Mega-Melodrama! Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the “Classical”

“Mega-melodrama!” describes blockbuster action films that occupy more and different kinds of space than previous films and serial television programs that occupy more and different time than previous episodic television. This article defines melodrama anew and attempts to disabuse scholars of a habit of thought in film studies that consistently aligns melodrama – whether action blockbusters or more emotionally resonant “women’s films” – with stylistic or emotional excess and thus, implicitly or explicitly, opposes it to a “classical” norm. For what we habitually call the classical is even more protean than the supposed excess of melodrama. Indeed, the very norms of melodrama are what we often mistake for the classical.