strongly identified with singled-out aspects of personality arrayed along an unambiguous moral scale.

Though Lewis refers to allegory as belonging "not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind," in that it "is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms," 3  Frye can fairly say that in the "characterization of romance ... subtlety and complexity are not much favored. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it they are caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly." 4  So quest romances feature a good knight, his lady, and often a noble male companion; their opposites of roughly equivalent power in rival knights and temptresses; rival good and bad characters of greater, supernatural power in wizards and sorceresses and the like; animals on both sides, for instance, the hero’s noble steed versus ravening dragons; wise characters who advise the hero, often hermits; and characters of lesser power both in people needing rescue and more peripherally in comic servants.

However, this doesn’t describe the characters in Wolfram or Ariosto nearly as well as in Spenser, and The Faerie Queene, like The Pilgrim’s Progress, requires you to dovetail the good and bad characters’ qualities into a series of patterns so intricately that I hesitate to say that such allegorical characterization lacks subtlety and complexity. Individual characters may--if the choice is between following Christian toward the distant light or turning back with Obstinate and Pliable to the City of Destruction, as at the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress, you’re not likely to choose wrong 5  --but it’s nonetheless challenging to put the characters and incidents together in a summary reading of the work. Great writers can do a lot with the labeled characters of allegory, which reaches us more through the mind than the heart, perhaps explaining why American movies don’t go in for it in a very methodical way. They have, however, knocked themselves out with the white versus the black knight, the true lady versus the deceptive temptress, et al.

Whether it works by allegory or not, romance anatomizes by trial what kind of "knight" the protagonist is. The episodic structure ideally can throw light on any number of recesses of character, though often our movies just show the same one repeatedly in a slightly different light. And even if they don’t go in for allegory, which pits the protagonist against personified aspects of himself, movie romances bring the hero into conflict with the things we fear will keep us from achieving our quests. As a technical matter they also tend to show us the protagonist’s dreams, memories, fantasies, or delusions, or else use point-of-view camerawork to show us how he sees or feels things to be. Almost the entire length of The Devil’s Advocate (1997), for example, turns out to have been Keanu Reeves’s feverish vision during a trial recess of what a career defending criminals will entail spiritually. With all these means of externalizing internal conflicts, romance steeps the protagonist’s world in his temptations and conflicts, blurring internal and external boundaries. It’s highly seductive.

It can be much more than seductive, however. In the greatest romances, the answer to the question of what a knight is made of, as provided by the episodes, and the system of values by which we know the quest to be good and the hero’s temptations to be evil, are mutually revelatory. This is notably a deductive process of signification. That is, the poet begins with an overarching system of universal meaning, such as medieval Christianity, and conceives of episodes to demonstrate how a properly ordered personality integrates itself into this system. 6  It is in this sense a didactic genre, which at its greatest rises to sublime power and grandeur.

A more recondite problem for literary classification is that romance can come to seem like a category of nearly universal application. Frye has written, for instance, "Romance is the structural core of all fiction: being directly descended from folktale, it brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as the epic of the creature, man’s vision of his own life as a quest." 7  He further generalizes that there are four planes of action in fiction--heaven, the earthly paradise, earth, and hell--and all storytelling involves either descent or ascent from one level to another. 8  I put this bulb in my porchlight and the examples clustered around it from all directions. What, for instance, is any horror movie but a descent into the underworld, or the ascent of a demonic figure to earth or an earthly paradise?

And so perhaps at some level romance is what we mean by fiction and every other genre is simply a way of organizing it, of controlling its effect on the audience. This may be why I recognize a movie as a melodrama with something like the click of a machine part, whereas the recognition of romance is a longer, more impressionistic process. All the same, the intuitive sense of romance as a genre is not unfounded: the combination of the marvelous and the purposeful, the fantastic quest adventure and the (often spiritual) authority to say why it matters, makes it seem distinct from every other genre. You can call romance the symbolic journey of the soul through life.

This is so even in a work like Oliver Twist in which the description of institutions is meant to be muckrakingly correct. But when Fagin says of Oliver "he was not like other boys in the same circumstances," 9  you know the little boy’s story is not representative at a realistic level, that is, the main concern is not with probability. And when Rose Maylie says of him, accurately, "He cannot be hardened in vice ... it is impossible," 10  you know he represents instead a romantic view of natural innocence--the Christian soul conceived of as bearing untouchable grace, no matter its estate, companions, or surroundings. This also tells you that Dickens made Fagin a Jew not merely out of ethnic prejudice but to complete the romance allegory.

