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.
There's a tinge of complacency inherent in the simplistic moral schemes of all melodramas, left and right. They work by attributing problems in the world to the nefarious machinations of purely evil characters and getting us to seethe in hatred and resentment of such characters; then they gratifying us by clobbering the baddies in a way we feel never happens in real life. If you go for it, you have to ignore some ugly implications, in particular the satisfaction we're meant to take in the avenging violence against the villain and his minions--who we know have committed the crimes but have not yet entered the legal system for prosecuting crime. Dark Blue is relatively civilized in that the good guys go after Gleeson by legal means, and Russell arrests rather than kills one of his pair of scumbag killers. The black one. The white one, however, is stomped by a black street mob during the riots, saving Russell the trouble of pursuing and arresting him. And the moviemakers, who plainly would be horrified by the lynching of an African-American, even an alleged criminal, lead us to feel that the guy got his.
Article comments