Though the word ‘melodrama’ may bring to mind the implausible plots, dangerous liaisons and treacherous trysts of a daytime television soap opera, such an understanding is limited, incomplete and, as Gledhill (1987, p. 33) argues, a “retrospective categorisation”. Melodrama, since its theatrical origins, which Brooks (1994, p. 11) sites in the city streets and village squares of a revolutionary France toward the latter part of the eighteenth century, has been through various spurts of growth in its development toward what is now, perhaps, the ever-fertile mother of Western popular culture, her womb inseminated by the relentless thrusting of patriarchal capitalist ideology. The traditional characteristics of melodrama, which, according to Mules (2000, pp. 19 & 20), include the “Manichean conflict between good and evil”, exaggeration and excess, the spectacular and incredible, as well as misrecognition and “resolution…based on a restoration”, permeate popular film genres from the Western to science-fiction, from horror to romantic comedy, from thriller to adventure, from mystery to fantasy. The melodramatic mode can be found in scenes as diverse as a laboratory where a scientist brews a wicked potion to an idyllic mountain landscape where a family plays with sheep. Melodrama has become so omnipotent in contemporary films, so integral to what is played out on our screens, that one might well be forgiven were one to open a window to the world, shove one’s head out, and scream: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” (Network 1976). Though this, with apologies to Peter Finch, may be, perhaps an act just a little melodramatic in itself, certainly many films across the medium, if not all, do display the traits of melodrama, as an analysis of just one scene from three different films from different genres, even from different times, would indicate. The scenes chosen for this analysis come from Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991) and Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996); and, although each scene would seem to be as different from each other as the films themselves would seem to be, the similarities are there - and the similarities are melodramatic. The similarities are the characteristic traits, the tell-tale genes of that mother, so often thought to be little more than a weeping woman’s genre.

The story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of the most blatant examples of the conflict between good and evil, with the aristocratic, educated Dr Jekyll doing battle with his own inner evil personified by the contorted, simian Mr Hyde. But this battle is of Jekyll’s own doing, having concocted a potion that, upon swallowing, releases this inner evil, a lust, a sexual hunger, a desire to devour what he sees as beautiful and precious. A scene that succinctly displays this conflict, and Jekyll’s realisation that his inner lust will, indeed, eventually destroy not only that for which it yearns, but he himself, occurs when Jekyll is on his way to the house of Brigadier General Danvers Carew (Halliwell Hobbes) for the formal announcement of his engagement to the Brigadier’s daughter, Muriel (Rose Hobart). Jekyll dressed formally with top hat, cane, cape and white gloves, is walking through a park, when his attention is drawn to a bird twittering from its perch on the limb of a tree. He sits on a chair under the tree to admire this beauty of nature; this creature which he avers was not born to die:

Thou was not born for death, mere mortal bird. No hungry generations tread thee down. Thou was not born for death.

But then, along comes a cat, a sleek, sneaky, black cat, which pounces on the bird and devours it. Jekyll stands in protest, “Oh no, no!”, but to no avail. The cat has serviced its own inner desires, its own hunger. Jekyll sits back in resignation, “Thou was not born for death”. As he says this, hair starts to grow on his hands, his face begins to contort. Mr Hyde is keen for an appearance, only this time there is no need for a potion - the spell has been cast by nature itself, the cat’s need to eat, a natural imperative, triggering the transformation, which constitutes a melodramatic moment of “excess in the narrative” (Mules 2000, p. 35). He clasps at his throat, the anguish and torment struggling against his outer civility. Hyde wins and grins, “Mine is death, death”. Hyde picks up the hat and cane, but has no further need for the white gloves, leaving them discarded on the ground. As he races off, a diagonal dissolve washes across the screen, pausing midway, revealing the gathered guests at the Carew manse, contrasting the scurrying Hyde in the darkness of the park with the bright politeness of wealth and etiquette. This contrast, “dividing”, as Mules (2000, p.35) states, “the world into zones of good and evil”, is a “chiaroscuro” as finite as black versus white, dark versus light. Jekyll’s cat, Hyde, will not be attending that particular soiree in the light. This cat has a bird of his own to devour, that being Ivy Pearson (Miriam Hopkins), a girl not of Jekyll’s polite society, but rather of the poorer, and, therefore, in Hyde’s eyes at least, seedier, darker, and more vulnerable side of town. The mise en scène of this particular passage in this text is simple yet powerful. The setting is uncluttered and plain, yet the characters are complex - the man, who is both good and evil, two characters in one; the bird which regales in life through its song, its innocence ultimately little more than fodder for lust; and, the cat which so lithely consumes that delicate morsel of purity and beauty. Nature, Jekyll realises, is far more powerful than those chemicals back in his laboratory. Unfortunately for Ivy, the nature of this man is evil.

