Rethinking the Family Melodrama: Thomas Elsaesser, Mildred Pierce and the Business of Family
Screen, 63 (3):
327-345 (September 2022)DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac026
Abstract
What do Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948), Mark Robson’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), Jay Roach’s Meet the Parents (2000), Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005) and James Wan’s Insidious (2010) all have in common? According to recent critics, they are all examples of the ‘family melodrama’, the genre that since the 1970s has dominated much of the conversation about melodrama in film studies and beyond.1 First coined by Thomas Elsaesser in 1972, the phrase ‘family melodrama’ quickly became a staple of melodrama scholarship, and by the 1980s the notion that there was a specific form of melodrama whose ‘speciality is generational and gender conflict’ had been firmly established in the work of critics like Laura Mulvey, Chuck Kleinhans and Thomas Schatz.2 For these scholars the family melodrama became ‘the ultimate form of film melodrama’, the single most important site for theorizing melodrama itself.3 And as the importance of the concept grew, films beyond just the canonical 1950s melodramas began to be discussed under this rubric. What once seemed a small subset of melodrama now looks to many critics like one of Hollywood cinema’s ‘dominant genres’.