Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (review)

Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. Ben Singer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 363. $49.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

Melodrama and Modernity is really two books. The first is a fluent, precise, and excellently historicized account of the interaction between early narrative film and the processes of industrial modernization. Singer carefully demonstrates how the numerous qualities of modernism—speed, mechanization, mass circulation, frenzied commercialism, rapid communication, feminism (viewed as athletic, successful women), labor unrest, and nationalism—were recognized by early filmmakers and integrated into the plots, scenic environments, marketing, and exhibition of motion pictures. Cinema emerges, according to Singer, not merely as a diversion from or reflection of these dynamics, but as an active participant in the creation of modern American culture. He is at his best when describing the marketing strategies and practices that bound film to other media, such as outdoor advertising, amusement park rides, and a wide variety of satiric and admonitory newspaper cartoons. He adroitly explicates the thought behind the manufacture and distribution of two-reel "cliff-hangers," such as The Perils of Pauline and The Hazards of Helen, and describes how the heroines of these serials enacted pride for new technologies and anxiety about the consequences of their use.

Singer argues that such films demonstrate the vitality of early twentieth-century capitalism, both in their subject matter and means of distribution. As an example he looks at the 10 - 20 - 30. Its title referring to the admission prices of ten, twenty, and thirty cents, the "ten-twent-thirt" toured on small circuits, was often performed in tents or improvised theaters, and was the source of cheap (in the sense of being inexpensive, not in terms of production values or dramatic material) popular melodrama. This genre arose in part because theatrical entrepreneurs faced increasing competition from films, and in part because expanding populations caused people to relocate in the suburbs. Singer locates in the 10 - 20 - 30 an impulse for lurid melodrama and an attempt to sustain a popular theatrical culture, but argues that film's commercial success spelled ruin for this short-lived hybrid of melodrama, comedy, and variety.

His second "book," an investigation of melodrama, is distinctly less successful. It is disfigured by an unsophisticated understanding of the genre's history and practice. Melodrama flourished in Europe and North America when events occurred that were not immediately subject to easily comprehended rational explanation or where explanations of phenomena were numerous and contradictory and the comforting presence of divine justice was absent. In place of the absent gods (or God) melodrama offered an explanatory narrative that attributed public disaster and private tribulation to the malign operation of evil seeking to overcome goodness. On stage and in early film, evil was represented through the character and actions of the villain, and unwelcome events occurred because the villain, motivated by greed, avarice, lust, jealousy, and other antisocial impulses, intentionally brought misfortune to good people, consequently forcing them out of their previously tranquil existences. In the dramas which Singer describes, the villain is often equated with the dangers of modernity (perilous machinery, rising prices, unemployment, urbanisation, etc.), but sometimes these potential dangers are used by the hero and heroine to effect their own rescues. Because melodrama was a pervasive mode of thought and expression for more than 160 years, it was necessarily written, performed, and understood very differently in different segments of multi-layered western societies. For some it was patriotic, conservative, hostile to alien cultures (and immigrants); for others it was a voice of protest, rebellion, and radical politics. Moreover, it substantially changed style, structure, and subject matter in response to various pressures and events, such as rising immigration, the closing of the American frontier, the financial crashes and subsequent depressions of 1873 and 1895, labor struggles, and the unexpected "calamity" of winning the Spanish-American War, which resulted in the inadvertent acquisition of a large number of dark...