The lust of a more contemporary Hyde pushes two women onto a roller-coaster ride of misrecognition and misunderstanding in Thelma & Louise. The Jekyll/Hyde character of this film, Harlan (Timothy Carhart), rapes Thelma (Geena Davis), but is then shot by Louise (Susan Sarandon) - and so begins their drive down the road to ruin. After the chaos of the carpark where the rape and shooting take place, the women stop at a roadside diner to gather themselves, to decide what they should do. But rather than being an opportunity for reflection over a cup of coffee, this scene, as with Jekyll’s pause in the park, is a potent piece of the puzzle that lays the narrative of this film out on the table. As they sit at that table, Thelma to the left, Louise to the right, the diegetic sound of the ‘Country & Western’ song by Lynn Anderson, “I don’t want to play house”, conveys the essence of this text with far more clarity than the thoughts that cloud their minds and distorts their conversation.

Louise: Now is not the time to panic. If we panic now, we’re done for. Nobody saw it. Nobody knows it was us. We’re still okay. We just have to figure out what we’re gonna do next. We just have to figure out what … (long pause as a man’s body, lower torso and thigh passes across the frame) … what we’re gonna do.

Thelma: I’ll say one thing. This is some vacation. I sure am havin’ a good time. This is real fun.

Louise: If you weren’t so concerned with having a good time, we wouldn’t be here right now.

Thelma: Just what is that supposed to mean?

Louise: It means shut up, Thelma.

Thelma: So this is all my fault, is it?

At this point, Louise looks up at Thelma with an expression that almost says “yes”, but she looks away again. Thelma stands up to go to the bathroom. As she does so, she grabs her purse and accidentally drags her cup and saucer off the table, the crockery crashing to the floor. “I have to go to the bathroom”, she says nonchalantly as she steps over the broken dishes. Louise pulls on her cigarette, exhales and becomes shrouded in a thick cloud of smoke. The confusion, the uncertainty of what they should do, their decision to run rather than face the authorities are common facets of melodrama. As Cook (1985, p.75) claims, characters in melodrama are propelled, driven along the road of the narrative by forces they are not necessarily aware of, by situations and circumstances that would seem to be beyond their control. Certainly Thelma had not chosen to be raped, but as Louise points out, if it had not been for Thelma’s desire to stop at a bar, to have “a good time, we wouldn’t be here right now”. Was it her fault? Was not she the victim? The problem these women face is not who was at fault, who was right, wrong, good or evil. The conflict here is, as Lang (1989, p. 3) would concur, with the patriarchy, that is, the ideology of our society, our culture, wherein women are dominated by men. Despite the fact that Harlan was obviously in the wrong, these women are sitting in this diner, afraid and consumed by guilt. Though Thelma does not mean to knock the dishes off the table, she does absorb from the mishap a resolve, a renewed vigour, that, it would seem from her desperate puff on her cigarette, Louise does not share. Thelma does not want to play house. She rejects domesticity just as she knocks the dishes off the table. She has no intention of picking up the pieces, of restoring the patriarchal hegemony from which she is trying to escape. Stepping over those broken pieces, she is indicating her desire to never play house again. In this sense, she is casting herself out of the ‘normal’, patriarchal family home. Typically, in melodrama, this casting out would be resolved by the evicted being brought back into the fold, a restoration of patriarchal domestic order. Whether or not this win to the hegemony occurs as Thelma and Louise drive off the edge into the Grand Canyon is as cloudy an issue as the smoke that engulfed Louise in the diner.

