Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (Disruptions) - Softcover

Rooney, Monique

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783480475 ISBN 13: 9781783480470

Publisher: Rli, 2015

Synopsis

Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a “plastic” form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation.

Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

About this title

About the Author

Monique Rooney is a lecturer in the English Program, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Living Screens

Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television

By Monique Rooney

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Monique Rooney
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-047-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Chapter 1: Introduction, 
Chapter 2: Mad Men: Melodrama and Metamorphosis, 
Chapter 3: Turned Back: Advertising, Televisual Melodrama and Metamorphosis in Mad Men, 
Chapter 4: Earth-Object: Melodrama and Plasticity in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, 
Chapter 5: Melodrama and Plasticity in Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce, 
Conclusion: Postlude: Animated Statue, Melody, Encore (Moi!), 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Melodrama sprang to life on the Enlightenment-era stage, where it gave new form to an old story of metamorphosis. As if in a permanent state of adaptation, melodrama has mutated as it has migrated from Enlightenment theatre to present-day film and television. Should melodrama be understood as a form? Or, rather, is melodrama a substance that, subject to modification, changes form? A compound of the Greek root words melos (music) and drama (deed, action, play), 'melodrama' denotes at once the form and the content of an enduring aesthetic category that, persisting and migrating across time and space, tends to elude precise categorisation. Combining basic elements of sight and sound and aimed at producing an effect or sensation in the broad-based audience to which it has historically appealed, melodrama has been described as a primal dramatic form that stirs base desires (Booth 1965, 38).

Defined thus, melodrama potentially describes all drama, and indeed some have argued that its form reaches back beyond Shakespeare to Ovid and Euripides (Booth 1965; Kaleva 2011; Michelini 1987). Nevertheless, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Pygmalion: Scène Lyrique (written circa 1763 and first produced in 1771) is commonly identified as the first melodrama (Anker 2012; Booth 1965; Buckley 2006; Holmstrom 1967; Kaleva 2011; Smith 1973; Steele 1968). Rousseau's one-act play was named after the story of Pygmalion, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which a sculptor falls in love with his own creation, the statue Galatea. Rousseau's Pygmalion appeals to Venus to help him bring his statue to life within a 'lyric scene' (scène lyrique) that dramatises the erotic push and pull between the artist and his creation. Pygmalion ends with Galatea springing to life but then withdrawing from her maker; her act is one that marks the self-differentiation of the creation from itscreator. It is significant that Rousseau composed this first mélodrame as a formal experiment, adapting an ancient myth within a form that melded old and new elements. Pygmalion unfolds its story of metamorphosis through pantomime, speech, lyric, melody and harmony. It alternates affective and sensory musical phrasings with a spoken prose poem in order to differentiate the various elements (pantomime, speech, lyric, melody, harmony) that the whole work comprises. Galatea's withdrawal signifies the possibility of differentiation within this generalising system.

While there is a dominant thread of critical scholarship about melodrama in recent decades that attests to its cultural power and influence, melodrama has been depicted as a conservative genre that tends to reinforce the status quo and/or as a mode that generates melancholy and thwarted wish fulfilment. Such readings are somewhat in tension with melodrama's endurance as an aesthetic category that has mutated as it has

Edition details

• Publisher: Rli
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783480475
• ISBN 13: 9781783480470
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208