ABSTRACT

Realist and melodramatic texts share many of the same strategies, among them the narrative structure characteristic of what has come to be known as the “classical Hollywood film” (a remarkably homogenizing and reductive notion). Based in the (also homogenizing and reductive) model referred to as the “classic realist text”—which focuses on storytelling strategies the cinema shares with other media-the classical Hollywood film is remarkably realist. It presents a coherent reality in which individual identity is unified and clear and in which characters’ actions are goaloriented, motivating a formulaic plot pattern. The exposition lays out the situation and the primary conflict, showing psychologically defined individuals striving to solve problems or attain goals; the middle drives inexo rably toward an absolute truth as the protagonist struggles with other individuals or with a hostile (often social) environment; and that absolute truth (the “truth” of dominant ideologies) is revealed in the plot’s logical conclusion, the happy ending achieved through individual action. In some films, however, the motivation for the happy ending fails to convince, revealing contradictions in the ideological problematic the ending seeks to reinforce. On occasion, for instance, an epilogue may be used in an attempt to gloss over the dangling difficulty. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. One thing it certainly does is make clear the need to examine the relationship between story content and story form even, perhaps especially, in films with convincing endings; aesthetics are irrevocably linked to ideology.