Melodrama and the New Woman

From the September-October 1978 Issue

Also in this issue

Interview: Néstor Almendros By Brooks Riley

Melodrama and the New Woman By David Ehrenstein

Martin Scorsese’s Guilty Pleasures By Martin Scorsese

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It’s not uncommon in the course of constant (or even casual) moviegoing, involving as it does the viewing of similar dramatic situations one after another, to experience feelings of déja vu. But often the sense of having been in a movie before is something more than that. Take for example the scene in Coming Home where Jane Fonda discovers Bruce Dern asleep with a gun in his hand; we were here before, in 1956, with Lauren Bacall and Robert Stack in a film called Written on the Wind.

Some might object to this parallel as mere coincidence. Written on the Wind was a glossy melodrama, filled with what critic Lawrence Alloway has called a “mixture of threat and opulence” typical of the period. Coming Home presents itself in a much different light—a serious investigation of the effects of the Vietnam War. But suspicion of melodramatic purport comes back to haunt, with Dern’s neurotic soldier matching up almost scene for scene with Stack’s embittered millionaire, and with Fonda, no longer able to deal with him, being irresistibly drawn to Jon Voight just as Bacall turned to Rock Hudson. There’s even Penelope Milford’s table-top dance to recall Dorothy Malone’s convulsive rhumba.

But it’s the film’s climax that’s the real giveaway, with Dern drowning himself in the ocean (like Norman Maine in A Star is Born) when he finds out about Fonda’s affair with Voight. What does the Vietnam War have to do with all this? Very little. Just background really. Coming Home is more than reminiscent of Written on the Wind; it practically is Written on the Wind, refurbished and updated—a melodrama.

To “unmask” Coming Home in this light is not to dismiss it—melodrama being seen as less worthy of consideration—it’s to understand it better, to attempt to deal with why and how its mechanics operate in films today. For melodrama merits our most serious attention. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s observation emphasizes, it is the critic’s task to examine this “ideological failure” to see the areas it intends to “close off” open up.

This critical regard for the importance of melodrama is a relatively recent phenomenon. Melodrama has been traditionally seen as a debased form. In a 1961 article entitled “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience,” Pauline Kael indicted what she felt was the hypocrisy of spectator and critical reaction to Hiroshima. Mon Amour as a serious attack on atomic warfare, when all that she saw was a soap opera of a woman’s frustrated love life. “It seemed to be a woman’s picture-in the most derogatory sense of the term . . . like True Confession at the higher levels of spiritual and sexual communion . . . But here was the audience soaking it up—audiences of social workers, scientists, doctors, architects, professors—living and loving and suffering just like the stenographer watching Susan Hayward.” Raymond Durgnat, in a piece called “How Not to Enjoy the Movies” (1967), challenged Kael’s objections: “Yes, of course educated people enjoy their films in just the same way as the mass audience, as well as in their own way, and so they should, for the latter without the former is just a collective of intellectual formulae.”

It is in the juncture of these two views that the key to the critical problem lies. For what is at stake is not so much aesthetics as it is the class basis from which aesthetic judgments are formed. Kael wonders why “educated” audiences can fall into attitudes akin to the “infantile mass-audience.” Durgnat wonders at Kael’s surprise in discovering the existence of both “high” and ” low” themes co-existent in cultural forms. Neither writer quite manages to come to grips with the fact that lies behind this: that audiences are appealed to by films on the basis of class, and in the case of Hiroshima, Mon Amour a new “educated” (upper-middle) class was being sought and, evidently, found.

Looking at film production since the time of that film, we can see that this class has left the ghettos of the “art houses” and entered the mainstream. The “mass” (lower-middle-class) appeal has retreated to television, and Roots, Holocaust, and Rich Man, Poor Man; its place at the movies is set aside for fantasy sagas of the super-rich like The Other Side of Midnight, The Betsy, and The Greek Tycoon. Written on the Wind‘s millionaires, whose lives and passions were scaled down to the level of middle-class domestic tragedy, have become a thing of the past—and a new area for study in academic film circles (Screen, Movie, etc.).

Meanwhile, the new upper-middle class has staked out territory of its own in films like Coming Home, Annie Hall, and An Unmarried Woman. Paul Mazursky, An Unmarried Woman‘s writer-director, has accurately characterized this new scene: “The appealing thing about Annie Hall, for a lot of people, is that you’re seeing a film which doesn’t offend your intelligence: we talk that way, we know about that.” But who is this “we” Mazursky speaks of, and how did it manage to take a place alongside the “mass” audience of the past? In order to answer that, we must return to this “mass” and examine its formation and meaning.

