Melodrama can also be considered as popular because it is available culture to the masses. Everybody can become involved in it. Melodrama can be found everywhere, from the theatre to the cinema. It can be found in books and on the television. It can be located everywhere in varying forms which enables it to appeal to all different classes, it incorporates many different cultures, using ideology, it can be ambivalent, it is usually performed by professionals, who use emotion to find a common denominator, between everybody in the audience, for example, everybody knows how to laugh, and everybody can experience pain. Through Melodrama, people can express emotions that they are not usually “allowed” to show in public. The audience can also sympathise with what happens on the stage. Melodrama could be considered one of the most preferred and therefore popular performance forms for that reason. With there being a wide range of areas that melodrama can be applied to, many people can have access to the art form. Some groups of society are more comfortable going to see a film at the cinema, than going to see a play at the theatre, but they are still able to enjoy the ideas of a particular genre of entertainment, just in a different form. Barbara Klinger makes the point that melodrama appeals to people because of the issues it deals with. In the 1950’s films began to deal with issues of drug addiction, she uses the 1955 film “The Man With The Golden Arm” , these kinds of issues had never been raised before, and they provided an voyeuristic allure to the film, because it allowed people to see an interpretation of what it was like to deal with a drugs problem, when many of the audience, would actually have had no personal experience of this issue. One reason modern melodramas use things like drugs to attract people to watch them is so as people can see what different “cultures” are like. Government’s in the 1960’s banned certain issues from the movies like drugs, abortion and prostitution in a vain attempt to stop people being interested in the ideas, because they did not want people to see what it is was like to be involved in illegal procedures. However that was when a new strain of melodrama became popular. It moved away from forbidden loves and romances. To more gritty issues of exaggerated violence, drugs, prostitution and a general ugliness of life. Because the society which were being attracted was changing, and they wanted a more gritty, aggressive genre of films and plays to be shown, to experience new ideas about life.
Through tracing the history of Melodrama one can see the development of society through the ages. Melodrama has changed with society to maintain its appeal. The first dates of melodrama come from the #### with the philosopher Sophocles. His works show forms of a melodramatic nature, which was a first for his day. Shakespeare’s work in the seventeenth century was when Melodrama became first publicly noticed as such a genre. The tragedies of Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, the pure fantasy of A Midsummer’s Nights Dream. So complete imagination, yet are based loosely on reality, and are set with the same moralistic ideas that were fashionable in the time that they were written. Melodrama of Shakespeare’s day was designed to attract both the middle class and the working class, as both sides could draw from it, and get an elaborate view of how the other side of their society lived. For example in “A Midsummer’s Nights Dream” there are the two elements of society, with Bottom and the other working men, preparing to put on a play, and then there is the Prince and Demetirus and group who have the dream. Both areas of the society that would have watched the play when it was written would have been given an impression of what it would have been like to live in the other social class. Another period that has become noted in dramatical history is the Victorian times, for the melodramas, with the works of Dickens, “Oliver Twist” is the typical melodramatic character, the poor orphan, sold as a work house slave. His whole life is characterised in the melodramatic form. In more modern melodramas like, “A Streetcar Named Desire” and in even more modern melodrama’s like the film “Fatal Attraction” all the traditional elements are still present but they have developed in to a more aggressive type of thing, to keep up with public attraction. Melodrama has maintained the title of a popular form of drama because of this development, it has changed and progressed to meet the new needs and desires of the popular public. Modern melodrama relate to the things that are happening in today’s society. The ideas of abortion, prostitution and drug abuse being areas of interest, so much so that films are made highlighting what happens would have been unthinkable. Yet they have become an every day issue, in the soap operas on the television at the moment, because the “ugly” side of people’s characters attracts the common public. The openness of society about such things is what has changed the way melodrama is presented.
Melodrama should be considered as a popular performance form because it is still used to day, and has progressed from it’s original form, as play texts performed on a stage, in to movies, to keep up with popular trends. It has developed over at least the last 400 hundred years, to maintain, it’s levels of popularity as an entertainment form. Melodrama fulfils all the outlining criteria that makes an art form popular. It attracts different people from different cultures and different areas of society. It is available to everyone in different forms. It draws on common ground to everyone, usually in an emotional way. It provides an accessible way of people becoming more educated, without reading a book. People enjoy going to watch melodramas no matter how much the depress them, because it shows them something about there own life. That no matter how bad it seems it will never be as bad as having Glenn Close putting your pet rabbit in a pot on the cooker. (From the film “Fatal Attraction”). And life will never be as bad as it seems for Blanche Du Bois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, who has so much bad luck it is unimaginable.
Bibliography
Klinger, B: Melodrama and Meaning, Indiana University Press, 1994
Brooks, P: The Melodramatic Imagination, Yale University Press, 1995
Burke, P: Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Wildwood, 1988
Prendergast, C: Balzac:- Fiction and Melodrama, Edward Arnold, 1978
Williams, T : A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947
Griffiths, D.W.: Way Down East, 1920
