Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 92, No. 3, August 2006, pp. 239 ! 261 Environmental Melodrama Steven Schwarze Rhetorical scholarship criticizes melodrama for its tendency to simplify and reify public controversies and valorizes the comic frame as an ethically superior mode of rhetoric. These judgments are rooted in the discipline’s reliance on Burkean categories, a reductionist conception of melodrama, and an implicit assumption that social unification should be the telos of rhetoric. In response, this essay advances a concept of melodrama as an integrated set of rhetorical appeals. It uses examples of environmental rhetoric to illustrate how the inventional resources of melodrama can transform public controversies and oppose dominant discourses that rationalize or obscure threats to the quality and existence of life on Earth. Based on these arguments, the essay endorses a sophistic critical perspective that foregrounds timeliness as the primary ground for rhetorical judgment and refuses to treat any rhetorical frame as inherently superior to another. Keywords: Melodrama; Comedy; Polarization; Movements; Libby, Montana; Asbestos Environmental Rhetoric; Social Melodrama is a recurrent rhetorical form in environmental controversies. From local land management to global warming, from resource extraction to toxic contamination, environmental issues often get constituted within a melodramatic frame. As it generates stark, polarizing distinctions between social actors and infuses those distinctions with moral gravity and pathos, melodrama offers environmental advocates a powerful resource for rhetorical invention. Arguably, melodrama’s ubiquity in environmental controversy stems from its capacity to provide a coherent, synthetic response to several of the persistent rhetorical obstacles facing environmental advocates. It can transform ambiguous and unrecognized environmental conditions into public problems; it can call attention to how distorted notions of the public interest conceal environmental degradation; and, it can overcome public Steve Schwarze is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Montana. Correspondence to: Department of Communication Studies, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA. Email: steven.schwarze@umontana.edu. Preliminary work on this essay was presented was presented at the NCA Conventions in 2002 and 2003. The author wishes to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers and Anthony Hurst for their careful reading and feedback during the development of this essay. ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/00335630600938609 240 S. Schwarze indifference to environmental problems by amplifying their moral and emotional dimensions. To the extent that melodrama serves these purposes, it presents itself as an enticing rhetorical strategy for environmental advocates. The attractiveness of the melodramatic frame as a mode of engaging recurrent rhetorical obstacles makes this rhetorical phenomenon worthy of theoretical explication and critical analysis. Yet contemporary rhetorical scholarship has paid little theoretical attention to melodrama, a deficiency that has led to consistently negative critical judgments of the form. Theoretically, the few discussions of melodrama within rhetorical studies interpret the form by focusing on its tendency to reify and simplify public controversies.1 Ironically, this perspective simplifies melodrama, mistaking one of its dimensions*polarization *for the larger rhetorical action of that frame. In fact, the multiple appeals of melodrama can work together to complicate and transform public issues, not just reduce them to simplistic formulations. A richer theory of melodrama would account for both transformative and reifying possibilities of the form. As a matter of rhetorical theory, then, melodrama clearly merits further scrutiny. Moreover, the reduction of melodrama to polarization risks diminishing the range of critical judgments of the form and its uses. The narrow focus on melodrama’s capacity for polarization encourages blanket negative judgments of the form itself, foreclosing the possibility of situated rhetorical assessments. Such wholesale judgments of the melodramatic frame are not surprising, given the discipline’s embrace of Kenneth Burke and the valorization of the comic frame as a superior mode of engagement with public controversies.2 Even critical readings of Burke affirm his negative judgment of melodrama based on its polarizing tendency. Gregory Desilet, for example, endorses Burke’s indictment of melodrama or ‘‘factional tragedy’’ found in Attitudes Toward History. ‘‘Burke rightly sees that this brand of melodramatic catharsis fuels the narrowness of moral indignation, serving to perfect divisions between people rather than minimize them.’’3 While Desilet (and Burke) is right to caution us about the danger of perfecting division, I would urge caution about the implicit assumption that division is always or necessarily a problem to be minimized. In some situations, clarifying and enabling division may be beneficial, and melodrama can offer a potentially fitting rhetorical response to those situations. A broader theoretical conception of melodrama would explain how its combination of appeals can generate productive forms of polarization that recast the line between identification and division in beneficial ways. Consequently, such a conception of melodrama would facilitate a full range of critical judgments that are sensitive to specific rhetorical contexts. In response to these deficiencies, this essay advances a concept of melodrama as a complex and integrated rhetorical form. In doing so, it seeks to elevate the status of melodrama to that of comedy and tragedy as a central concept in rhetorical theory; it intends to make a wider range of critical responses to melodrama more readily available; and it attempts to provoke reflection on the grounds for judgment in rhetorical criticism. While I contextualize this argument within the realm of Environmental Melodrama 241 environmental controversy, the essay addresses issues regarding identification, polarization, and moral and emotional appeals that persist for all rhetorical scholars. Privileging Comedy, Denigrating Melodrama Melodrama stands as a relatively neglected but potentially productive category for interpreting the framing of public controversies. While this neglect may be explained by the negative connotations that adhere to popular conceptions of melodrama,4 it also may be a consequence of the Burkean terministic screen that influences rhetorical studies. Burke’s comic and tragic frames are core concepts in rhetorical criticism, and several scholars of environmental rhetoric have adopted his broader dramatistic perspective.5 But continued reliance on Burke’s frames may deflect our attention from alternate frames in public controversy. Burke himself refers only briefly to melodrama, as a subset of tragedy;6 for scholars of public controversy, however, the concept merits greater attention, since its features make it a particularly appealing option for those engaged in communication about virtually any public issue. As literary theorist Robert Bechtold Heilman has claimed, the realm of melodrama is the realm of competition and rivalry, and therefore melodrama often constitutes ‘‘the special conflicts produced by public situations: this or that group fights to compel a community or nation to adopt a program or pattern of life.’’7 In this light, melodrama would seem to be a useful resource for scholars wishing to understand the dynamics of public controversy. However, melodrama has received surprisingly scant attention within rhetorical studies. Michael Osborn and John Bakke’s essay about narratives of the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968 is one of the few articles that attempts to theorize melodrama as a concept for interpreting public discourse. They affirm Heilman’s observation about the centrality of melodrama in constituting public