9 - Pathos and Transfiguration in the Face of the Camera: A Reading of Stella Dallas

Summary

In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks argues that in theatrical melodrama, human exemplars of good and evil can and must declare themselves. In the original theatrical melodramas of the early nineteenth century, heroine and villain declare their moral natures. Announcing themselves to be human exemplars of the occult forces of good and evil, they perform acts of “self-nomination.” But in films, human beings never stand revealed by their own gestures alone. They are always also revealed by the camera.

As I show in the preceding chapter, the camera can “nominate” a human subject as an exemplar of evil only by revealing at the same time that this figure's villainy is inseparable from the camera's bond with him or her – that is, only by nominating itself as well, and thereby implicating the film's creators and viewers. When human beings appear inhuman in films, as they often do, the camera is instrumental in creating their inhumanity. Understood as theatrical melodrama understands it, as an occult force existing apart from human beings and their creations, evil has no reality in the face of the camera.

If the camera is an exemplary instrument of villainy, how can it single out an exemplar of goodness? Starting at least with Griffith (and perhaps this has a precedent in American theatrical melodrama as opposed to the French examples Brooks studies), “virtue” in films is typically reduced to innocence and in turn to vulnerability.