THE VENOMOUS EYE

Melodrama, Media, and National Identity after 9 /11

You couldn't call yourself an American if you hadn't, in solidarity, watched your fellow Americans being pulverized, yet what kind of American did watching create?

—Amy Waldman, The Submission

Melodramatic political discourses depict the nation-state as a virtuous and innocent victim overwhelmed by villainous action. They draw upon a moral economy that locates goodness in national suffering, and that locates heroism in unilateral state action against dominating forces. Melodramatic discourses often depict war and state surveillance as moral imperatives for both the amelioration of nationwide suffering and the achievement of nationwide freedom. In melodrama, the United States becomes virtuous by the very experience of being injured, as if acts of violence against the nation demonstrate the nation's exceptional virtue. This chapter first sketches the primary genre conventions that form melodramatic political discourse, sketches that will be complicated, unraveled, and challenged throughout the book. While melodrama, like all genre forms, is somewhat unstable, melodramatic political discourse has a distinctive set of characteristics that give it a recognizable integrity, even as its conventions mutate across media platforms and historical events. Melodramatic conventions influence one of the most heightened dramas in U.S. history, the media coverage of the 9/11 events. The second half of this chapter scrutinizes media coverage from September 11, 2001, to investigate the operations and effects of melodramatic political discourse in this context; it asks: How does a melodramatic narrative of victimization and retribution negotiate the ambiguities of political crisis? In what ways does melodrama rearticulate dominant ideals of U.S. nationhood through depictions of terror? What conceptions of political agency does melodrama enable, and what political practices emerge as its effect?

Five Conventions of Melodramatic Political Discourse

The first convention of melodramatic political discourse is a moral economy of good and evil that shapes its depictions of political events and national identity. Good equates to the U.S. nation-state, evil equates to the sources of national injury, and as these moralized identities circulate they reinforce each other—so that claims of national goodness are enabled and sustained by the injuries caused by evil Others. As Peter Brooks describes melodrama more broadly, "[Melodrama's] starting point must be in evil.... The force of evil in melodrama derives from its personalized menace, its swift declarations of intent, its reduction of innocence to powerlessness." Melodrama's moral economy originates in evil, and it relies on evil to identify goodness and generate a narrative trajectory. This moral economy thus aligns with what Friedrich Nietzsche has called "the venomous eye of ressentiment"—a strategy of identity production in which goodness is produced out of injury by evil, and the legitimation of reactive vengeance becomes part of that identity. Goodness is identified only after one suffers at the hands of evil. Nietzsche describes identities produced by goodness as such: "He has conceived 'the evil enemy' 'the Evil One,' and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a 'good one'—himself!" The category of goodness arises with and through the naming of evil; in this temporal reversal, goodness is dependent on a prior identification of its opposite for its content and character. Goodness is produced by retrospectively positing a moral self that seems to exist before "the evil enemy," even as it emerges through and from the antagonistic relationship with evil.

In the melodramatic moral economy of U.S. political discourse, goodness is produced by just this type of temporal reversal, constituted through the prior act of goodness's defilement by evil. In Nietzsche's concept of the venomous eye, evil is not just the constitutive opposite of goodness; it actively aims to harm goodness. In melodramatic political discourse, the venomous eye of ressentiment works to understand good Americans as under siege by evil action. Yet the temporal reversal of melodramatic identity production occludes this retrospective process and imagines the identity of the "good" nation and "good" citizen to exist independently of the appearance of an evil antagonist who wants to maim the nation. In melodrama, goodness comes to appear as a stable identity of U.S. nationhood even as the nation first requires harm by evil to establish the content of goodness. The qualities that make up goodness thus shift depending on the evil that serves as its definite opposite; so in melodramas of communism the nation's goodness is predicated on individual freedom, the free market, and capital accumulation, among other things. In melodramas of terrorism the nation's goodness is predicated on tolerance, individual freedom (again), and the judicious use of violence—violence that is deemed moral because it is democratically legitimated and state organized, among other things. In each of its iterations, the ascription of "goodness" to the nation through the venomous eye of melodrama disavows its dependence on a diagnosis of evil and proceeds as though its own goodness exists independently of an evil Other out to harm the nation.

Second, melodramatic political discourse designates political actors and agency through characters of victims, villains, and heroes. The nation's antagonists are villains—invaders foreign to the proper national body—while the nation is often at once the victim and the hero, both what suffers from villainy and what has the strength to overcome its adversary through the force of its goodness. (I examine the dynamics of heroism more in the fourth convention; here I focus more on victimization.) Melodrama's moral economy overlaps with these designations so that its depictions of victimization confer goodness on those who suffer unjustly. America becomes a virtuous nation through the harm it suffers. In melodrama, victimization is also equated with innocence, so that the nation's injury often retrospectively designates a previctimized nation that was innocent and pure. This dynamic is part of what Brooks and Thomas Elsaesser note as melodrama's theological inheritance in Judeo-Christian worldviews that link suffering to goodness and retrospectively posits a state of innocence before villainy strikes. The connection between virtue, victimization, and suffering is a grounding...