Each One Another by Rachel Haidu

Author:Rachel Haidu [Haidu, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART000000 ART / General, ART015110 ART / History / Contemporary (1945-)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Sex Panics: Tragedies or Melodramas?

Seeing Brandon as “isolated in soul-sickness against an indifferent city,” James Quandt argues that nothing in this “passion play to gladden Michelle Bachmann’s heart” can recoup Shame.16 His review oscillates between defining Shame as a tragedy (a “passion play”) and as a melodrama, characterized by its “moralizing coda” and “bathetic Barber-like lamentation.” This ambiguity, as it seems to me, rides precisely on those late moments in the film when its narrative is finally trounced by the formal unities I have been describing. For Quandt is particularly irritated by the precise chromatic and sonic interruptions that I have focused on. He notes both chroma and sound—the sequence in the bathhouse is “luridly lit in Hades red and sordid strobe lights”—and decries McQueen’s deployment of “Glenn Gould’s lugubrious second recording of the Goldberg Variations over both a showy long tracking shot of Brandon jogging at night and the film’s histrionic denouement.” Might it then be fair to assume that even if this acute critic is indisposed to submit to the very moments that this drama unfolds its most spectacular effects, they are nonetheless part of what he sees overdetermining Shame’s genre-bending hyperbole? What genres can Shame be seen to bend—and to what effect?

For Blair Hoxby, the defining characteristic of tragedy is its use of pathos. This is true by virtue of “the end of the genre: to effect through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions” and because of the way tragedy is defined, for Hoxby, by its historical concessions to the spectacular, or what he names as the operatic.17 Those concessions include music and song, costuming and sets. The leveraging of pathos to become the central criterion for tragedy upsets the distinction between theatrical performances and the idealist framework, in which “theatrical performance is tied to the very appearances that must be dissolved before tragic insight can be generated” (emphasis added).18 In other words, Hoxby’s contention is that tragedy’s spectacle must be so elaborate, in order to “generate tragic insight,” that it actually must end in order for that insight to actualize. After all, he reminds us, “the heroes of tragedy did sing in the Greek theater”; thus, “the representation of pathos might be [the tragedian’s] essential task.”19

What is pathos? It is the genre’s mimetic and performative side, the showing of suffering. “Because the whole weight of the ancient rhetorical tradition maintained that the best way to move the passions of an audience was to exhibit those passions,” then to think of passion as pathos, as representation, was to reconcile the effects seen onstage with “the soul’s passive suffering of the strong movements of spirits and fluids in the body when the mind formed some judgment that an object promised good or evil.”20 In other words, pathos is not action but the scene of what it does to a body rendered passive, perhaps even sculptural, plastic. It is only as such effortful, visible accentuation of suffering so acute that it renders the body passive that pathos

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