Core Post 3 FT

The breakdown in Feuer's piece of the development of the theoretical approach towards melodrama elucidated the problems I've encountered with the way the 'reclamation' for lack of a better word of melodrama auteurs like Sirk has seemed to have gaps between it that don't exactly delineate the layered synthesis that his films provide, and the close-circuited approach I've always been left a little confused by of what is included within the confines of melodrama as bearing contradictory, meaningful heights, by discarding for the most part with an auteur approach to reading the form of melodrama that Feuer attributes to feminist and psychoanalytic tradition extending from the impasse, a more open approach to what constitutes as melodrama and where it's weight lies is revealed. Feuer's further stretching of the aesthetic signifiers of melodrama, that of excess, into the mise-en-scene and editing of soaps, citing the feverish frequency of zooms that produce a 'high melodrama'. The undefined and unbounded seriality of soaps leading to contradictions to accumulate and an instability to reach endless heights reminds me of the melodrama of Spider-Man comics, upon which for its first four decades, essentially and almost explicitly functioned as a serial soap opera with a large rotating supporting cast and focus on personal life. Breaking Bad is a show which visually seems to draw from comics/graphic novels, and in its insularity and 'prestige' status, seems to discard the melodramatic conventions of soaps outside of seriality (even then apparently confined by its almost compulsive need to rarely have gaps narratively and promise of a planned ending), stylistically and in writing one can easily identify the melodramatic elements imbued into it, but what this reading specifically opened up to me is that the contradictions and preoccupations of the show and the way they fester (class insecurity and fantasy, masculinity and gender performance), are directly due to their resemblance of soap opera melodrama.