Without reaching for this level of complexity, romance is a natural for American moviemakers, given its slight emphasis on realism, which makes it highly adaptable to any setting or handling, from supernatural fantasy to urban naturalism.

Romance has a very wide range and every possible structural component falls out along a gradual spectrum. For instance, in physically active American movies (i.e., cop or detective stories, sports pictures, and action adventures), a straightforward, and hardly spiritual, form of the quest will dominate (i.e., nab or name the killer, win the big game, find the lost ark). But it can get more complicated, and even complex. In The Wizard of Oz (1939) the literal quest for the witch’s broomstick co-exists with the allegorical quests of Dorothy’s companions. In little songs set to the same tune, each announces what he’s after--brain, heart, courage--components of an ideal human, each of which Dorothy herself displays in the course of getting what they’re after from the Wizard. At the opposite end of the fantasy-reality spectrum, the quest in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) divides between irony and mystery. The discovery that Sonny is robbing the bank to pay for his lover’s sex change operation is highly unexpected and feels incomplete--there’s a broader margin of motivation unexpressed, probably even to Sonny himself. The ironic romance debouches into tragedy.

Quests are common but not necessary elements of romance. Temptation is so dominant that you recognize romance where you would have to stretch to identify a quest (as in the Book of Job). Under its realistic contemporary surface Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945) is an example of a romance in which temptation dominates a highly developed allegorical structure with no quest at all. Ray Milland’s brother shows the limits of the rational recognition that his drinking is a problem; the bartender who listens to his self-glorying/self-pitying guff stands for self-disgust; the sadistic nurse in the alcoholic ward does the talking in his exchanges with Milland and serves as a harbinger for the coming physical anguish, which, unlike moral disgust, can’t be talked away; the active girlfriend who blocks his suicide attempt might as well be named Hope, a reason to go on living when you have no other reason. But the script, like Charles Jackson’s source novel, employs the simplest of narrative forms: a descent into the netherworld. (What makes it seem hard-edged is that it’s an ironic descent from a world without a sacred system or at least one that the protagonist is shut out of--that’s why the pawnshops are closed for religious observance.) As the alcoholic blocked writer descends into the netherworld of his own alcoholism, temptation becomes synonymous with story.

In a romance of temptation the entire atmosphere becomes pregnant with what is alluring and repellent about the hero’s temptations and it can be done without the articulated allegory. In Sunset Boulevard (1950), another of Wilder’s romances of temptation, Gloria Swanson’s mansion is as fascinating and spiritually perilous as Venus’s cave in Tannhäuser, and William Holden’s choice between the fresh-faced young screenwriter and the deluded has-been screen goddess seems to involve a literal choice between light and shadow, corresponding to what is bright and dark within himself.

This is also the case in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) in which the young hero’s quests for a killer and for his own adulthood are inseparable from the tempting choice between an idealistic blonde and a mysterious, compromised brunette he sees only at night, between taking the place of his own disabled father or the psychotic criminal who beats the dark lady. The camera work in Taxi Driver is often expressionistic to show us what bits of life in the city are getting caught and distorted in Travis Bickle’s mind. Blue Velvet goes further into romance stylization in that elements that could be attributed to the hero’s subconscious act out his internal drama all over town, on both sides of the tracks.

The romance of temptation has also been the major narrative form for American dramas with female stars. In literary romance, the virtuous Christian ladies and the two-faced temptresses tend to play limited roles in a restricted range (though in our movies the bad girls are usually far more entertaining). Ariosto’s Bradamante and the Patient Griselda, who turns up in Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer--the female knight at one end of the power and control spectrum and the female Job at the other--and their descendants have been more characterful in no small part because they’re more central to the narratives in which they appear. Such romances have enabled actresses to act out the modern woman’s quest for power and independence, as well as her conflicts en route and once arrived.

Aside from movies about Joan of Arc, confined by the historical record to a distasteful end by Hollywood standards (with a free hand they’d put her in a dress and marry her to the dauphin), there have been few movie romances in which an actress has played an actual warrior type. Usually it’s updated or transposed--she’s a spy, an astronaut, a political crusader, or a lady cop. (Frances McDormand as supernormal Marge in Fargo (1996) has been the most amusing, Jennifer Lopez as the cop in love with a thief who is living out an antagonistic romance in Out of Sight the most convincing.) More often, the heroic woman’s quest takes the form of a business venture or a career, which may involve some kind of performance and almost always leads to stardom.