controversy, asserting ‘‘an inevitable thesis: melodrama is the most rhetorical mode of narrative.’’8 However, Osborn and Bakke’s analysis of the Memphis narratives ultimately yields a broad indictment of melodrama on grounds shared by many critics of environmental rhetoric*its moralism, its pathos, and its simplification of complex situations. In their words, ‘‘A vision of the world that expresses itself through moral absolutes, appeals to feeling, simplicity, rigidity, and stereotypes may offer boundless opportunity for error if not inhumanity.’’9 Near the end of the essay, Osborn and Bakke support these criticisms with reference to the rhetorical action of melodrama. They assert that melodrama draws sharp distinctions between opposing forces, making resolutions difficult to negotiate; it personalizes problems, deflecting attention from systemic issues; it invites simple solutions, denying the complexity of controversial situations; and finally, it blinds us to the capacity for change among others and failure among ourselves.10 While these claims will be addressed later in this essay, of primary importance here is their normative judgment of melodrama as rhetorical form. Ultimately, Osborn and Bakke contend that the polarizing tendency of melodrama threatens the ‘‘circles’’ or relationships that constitute a community: 242 S. Schwarze ‘‘Rhetorical melodramas are dangerous because they drive these circles apart and diminish the sense of shared communal life.’’11 Osborn and Bakke’s desire for social unity is shared by scholars who praise Burke’s comic frame. For these scholars, social unification is assumed to be the telos of rhetoric, and the comic frame is viewed as unique in its capacity to enable unification in divisive situations. For example, A. Cheree Carlson endorses the comic frame’s establishment of a clown who functions to promote a community’s engagement with its errors and mistakes. ‘‘When the clown is punished, dialogue can begin, eventually leading to a rapprochement.’’12 Similarly, Adrienne Christiansen and Jeremy Hanson support Burke’s preference for the comic frame ‘‘because the rhetor who speaks from the comic frame assumes that humans eventually will recognize their shared social identifications and will respond in a moral manner.’’13 For these critics, the comic frame is valuable precisely because it forsakes the divisiveness of the tragic frame in favor of unification within a reformed social order. Certainly, unification can be a desirable goal, but a desire for unification in all situations may be misplaced. Promoting division and drawing sharp moral distinctions can be a fitting response to situations in which identification and consensus have obscured recognition of damaging material conditions and social injustices.14 So, while use of the comic frame can be an appropriate rhetorical strategy in some situations, scholars must be wary of making judgments about the comic frame*or any other frame, for that matter*as an inherently superior form for public discourse. Carlson, for example, on one hand judges the comic frame to be ‘‘the most humane frame for understanding and acting in society;’’15 on the other hand, she recognizes elsewhere that the comic frame may not always be the best strategy for promoting social change. ‘‘Naturally, some social orders are so rigid that there may be no wedge for accommodation at first, thus in some cases a movement must either abandon the charitable mode or be prepared to wage a forty year struggle much as Ghandi pursued in India.’’16 William Lewis, too, has argued that comedy can be an insufficient mode of engaging questions of social justice because ‘‘it subordinates the pain of social life and the felt reality of conflicts to visions of integration that somehow reconcile the vital tensions of politics and society.’’17 In some instances, then, the integrative action of comedy may be less appropriate than melodrama’s dynamics of division. Given the infinite variability of uses and contexts, it is questionable to privilege rhetorical frames apart from their deployment in specific contexts. Christiansen and Hanson’s study of ACT UP reveals the difficulty of moving from situated rhetorical judgments to broader generalizations about frames. They make a convincing case that ACT UP’s rhetoric exemplifies ‘‘an appropriate and sensible use of the comic frame;’’ in particular, they document how comic rhetoric was an especially fitting counterpoint to the dominant tragic discourse surrounding AIDS in the 1980s.18 From this case, they cautiously conclude ‘‘that there may be recurring social conditions for which rhetoric in the comic frame may be the only sensible response. Although there may be more, Burke (1959) suggests several of those conditions: When society deals with ‘anguish, injustice, disease and death.’’’19 Their tentativeness in making these claims is Environmental Melodrama 243 appropriate. After all, the comic frame may be invoked effectively or ineffectively, and other frames might be equally or more sensible in particular contexts. As this essay will suggest, melodramatic rhetoric also can be a wise response to these very conditions of anguish, injustice, disease and death. By displacing unification as the primary telos of rhetoric and resisting decontextualized judgments of frames, we can begin to give melodramatic rhetoric fair critical consideration. This consideration is rooted in a broader assumption that should guide rhetorical criticism: the question of division!and its compensatory counterpart, identification!should remain an open one. The critical concern surrounding melodrama should not be that it generates conflict and division; rather, it should lie in how melodrama constitutes particular conflicts and whether it promotes divisions (and identifications) that are beneficial in particular circumstances. As Burke reminds us, the line between identification and division is always a matter of rhetorical contestation. (P)ut identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. . . . When two men collaborate in an enterprise to which they contribute different kinds of services and from which they derive different amounts and kinds of profit, who is to say, once and for all, just where ‘‘cooperation’’ ends and one partner’s ‘‘exploitation’’ of the other begins? The wavering line between the two cannot be ‘‘scientifically’’ identified; rival rhetoricians can draw it at different places, and their persuasiveness varies with the resources each has at his command.20 Arguably, melodrama is one of the resources available for drawing this line. And if we agree that the line between identification and division is not a matter of scientific certainty but of normative judgment, then the rhetorical resources used to draw that line must be judged flexibly, with an eye toward their timeliness and appropriateness to the situation. I turn below to examples of environmental melodrama that fit this flexible rule, both to provide counterpoint to negative assessments of melodrama within rhetorical studies and to provide further support for the argument that rhetorical frames must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Conceptualizing Melodrama As mentioned above, fair consideration of melodrama also requires a sufficiently complex theoretical account of the concept. Initially, melodrama’s contribution to the rhetorical lexicon can be clarified through its relationship to comedy and tragedy. Melodrama can be distinguished from tragedy according to the locus of conflict that orients each frame. Upon first glance, melodrama and tragedy appear to share the characteristic of examining conflicts that lead to pain and suffering. But as Heilman argues, tragedy focuses on conflicts within individuals, whereas melodrama and comedy are staged around conflicts between individuals and some external opponent. ‘‘In tragedy, the bad guy is within; in melodrama, he is the external adversary that one is lined up against; in comedy, he turns out to be not so bad after all or else lives on 244 