Melodrama can't tell you anything about how the world actually works, no matter how ostensibly realistic the handling is, because the writer has to simplify and distort the material to fit the formula. A classic example from Dark Blue is the sequence in which Russell pressures a female magistrate into issuing a warrant on the basis of his perjurious word. Their negotiation is the best thing in the movie. She knows he's up to no good but he seems to plant just enough doubt in her mind to get what he wants. It doesn't seem like factual doubt, but power doubt--will he outplay her in the system and make her look bad--a hand of poker of the sort we play at our jobs all the time. But then as Russell leaves with the warrant he tells his young partner that he holds an explicitly sexual video of the woman over her, and the movie gets right back on track. Next we see a judge sign the trumped-up warrant while literally holding a martini in the other hand. At that moment it could be a live-action version of The Simpsons.

The truest way for modern artists to show us how a social system actually operates is the mode of naturalism, which impersonally lays out how we end up compromising our ambitions and desires when we seek to act on them in a world of competing ambitions and desires. In order of increasing stylization, this approach can take the form of nonfiction reportage; a detached, seemingly recorded rather than ordered, pure naturalism, as in Abraham Cahan's novel The Rise of David Levinsky; details of setting, cause-and-effect, and psychology incorporated into a densely-woven realistic novel, as in George Eliot's Middlemarch; or such details used to create an ironic tension between the representative surface of a work and its structure as a romance, as in Melville and Kafka. You can't do what these works do in melodrama, which requires an absolute dichotomy of moral values embodied in the characters and a symbolic drama vindicating those values. What melodrama offers in place of observation and analysis is the release of pumped-up emotion, and any dialogue about values would just block the vents.

Most people enjoy melodrama more than I do, and so you may like seeing your liberal values affirmed in Dark Blue. David Edelstein's 21 February 2003 online review in Slate, for instance, offers robust critique of the melodramatic elements, but then defends the picture as preferable to right-wing melodramas. This isn't an aesthetic defense, but one that, like melodrama, assumes shared values. My gut is that you should hold moviemakers who share your outlook to a higher standard, if it bothers you to see issues you care about trivialized. (For instance, Philadelphia (1993) upsets me personally more than the lurid homophobia in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).) But audiences tend to respond to melodrama the way they do to topical satire: they like it to the extent they think the makers are trying to express attitudes they already share. This almost always involves a lowering of standards.