Snidely, Saddam and Melodramocracy
Imagine the cackles echoing down the White House halls when the political screenwriters for President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld realized that Saddam Hussein actually looked like the very icon of dastardly villain-hood, cartoonist Jay Ward's Snidely Whiplash. Sure, Ward's evildoer was meant to satirize Snidely's simple-minded villainy and Dudley Do-Right's hapless heroics. And I suppose the giggling in the Oval Office choked off momentarily while the Bush team wiped away their gleeful tears and considered the matter of the Dudley Do-Right cartoon's setting: Canada, of all places. Close enough. Saddam hadn't been behind the 9/11 attacks, either. Evil icons are evil icons. It was time to get the game afoot. Now, Bush is probably wishing Saddam looked more like Superman's nemesis Lex Luther, because the president's resemblance to the bumbling Dudley is simply not a Right Stuff kind of image. Funny, isn't it, how a storyline can shape a character.
That's just the problem. Narratives do shape character. The American media's historical obsession with simplified narratives of good and evil and our popular culture's ubiquitous melodramatic heroes, villains and victims are driving ambiguity and complexity from the public sphere. We're beginning to look and act like the characters in these deterministic fantasies. In America, democracy is becoming melodramocracy. We can overcome this. But we first need to understand just how dominant the melodramatic mode is. Then we can identify alternative ways of escaping the melodramatic trap, ways that promote the social and personal transformations that are the promise of democracy.
Melodrama "is not merely a type of film or literary genre, but a pervasive cultural mode that structures the presentation of political discourse and national identity in contemporary America," writes political scientist Elisabeth Anker. That is a troubling thought. Democracy was invented to help us grapple with uncertain futures, to nurture new ideas and creative solutions to unexpected problems. Democracy is about social and personal transformation, about achieving tomorrow what yesterday seemed impossible. Melodrama, on the other hand, is about the restoration of a (fictitious) safe and virtuous world, a world disrupted only momentarily by evildoers. Melodrama and democracy are not really compatible, despite all their years of courtship. The trend is not new. It has marked American politics and culture since at least the early 19th Century, when penny newspapers, tinhorn dramatists and opportunistic public preachers picked up on Americans' unease at the terrifying unpredictability of life in the New World under a form of government that hadn't yet been sufficiently propagandized in the school books. To an anxious American public – they had only just become a "public" – they gave predictable stories about the triumph of good over evil, carefully implying that they, the (white, male) American audience, could be confident that they were the Good. Bookmen like Parson Weems invented myths of the Founders, golden-age heroes like Washington who could throw coins 'cross the Potomac and would never tell a lie. The Happily Ever After could be found in the Restored Before.
But if melodrama is not new, neither is the persistent and subversive alternative that celebrates originality and invention, that is comfortable with the vague and distrustful of Manichean myths of good and evil. It sees redemption not in the restoration of the past but in the realization of futures both wild and just. This tradition is often celebrated as the authentic American Grain. To name just a few artists and thinkers, that grain runs through Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Sojourner Truth. Through Margaret Fuller, Mark Twain and William James. Through Edgar Allen Poe and John Dewey. Through William Carlos Williams and Thomas Pynchon, Marianne Moore and Amelia Earhart. Through the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Altman. Through Cesar Chavez, Tony Kushner, Louis Erdrich and Bob Dylan. It is to be expected that our best artists, thinkers and revolutionary activists challenge the melodramatic status quo. But for all their celebrity, they remain marginalized politically by the enforcers of the vapid and banal. The mavens of popular culture acknowledge them, even capitalize on them. But one senses that deep down, the would-be masters of our universe see them as little more than temporary narrative complications. Soon enough, they hope after seeing a Tony Kushner play, the old order will be restored.
Actually, defenders and protectors of the status quo do more than hope. Paradoxically, the popularity of a revolutionary artist or thinker can be used to separate her from a public best kept docile. In his remarkable and hopeful book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe worries that celebrity culture teaches "life without consequences." However obsessed we might be with the private life of a celebrity, we cannot affect her life. And we live, safely, in our mundane world. There's nothing at stake. We invest celebrities with lives of melodrama, assured that whatever happens to them, our world will stay the same. It's the very lesson the melodramocrats want us to absorb. Melodrama is employed to quiet the non-melodramatic. Celebrity can cause a kind of political and social sterility.
