Mildred Pierce: ‘remarriage melodrama’ among novel, cinema and television

  • Simona Busni Università della Calabria
Keywords: melodrama, mildred pierce, novel, cinema, television

Abstract

Purpose

This essay intends to analyze melodrama, in its enigmatic and heterogeneous essence, through a female character: Mildred Pierce, protagonist of the novel by the American writer James M. Cain (1941), of the film by Michael Curtiz (1945) and the miniseries by Todd Haynes (HBO, 2011) – three different works and the same title, which coincides with her name. Mildred’s story reinterprets the rhetorical myth of the melodramatic unknown women, those heroines searching for an existential way to state the right to tell their stories.       

Methodology

Paraphrasing Stanley Cavell, author of a famous philosophical theory on cinematographic genres, that of Mildred Pierce’s could be defined a remarriage melodrama, namely a version of the story where we can find the restoration of the first marriage although in a melodramatic context of avoidance. The first step regards a rhetorical datum, that is the negation as the (re)generative tool in a system within which it’s possible to obtain a particular kind of melodrama from a certain comedy. Then this datum is incorporated in a wider philosophical perspective – concerning language, skepticism and the concept of “unknowness” – and it’s compared with the main theories about melodrama, from literature to cinema (Frye, Brooks, Elsaesser, Doane, Williams, Cook), until the implications connected to TV seriality (Mittel).         

Results/Findings

Through the case “Mildred Pierce” in its different versions, using categories belonging to philosophical reflection, it’s possible to test the theoretical strength of melodrama as crucial and constant mode of modern imagination, as well as to reread its potentialities as intermedial genre.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Simona Busni, Università della Calabria

Titolo professionale: Indipendente

Aree di interesse e ricerca: Filosofia del cinema, Melodramma, Cinema italiano, Divismo, Stanley Cavell

 

Posizioni Accademiche

Assegnista di ricerca, Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Novembre 2013 – Aprile 2015 [Assegnista ospite, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 (France), Département “Cinéma et Audiovisuel”];

 

Attività Professionali

Redattrice, Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita, Mimesis, Milano-Udine, 2014 – oggi;

Segretaria di Redazione, Fata Morgana, Pellegrini Editore, Cosenza, 2006 – oggi;

Redattrice, L’avventura. International Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2015 – oggi;

 

Pubblicazioni

-          “La creazione della donna” (2016);

-          “Corpi senza voce. Le donne imperfette del melodramma” (2016);

-         “The genre between television and cinema: for an aesthetics of the serialization” (2015);

-         “Silvana e il bajón: memorie di una (ri)nascita cinematografica” (2015);

-         “Donne di genere: il melodramma filosofico secondo Stanley Cavell” (2012).

References

Bachtin, Michail, Estetica e romanzo. Un contributo fondamentale alla «scienza della letteratura» (1975), Torino, Einaudi, 1997.

Bourget, Jean-Loup, Le mélodrame hollywoodien, Paris, Stock Cinema, 1985.

Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1976), tr. it., L’immaginazione melodrammatica, Parma, Pratiche, 1995.

Cain, James M., Mildred Pierce (1941), it. tr., Milano, Adelphi, 2012.

Cammarata, Valeria - Marcenò, Serena (eds.), Narrazioni di genere e biopolitiche neoliberali. Mildred Pierce e i suoi spettri, Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2014.

Cavell, Stanley, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1996.

Cavell, Stanley, Pursuit of Happiness. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), tr. it Alla ricerca della felicità. La commedia hollywoodiana del rimatrimonio, Torino, Einaudi, 1999.

Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason. Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (1979), tr. it. La riscoperta dell’ordinario. La filosofia, lo scetticismo e il tragico, Roma,  Carocci, 2001.

Cavell, Stanley, “The Fact of Television”, Cavell on film, Ed. William Rothman, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2005: 59-85.

Coglitore, Roberta, “Le donne di Cain. Confessione e identità transessuale”, Narrazioni di genere e biopolitiche neoliberali. Mildred Pierce e i suoi spettri, Eds. Valeria Cammarata - Serena Marcenò, Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2014: 61-90.

Cook, Pam, “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce”, Women in Film Noir, Ed. Ann E. Kaplan, London, BFI, 1978. 

Cook, Pam, “Beyond Adaptation: Mirrors, Memory and Melodrama in Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce”, Screen, 54. 3 (2013): 378-387.

Cook, Pam, “Text, Paratext and Subtext. Reading ‘Mildred Pierce’ as a Maternal Melodrama”, in “SEQUENCE: Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music”, 2.2 (2015),  http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence2/archive/sequence-2-2/, online (last accessed 07/11/2016).

Doanne, Mary Ann, The Desire to Desire. The Woman’s Film of the ‘40s, Bloomington,  Indiana University Press, 1987.

Doanne, Mary Ann, “Le disavventure del desiderio femminile nel woman’s film degli anni quaranta”, La grande Hollywood, Ed. Veronica Pravadelli, Venezia, Marsilio, 2007.

Elsaesser, Thomas, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” (1973), tr. it. “Storie di rumore e di furore. Osservazioni sul melodramma familiare”, Forme del melodramma, Ed. Alberto Pezzotta, Roma, Bulzoni, 1992 : 65-109.

Elsaesser, Thomas, “Modalità del sentire o visione del mondo? Una rivisitazione del melodramma familiare e dell’immaginazione melodrammatica”, Il melodramma, Ed. Elena Dagrada, Roma, Bulzoni, 2007.

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), tr. it. Anatomia della critica, Torino, Einaudi, 2000.

Lebrun, Michel, “Les figures imposte du mélo”, Le Cahiers de la Cinémathèque, 28 (1979): 90-93.

Lukács, György, Teoria del romanzo (1920), Milano, SE, 2004.

Merritt, Russel, “Melodrama: Postmortem for a Phantom Genre”, Wide Angle, 3.V (1983): 24-31.

Mittell, Jason, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (2015), tr. it., Complex Tv. Teoria e tecnica dello storytelling delle serie tv,  Minimum Fax, Roma 2017.

Nelson, Joyce, “Mildred Pierce Reconsidered”, Film Reader, 2 (1977): 65-70.

Orabona, Francesca (ed.), L’immaginazione melodrammatica secondo Peter Brooks. Per una costante della visione estetica nei tempi moderni, Milano, Cuem, 2004.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Empirismo eretico (1972), Garzanti, Milano 2015.

Pezzotta, Alberto (ed.), Forme del melodramma, Roma, Bulzoni, 1992.

Pravadelli, Veronica, La grande Hollywood, Venezia, Marsilio, 2007.

Quaresima, Leonardo, “Melodramma”, Cinema e cinema, 30 (1982): 47-53.

Schatz, Thomas, The Genius of the System, New York, The Pantheon Books, 1988.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), tr. it. Critica della ragione postcoloniale, Roma, Meltemi, 2004.

Viviani, Christian, “Qui est sans péché: Le mélo maternel dans le cinéma américain, 1930-39”, Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque, 28 (1979): 73-82.

Williams, Linda, “Feminist Film Theory: Mildred Pierce and the Second World War”, Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, Ed. Deidre E. Pribram, London-New York, Verso, 1988: 12-30.

Published
2018-01-30
How to Cite
Busni, S. (2018). <i>Mildred Pierce</i&gt;: ‘remarriage melodrama’ among novel, cinema and television. Between, 7(14). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/2769
Section
Contemporary Melodramas. Cinema, TV, Graphic Novels