S. Schwarze peripherally, a steady ingredient in life but not a serious danger that demands combative action and makes life impossible.’’21 Importantly, tragedy is not a blanket term for all narratives of devastation. Tragedy and melodrama should be distinguished by the location of conflict; melodrama constitutes social and political conflict rather than personal, inner conflict. Further, melodrama’s orientation to conflict differs from that of comedy. Whereas comedy mediates and mitigates conflict, melodrama clarifies conflict through polarization. Consequently, melodrama and comedy imply different trajectories of political action. Heilman captures the relationship between melodrama and comedy in this way: Melodrama and comedy, then, share a large common ground: they are both ways of meeting the world *the many-sided, inconsistent, imperfect world, occasionally gratifying or fulfilling, often frustrating, and perhaps still more often seeming punishably unregenerate. Melodrama would do something about it, comedy would strive for ways of coming to terms with it. Melodrama would take arms, comedy accept. Melodrama is for victory or defeat, comedy for compromises.22 Thus, while comedy seeks to reconcile conflict via compromises, melodrama sharpens conflict through a bipolar positioning of characters and forces. This constitution of conflict leads Jeffrey D. Mason to argue that ‘‘the essential action of melodrama is to polarize its constituents, whatever they may be!male and female, East and West, civilization and wilderness, and, most typically, good and evil.’’23 Indeed, as Mason suggests, melodramatic polarization is moralistic in character. According to Peter Brooks, the moralistic tone is a vestige of melodrama’s emergence during the French Revolution. As the traditional bases for moral order were overthrown, melodrama helped fill the void by staging new visions of moral order. The moral impetus of early melodrama, Brooks suggests, is even consistent with traditional rhetorical practices of the time. Like the oratory of the Revolution, melodrama from its inception takes as its concern and raison d’etre the location, expression, and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths. It says them over and over in clear language, it rehearses their conflicts and combats, it reenacts the menace of evil and the eventual triumph of morality made operative and evident.24 In a post-traditional world, a world without clear moral frameworks, melodrama attempts to give voice to what Brooks calls the ‘moral occult,’ the domain of spiritual values that is implicit within but hidden by the material world, ‘‘and which demands to be uncovered, registered, articulated.’’25 Melodrama, then, frames conflict not as a mere difference of opinion, but as evidence of fundamental moral clash. Finally, melodrama’s moral polarization is shored up by a structure of feeling Heilman refers to as monopathy. Stark moral oppositions and the location of conflict between rather than within social actors encourage a unitary emotional identification with victors or victims, whether celebrating the former or sympathizing with the latter. This ‘‘oneness of feeling,’’ as Heilman defines it, provides audiences both with a respite from their personal inner struggles and a motive force for collective action. Environmental Melodrama 245 ‘‘The oneness within makes it easier to contribute to, and in turn is reinforced by, the oneness without, the union of the like-minded: the satisfaction of being on a moral bandwagon, of being ‘with it,’ of feeling ‘solidarity,’ of cooperating in a crusade or a quest for salvation; or the reassurance of fellowship in the face of disaster.’’26 Monopathy, in other words, begets identification with those who are on the side of virtue or who have been victimized by villains. These four features *a focus on socio-political conflict, polarization of characters and positions, a moral framing of public issues, and development of monopathy* comprise the rhetorical action of melodrama. While other rhetorical forms also may produce these outcomes, in melodrama they work in concert to constitute a coherent perspective on the world. This position is consistent with Osborn and Bakke’s view that ‘‘melodrama interprets as it personalizes events and provides their moral and emotional coherence.’’27 Within environmental controversies, the coherence offered by melodrama typically serves an oppositional political stance and mode of public address. At one level, melodrama constitutes opposition; its telos is precisely to configure conflict and then generate solidarity and motivate action among those who might engage one side of the conflict. On another level, the use of melodrama by environmental activists in particular is oppositional in a political sense; it critically interrupts dominant modes of argument and appeal that obscure threats to the quality and future of life on the planet.28 The next section explains how melodrama can intervene as an oppositional force in environmental controversies. Illustrating Melodrama The subsequent explanation of the rhetorical action of melodrama includes brief examples of several environmental controversies, but it returns persistently to a case in which the melodramatic frame is a pervasive feature in public discourse: asbestos exposure in Libby, Montana. In Libby, over 200 people have died from asbestosrelated diseases and over 1000 people currently reveal evidence of lung abnormalities consistent with exposure to asbestos. These exposures are the result of the mining and milling of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite near Libby for most of the twentieth century, as well as widespread distribution of the mine’s products throughout the community. Mine workers, their families, and community members with no connection to the mine ultimately became the endpoint of multiple pathways of exposure to various amphibole forms of asbestos. Although the W.R Grace Company stopped mining in 1990, residents continued to face significant environmental exposure to asbestos throughout the community. In addition to contamination near abandoned processing facilities, vermiculite products were used as insulation in many Libby homes (as well as 15 to 35 million homes in the US alone), as soil conditioner in residents’ gardens, and as fill material for the school skating rink and running track. Newspaper accounts in November 1999 began to reveal some of these conditions, as well as evidence that company, state, and federal officials knew of the asbestos hazard in Libby and did little to prevent it. Soon afterward, federal environmental and public health officials sent emergency teams to investigate 246 S. Schwarze conditions in Libby, and later expanded the scope of their investigation to hundreds of facilities across North America that processed Libby vermiculite. The entire town of Libby eventually was put on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Priorities List for cleanup under Superfund legislation, and in February 2005 seven former and current W.R. Grace employees were indicted for knowing endangerment, obstruction of justice, violation of the Clean Air Act and other alleged crimes related to the Libby operation. Since 1999, a tremendous amount of public discourse*including public advocacy, resident testimony, journalistic accounts, documentary film, and photojournalism* has emerged to characterize and address the asbestos problem in Libby and the scope of its effects. Melodrama is the overarching frame in this discourse. Across the genres mentioned above, a consistent narrative draws clear lines of conflict between victimized residents and W.R. Grace (the company that operated the mine from 1963 until its closure), highlights the sense of moral violation and social injustice, and encourages monopathic identification with local activists and exposure victims. I will refer to the public discourse surrounding the Libby situation in order to support five arguments about the rhetorical action of melodrama. First, melodrama