A much clearer return to domestic harmony is visible in the final scene in The Long Kiss Goodnight. The opening shot of this scene shows Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) and Hal (Tom Amandes) sitting on a picnic table, their backs to the camera. To one side, Samantha’s daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima), is playing with some sheep. It is an idyllic countryside setting with lush grass and gently sloping mountains in the background, capped off by a crisp, golden setting sun. The camera then cuts to a two-shot of Samantha and Hal facing the camera, happy, chuckling, eating. There is a house in the background. Hal holds up a chicken ‘drumstick’ as though it is a trophy, an Olympic torch - or, perhaps, the club of a successful primordial hunter. He says, licking his lips, “Yeah, I could just sit out here forever, couldn’t you?” Samantha takes a sip of wine, gently toys with the knife in her hand, then throws it, firmly, into a tree stump. Hal looks concerned, but Samantha waves it off as if it was just something unimportant, as she had done previously in the film when she had deftly impaled a tomato to a kitchen cupboard door, saying “Chefs do that”. Samantha and Hal then get up and join Caitlin with the sheep. The camera moves up and circles away from them, looking down on family, house and valley - domestic bliss. The nondiegetic music, Tracy Bonham’s “Free”, suggests, however, that Samantha’s Hyde, her ’spy’ character, Charley Baltimore, may still be lurking inside her: “Free - if you want to be like me, you’ve got to be free”. The mise en scène here clearly states what could be lost by rejecting the domestic realm. The colour, the serenity, the wholesomeness of this scene provide the “aesthetics of the domestic”, as Cook (1985, p. 75) would describe it, that confirm the joys of life that is, apparently, the patriarchy. This film began with Samantha, somewhat like a ‘homecoming queen’, taking part in a Christmas parade, an event that is part of a festive season, which, in modern times, celebrates the closeness of family. It is considered as a time when family members travel far to come together and rejoice, no so much in any birth of a God, or any religious or pagan rituals, but rather in being together as a family, sharing food, wine and gifts. It is, under this guise, quite possibly, a most elaborate and excessive celebration of commercialism, capitalism and the patriarchy. Regardless of the events in between her presence in that parade as Mrs Clause, the wife of all that Santa has come to represent, and her reunification with the family way on the slopes of bliss, the patriarchy has, as it is want to do both in melodrama and popular culture, prevailed. Samantha is tested throughout this text, and in the tradition of melodrama, she must pass these tests foisted on her by ruthless villains. She must, as Mules (2000, p. 37) states, “overthrow” these oppressors in order to restore her “good person to the family”.

Each of these scenes, via their melodramatic modes, contribute, not only to the text from which each has been selected for the purposes of this analysis, but also, just as do those texts in their entirety, to a confirmation of the status quo; the conflict between good and evil which must be resolved in order to confirm the virtues of contemporary Western cultural mores and hegemonies. Dr Jekyll, by releasing his Mr Hyde and rejecting the hand of Muriel Carew and his ‘proper’ place in society, has brought upon himself his own demise - “Mine is death”. Thelma and Louise, by running away from their domestic responsibilities, by stepping out of their ‘normal’ environs, by stepping over the broken dishes rather than picking them up, also bring upon themselves their own demise, though their’s may be more spiritually liberating than the unfortunate Jekyll. Samantha Caine, on the other hand, having won her battles, and in doing so, saved the world, has not been left out through death, but rather has returned to the fold to be rewarded by the supposed pleasantness of domesticity. Samantha, perhaps, may have learned her lesson, but has Charley Baltimore? Perhaps, in the tradition of the melodrama, Samantha’s return to the patriarchal hearth is a just punishment for the non-conformist Charley. The status quo has prevailed, and melodrama has been its most potent performer.

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