The romance form in these movies is shopworn for sure, but the heroine’s temptation is specifically modern: career versus family life. Would a man and babies give "true" meaning to her glamorous, high-powered existence? The answer is always yes, even when the heroine isn’t able to hold on to the better life, but the audience, for whom the answer was probably unequivocally yes, still gets to enjoy the romance of the heroine’s freer range of activity. (There’s an inherent irony in Streisand’s clinching her movie stardom at the end of Funny Girl (1968) with a rendition of "My Man". Her performance of the song enshrines the man and obliterates him from our minds at the same time--no one ever wished the number was a duet.) Women enjoy an extraordinary amount of freedom in these movies, even if that freedom is shut down or rejected in the end. Sometimes they push at the boundaries of acceptable behavior that romance usually accepts as firm: Jezebel (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939) pointedly include traditionally decorous young women as foils to their more complicated protagonists.

Even when the heroine is more like Patient Griselda, as are the sorely beset heroines of Madame X (1916, 1920, 1929, 1937, 1966) and Back Street (1931, 1941, 1961), they have consistently drawn crowds. In fact, this kind of masochistic romance is as highly adaptable as the career girl-superstar romance: Lost in Yonkers (1993) and The Piano (1993) fit the mold, and What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993) is both at once. (In a way, all Griselda movies are both at once since we know the helpless dear is being played by a well-paid, well-known, influential movie star.) If fewer movies of either type are made for theatrical release now it’s because TV soap opera (the female version of the romance of temptation and ordeal expressed in terms of bourgeois realism) can use the sequential structure of romance to let the good and bad girls face off unendingly, and has more direct access to the female audience centered in the home.

Many of the dramas starring women are notoriously overwrought and blubbery but they’re not worse as romance than other kinds, almost none of which offer the genre at its full ethical capabilities. Adaptations from Raymond Chandler, who conceived of Philip Marlowe as a knight in modern dress, are typical of the limitation of romance in our movies: they’re far better at catching the allure of temptation than the payoff of redemption. Redemption is presumed to follow, if at all, from the melodramatic deliverance from corruption personified. The Devil’s Advocate is an entertaining recent example, in that it makes Al Pacino as the head of the law firm who recruits Keanu Reeves into the Villain himself, and more. (The funniest exchange: Reeves, "What are you ... Satan?"; Pacino, "Call me Dad.") If it were a "realistic" anti-corporate melodrama it would be as run-of-the-mill as The Firm (1993). As a romance it can trace its paranoia and hysteria back to their inflamed roots, though still entirely without genuine religious conviction.

Usually romance and melodrama come together in a package--the most common narrative structure among serious American moviemakers hands down. It’s an industrially efficient mix: the episodic story structure of romance and the moral polarization of melodrama are simple, readily-fabricated materials that can be combined by anyone who can hold a pen. 11  Also, the extension ad libitum of plot in romance partakes of a certain dream-likeness, while the moral insistence of melodrama offers a seeming imperative; the combination has the erotic pull and hardball push of advertising, from which movies are often indistinguishable. (The image of a star, the central feature of American movies almost from the beginning, is, after all, analogous to a branded commodity and is protected by right of publicity law. 12  )

In addition, as Northrop Frye noted, romances also tend to pit purely good against purely evil characters, so there’s already a lot of overlap with melodrama. The Christian, Obstinate, and Pliable of romance can easily become the hero, villain, and shuttle figure of melodrama. So it matters relatively little that the villain initiates the action in melodrama whereas the romance hero sets out on his quest and encounters antagonists along the way. Roughly speaking, the more compact a movie’s action--an entire plot devoted to a single contest, for instance--the more likely a movie is a melodrama. In melodrama the antagonists have to be pulling at two ends of a single rope (in Casablanca it’s the struggle for the possession of the letters of transit), even if, as in the murder mystery, the hero doesn’t know the identity of his antagonist. The more episodic the action, the more likely it’s romance. Often you don’t even have to make the call: The Contender is a melodrama seen as Joan Allen’s fight against Gary Oldman over her confirmation and a romance seen as her crusade against the double standard. What’s unfortunate is that the moral schematization of melodrama cuts off the heights that romance can reach. The result is an overlong, escalating series of episodes in the battle between good and evil, both of which are simplistically conceived.

