Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home

Abstract

In the 1950s, the Hollywood studio system was faced with three massive crises: the impact of the HUAC (House of UnAmerican Activities Committee) investigation, indictment as a monopoly under the antitrust laws, and the coming of television. The first two provided an ideological and economic background to the third, which broke the genealogical links connecting different forms of popular theatrical entertainment that stretched back to the early days of urban industrialised culture. Television revolutionised the conditions of spectatorship associated with mass entertainment. Urban cultures of spectacle had always previously depended on a communal audience, collected together in larger or smaller spaces, from the vast theatres of the London melodrama, the Keith Vaudeville Bijou in Boston or the small shop-front nickelodeons of early cinema. The cinema’s birth as a mass art can be fixed at the moment when the Kinetoscope gave way to communal theatrical viewing.¹ Television broke up this audience, to create a home-based mode of consumption that was prefigured by radio but without precedent as mass visual entertainment. Whereas the appeal of films was posited on ‘going out’, television appeals to ‘staying in’. The draw of the city lights at night, the neon, the names of the stars, the glamour of the Palaces are at an end.

Published in C. MacCabe (ed.), High Theory/Low Culture, 1986.