Still, the success of artists like Tony Kushner speaks to a spirit of personal and social transformation that yet animates the lives and thoughts of many Americans. Also, even melodrama, for all its deterministic, conservative biases, cannot fully contain our all-too-human ways. We forget our lines. We stumble. We sometimes pick the wrong melodrama and wind up, like George W. Bush, looking more like a Dudley Do-Right who's always doing it wrong. Melodrama wants to convince us that nothing ever changes. We know in our lives that is not true, however some may wish it was. I stub a toe and then fall in love with the nurse who bandaged my foot. Life is joyously unpredictable. Even humble little stories like this show that melodrama is patently false, which makes it all the more unsettling that it is the dominant mode of an American news media that is supposed to give us the truth.
The stakes couldn't be any higher in this contest among incompatibles, the struggle of democracy to wrench its stories away from the melodramocrats. Make no mistake, melodrama is a conservative cultural mode. Melodrama wants to eliminate the specter of change. (Conservatives do, of course, advocate for change, but to them the concept is, generally, restorative.) Melodrama follows the traditional narrative form. There's a balanced world made suddenly unbalanced by what literary theorist Kenneth Burke called Trouble, or what Aristotle termed peripeteia. Snidely Whiplash disrupts Nell Fenwick's virtuous world, Dudley Do-Right saves her and her virtue and restores idyllic domestic innocence. A hero saves the victim from the villain, and balance is restored. There is no transformation, there is no change. An audience accustomed to melodrama is an audience constantly reassured that the world remains predictable, predestined even. In melodrama, society does not change, unless the change is reversion to its prior virtuous and undisturbed, balanced condition.
"If society can change, if it can evolve or transform into something new rather than experiencing restoration to its former condition, then it is possible for such change to leave the subject behind, rendering him marginal, rejected, and out of place. This is the fear of erasure or of displacement, of being cast aside and left alone," writes American theatre historian Jeffrey Mason, in his book, "Melodrama and the Myth of America." In other words, transformative narratives or art make us nervous because of our fear that there will be no place for us in the world so transformed. Melodrama, then, is satisfying for what it doesn't do to our psyches.
What it does to our politics and culture, however, is another question. There is no question about its ubiquity in news reporting and popular entertainment. One clue to news industry's fondness for melodrama can be found in the cable and network news of musically scoring their reports. Melos is the ancient Greek word for song. Think of the English word, melody. Music was used in Greek theatre to enhance emotional tone, a practice revised by Rousseau (melo-drama: song + words) and still practiced in film and television. The composer Carter Burwell, not long after Bush launched his war in Iraq, noticed the emotional quality of the music that accompanied the war reporting on network and cable television. Burwell interviewed composers of the news soundtracks to confirm his suspicions that the music was intended to make viewers feel an emotional attachment to America's mission of vengeance in Iraq. "In a striking return to the melodramatic traditions of the newsreel, American television invested every piece of war news—down to the titles and graphics—with an overwhelming amount of emotional context," Burwell said.
The use of music to set the emotional tone of television news reports is a relatively new development. As Burwell indicates, most of the Vietnam War went unaccompanied. Musical scores (such as the Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Volume, with its "War" music on page 11) were provided to movie theatre musicians during the silent film era, and Burwell notes that 1914 newsreels announced war news with "the unmistakable cadence of military drums and a fanfare of brass… the spectacle and drama of each moment driven home by rhythms and melodies familiar from previous reports."
In 2003, music-happy television news executives were, superficially, simply doing what Jean-Jacques Rousseau did more than 300 years earlier. Rousseau, the 18th Century Genevan philosopher, wrote the very first melodrama, Pygmalion, in 1762. Rousseau added music to enhance the emotionality of his play based on Ovid's poem about a sculptor, Pygmalian, who falls in love with an ivory statue he created. However, Rousseau was trying to deepen the audience's experience. In the subsequent tradition of modern melodrama, the news execs were trying to guide their audience's responses in a specific direction. War meant ratings, and the right emotional responses might lead the audience to love the media sculptors' creation almost as much as they themselves already did.