The way John Singleton and his screenwriter Gregory Poirier altered the historical record in Rosewood typifies how American moviemakers’ use of romance limits them, even when their ambitions go beyond the usual cop or detective picture or soap opera storyline. 13  What we know of the facts 14  is that a married white woman in a neighboring town claimed to have been raped in her home by a black man the day after a black convict escaped from a road gang in the area. A growing mob of white men, assuming the convict was the rapist, used the woman’s clothes to give the bloodhounds their scent and then followed the dogs straight to Rosewood, where they failed to find the man. Having quickly exhausted their investigative leads but still riled, the white mob rampaged for a week, torturing, maiming, and killing men and women, and eventually dispersing the entire community and dispossessing them without compensation.

Not surprisingly, there was no Mann, no allegorically-named stranger who rode into Rosewood on a horse. There was instead a resident named Sylvester Carrier, nicknamed "Man" by fellow citizens, who shot two members of the white mob as they stormed his mother’s house before being killed himself. Even before the pogrom, Carrier’s heroism was highly impractical for the time, involving as it did a refusal of the normally mandatory signs of deference. He had, for instance, called two white men out for making indecent comments to his sisters. 15  By splitting Sylvester Carrier into the historical figure called by his right name and the allegorical figure of Mann, Singleton is able to make a more upbeat picture for African-Americans, a fantasy of self-help rescue about as authentic as if he’d put Mann in a cape and tights and had him fly into town. The script is nearly that fantastic: Mann pulls off a Houdini-like escape from a lynching while Sylvester makes his getaway by hiding in his mother’s coffin.

Not all the changes are this silly, however. It’s historically libelous, in a manner of speaking, for Singleton to make it so that the white men who brought a train to Rosewood of their own volition to spirit the women and children to Gainesville have to be argued into it. 16  Far worse is the decision to have Mann on board 17  when black male stragglers run to get on as whooping whites shoot them down. Singleton’s model, once again, is the western, but now we’re supposed to be free to cheer as Mann picks whites off, as we no longer are when watching Indians bite the dust. Worst of all is the shot near the end, presented as a tasty little dessert to send us off satisfied, in which we hear the white Eve who started it all being beaten by her husband. In Singleton and Poirier’s version, despite the controversy in the record, 18  we know she’s lying about her attacker’s being black, so she deserves it.

The romance form enables Singleton to reshape the facts into an unthinkingly "male," anachronistic black nationalist entertainment in which African-Americans mete out capital penalties to whites. Of course oppressed minorities get tired of seeing themselves as victims, but this way of rewriting history doesn’t make the audience more sensitive. It doesn’t give us the reimagined heroes or affirmations we could use, it just switches the codes of the stock form so we can stay exactly as insensitive as our entire history of moviegoing has let us remain.

Singleton’s black-and-white moralizing is typical of the way in which the flattened moral perspective of melodrama fills in for romance’s system of values. Even more troubling is the fact that so many people in this country have the same melodramatic outlook about history and politics outside of the movies. This suggests that you don’t have to look for special reasons for the predominance of melodrama in movies, since melodrama is interfused with big issues for us. So it’s not surprising that with melodrama what begins as a discussion of narrative form segues into something that sounds like a discussion of morality more generally.

This is actually a more vexed question than my distaste for Rosewood makes it sound because one of the best tricks of American movies has been to cast the star in a melodrama in which the villain is the central character, a set-up which merges with romances in which the role of the evil tempter, or the vice, dominates the role of the white knight. In some morally-suspended way you watch Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (1931), both Jeanne Eagels and Bette Davis in The Letter (1929; 1940), Ida Lupino in The Hard Way (1943), Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), James Cagney in White Heat (1949), and Orson Welles in Touch of Evil (1958) with rapt fascination. (The gaudiest recent example would be Denzel Washington in Training Day (2001).) Such movies still have virtuous characters struggling against the vicious ones, it’s just that the good boys and girls have been pushed to the side because the audience is there for the star display of twisted temperament. It’s also notable that in heist movies, ironic quest romances in which the values have been inverted, it’s no trick at all to get us to root for the criminals. (They just have to be good-looking and avoid sadism.) This is one of the most interesting aspects of our movie culture, which always showed that crime didn’t pay in the long run, yet consistently indulged our felonious and violent fantasies. Still, there should be a limit to intellectual acquiescence with such works because of the relationship of American movie romance and melodrama to the rule of law and our sense of fair play, which serve the function for these genres that Christianity and chivalry served for medieval romance.

