You often hear a movie described as a melodrama, but have you ever taken the time to wonder what exactly separates a melodrama from a run of the mill, average, ordinary drama? Essentially, a melodrama is a drama in which the emotions and events are invested with a heightened sense of meaning. Almost always, a female character is the driving force behind the plot of a melodrama, though this need not necessarily be the case. If action movie heroes are defined by their exceptional strength and sub-human inability to verbally express themselves, or even register the fact that they feel any emotion through facial movement, the females in melodramas are defined by such things as their willingness to sacrifice their own desires, their almost ferocious tenacity in clinging to relationships and, above all, their ability to protect their offspring like a female bear facing down a hunter who forgot to bring the gun that gives him a sense of manhood.
The melodrama itself if defined by a threat to what the heroine holds dearest. Most often a melodrama does not exist in a cultural vacuum. For instance, many of the great melodrama of the 1930s focused on the economic difficulties of being a mother. The finest example is probably the Barbara Stanwyck classic Stella Dallas. The underlying motif of these melodramas spoke to widespread disenfranchisement at many class levels during the Great Depression and served to encode the mother willing to sacrifice all as an example of how everyone should behave. Call it socialist propaganda if you will, but the fact is that the sacrifice of mothers, as well as fathers and sons and daughters, was an absolute necessity in order for all the survive.
At the other end of the spectrum is another justly famous example of the melodrama, one for which Joan Crawford inexplicably was awarded an Oscar, Mildred Pierce. Mildred Pierce is the kind of melodrama in which maternal devotion to duty goes tragically awry, proof that even too much love isn’t always a good thing or can’t solve the problems of the world. Crawford Mildred is every bit as dutiful a mother as Stanwyck’s Stella, but the paths of their respective daughters diverge significantly. The younger Pierce grows up to become a savage lunatic rather than understanding and appreciating the sacrifices made for her.
Melodrama need not always focus on parental responsibilities, however. Everything from A Star is Born to Love Story can rightly be categorized as melodrama. For that matter, the melodrama is very much alive today, from Waiting to Exhale to The Stepmother. Regardless of the era and the fluctuating popularity in both form and style, the melodrama has never gone completely out of style. The 1970s and feminist notions of identify produced An Unmarried Woman, while Waiting to Exhale introduced an idea that might well have been reserved for the avant garde only a few decades earlier: the idea that African-Americans could star in an ensemble piece of love without resorting to the introduction of either a criminal element or necessitating that the locale be a ghetto. That movie reflects the evolution of black actors and actresses into the full mainstream by subjecting them to what could essentially have the same movie starring whites with only minor changes.
So what makes something like Titanic a melodrama, but not The English Patient? Both are love stories in which great sacrifices are made so why is one a melodrama and the other not? In addition to the aforementioned elements, a melodrama differs from a drama in that the heroes and villains are easily distinguished. Consider a melodrama to be literally written in stark black and white, while a drama contains shades of gray. The villain in Titanic, the character by played by Billy Zane, is so over-the-top that he may as well be twiddling a waxed handlebar mustache and wearing a cape. In fact, the earliest melodramas contained just that kind of villain, later parodied in the form of Snidely Whiplash on Dudley Do-Right. At the same time the characters played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio contain almost as little complexity and ambiguity as the Zane’s bad guy. Contrast that with The English Patient where you really don’t know until the very end whether you should be rooting for Ralph Fiennes, Willem Dafoe or, for that matter, anyone. Melodrama is about making it easy to know who to root for and against; with drama it becomes a bit more complicated.
