Time in Melodrama

This teasing delay of the forward moving march of time has not been sufficiently appreciated as key to the melodramatic effect. Nor has it been appreciated as an effect that cinema realized more powerfully than stage or literary melodrama. It needs to be linked with melodrama's larger impulse to reverse time, to return to the time of origins and the space of innocence that can musically be felt in terms of patterns of anticipation and return. The original patterns--whether of melody, key, rhythm, or of physical space and time--thus take on a visceral sort of ethics. They are felt as good. The "main thrust" of melodramatic narrative, for all its flurry of apparent linear action, is to get back to the beginning.

Melodrama offers the hope that it may not be too late, that there may still be an archaic sort of virtue, and that virtue and truth can be achieved in private individuals and individual heroic acts rather than, as Eisenstein wanted, in revolution and change. For these reasons the prolonged play with time and timing so important to the last-minute rescue should not be attributed to the linear cause-effect outcome of classical realism or the naturalism of scenery, sets, or acting, The rescue, chase, or fight that defies time and that occupies so much time in the narrative is the desired mirror reversal of the defeat by time in the pathos of "too late."

The physical "realism" of this climax, so devoted to convincing viewers of the reality of the forces that combine to make the victim-hero suffer, is thus part and parcel of its melodrama. At its deepest level melodrama is an expression of feeling toward a time that passes too fast. This may be why the spectacular essence of melodrama seems to rest in those moments of temporal prolongation when "in the nick of time" defies "too late." There is another way in which this particular last-minute rescue works.

(Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 74)