(In)visibilities: Iñárritu's Cinema and the Melodramatic Regime

This article examines how some melodramatic films intimately attend to the outcasts of globalization and commit to their visibility. In doing so, these films highlight the interconstituency of aesthetics and politics embedded in the melodramatic form. Taking the films of Alejandro G. Iñárritu as a case in point, the article reads melodrama in terms of a visual regime that foregrounds its critical capacity, particularly when it draws on popular narrative conventions to make perceptible fraught everyday realities that are often overlooked.