Melodrama, Trauma, Mind-Games: Affect and Memory in Contemporary American Cinema

by Thomas Elsaesser

The woman's picture, the male trauma narrative, and mind-game films?three ways that American cinema tests the limits: of what victims can suffer, what the body can bear, and what the mind can understand. Usually considered both marginal and excessive, these genres, modes, or tendencies in contemporary Hollywood have more in common than might at first appear. They tell us much about the way America engages in dialogue with its own divided nature and nation, demonstrated across its most cherished and characteristic of art forms: the movies.