Film has far too long been regarded in ahistorical terms. There is a perception of great films, great moments, great directors, great technical innovations, etc. But all these things took place within a context, within a culture. Much work needs to be done to scrutinize this context and the effect it had on the films it produced, but at the same time some sense of an understanding of the changes the culture has undergone since that time must be brought to light as well.

It’s all well and good to review Douglas Sirk’s Fifties melodramas today, but the fact that we are examining them at all must be considered critically. To write about All That Heaven Allows as an attack on petit bourgeois values isn’t incorrect, but it isn’t really seeing the film in the same way as it was at the time it was made. We are in effect examining a different film. Scholarly study can fill in some gaps by providing information relevant to the era—the atmosphere of the film’s release—but it cannot reproduce the sense of the film in the full power that it once functioned. Likewise, to speak of “bourgeois melodrama” as a fixed eternal, as recent studies in Screen and elsewhere seem to, is to run the risk of not comprehending the changes it has undergone today.

Coming Home is Written on the Wind recast in a contemporary mold. But the process of that recasting is a register of changes in the melodramatic form and the social structure that surrounds that form—the reason for difficulty in recognizing it as a melodrama to begin with. Written on the Wind seems quaint now, its conventions are legible, we feel “safe” from their effect. Coming Home‘s conventions aren’t (though they will be in time), for the film’s context is too much with us, the power it has over our perceptions still too strong.

The gap between Written on the Wind and Coming Home underscores the shift that has taken place in film-audience relations in the time that has elapsed between the making of the two productions. This development isn’t unique. Film history is filled with such shifts. In a recent interview, Noel Burch noted that, “in the Twenties and earlier, cinema was primarily a people’s entertainment; it was the masses who went to the cinema . . . The positive characteristics of this audience are hard to define , but the negative characteristics of the audiences which in the Thirties came to the cinema, which is to say the bourgeoisie, are clearer. They came because it talked . . . it acquired prestige, status in their eyes.”

What Burch notes here involves film’s move from side-show novelty to the theater as it acquired the characteristics of the theater (and the novel as well). The respective audiences of those forms followed the medium’s new turn, attracted by its setting in cultural elements familiar to its class. It is the peculiar triumph of the Hollywood film of the sound era in combining the theatro-novelistic aspect with the come-on of the side-show, to attempt to homogenize both lower and middle classes under the umbrella spirit of “democracy.”

But the “educated” upper-middle classes were not so easily won over, regarding this new arena with suspicion (James Agee), slight derision (Parker Tyler), or outright contempt (Dwight Macdonald). It took the invention of another medium—television—to siphon off sufficient numbers of the despised lower-middle class in order to make American films acceptable for the new upper-middle, who had heretofore only found interest in foreign productions (whose class allegiance was their own, as in Hiroshima, Mon Amour). This time, however, unlike the Twenties, the shift took place at a time of no significant technical advance within film itself.

These movements of classes were not accomplished on a one-to-one basis in which the films alone spoke directly to the classes to which they were assigned, but rather through the elaborate mediation of accompanying material in the form of advertising, newspapers, and magazines, and the medium that had become film’s main competitor: television. Lawrence Alloway has suggested how these subsidiary forms created a context in which films could be understood: “In Written on the Wind the pessimistic story is set in a world of luxury hotels, private planes, polished cars reflecting the porticoes of great houses, and long dinner tables with gleaming silver; the scene of action is the advertisements from McCall’s, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Bazaar given reality.”

Needless to say, this “reality” isn’t the one critics of the time reproached films like Written on the Wind for lacking. It is a reality of a specific context, a reality that is cited by the film, not one made immediately manifest. It is of course a sense of the “real” possible only in the era of studio sets. When film abandoned them (due in no small part to television news making the outside world more familiar to audiences, thus less easily duplicated and accepted as “real” in film) new signposts to the “real” were created. This new “real” also sprang from magazines, but not in the projected wish-fulfillment fashion of the past; today there’s the do-it-yourself-in-your-own-spare-time spirit of New York magazine, with its attendant atmosphere of social climbing and the endless search for the “better” that is also “cheaper” and” chic-er.” It is in this fashion that An Unmarried Woman lines up with Written on the Wind in their respective realisms.