can situate conflict on the social and political plane, clarifying issues of power that are obscured by privatizing rhetoric. In contrast to discourses that frame environmental issues as matters of personal decision-making or action, melodrama can effectively place the fault line of environmentalism between the producers of significant environmental damage and those who suffer its effects. While melodramatic rhetoric may rely heavily on the testimony of personal experience and the depiction of individual persons, it positions those elements in conflict with other forces to evoke the power relationships at play in a particular situation. In more general terms, melodrama constitutes ecological conditions and socio-political relations as fundamentally imbricated. In Libby, the asbestos situation came to light through stories that W.R. Grace had exploited the community by knowingly exposing residents to asbestos and hiding that knowledge from the community. Initial newspaper coverage of the situation focused on the role W.R. Grace managers had played in downplaying hazards and attributing health problems to the high incidence of smoking among workers.29 Through such attributions, the company effectively privatized those health problems. But over time, evidence amassed suggesting that the company and the community’s interests were not the same. Journalists revealed company memos showing that mine managers knew workers were getting sick from asbestos; W.R. Grace thwarted EPA efforts to clean up contamination, and in April 2001 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which stayed all civil actions against the company. Public discourse depicted the company’s managers as nefarious, and residents deciphered the company’s interests as being opposed to the interests of its workers. For example, at an August 2001 public meeting in Libby attended by Governor Judy Martz, activist Gayla Benefield made the case for Superfund designation in this way. Environmental Melodrama 247 This is a corporation whose philosophy was based in putting profit over human lives. This is a company that we welcomed into our state and community in 1963 thinking that they were our friend. This is a corporation that has devastated our community. This is the corporation that you [Governor Martz] may feel deserves another chance?30 This framing of W.R. Grace as a company opposed to the community is reinforced by emotional vignettes and testimony from Libby residents who were unknowingly exposed or otherwise affected by asbestos. The series of newspaper articles that broke the Libby story, Andrew Schneider’s ‘‘Uncivil Action,’’ offers a melodramatic frame by juxtaposing articles about the company’s knowledge of the hazard with articles filled with emotional stories about the deaths of innocent victims.31 The implicit moral framework provided by that juxtaposition*innocent victims harmed by a powerful, deceptive corporation*further crafts a clear division between residents in the community and the corporation. Thus, the appeals of melodrama work together to reconstitute the dominant community understanding of the problem, expanding its scope from a private problem of ‘‘just a few old miners’’ to a community-wide problem caused by the agents of a callous corporation and requiring political action. This melodramatic depiction of opposed socio-political forces is pervasive in environmental controversy, especially as it arrays these forces using victim/villain and David/Goliath character types.32 In the Love Canal controversy, for example, Lois Gibbs and her neighbors targeted the Governor of New York and state health officials as prominent public obstacles to relocation of Niagara Falls residents who were threatened by buried toxic waste.33 More broadly, corporate boycotts often villainize a particular organization or industry by demonstrating how their actions victimize unsuspecting citizens. Such tactics allow advocates to define an obscure or unrecognized situation and provide a clear understanding of the entities that exercise power in that situation. This emphasis on melodrama’s constitution of socio-political conflict comes into tension with the assumption that melodrama’s personification of villains ‘‘may divert our attention from underlying conditions that require systemic change and may drain our rhetoric of genuine social critique.’’34 This is true in some instances; within the sphere of environmental controversy, Terence Check argues that public scapegoating of Exxon in the aftermath of the Valdez oil spill ‘‘worked to deflect attention from systemic issues concerning oil production and consumption.’’35 Yet the personification of villains also can point precisely at a system’s pressure points and provide the motive force for sustaining social critique. As a rhetorical process, personification can work via synecdoche to signify systemic failure. By focusing attention on public officials, residents in the Love Canal controversy symbolized the inertia of bureaucracy and provided a clear target for public advocacy and activism. Similarly, the personification of organizations as agents in environmental campaigns against corporations hardly blunts social critique; it can generate socio-political conflict by bringing environmental practices and regulatory enforcement under scrutiny. Further, criticism can be sustained as corporate logos and symbols provide easily recognized resources for oppositional iconography.36 Through symbolic reversal, 248 S. Schwarze advocates can tap into powerful mass identifications to generate indignation at environmental and human exploitation perpetrated by corporations. Within a melodramatic frame, reliance on sharply-opposed characters need not blunt the possibility of political critique. Simplified characterizations can initiate critique by providing a clear and recognizable entry point*a prominent government official, a well-known corporation, a widely-circulated logo or slogan*for broader discussions of environmental problems among wider audiences. While the extent of critique will vary from one situation to the next, the crucial point here is that melodrama offers a strategy for criticizing and resisting the potentially depoliticizing effects of environmental discourses that focus on personal habits, private actions, or consumption dilemmas.37 Second, melodrama can reconfigure social relationships and articulate interests that have been obscured by universalizing and singularizing rhetorics. In contrast to discourses that homogenize or singularize the interests of a population,38 melodrama’s polarizing tendencies can facilitate the disclosure of opposed interests and enable the formation of new social and political relationships on the basis of those interests. This extends the previous argument about melodrama’s capacity to articulate conditions as matters of social concern and public contestation; melodrama can give particular form and direction to that contestation. Specifically, as melodrama polarizes, it can encourage reconsideration of the allegiances and shared substance that might normally lead audiences to accept a certain set of social and political arrangements. In doing so, melodrama can be part of a critical rhetoric that questions assertions of a single or universally shared public interest. Libby provides a powerful example of how melodramatic rhetoric can reformulate distorted notions of the public interest. For several decades, identification between community members and the companies that owned the mine, Zonolite and later W.R. Grace, was strong. Journalistic reports and documentary films amply illustrate how residents perceived W.R. Grace as a good citizen and how mine workers perceived their jobs as the best in the community.39 But as evidence of the company’s knowledge and the extent of asbestos-related disease emerged, a new discourse about the company also emerged. As illustrated above, the circulation of emotional stories illustrating the scope and nature of asbestos disease in Libby, contextualized by evidence that