Melodrama Essay -- Literary Analysis,Steve Neal, Christine Gledhil

There are many debates in Film Studies over what films count as melodramas. Film scholar Steve Neale’s essay, â€Å"Melodrama and the Woman’s film,† describes the paradigm shift that melodrama has experienced from the Silent era to the 70’s. On the other hand, Christine Gledhill’s essay, â€Å"Rethinking Genre† and â€Å"The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,† suggest that melodrama is just a mode and, not, in fact, a genre. While Thomas Elsaesser’s essay â€Å"Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on The Family Melodrama,† identifies the different types of melodrama. But what is a true form of the melodrama genre? At first, it might be difficult to understand why an animated film such as Curious George made my nephew ask me why he felt like crying when the monkey was separated from his zookeeper, and proceeded to ask why the film made him sad. What my little nephew didn’t know was that I also cried. Melodrama tic films are those that make you cry: films that have an essence of verisimilitude, evoke pathos, and use music to accentuate the ‘drama.’ In this essay, I will take elements of Neale, Elsaesser, and Gledhill’s discourses on melodrama to support my definition. By the end of this essay, I will give a brief explanation on why the melodramatic film as the contemporary drama is important and universally understood. In order for a film to be considered to be a melodrama it has to have a presence of verisimilitude. In other words, a melodramatic film has to mimic real life. According to Elsaesser’s essay, he says that, â€Å"even if the situations and sentiments defied all categories of verisimilitude and were totally unlike anything in real life, the structure had a truth and a life of its own, which artists could make part of their material (37... ...ealizes the loss Pita is going to have. By adulthood, one is familiar with extreme sadness and true suffering. Most adults know the feeling of never being able to say you love someone because they have passed on. Or, losing your favorite toy. Even if you haven’t gone through such life changing events, we have all experienced the separation from our mother’s womb into the world. Our first cry is our first trauma that is implanted into our psyche. That’s why in Melodramatic films are solemnly those of great pathos that make the spectator cry because they familiarizes with the pain (even a five year old can understand), and there are cries of joy at the end for the purpose of catharsis which relieves of trauma of separation. (Why is crying therapeutic? How does it relieve this trauma? Does it cause us to confront the anxiety of separation you are referring to?)