Introduction: Global Melodrama

Abstract

Melodrama elicits the participation of our senses. It causes us to buckle in tears, tugs at our heartstrings, harnesses our rage, swirls up our hope, requests our empathy, and prompts our sense of justice. For this reason, melodrama has been an enduring and crucial conduit for producing and mediating our understanding of the world around us. Our emotional contact with melodrama drives our complicity; it turns us into active participants of those very societies that it reflects back to us and which it helps construct. The melodramatic mode breathes dramatic life into those elements that ground our emotional experience of the world: our bodies, the family, the home, the nation, the community, the wish for romance, and the bonds that bind us. The stories melodrama helps tell remind us that we cannot move through the world intact—physically, psychically, or emotionally. We now live at a time when the transformations brought about by globalization, more and more, challenge how we perceive and make sense of the world around us, at times eliding the full reach of our comprehension. Film, predicated on the capture and projection of the world, and cinematic narratives, which participate in the process of both making sense of that world and creating sense for it, must view the world anew.