the company knew miners were getting sick at alarming rates, tied moral and emotional appeals together to call into question W.R. Grace’s role in the community. Residents spoke of how the company had violated their trust, and it led some residents to see W.R. Grace as a barrier to fulfilling community’s need for an effective clean-up. In other words, the melodramatic rhetoric depicting the community’s health and W.R. Grace’s awareness of health problems illustrated how the interests of the company were not isomorphic with those of the community, even though those interests had been articulated and accepted as such for several decades. In that situation, redrawing the line between identification and division was necessary for residents to acknowledge the problem and address its aftermath effectively. Melodramatic rhetoric about past and present events in Libby generated a healthy skepticism about W.R. Grace’s clean-up efforts and provisions to pay for Environmental Melodrama 249 40 medical care for Libby residents diagnosed with asbestos-related illnesses. Both Libby residents and EPA officials came to see that W.R. Grace’s interests in maximizing profits had persistently undermined their claims about helping the community. In this instance, melodrama effectively redefined the characters in the situation; instead of being viewed as a pillar of the community or a partner in cleanup, the company rightfully came to be seen as an enemy of the people and their health. The melodrama surrounding Libby performed two important rhetorical interventions. First, it helped break the identification between community residents and the company. No longer were residents quietly trustful of W.R. Grace’s actions; they closely scrutinized the company’s early clean-up efforts, found asbestos-contaminated vermiculite remaining at clean-up sites, and displayed vermiculite at public meetings to dramatize W.R. Grace’s ineptitude and disregard for the community.41 Second, breaking this identification allowed public health to be articulated as a significant public interest. Whereas Grace had consistently downplayed threats for decades and sustained a perception of asbestos as merely a ‘‘nuisance dust,’’ and whereas workers had accepted health problems as the price of having a good job with a good company, now concerns about public health came to the foreground. After decades of denial and a discourse that put a ‘‘good job’’ ahead of environmental and health concerns, the connection between W.R. Grace’s dissembling and the pervasive health problems in Libby no longer could be ignored. The melodramatic depiction of the company’s actions not only showed how the interest of community health had been systematically repressed; it also facilitated its return. Other environmental controversies, especially those with a salient public health dimension, illustrate how the polarization of characters or groups can work to reformulate notions of the public interest. For example, at the national level, opponents of a proposed trust fund for compensating asbestos victims highlight the history of deceit and denial by asbestos companies in order to generate public skepticism about claims that the proposal is truly in the interest of victims. Even the Environmental Working Group’s heavily documented website on ‘‘asbestos litigation reform,’’ a resource filled with graphs, charts, and copious citations from scientific and medical journals, relies heavily on moral labeling and an evocative emotion-laden picture of an asbestos victim to frame their overall message about asbestos companies: This site takes the visitor behind closed doors at asbestos companies and their insurers via internal documents showing that company after company was willing to let workers suffer and die long after it was clear that asbestos was killing them. It is precisely the callous behavior evidenced by these documents that is at the core of all asbestos litigation.42 Using very different means, the Toxic Links Coalition also draws attention to conflicts between private and public interests with regard to environmental causes of cancer.43 Their street performances invoke moral outrage and monopathic identification with cancer victims to generate resistance to industries that contribute to these cancers. By 250 S. Schwarze exposing the duplicitous rhetorical strategies companies use to deflect attention from the production and dissemination of carcinogens, advocates attempt to show how these organizations’ actions do not necessarily coincide with the public interest. The tendency of melodrama to polarize the social landscape, then, can serve to enrich public understanding of the interests at stake in environmental controversies. It can help audiences resist rhetorical appeals to the public interest that cloak environmentally degrading practices and ultimately serve narrow private interests. In doing so, the polarization of melodrama can constitute new lines of conflict, allowing new issues and alternative grounds for political judgment to emerge. Third, by identifying perpetrators and crafting public interests, melodrama can remoralize situations that have been demoralized by inaccuracy, displaying concerns that have been obscured by the reassuring rhetoric of technical reason . In contrast to discourses that define environmental issues in strictly scientific terms and reassure citizens about technological control of natural phenomena, melodrama can foreground the moral dimension of all human actions and thus offer a new basis for challenging those that contribute to ecological degradation. Melodrama’s capacity to articulate moral concerns makes the frame an especially attractive option when scientific, technological, and bureaucratic discourses are blocking meaningful participation in public affairs and restricting discussion to technical spheres of controversy. The distinctively melodramatic frame typically interprets polarized, socio-political conflicts in moral terms. Conflicts are not simply about competing interests; the pursuit of these interests leads to moral wrongs, injustices that cannot be rectified through political compromises or minor adjustments to existing practices. In environmental controversies, melodrama often advances this position by disclosing foreknowledge of environmental hazards to suggest deception and inaction on the part of government agencies and corporations. In the Libby situation, Schneider’s initial articles and testimony from local residents at a public meeting in December 1999 juxtaposed technical claims about the safety of the mine with the verbal and bodily testimony of asbestos victims.44 Schneider’s articles, for example, revealed that company officials not only knew of the possibility of asbestos-related health hazards as early as 1956, but had been keeping track of workers’ health status through an annual lung x-ray program. The juxtaposition of this evidence with residents hooked to oxygen tanks implies that officials knew what was happening to their fellow citizens but refused to warn residents or take action. Combined with residents’ repeated claims that they were reassured that the dust was not asbestos and was not harmful, this narrative of deception and inaction taps into the victim/villain motif and further reinforces a moral framing of the situation. Similarly, Bill Moyers’ PBS documentary on the vinyl chloride industry, Trade Secrets, shuttles between images of confidential company memos describing toxic workplace exposure in scientific language, and episodes of workers on hospital beds or widows tearily recalling their spouse’s suffering.45 These melodramatic juxtapositions offer a clear moral framework for interpreting the actions of company decisionmakers. They characterize officials as knowledgeable about toxic hazards in scientific Environmental Melodrama 251 terms, but utterly indifferent to the human suffering that resulted from those hazards. As with the rhetoric surrounding Libby, the melodramatic frame here mobilizes ethos *particularly, questions of moral