I'm always amazed when someone tells me that melodrama died in the late 1890s. Actually it's alive and well, even today. I don't mean in soap operas, I mean in most mainstream films and novels. What was the recent Academy Award winner, "Slum Dog Millionaire," but a re-hash of the old story of the virtuous orphan abused by an evil skinflint?
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that if you want to learn how to write stories, you better make your peace with the conventions of melodrama. For one thing, you better learn how to love cruel stepfathers, scheming misers, generous benefactors, smooth villains, stolen children, lost wills, missing heirs, disguises, plots overheard, people thought dead returning to life, and all the rest.
I wish I'd learned melodramatic writing in school. Here's (below) a fantasy of mine, where an imaginary teacher hands out the kind of assignment I'd have killed to get:
TEACHER: "A nice girl from a mid-west farm has come to New York to see if she can get a part in a Broadway play. She's talented but she doesn't know anybody in the city and her money's running out. We pick her up when she's standing in a line outside a theater waiting for an audition.
An awkward young man comes out and she inadvertently causes him to drop his copy of the script into the mud. When she helps him pick it up she loses her place in line and ungraciously blames him for it. He asks who she is and she impulsively says that she's a big star who's slumming by reading for the part. When he leaves she discovers that the man she's just alienated is the leading man in the play.
The assignment? Make an outline of the conversation they have outside the theater. A little humor is okay, but don't don't make fun of the genre, and make it a scene the audience won't soon forget."
STUDENTS: "But it's cheesy! Nobody can write stuff like that with a straight face anymore!"
TEACHER: "You not only have to write it, but you have to write it with conviction. And it has to be good!
STUDENTS: (Groans).
8 comments:
Have you read "The Quincunx" by Charles Palliser? It was a conscious attempt to write a Charles Dickens type story, but being more overt about the sexual and other modern undertones. It's a very clever book on many, many levels, and isn't easy reading, but I find it fascinating. The central ambiguity is very cleveerly judged, if tantalisingly frustrating.
My favorite Far Sides were the ones that played on the conventions and cliches of genres like melodrama westerns and Film Noir. As a cartoonist theres so much there to
twist and put your own spin on
You can breathe life into the genre and still have fun with it. The evil heir can eat no fat, while the good heir can eat no lean. So the girl loves them both and in public, to win a bet with Jesus.
By "manly" I don't mean the moronic fratboy, Ed Hardy wearing misogynistic douchebag culture I meant that guys should try to emulate men like Humphrey Bogart and Gregory Peck instead of being another jackass that plucks their eyebrows and shops at banana republic
Alec: Thanks much for the recommendation. I looked it up and discovered that the book is 800 pages long! That's too long for a book that's just trying to be entertaining. Even so, I'll try to take a look at it next time I'm in a bookstore.
I always thought the advent of sound pictures slowlly killed melodrama in film. In silent films you had to be bursting with facial expressions and over the top reactions because without sound, you miss the other half of translating emotion. After sound was invented melodrama's death didn't start yet since the newer generation of actors grew up on silent picture and live entertainment like Vaudeville. However during the mid 50's onward, their started a slow decline with melodrama. The newer generation was brought up on the previous generation's talking pictures and they never fully grapsed how they gesticulate so well on screen and not flail. Today the situation is even worse with only minor exceptions. The past 40 years we were brought up on "pre-packaged" entertainment. No silent pictures with hypnotising gestures and live, a-list, entertainment is very limited to the public. The only place melodrama still lives is on Broadway.
There's nothing wrong with melodrama. It's all about style over substance, and as long as one knows that going in, one can have tons o'fun with it.
Someone once called Western movies the American equivalent of Noh and Kabuki dramas insofar as they had only 8 basic situations and just a couple of dozen different characters. What made them entertaining was wringing all the variations out of those basic ideas (f'r instance, compare RIO BRAVO with EL DORADO; almost identical re situations and characters but one is the obverse of the other).
Drama is when the character's interior motivations override the external (i.e., situation) motivations. DRAGNET is a series about a guy who solves crimes because it's his job to solve crimes; the crime solving is the whole point of the stories. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is about three guys who solve crimes because solving crimes helps them get what they want; the crime solving is incidental to their character motivations.
Almost all genre fiction -- certainly almost all genre fiction that starts out with the writer deciding they want to write a story in a particular genre -- is melodrama.
There's nothing wrong with melodrama. Most stories in movies and TV today are melodrama. The trick is connecting on an honest emotional level with the audience. That's where the conviction comes in.
I also agree with Rick in that actors need to learn to gesticulate and use their faces to convey emotion.
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