Elizabeth Anker, in her study of the melodramatic presentation of 9/11 by cable news, noted that FOX used music to enhance its good vs. evil, vengeance-will-be-ours reporting about that awful day. "No melodramatic narrative would be complete without music. Although the written words mark indelibly the clarity of moral positioning, music fixes the melodramatic insistence on the importance of this day [9/11]," she said.
Using music to enhance melodramatic effect is not limited to FOX. Burwell notes that back in 1985, NBC hired composer John Williams to write new music for its news. Williams, best known for his scores for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas films, delivered an emotion-packed overture and incidental music package now familiar to most Americans. The melodramatic music intrigues as it reassures. Although the musical news is relatively new, in the 1960s it was used to introduce or conclude newscasts. CBS introduced its news with Lalo Shifrin's score for the prison road-gang scene in the Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke. That's the film in which in which the villain utters the famous line, "What we got here is failure to communicate." What a way to introduce the news. But it wasn't the allusion to the movie, it was the teletype-rhythms and melodramatic urgency of the chain-gang music that CBS wanted. In 2003, CBS music composer Peter Fish told Burwell that the network wanted "to promote the war in the same way they would promote Terminator 3 —it was like 'Battle of the Megaheroes…it was just Techno-Ali-vs.-Frasier-IV- we're-going-to-knock-the-crap-out-of-them, testosterone-driven, big-punch music.'"
Of course, musical clues offer only circumstantial evidence of news programmers' fondness for melodrama. But is it really necessary to document the overwhelming number of melodramatic narratives pursued and presented by the news, from babies in wells, to murder trials of celebrities like O.J. Simpson, from missing brides to we-only-wish-they-were-missing celebrities like Paris Hilton? It was as melodrama that the "right wing conspiracy" sold the phony and the prurient Clinton scandals to news reporters. It is as melodrama that we are given news of North Korea, Iran, China, Afghanistan, and Darfur. Perhaps one of the reasons Americans have been slow to respond to the genocide in Sudan is we can't figure out how to effect outcomes within a melodrama, when it is melodrama that trains us to keep our distance, that everything will be restored to the Good in the end anyway.
Referring to Bush's 9/11 speech, Anker writes that, "Bush shrewdly invoked the melodramatic premise that action, when responding to pathos, reinforces America's moral goodness." The Bush White House well understood the opportunity. The news wanted melodrama. The public wanted a simplified account. This was a time when simple-minded accounts of Good and Evil served the interests of power as it reassured a bewildered and grieving America that before the curtain came down, the U.S. would "hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts," as the president's script put it.
As Anker notes, reducing the complex and ambiguous circumstances of 9/11 to simple melodrama serves to identify the State with the Good and to require State action to restore our virtue and take melodramatic vengeance upon those who had violently interrupted our otherwise peaceful community. "My concern is that in the ensuing national discussion, designations of right and wrong became depoliticized because they were codified as universal moral truths. Hence, they became unaccountable to public debate," Anker wrote. "Equating state action with national identity further depoliticized state power by assuming its deployment to be natural and hence incontestable. Thus, the pronouncements to 'protect the American people,' 'get back into this messy business,' and 'hunt down and punish those responsible' became necessary and moral acts, not specific political choices by specific political actors in response to a specific situation."
It matters what kind of stories we are told. Psychologists and anthropologists have been preaching for years about the importance of narrative to human cognition and behavior. We think with stories. We assemble our self-understanding through stories. Over the last twenty years, cognitive scientists like Mark Johnson and my Rockridge Institute colleague George Lakoff have empirically shown how thinking is embodied, how concepts are derived from our physical orientation and movement through space, and how most – about 98 percent – of our cognition is unconscious. Frames are among the unconscious structures of our brains. Every word evokes a frame. In Lakoff's famous example, the word "elephant" evokes a frame that includes large, floppy ears, a trunk, etc.
