Conclusion: Of Gravity and Tears

Abstract

Why insist on melodrama as a lens through which to approach global, contemporary film? What do we gain by retaining the melodramatic as a category of analysis? Sometimes the question is just plainly: why melodrama? For those of us who are invested in melodrama as a field of analysis, my experience is not uncommon; it seems that we often find ourselves backed into having to explain, sometimes with some defensiveness, why we believe it remains important, or even why it is important at all, to continue to think through the pervasiveness of the melodramatic mode and its shape-shifting capacities. As the field of film studies continues to move toward embracing the study of global cinema, either as an antidote to studies of national cinemas or as a response to the need for theorizing the pervasiveness of global media, we run into the danger of reifying similarity at the expense of historical and local specificity. This conundrum has always been at the heart of any kind of comparative analysis. I offer that melodrama provides a method through which to approach global cinema such that we can retain a kind of elastic tension to locality that does not permit our lens of analysis to wholly extricate texts that circulate globally from the national and historical contexts that inform their stylistic and narrative choices.