Dreams That Money Can Buy: Families and Finance in the Melodrama

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Category: Gallery

Gallery Talk and Film Screening

with

Robert L. Cagle
Cinema Studies Specialist, University of Illinois

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Made from overwrought anguish and predictable improbabilities, melodrama doesn't encourage its audience too look too deep. But according to Robert L. Cagle, a cinema studies specialist at the University of Illinois, look at post-war American melodramas and post-IMF crisis South Korean melodramas and you'll see critical thematic and philosophical similarities.

Both sets of cinema were produced by recently traumatized societies: WWII in the case of 1950s America, economic calamity in the case of late-90s Korea. Both societies were embracing economic growth and watching as consumer culture sparked conflict between tradition and modernity. In mid-‘50s America, filmmaker Douglas Sirk presented these realities in films like There's Always Tomorrow, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. All three melodramas highlighted characters striving to escape lives they feel trap them, in the process creating an even more anguished personal mess. A common thread, Cagle noted, is that American melodramas of the period tend to feature characters that are afraid of losing their place in the world; either physically, through losing a home, or emotionally, through damaging important relationships.

The same can be said for contemporary Korean melodramas. In recent films such as The Man Who Went to Mars and Cracked Eggs and Noodles, Korean melodrama directors portray an emotionally deadening consumer culture through the symbolic pervasiveness of Korean electronic gadgetry. The characters go through the same process of disillusion and loss.

American and Korean melodramas do part ways, however, when it comes to the end of the film. In American melodramas, characters whose world has collapsed around them usually find another form of personal satisfaction and re-invest their faith in the typical American dream: a classic Hollywood happy ending. Contrast this to Korean melodramas, where the main characters don't recover. When Korean melodrama characters realize they've lost it all, the film usually takes them back to a fleeting memory of past happiness and then ends, eschewing resolution.

This perspective gives South Korean melodramas a more sophisticated feel than their American counterparts. Korean melodramas, Cagle said, "dare to raise questions...they don't give audiences the false hope that American films do, and don't feel as manipulative."

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