Irresistible Death: 21 Grams as Melodrama

Abstract: This essay applies theories of film melodrama to Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams. It argues that the film presents a turn, progressively, away from the garishness, irony, and hysteria of Sirkian melodrama, as well as the utopian sentiment of various women's and/or rites of passage films, toward nihilism, the abject, and what Jeffrey Sconce calls "cold melodrama."