The problems facing Mazursky’s heroine are scarcely different than those faced in years past by Joan Crawford; but the taint of “common” lower-middleclass middleclass aspiration doesn’ t haunt Jill Clayburgh, since they spring not from Ladies Home Journal but from its modern upper-middle-class update, Ms. The view from Clayburgh’s apartment (a New York feature spread in and of itself) rivals that enjoyed by Susan Hayward, whose intellectual and emotional concerns Clayburgh shares, though the film pitches them in a manner that seems new.

An Unmarried Woman is supposedly dealing with feminist issues, but it skirts them just as gracefully as Coming Home does Vietnam. We can see how this works in the scene where Clayburgh’s Erica points out that another character’s “male chauvinist pig” attitudes are “out of fashion.” It’s the film’s intention to set this aright—to put things “in fashion,” so to speak. So it’s not really a question of feminism so much as it is seeing how its issues can be rephrased in the proper style—like a New York magazine piece filling you in on what’s “in” and what’s “out.”

As Pascal Kane notes, “The Hollywood hero is thus generally one who is excluded from all class antagonism. One, also, from whose vantage point the real contradictions can be contemplated in their regular displacement on terms ‘suitable’ to him.” So the comfortable upper-middle-class urban lives of the characters of An Unmarried Woman keep any potentially explosive feminist issues at bay: they wouldn’t be likely to enter the lives of these people to begin with. This other world exists only in asides, casual remarks, like the Michael Murphy character’s complaints about the city’s filth and violence in the public schools.

As for Clayburgh’ s Erica, her “raised consciousness” is little more than allowing herself the luxury of a good cry at the analyst’s, and not capitulating so easily to Mr. Right when he makes his inevitable appearance, this time in the form of shaggy, lovable Alan Bates. The film might in fact have been called Looking For Mr. Right, its positive image of promiscuity contrasting sharply with Looking for Mr. Goodbar‘s pessimism. But Goodbar, its studio-lit melodramatics put across with a hysteria bordering on the expressionistic, at least made nodding acquaintance with problems in the socio-sexual sphere and, however confusedly, tried to address itself to them. The soft blue blur of An Unmarried Woman has only smoothing things over on its mind.

The low-key, less-than-deliriously happy ending, in which Clayburgh and Bates go their separate ways for the summer, helps Mazursky avoid the clichés of the past, but at the same time it helps to coin a new cliché: the New Hollywood brand of feminism, where the heroine is made to seem to take a stand for her own “independence” (see also Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore)—though the circumstances in which she resides have made no significant change since the Hayward-Crawford era.

Coming Home covers its tracks just as cleverly, the comfort in which its characters reside similarly keeping potentially disruptive issues at a distance. With Bruce Dern in the secure position of a “career” soldier and Jon Voight’s 100-percent disability apparently providing him with a fairly comfortable middle-class life, we are made to forget social forces, and to view the character’s interactions on an individual-to-individual basis rather than in the context of the societal upheaval in which the war was fought and opposed. Typically, the one political act depicted in the film—Voight’s chaining himself to the gate of a Marine base—is deprived of all political resonance by being shown as the action of an individual taken for reasons that can be interpreted personally as much as politically. To show Voight becoming an active part of an identifiable anti-war group would force the film to deal with the anti war movement as a whole—a situation, despite its makers’ supposed liberal bias, which the entire narrative structure is loath to allow.

Neither An Unmarried Woman nor Coming Home completely buries the problems with which they refuse to deal; they just make the opportunity for examining them more difficult. But it becomes less difficult if we see these films for what they are—melodrama. What Nowell-Smith cites as the form’s inability to “accommodate its problems” persists today as much as in Sirk’s or Vincente Minnelli’s time, despite the attempts at suppression these two films display. For in release concurrent with these films, The Turning Point offers a prime example of ideological “crisis” in the contemporary melodrama.

Unlike Coming Home and An Unmarried Woman, The Turning Point has had a far more difficult time of covering its tracks. Most critics have come right out and labeled it as a melodrama, even a soap opera. At first glance it’s fairly easy to see why: with Anne Bancroft as a famous (unmarried) ballet star pitted against Shirley MacLaine as a dancer who gave it all up to be a wife and mother, the old “Marriage vs. Career” question comes across with all the freshness of a fifteen-year-old issue of Redbook. But that’s not the only reason for the soap-opera label: the MacLaine character and her family are clearly lower-middleclass in the Old Hollywood manner (comfortable-to-opulent surroundings though “just-making-ends-meet” financially), not the “classless” upper-class types so in favor today. MacLaine’s class origins color her aspirations and are thus to be taken less seriously in the presently received context.