Melodrama in American movies divides between those dealing with relationships of law and those dealing with relationships of loyalty. If the innocent protagonist and/or his defender are related to the villain within an institution governed directly by the legal system (which would include the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government; law enforcement, including the CIA, FBI, and local police forces, as well as penal institutions; and the military) then they’re in the law branch of melodrama (featuring such villains as corrupt judges, politicians, D.A.s, police officers, prison wardens, and military leaders).

If they’re related personally, by emotional bonds subject in some ways to legal regimes but not truly established or governed by them (which would include sexual relations, marriage, and family; friendship; confidential professional relationships; the workplace; and religious institutions) then they’re in the loyalty branch of melodrama (featuring such villains as parents (molesting fathers were popular in the ’90s), spouses (ditto for battering male consorts), best friends, doctors and psychiatrists, priests, colleagues and higher-up executives). Professional relationships are more on the side of loyalty than law, despite the importance of legal regulation in business and the prevalence of legal malfeasance in corporate melodrama, because the emphasis is on the interpersonal relations. (Plus, you can always walk out on your job, as you may not just quit the military, for example.) This is true even of crime melodramas in which the characters are engaged in crime as a business.

Both branches of melodrama move toward the protagonist’s disillusionment when the villain is unmasked as the perpetrator of acts that usually involve breaking the law. The genre can again be divided in terms of the nature of the response to the exposed villain: it can be either violent retribution or a moral victory. Moral victory usually takes the form of a legal judgment, bringing the villain’s behavior back within the realm of law, but sometimes it simply consists of the protagonist’s awareness of his or her superiority.

There would be four squares in the grid, then: melodrama of law which deals violently with the villain (The Shawshank Redemption (1994; the warden’s death is self-inflicted, which is not an important difference in terms of the audience’s experience); Conspiracy Theory; L.A. Confidential; Gladiator (2000); Training Day); melodrama of law which ends in moral victory (A Few Good Men (1992); The Contender); melodrama of loyalty which ends in moral victory (The Prince of Tides (1991); Philadelphia); and melodrama of loyalty which deals violently with the villain (Thelma & Louise (1991); The Fugitive; To Die For (1995)).

If the protagonist doesn’t know the villain until he or she gets caught up in the villain’s nefarious doings, as is the case in stories of detection, which tend to be melodramatic romances, and with populist stories of small people being steamrollered by landgrabbing magnates or polluting corporations, then the default is to the melodrama of law, and the reaction generally violent (even if the violence is directed against the ultimate villain’s enforcer, as in Shane).

There are hybrids of every possible kind and Schindler’s List and Rosewood stick close enough to historical facts that their moral schematism almost fits into a separate "self-defense" category (as Do the Right Thing (1989), which Stanley Crouch accused of "the kind of vulgar distortion of history one is familiar with in the work of fascists," 19  does not). Finally, because violence against the villain is always morally justified in the movie’s outlook, the two forms of response converge in a triangulated breach of the golden rule. Since the villain doesn’t follow the rules, this justifies for the audience in some irrational way any action by the protagonist against him. The moviemakers can disguise this barbarity--in The Fugitive, for instance, Ford "has" to hit Jeroen Krabbé with a metal bar because he’s about to shoot Jones--but it’s purely cosmetic.

Peter Brooks celebrates melodrama for providing a "rhetorical breaking-through of repression," 20  but what gets unrepressed is mainly violence, and, of course, sex, the two most gratifying forms of self-assertion. And they can come all tangled together, as in The Shawshank Redemption, in which we’re supposed to be glad to hear that the homosexual predator who beats and rapes Tim Robbins in prison is beaten in his turn, so badly that he’s paralyzed and has to be fed through a straw. Having a tolerant view toward pornography I care less about the sex, even recognizing how often it comes in these forms that seem to punish us for being susceptible to them. The violence is more of a problem, not so much in itself but in the way it’s presented as the natural food of the moral appetite. A delicacy, in fact--notice how the heroes in L.A. Confidential typically dispatch a host of supernumerary fallen angels for the excitement, saving the big devil for last, the pièce de résistance. Melodrama in this way often turns into a kind of moral pornography.

