Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (1998)
Melodrama as the quintessential American style. America is a modernist nation, and it reads its own history in terms of narrative. Williams refers to melodrama’s ability to “reconcile the irreconcilable” — which sounds a lot like the never ending American quest to reconcile its irreconcilable founding mission: to “create a more perfect union.” Nostalgia for the Founding Fathers is the nation’s melodramatic urge to return to the “innocence” of its origins, which paradoxically works in accordance, not in opposition, with its forward-thinking narrative of national progress, i.e. the pursuit of the “more perfect.”
It is often said that Americans aren’t interested in history, but I think it’s more accurate to say that people — in general — aren’t interested in history that makes them feel bad. We surely are interested in those points of history from which we are able to extract an easy national glory — our achievement of independence from the British, the battle of Gettysburg, our fight against Hitler, and even the campaign of nonviolence waged by Martin Luther King. For different reasons, each of these episodes can be fitted for digestibility. More importantly that can be easily deployed in service our various national uses. Thus it is not so much that we are against history, as we are in favor of a selective history. The fact is that Martin Luther King is useful to us, in a way that Bayard Rustin is not (yet.)
What TNC is describing here is America’s tendency to read its history as a melodramatic narrative: the “powerless yet virtuous” achieving justice through their fealty to the nation’s founding principles.