character*to call into question the invocation of narrow forms of logos. Melodrama puts the inaccuracy of scientific language on display and highlights its potential moral blindspots. Melodrama, then, partakes in the rhetoric of moral confrontation.46 To the extent that melodrama combines polarization and moral claims, it frames situations as confrontations between the virtuous and the villainous, and encourages audiences to take sides in such confrontations in order to repair the moral order. While it can be argued that the moralizing tendency of melodrama hinders the possibility for pragmatic compromise, this begs the question of whether compromise is always an appropriate rhetorical purpose or objective. As Jonathan Lange has shown, radical environmental groups often view compromise as an underlying cause of, not a solution to, ecological degradation.47 In turn, these groups’ confrontational rhetoric breaks from the pattern of compromises sought by mainstream environmentalism in order to reveal the shortcomings of past compromises. By renaming situations in moral terms, melodrama enables advocates to question the appropriateness of calls for compromise that ignore the history of moral slights committed by parties to the compromise. Melodrama, then, can function to reconstitute the parameters of controversy by positioning advocates and interpellating audiences in a stance opposed to the amoral and immoral actions of political adversaries. Fourth, sustaining this oppositional stance takes considerable energy, but melodrama can provide that energy. Specifically, melodrama can encourage a unity of feeling, offering a basis for identification that has been obscured by emotionally dissipating and dispassionate rhetorics. In contrast to environmental discourses that promote equal degrees of concern for competing viewpoints*whether through appeals to ‘‘balance’’48 that encourage seemingly rational tradeoffs and compromises, or through the trope of ‘‘uncertainty’’ that intends to weaken motivation and forestall action49 *melodrama offers monopathy, a ‘‘singleness of feeling’’ that strengthens identification with one party to a controversy. Like the other appeals of melodrama, monopathy can oppose dominant discourses by giving voice to their strategic silences. In doing so, it provides a rallying point and source of identification for those whose voices have been excised from the dominant social and political order.50 The monopathy of the public discourse surrounding Libby reinforces the aspects of polarization and moral framing described above. Newspaper reports and public testimony increasingly display the anger that residents direct at W.R. Grace, and as they depict entire families who suffer from asbestos disease, they elicit pity for innocent victims. Photojournalistic essays, too, promote sympathy for the victims by persistently revealing symbols of death: hearses, coffins, and white crosses with victims’ names that are installed at the Libby cemetery every Memorial Day weekend.51 But monopathic identification is not purely about victimage; book and film treatments of the events in Libby place local activists Gayla Benefield and Les Skramstad in the role of heroes in the story, who struggle mightily against government bureaucracy, corporate deception and community silence to bring the 252 S. Schwarze problem to light.52 Conversely, those sources tend to downplay the voices of residents who believe that their fellow citizens knew of the asbestos hazards or were in some way responsible for their plight. Overall, the public discourse surrounding Libby promotes monopathic identification with Libby residents affected by asbestos disease, and generally blocks identification with company officials and those in the community who appear to oppose the heroic Benefield and Skramstad. Broader environmental discourses further illustrate the two components implicit in the notion of monopathy. From one angle, stress on the singleness of feeling can counter the dissipation of energy and feeling by tempered, moderate rhetoric. For example, the rhetoric of cost-benefit analysis dissipates concerns about human and environmental well-being to the extent that it characterizes these concerns as needing to be ‘‘balanced’’ with the regulatory costs incurred by polluting companies. The related rhetorical frame of ‘‘jobs versus the environment’’ also dissipates concerns about ecological degradation by encouraging audiences to divide their allegiances. These kinds of rhetoric exploit our split subjectivities, encouraging us to perceive political choices as necessary and inevitable ‘‘tradeoffs’’ between monetary wealth and a healthy planet, even though such tradeoffs often perpetuate damage both to economic systems and the ecological systems on which the former depend. As a form of oppositional rhetoric, melodrama attempts to restore the energy dissipated through these balancing acts and tradeoffs. It consolidates and channels that energy so that muted voices may be heard loud and clear. In its most powerful manifestations, it can displace the ideological privileging of balance, revealing how presumably even-handed and rational discourses of regulation can diminish citizen voices and consistently fail to enhance the quality of life on the planet.53 From another angle, stress on the singleness of feeling foregrounds emotion as a crucial mode of meaning-making and appeal. The emergence of emotional appeals in environmental controversy signifies not a lack of rationality, but rationality’s lack* that is, the inability of technical rationality to fully constitute the meaning of a recalcitrant material reality. Whether it is the inability of an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) to convey the spirit of an endangered species or a wild place, or the suspicious claims of a company with a track record of deception, the limitations of technical rhetoric can lead advocates to invoke emotional appeals as a supplement. Together with a moral framing of conflict, the emotional supplement provided by melodrama can enrich the idioms of environmental conflicts and help to situate them in public rather than technical spheres of controversy.54 Emotional appeals can then serve to promote identification with the victims of environmental degradation, especially among those who may have little specific knowledge of a particular environmental situation but sympathize with those in positions of pain, suffering and exploitation. Sympathetic depiction of victims in Libby is mirrored in other toxic exposure situations such as Chernobyl and Bhopal. Emotional appeal also can extend identification beyond the boundaries of the human. The depiction of oil-soaked birds after the Exxon Valdez crash encouraged sympathy for innocent victims and brought the ‘‘costs’’ of oil dependence home to audiences. Across these cases, we see how the Environmental Melodrama 253 emotionally charged characterization of environmental victims can elicit feelings of pity, grief, and anger that encourage audiences to take the side of those victims. The foregoing arguments lead to a fifth and final claim: melodrama has the capacity to complicate and transform, not merely simplify and reify, public controversies. In contrast to assertions that melodrama oversimplifies and reifies conflict, the examples in this essay demonstrate that melodrama also can be a transformative rhetorical force, one that can compose nascent conflicts and shift the parameters of ongoing controversies. This observation becomes available once we discern the potential of polarization within melodramatic form. While polarization may oversimplify and harden some conflicts, in others it interacts with the other resources of melodramatic form in ways that invent new issues, identities, audiences, and grounds for judgment. Melodrama’s transformative potential is obscured by the conventional wisdom that such rhetoric oversimplifies and reifies conflict. For example, in their assessment of the ‘‘costs’’ of melodrama, Osborn and Bakke assert that the