The film has more success in concealing other aspects of its shopworn origins, by placing the action in the ballet setting. The film has no intention of dealing with ballet as a subject; for all we get of it in terms of the narrative the characters might as well have been staging a production of Oklahoma. It is the aura of ballet that the film seeks to annex onto itself: this is classy, this is to be taken seriously, and there’s Baryshnikov to prove it. These cultural wrappings serve to disguise the stale dramatic core, but at the same time raise the possibility of adding fresher newer material, the occasion which the film tries to rise. By bringing up the subject of homosexuality, The Turning Point seeks to attain a far more serious plateau. And here is precisely where the real contradictions begin to open up—contradictions the melodrama at present cannot hope to attempt to resolve.

In a recent interview, Arthur Laurents, the author of The Turning Point’s screenplay, spoke of film’s main problem: “The ballet world is dominantly homosexual compared to others. But I had to fight like hell to get any homosexuality in this film. I insisted we’d be laughed off the screen.” What he did manage to get in wasn’t what he wanted though. Years before the action of the film’s story begins, Didi (MacLaine) lost out on a major ballet role to Emma (Bancroft) by becoming pregnant. She could have had an abortion, but bowed out at Emma’s urging that unless she did she’d “never be able to hold Wayne” (Tom Skerritt )—the child’s father, another dancer in the company. She took Emma’s advice, married Wayne, and settled down to raise a family and run a ballet school with her husband in Oklahoma City. Now, years later, when her daughter is offered the opportunity to dance in the company she had left (where Emma has since become a star, launched by the role Didi lost), Didi begins to wonder if she did the right thing. It’s not only her misgivings about her abandoning her career that trouble her, it’s her wondering over whether or not she “trapped” her husband into marrying her when he would have rather. . . .

But what about her husband ? As Tom Skerritt plays him, he’s an unusually calm low-key type. In relation to the narrative’s economy, with both Didi and Emma mulling over the wisdom of their respective choices in life (Didi’s daughter providing Emma with a taste of the motherhood she’s missed out on ), it would seem some sort of conflict or upheaval should be coming from Wayne’s corner. But it fails to materialize. Didi confesses her feelings to him for the first time at the film’s climax. He tells her he’s always known that part of the reason she wanted to marry him was to prove he “wasn’t gay.” And that’s it. But was he or wasn’t he? The film doesn’t seem to want to say for sure. It’s not an unimportant point, and the narrative begins to collapse under the weight of its impact.

In Laurents’ version, there was a conflict, with Wayne meeting his ex-lover Michael, the director of the ballet company, after not seeing him since his marriage. In the film as it stands that character still exists, but alone and unconnected to Wayne. The only remnant of this plot strand’s existence in the finished film is a bit of dialogue between Emma and Emilia, Didi’s daughter. She asks Emma why she never married Michael, “did he prefer boys?” Bancroft’s Emma registers slight shock-surprise at her candor and then says ” tactfully,” “I don’t really know. But then we never discussed things like that in those days.” It would seem we don’t discuss “things like that” now either. We do bring them up, but only to drop them once again.

The whole of The Turning Point is enclosed in that brief exchange: the theme of marriage vs. career, the “adult” atmosphere of the theater, melodrama’s inability to resolve the problems it raises. Had things worked out more to Laurents’ liking, it really wouldn’t have changed anything fundamental. How could the subject be broached in this given context without the foregone conclusion of the narrative’s attempt to resolve it? It can’t, really—but does it need to? Homosexuality is, after all , only there for spice. It replaces Robert Stack’s impotence in Written on the Wind. It’s this year’s additive to the formula, like Jane Fonda’s orgasm in Coming Home, or Jill Clayburgh’s promiscuity in An Unmarried Woman.

In The Turning Point, however, sex leaves a residue of threat. Marital stress resulting from infidelity is a prime mover of melodramatic design: what better way to undermine the “stability” of a marriage than this? But the film can’t quite bring itself to deal with things in this way. It backs off, unsure as to how to resolve in a manner ideologically acceptable a situation so potentially volatile. It’s touching then, Bancroft’s reading of “We never discussed.” It isn’ t the smug self-satisfied “we” of Paul Mazursky. It is a “we” not entirely sure of itself. It is the “we” of melodrama locked within the grip of its essential ideological failure.