Forced to choose between the form of law--which the villain perverts to do his evil work and/or exploits to avoid punishment by means of technicalities--and innate morality, we side with the hero who violates or evades the law. Melodrama is thus deeply rabble-rousing in that we’re meant to cheer the avenging hero who gives the villain what the audience feels he really deserves, regardless of legal formalities. You recognize melodrama whenever you feel that the movie is urging you to cheer retributive action against the villain--anything from legal fudging to humiliation to beating to torture to homicide--that you would be unhappy to see happen to the protagonist. For all that it tells its tale with a mournful, understated naturalism, In the Bedroom (2001) is still melodrama because you can’t help but share the parents’ outrage at the reduced charge the prosecutor has to press in the trial of their son’s killer. The killer has no existence except as he intersects with the parents; when the father takes the law into his own hands you find yourself hoping he gets away with it.

And it isn’t just a matter of retributive violence, but of legal procedure. Because the audience witnesses the villains raping the ten-year-old black girl in A Time to Kill (1995), for instance, the movie elides the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing, and so (four years after the Rodney King incident) we’re supposed to take righteous pleasure in Charles S. Dutton as the black sheriff smashing his billy club into the racist rapist’s face for resisting arrest (and using a racial epithet) and then, for ironic effect, holding the club against his throat while reading him his Miranda rights.

Things are only superficially more civilized in the courtroom where the melodrama typically treats us the way the most cynical of criminal attorneys would approach the jury, as people to be swayed rather than convinced. The emblematic moment comes when Dutton answers the defense attorney’s question, incriminating the now-dead rapists, a full beat after the judge has sustained an objection to it. (In the John Grisham book he answers during the objection, so the moviemakers knew what they were doing. 21  ) Sandra Bullock and Oliver Platt look down and smirk in appreciation and I thought, Would the moment be so "cute" to the moviemakers if it were the defense attorney in The Accused sneaking in details of Jodie Foster’s past sexual activity over the prosecutor’s objections? (Primal Fear at least understands we have to pay for these moments: when Gere exposes one of the villains on the stand with a line of questioning irrelevant to the case being tried, the tough-but-fair judge holds him in contempt and fines him $10,000.) Such scenes, which are standard in melodrama, can make you forget that such procedural rights are especially necessary to protect the unpopular, even if they’re deservedly unpopular. When did liberals start making pro-lynching movies?

It used to be that the classic right-wing melodrama was D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) while Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and William Wellman’s Ox-Bow Incident (1943) were the classics on the left: pro- and anti-mob violence movies, respectively. Still, liberal dramas were usually melodramas and there are repellent moments in as fine a movie as From Here to Eternity (1953), when we’re supposed to cheer as Prewitt, the man who refuses to box for his company because he had blinded a sparring partner, starts hitting Galovitch in the face, for example. It’s supposedly okay because Galovitch has goaded him into the fight and because we hear someone shout, "C’mon, Galovitch, fight fair!" (In the novel Prewitt is a more ambiguous figure; for instance, when Bloom goads him into a fight over a card game Prewitt tries to hit him while his arms are still tangled in his shirtsleeves but Maggio stops him. 22 )

Melodrama is a leveler: villains always cheat, always violate fair play, chivalry, hospitality, defense of the weak, and the golden rule--all the foundations of civilization--and in their punitive response liberal melodramas aren’t distinguishable from right-wing melodramas like Dirty Harry, which justifies Clint Eastwood’s cop acting as a vigilante because the law isn’t effective enough against criminals who don’t play by the rules and so can’t be put out of commission by them. The most complex political situations can be shaped for the same effect, as in The Green Berets (1968) when John Wayne barks at David Janssen as the journalist who has objected to the rough interrogation of a Vietcong prisoner, "Out here due process is a bullet!" And the echo from the left is Oliver Stone’s career. (JFK (1991) is the Kennedy assassination movie that got made instead of the adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Libra--that’s our dramatic movie culture.)

If there’s any difference between melodramas of the right and left it may be that the right-wing melodramatic hero is an authoritarian figure while the left-wing melodramatic hero is a member of the people. Either way, melodrama stirs an infantile excitement that somebody’s in charge now and the asses that need kicking, but that the good are too weak to kick precisely because they’re so good, are going to get kicked on their behalf, no matter what anybody says. In Thelma & Louise Susan Sarandon shoots the attempted rapist not for the sexual assault of Geena Davis, which she prevented, but for what he says afterwards. "You watch your mouth, buddy," she advises after shooting him through the heart. (If you put that other Sarandon message movie Dead Man Walking (1995) together with Thelma & Louise, you come up with this peculiar policy: whereas the state should not execute a rapist-murderer, it’s okay for a citizen to murder an attempted rapist even after a point at which self-defense is no longer at issue.) Later the two women destroy a trucker’s rig because he made a suggestive gesture at them.

