Melodramatic Concepts, Meaning, and History

 Melodrama is based on a turbulent love story and accompanying emotional conflict. Conflicts in melodrama are not as physically solvable as in action movies, nor can they be transformed into magic as in musicals. Resolution of the conflict is possible only with self-reflective criticism of the entire oppressive social community.

Concepts and meanings of melodrama

Melodrama is a concept that combines melos, which means music, and drama, which means play. Melodrama presents a popular love story, but its composition focuses on human emotions that can be expressed only by music. Therefore, the genre regulation of melodrama is based on a stylistic approach to reaching the audience, which is thoroughly emotional.

Melodramas' emotional-centered narratives stem from 18th-century literature that denied classical art and represented civic sentiment. Popular love novels at the time described individual alienation that occurred when patriarchal society suppressed women's emotional needs. The phenomenon of human alienation emerged as a bigger social problem after two world wars shook the family system to its roots. Emotional disconnection and human alienation have changed the appearance of the middle class, which is a representation of the bourgeois social order, which is the core of the narrative commonly found in Hollywood melodrama.

Melodrama is described from the perspective of the oppressed heroine under the pretext of patriarchal society and family community. Therefore, in melodrama, conflict is mostly related to marriage and family problems. Here, the external determinants of social system and the psychological factors expressed inside the family are appropriately mixed. Most of the endings of melodrama oppose the patriarchal social system, but in the end, it presents the image of a woman who gives in to the absolute father figure or falls victim to sexual inequality. The satisfaction that female audiences feel in melodrama lies in finding women's independent identity along with a sad proxy experience of love that is impossible in reality.

History and Development of Melodrama

The melodrama begins with David Griffith's first feature film, "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). In this film, which is a film adaptation of Thomas Dixon's novel "The Clansman" (1905), the love story of a woman suffering from American Civil War and racism was presented for the first time being. Here, Griffiths enlarged the face of the heroine, who was filled with grief, with repeated close-up shots, and since then, close-up has become a key film language for melodrama. The setting that a woman's individual "love story" is victimized by a male-centered "he-story" marks the classic period of melodrama until the end of World War II, at the top of which is "Gone with the Wind" (1939).

Modern melodrama

Modern melodrama tends to emphasize emotional opportunism rather than self-critical probability. Various types were born as other genre elements were mixed with the motif of love, broken heart, and despair. However, the basic framework that defines melodrama, the love triangle between a woman and a man and a third party, remains unchanged. At this time, a third party may be another male savior or female intruder, but it may be a narrow family, social community, war, or natural disaster.