Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom by Elisabeth R. Anker (review)

Once, the jeremiad was the genre that set the parameters for American political discourse. Since the 1950s, and especially since September 11, 2001, it has been melodrama that sets the parameters. Politicians, journalists, and even leftist academics have adopted the conventions of melodrama. These are the central claims of Orgies of Feeling, a deeply compelling and smart work that itself defies genre convention, standing between political theory, cultural studies, and media studies.

The jeremiad essentially involves self-criticism, a sense that we have gone morally astray and that we must be held to account for our transgressions. On this our future depends: if we succeed in moral correction now, we will enter the land of milk and honey; if not, fire and brimstone await. In contrast, melodrama, on Anker’s account, involves an innocent community injured by an evil Other. A hero emerges from the victimized community to combat the forces of evil and return a community to its original goodness. In melodrama, unlike in the jeremiad, there is no self-criticism: pure evil is located outside “our” community, pure goodness inside “our” community. When melodrama becomes a political convention, on Anker’s account, the community becomes the nation (America) and the hero represents the nation—paradigmatically, George W. Bush’s carefully choreographed performances of heroism post 9/11. The problems that accompany this sort of Manichean political discourse are obvious.

According to Anker, melodrama became the genre of American politics during the Cold War. Even after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt did not portray the struggle against the Japanese as a war of good against evil. It was Truman who first cast America as a victim-hero, beleaguered by Communist advances and intervening around the globe to defend freedom. Anker tracks the development of melodramatic politics over the next several decades as it took on new forms and gained a monopoly on the American political imagination. For example, she notes how Reagan positioned Americans as victims of inflation requiring his heroic efforts at deregulation and government shrinkage in order to restore freedom to Americans—who each can become heroes themselves by letting self-reliance replace dependence on government.

Anker draws on Nietzsche (from whom she takes her title) to argue that the strong emotions evoked by melodrama are responsive to a sense of powerlessness, a sense that one is a victim but that one cannot clearly identify the cause of one’s suffering. The reason melodrama has such a strong hold on our current politics, Anker posits, is that it is the impersonal force of neoliberalism that is victimizing us, depriving us of actual freedom while promoting a hollow rhetoric of freedom. The genre of melodrama gives form to the feelings that this contradictory situation produces, affirming Americans’ sense of themselves as victims, clearly identifying the cause of suffering—Communism, inflation, Osama bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein—and authorizing the state to play the role of hero, championing good against evil. Even Leftists, Anker charges, adopt these conventions: Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” battles “empire.” The book concludes on a hopeful note. Reading Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows together with Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, Anker suggests that melodramas that underscore their own failure, intentional or not, can encourage Americans to think about freedom in new, less sensationalist modes.

This is a largely successful book, one that will surely have a significant impact on the field. It makes broad claims, claims that cannot be decisively proven, but claims that Anker shows to be plausible and, most importantly, useful in thinking about contemporary American culture. The book suffers, mildly, from a typical vice of first books: it is overly dependent on, and uncritical of, scholarship by the author’s advisors, political theorist Wendy Brown and film theorist Linda Williams. It is also perplexing that the only “transnational” moment in the text comes in the second chapter’s tracing of melodrama’s origins in Europe. At least some reflection...