In A Time to Kill Samuel L. Jackson murders the defilers of his little girl not after they’ve been acquitted but before they’ve been tried (same as In the Bedroom), and the charge isn’t reduced to manslaughter on account of the provocation--he walks. (Don’t the concocters of this swill realize they’re just inverting the racist sexual fears in The Birth of a Nation?) Left-wing "issue"-oriented melodramas are often more depressing than right-wing law-and-order melodramas because you expect the makers to know better. They go in progressive and come out the other end; it’s not a coincidence that the shooting in Thelma & Louise came in the same decade as the push for sanctions on "hate speech," a left-wing incursion on the First Amendment.

The difference between these movies and something like White Heat, in which all the excitement comes from what the star brings to the central role of the villain, is that we don’t kid ourselves that Cagney’s bad behavior falls under some higher moral exception that this world just isn’t good enough to recognize. Not yet, anyway, which is the clincher that permits a movie like Thelma & Louise or A Time to Kill to comport itself as if its reactionary stance were progressive.

1. essential element of plot in romance: Frye, Anatomy 186-7. (return to text)
2. C.S. Lewis: 60. (return to text)
3. not to medieval man: Lewis 44. (return to text)
4. characterization of romance: Frye, Anatomy 195. (return to text)
5. following Christian: Bunyan 94-95. (return to text)
6. an overarching system of universal meaning: As the beleaguered priest writes to his bishop in Michael Tolkin’s new book Under Radar, "[F]aith offers better drama--or comedy!--than skepticism. Skepticism shatters the possibility of coherent meaning, leaving a collection of pointless shards strung together only by mathematical coincidence, and no valid mystically obscure significance to induce revelation" (112). (return to text)
7. Romance is the structural core: Frye, Scripture 15. (return to text)
8. four planes: Frye, Scripture 97-8. (return to text)
9. Dickens, Oliver Twist 196 (ch. XXVI). (return to text)
10. Dickens, Oliver Twist 222 (ch. XXX). (return to text)
11. anyone who can hold a pen: The usual problem with romance in the movies is that the easy structuring leads to a plot that lacks tension and to an interchangeable quest. But it’s also possible to blow romance structurally. Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy (1983), for instance, is unsatisfying because we’re meant to judge Rupert and Masha’s actions from Jerry Langford’s point of view, only he doesn’t have one. He just wants to play golf and be left alone. Rupert and Masha are an ironic antagonist and temptress, but as a protagonist Langford is a cipher. There’s way too much time devoted to the creepy losers, but they’re losers precisely because they’re devotees of the religion of celebrity, with Langford their hollow idol, so you don’t want more of him either.
          Similarly, melodrama can fail structurally, as The Prince of Tides (1991) does. The villain is the father yet the sexual assault that is the key to the family mystery is transposed onto some random pirates of the Caribbean who show up at the door drunk one night. It’s as self-defeatingly evasive as old Hollywood movies that changed the ending because the audience wouldn’t accept Cary Grant as a killer. (return to text)
12. right of publicity law: Clint Eastwood, for example, successfully sued the National Enquirer for, among other things, "misappropriat[ion of] his name, likeness and personality under Cal. Civ. Code § 3344 and California common law." Eastwood v. National Enquirer, 123 F.3d 1249 (9th Cir. Cal. 1997): 1250. (return to text)
13. John Singleton and his screenwriter: Material about the writing of the screenplay available online . (return to text)
14. What we know of the facts: D’Orso 1-13. (return to text)
15. called two white men out: D’Orso 6-7. (return to text)
16. the white men who brought a train: D’Orso 12, 196. (return to text)
17. Mann on board: Mann’s presence on the train really distorts the record: the reason they took only women and children on board was that the mob was looking for men and there wasn’t any point in taking the women and children on board only to endanger them if the train should be stopped, which it was, twice, on its way to Gainesville (D’Orso 155). (return to text)
18. the controversy in the record: D’Orso 198-9. (return to text)
19. Stanley Crouch: 241. (return to text)
20. rhetorical breaking-through of repression: Brooks 42. (return to text)
21. In the John Grisham book: Grisham 332. (return to text)
22. When Bloom goads him: Jones 140. (return to text)