Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things: Who Wants to Be a Victim - Page 4

A character like Senay who is repeatedly wronged speaks mainly to our self-pity. In my suck-it-up headmistress aspect I'm probably overly resistant to self-pity in movies, putting me in a somewhat false position because it is an important component of drama and there are pure victims in the most exalted works, Desdemona and Cordelia, for instance, or the Vietnamese girl abducted, raped, and murdered by American soldiers in Brian DePalma's Casualties of War (1989). These characters are purely good in an allegorical sense, representing what's threatened by various types of moral depravity.

By contrast, the naturalism of Dirty Pretty Things blurs the clean cerebral outlines of allegory, gaining effectiveness by letting us think of Senay as typical of current female immigrants. It intimates that what we see is happening all around us and but for a crusading movie like this we'd remain blind to it, and then heats up our reactions by means of the melodramatic head-to-head. This is to say that in melodrama the audience's reaction doesn't have the quality of detachment that it has in allegory or tragedy. Melodrama--programmatic, earnest, and flagrantly, exclusively, emotive--misses the overwhelming emotional effect of tragedy at the same time that it foregoes tragedy's invitation to contemplation. Melodrama presents its tricked-up situation as reality and puts the pressure on you to respond viscerally, as if gut reactions were your truest guide in this life. (It exploits you by means of your own predispositions and prejudices.) Thus, the self-pity elicited by victimization in melodrama is different from the self-pity in allegory and tragedy--it's the whole experience except in so far as it leads to a morally repugnant pleasure in vengeance. (In some ways, melodrama itself is a form of moral depravity.)

Melodrama presents victimization as the truth of experience (which is why it's so appealing to certain feminists), and by implication the blamelessness of the heroes and heroines suggests that a person has to be without fault to be sympathetic, and I don't buy that. (The movie also undermines its own naturalism by assuming we wouldn't be interested in an immigrant's life on its own terms without a prefab plot.) Melodrama offers the most simplistic projections: an all-good hero like Okwe functions simultaneously as a New Testament fantasy of our total goodness and an Old Testament fantasy of avenging righteousness. It's patently false and facile so it isn't surprising people tend to accept it as true in movies to the extent it flatters their political perspective, which itself is all too often melodramatic. Marxism, for example, is often espoused, even by educated people, in a melodramatic form, and the whole Republicans-vs.-Democrats back-and-forth in American politics even more so, and I don't buy these perspectives, either.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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