form ‘‘actuates the rhetorical temptation to oversimplify and distort people and events to facilitate choice. . . . It reduces the complexity and disorder of life-as-lived to simple, coherent explanations of opposed interests.’’55 Then, these polarized characterizations are reified through the moral and emotional appeals of melodrama; in their view, the form ‘‘rigidifies the positions in conflict, fixing them in opposed moral certainties, and making negotiation and concession quite difficult.’’56 However, this view reduces the rhetorical action of polarization to the facilitation of choice based on a false dilemma.57 Such a view interprets polarization merely as an instrumental tactic for persuasion within a relatively fixed field of controversy, rather than considering how it might operate as part of an overall constitutive rhetoric that seeks to generate the very parameters and objects of controversy.58 The public discourse surrounding Libby illustrates how melodrama can invent and transform public controversy, not merely simplify and reify existing positions. In Libby claims of moral rupture and emotional trauma within the community articulated a new understanding of social relations. As critical publicity deepened, previously strong identifications with W.R. Grace began to crumble. Also, the melodramatic framing of an innocent population victimized by a knowing victimizer transformed a set of unremarkable, taken-for-granted illnesses into an unparalleled environmental health disaster perpetrated by knowing corporate agents. As a result, the Libby melodrama focused the attention of public agencies on W. R. Grace, setting into motion a nation-wide investigation of hundreds of vermiculite processing facilities and raising awareness of the hazards of Zonolite insulation in homes across North America. In other words, the melodrama of Libby invented public controversy, both locally and nationally. It restored public health as a significant issue in Libby, it placed asbestos back on the environmental and public health agenda in the United States, and it prodded EPA and other agencies to take action on the ground and fundamentally reconsider asbestos policy. Consider, too, how melodrama complicated understanding of public health and environmental conditions in Libby. Prior to late 1999, those conditions were oversimplified to the point that virtually no public discourse circulated about 254 S. Schwarze them. As morally and emotionally charged stories emerged about the devastating impact of asbestos disease on entire families, it became clear that the health problem was not limited to miners. Consequently, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry undertook one of the largest public health screenings in the United States to determine the scope of asbestos disease in the Libby area. Multiple federal agencies engaged in new studies to discern how Libby asbestos differed from other, more common forms of asbestos. In this context, melodramatic rhetoric about families harmed by asbestos hardly deflected attention from scientific aspects of the issue. If anything, such stories forced new scientific inquiry into the properties of asbestos and the public health ramifications of exposure to asbestos-contaminated vermiculite. Thus, the melodramatic frame that constituted the asbestos hazard in Libby arguably complicated a deeply oversimplified situation, giving form and meaning to a disparate set of material conditions. Beyond Libby, the global justice movement’s opposition to neoliberal trade policies further illustrates how melodrama can invent and transform public controversy. Movement rhetoric is melodramatic to the extent that it constitutes controversy over global trade as a political struggle pitting powerful corporations and trade institutions against the interests of ordinary citizens; generates moral outrage over human rights violations, cultural imperialism, and environmental degradation that flow from global trade; and encourages sympathetic identification with victims as well as heroes of political struggle.59 This rhetoric attempts to destabilize a public discourse limited to high-level disputes over the mechanics of global trade and force issues of ecological sustainability, labor rights, and democratic participation onto the public agenda.60 Within this expanded set of issues, advocates contest what counts as ‘‘the middle course’’ and interrogate whose version of ‘‘progress’’ ultimately warrants decisions. In addition, by nurturing moral outrage and generating sympathy for victims, melodrama can transform isolated local troubles into broader regional, national or international problems. Much of the campus rhetoric about sweatshops, university investments, and purchasing practices illustrates how melodramatic rhetoric can effect transformations in audiences, issues, and grounds for judgment. These examples demonstrate that melodrama need not oversimplify or reify public controversy. Melodrama can expand the possibilities of controversy by bringing new issues to public attention, soliciting support from far-flung and previously inactive audiences, and complicating the grounds for public judgment. Controversy certainly can become rigid when identities and issues are already well-defined, and melodrama merely rehearses them. But when conflicts have yet to be articulated and practices are taken-for-granted, a melodramatic frame can recast their ‘‘substance’’ through political, moral and emotional appeals in order to generate new forms of consubstantiality that could muster opposition to the established order. Admittedly, this may delay resolution of issues, but not because it reifies conflict; instead, melodrama defers resolution as it seeks an equally important end: democratization and enrichment of the domain of controversy. Environmental Melodrama 255 Assessing Melodrama: Implications for Rhetorical Practice and Scholarship For environmental advocates, melodrama provides a rhetorical framework that can articulate multiple concerns that are hidden, ignored, or repressed in a culture that operates according to a simplistic calculus of ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘economic growth.’’ It can bring emotion into the foreground, complicating public discourse that takes a purely scientific and technical approach to environmental problems. It can polarize situations so that victims of environmental degradation might have a voice, complicating public discourse systematically dominated by producers of that degradation. And it forces moral questions onto the agenda, complicating public discourse that focuses on technical matters to the exclusion of issues of right and wrong. To the extent it synthesizes these oppositional rhetorical actions, melodrama presents itself as a productive inventional resource for countering the ideological simplifications of dominant public discourses and prying spheres of controversy open to a wider range of voices. Given the arguments in this essay, practicing advocates as well as rhetorical theorists and critics should attempt to discern conditions under which melodrama is more or less likely to be a productive rhetorical choice. By this, I mean to ask when melodrama would have the most potential for the transformative possibilities I have described, and when it would be less likely to enrich public discourse. The examples in this essay point toward the conclusion that melodrama may have greater potential to generate productive outcomes when issues are nascent and when voices have been muted or excluded from the rhetorical field. For emerging or relatively unrecognized public issues, melodrama can provide those issues a discernible outline along easily recognizable moral and emotional contours, facilitating broad identification among diverse audiences. In fact, melodrama may find its richest rhetorical possibilities when the initial bonds of identification between victims and audiences are relatively weak. This may seem counterintuitive, but the cases of Libby and global justice rhetoric point