Narratives are a sub-category of frames. In fact, the linguistic concept of the frame was derived from sociologist Erving Goffman's observation that institutions and social organizations are shaped by mental structures – frames – which determine how we might behave in given settings. For instance, a hospital comes with roles (doctors, nurses, etc.), locations (operating rooms, nurses stations, etc.), and scenarios allowed within the frame. For instance, a patient goes to recovery after surgery. That's a scenario permitted by the frame. Other scenarios – the janitor performs surgery – are prohibited. Narratives help us learn what is possible and what is not. Melodrama, with its simple structure and stereotyped roles, greatly reduces our possibilities for action.
We learn narratives naturally as we develop, and, in fact, employ little narratives unconsciously when we perform simple goal-oriented tasks like taking a drink of water. Our brains learn temporal sequencing and develop image schemas to help us navigate and think in the world. For example, the beginning-middle-end structure of narrative is an instance of a fundamental cognitive image schema, source-path-goal. "The source-path-goal schema consists structurally of a starting point, a contiguous series of intermediate points, and an end point," Johnson explained. "This image schema underlies the structure of stories that typically start at some point in time, move through a series of more or less connected intermediate events, and end with some culminating event." This image schema, source-path-goal, is employed by a child listening to a bed time story and reaching for a glass of water on the bed stand. That's how intimate our brains and bodies are with story. In a sense, we become the stories we are told, although there is always an excess, a remainder, a human possibility of transformation.
So, what's so bad about melodrama? First, it presents a false picture of the world we live and think in. All stories, of course, are incomplete. But a form of narrative that discounts or eliminates ambiguity, uncertainty and the possibility of personal and social transformation is not a form we should want to dominate in that hidden, 98 percent part of our brain.
In addition, melodrama over-simplifies concepts of causation. In these narratives, causation is always direct and easily identifiable. Is Nell tied to the tracks? Snidely did it. Are you poor? It's your fault, because complex, systemic causation has no place in the melodramocracy. Our complex reality, and certainly the nurturant moral views progressives seek to bring to that reality, require an understanding of systemic causation. We won't find it in melodrama.
If I may use the melodramatic mode against itself, how do we untie democracy from the tracks before it's too late?
First, we should not make the mistake of making melodrama and theatricality equivalent. There are compelling ways to tell public stories without resorting to this simplified mode. But we shouldn't be under any illusions that we can drive melodrama from popular culture. The keys are to utilize more complex modes when we can, and to discourage the dominance of melodrama in news reporting.
Modern science has exploded the myth of the perfectly Rational Mind. Political decision-making is emotional, and we must engage people emotionally if we are to expect understanding. In the recent debate over immigration, Americans are responding to more nuanced, complex stories of opportunity and the contributions to our nation made by immigrants. Efforts to turn the issue into melodrama, with immigrants as villains, non-immigrants as victims, and nativist yahoos as would-be heroes, are not faring well. In popular culture, Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-winning Angels in America is a great example of effective, non-melodramatic narrative. The trick, of course, is to keep the spirit of such a play alive after the curtain comes down.
We should put public pressure on the news industry to drop its devotion to the melodramatic mode. Everything about this presentation style is irresponsible and anti-democratic. There is nothing about the American audience that requires melodrama. Newspapers, cable and broadcast news can entertain while delivering more complex accounts of events. They are currently just taking the cheap and easy route. It's time we threw up our hands as we might at a stubborn teen and say, "Just stop. You're being melodramatic."
Finally, we might commit ourselves to what George Lakoff calls a "higher" or "deeper" rationality and work to understand the many ways we are influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by the narratives and frames we hear, see and read. We are constrained by the narratives that surround us and the narrative forms and frames we use to think. But we are not without resources. The first step in freeing ourselves from the melodramocracy is to recognize that we don't need a hero to untie us from the tracks. Our hands are free. In our panic, we just forgot to look.
Sources
Anker, E. (2005). Villains, victims and heroes: Melodrama, media, and September 11. Journal of Communication 55, 22–37.
Burwell, C. (2003). Music at six: Scoring the news, then and now. Esopus, 1, 31-37.
Duncombe, S. (2007) Dream: Re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy. New York: The New Press.
Mason, J.D. (1993) Melodrama and the myth of America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
