UC Berkeley

Melodrama Undercover rethinks the affective work genre cinema performed in post-dictatorship Argentina. Dominant scholarship has tended to dismiss the political and cultural significance of popular films produced after the 1976–1983 military rule. It claims this cinema largely stops reckoning with the dictatorship in the 1990s, given the proliferation of genre films that do not represent state violence and genocide directly. I reconsider mainstream cinema’s role in mediating the past to show how it confronts and represents historical trauma allegorically to negotiate questions concerning justice, memory, and national identity. These films engage processes of displacement and resignification to imagine a different relationship to the country’s past as they restage social and subject-state relations under authoritarianism. In their use of allegorical images, plots, and resolutions, diverse popular genres allow audiences to work through the past in a collective experience of spectatorship that addresses the wounds of historical trauma and, in the process, imagine a (bearable) future that holds the possibility for change. Organized through the conventions of the melodramatic mode, prominent Argentinean genres (such as the tango musical, the policial/crime thriller, and the science fiction film) have historically acted as beacons of memory and justice during moments when both were imperiled. Using a contextual approach, Melodrama Undercover engages archival research, close reading, and film theory to reconceptualize melodrama as a site of collective resistance. In the Argentinean films under consideration, melodrama has offered audiences fantasies that dramatize the restoration of the social and familial relations severed by authoritarianism. I use the concept of the “melodrama of community” to show how Argentinean genres eschew reactionary escapism by looking forward as they look back: they investigate and narrativize the past in order to envision—or warn about—the future. In this way, genre cinema functions as a palliative for the violent losses the military inflicted on marginalized Argentineans while modeling new social formations and resilient communities able to rebuild a shattered nation.