in this direction. When bonds are strong, melodramatic rhetoric may do little more than reinforce existing identities and perspectives on a controversy; but when audiences are encouraged to empathize with unknown or far-flung victims, there is a much greater possibility for transformed perceptions of public problems. Arguably, it was this potential for broad public support of Libby’s residents, along with the sense that government agencies were complicit with past injustices, which pressured government officials to take the situation in Libby seriously. Conversely, melodrama appears less likely to be a productive choice when controversies are well-defined, issues have been thoroughly articulated, and a full range of stakeholders has identified possible means for resolution. These conditions suggest a relatively advanced stage of conflict, and here the potential of melodrama is constrained. Since it maps easily onto already-polarized situations, melodrama can reify conflict; and if participants generally agree to seek compromise, they are likely to dismiss the moral and emotional appeals of melodrama as distractions from pragmatic resolution. Melodrama may help tip the undecided to one side, but it is 256 S. Schwarze less likely to realize its transformative potential when the poles of conflict are wellestablished.61 This initial attempt to theorize melodrama, then, suggests that melodrama may be a more productive rhetorical choice for inventing and transforming controversy than resolving it. However, these assertions about when melodrama ‘‘works’’ are speculative and rooted primarily in the analysis of a single case. Further research by rhetoricians working in other contexts would contribute to enhanced understanding of conditions that are more or less favorable for melodramatic intervention. Still, the recurrence of the melodramatic frame at various levels of environmental controversy presents an especially rich field of inquiry for environmental communication scholars in particular. For rhetorical scholars, the concept of melodrama I have advanced facilitates improved theoretical comprehension and critical judgment in several ways. First, treating melodrama as an integrated rhetorical form enhances accurate identification of frames and encourages more careful analysis of frames, consistent with Carlson’s argument that critics ‘‘must examine carefully the tactics of a group before judging whether its strategy . . . rises from the comic frame.’’ This essay points to the fact that rhetorical tactics can migrate easily between different frames. For example, the scapegoating tactic so central to the tragic frame also appears in melodrama as advocates identify villains and polarize competing positions. Similarly, while other scholars have identified perspective by incongruity62 and juxtaposition63 as useful tactics within a comic frame, these also emerge in melodramatic rhetoric, especially as they position moral and emotional appeals alongside dominant discourses that displace those concerns. Because of the easy migration of tactics and appeals between frames, critics must attend to multiple tactics and their interaction in the process of rhetorical analysis. An integrated conception of melodrama’s appeals encourages such attention. Second, this conception of melodrama enables observation of the frame’s transformative possibilities. These possibilities are largely ignored by melodrama’s critics, who dwell on polarization to highlight how melodrama reifies and oversimplifies public controversy. If we consider that the moral, monopathic and socio-political appeals of melodrama can reconfigure patterns of identification and generate new topics of controversy, then melodrama must be seen as more than a mere instrument of reification. Likewise, formal manifestations of apparent simplicity*diametrically opposed interests, stark moral conflicts, narrow monopathic appeals*are taken by some critics as incontrovertible signs of oversimplification,64 yet this may belie how the rhetorical action of melodrama can actually complicate public understanding by enhancing perception of largely unrecognized issues and challenging the simplicity of dominant discourses. Melodrama’s individual appeals may seem simple, but together they can generate rhetorical action that complicates the realm of public controversy. Third, this study consequently discourages the use of simplicity and complexity as criteria for judgments of frames per se, apart from a frame’s use in particular circumstances. While some melodramas may respond to a complex situation with Environmental Melodrama 257 simplifications that stifle alternative voices and foreclose options, the examples of environmental melodrama noted in this essay operate conversely: they respond to oversimplified situations in order to complicate public discourse. They invoke seemingly simple storylines about environmental issues in order to amplify muted voices, expand the range of issues relevant to public decision-making, and invent new possibilities for creating a sustainable and healthy environment. The charge of simplification loses force as we interpret how a particular melodramatic framing interacts with other available meanings to enrich, rather than eviscerate, the quality of public discourse. Rather than criticize a frame for being simple or praising it for being complex, it is preferable to assess how and toward what ends that frame simplifies and complicates in a specific situation. Fourth and finally, this theorization of melodrama and the implications I have drawn underscore the relevance of kairos as principle for critical judgment and rhetorical practice. For criticism, this conclusion interrupts the valorization of the comic frame in the discipline. Rather than privilege one frame as inherently superior to others, the basis for critical judgment is better cast in terms of kairos: to what extent does a particular rhetorical intervention operate as a timely and opportune response to contingent circumstances and particular audiences? This sophistic principle allows critics to acknowledge the typical strengths and limitations of a particular frame, but also encourages critics to rethink what might count as a strength or a fault in relation to specific situations. For practice, even Burke, the consummate champion of comedy, recognized that there are always choices*in particular, political choices*to be made between competing frames: ‘‘The choice must be weighed with reference to the results we would obtain, and to the resistances involved.’’65 Given the stakes of our environmental challenges and the mighty economic, political, and cultural resistance to addressing those challenges in a significant way, it is not surprising that contemporary advocates see melodrama as a timely and appropriate rhetorical strategy for addressing environmental issues. Notes [1] [2] This interpretation is most apparent in Michael Osborn and John Bakke, ‘‘The Melodramas of Memphis: Contending Narratives during the Sanitation Strike of 1968,’’ Southern Communication Journal 63 (Spring 1998): 220 !234; see also Carl Burgchardt, ‘‘Discovering Rhetorical Imprints: La Follette, ‘Iago,’ and the Melodramatic Scenario,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 71.4 (November 1985), especially pp. 449 !452. For a more recent essay that rehearses the ‘‘dangerous ramifications’’ of melodrama in the context of national identity, see Elisabeth Anker, ‘‘Villians, Victims, and Heroes: Melodrama, Media, and September 11,’’ Journal of Communication (March 2005): 22 !37. A. Cheree Carlson, ‘‘Gandhi and the Comic Frame: ‘Ad Bellum Purificandum,’’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 446 !455; and ‘‘Limitations on the Comic Frame: Some Witty Women of the Nineteenth Century,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 310 !322; Adrienne E. Christiansen and Jeremy J. Hanson, ‘‘Comedy as Cure for Tragedy: ACT UP and the Rhetoric of AIDS,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (May 1996): 157 !170; Anne Teresa Demo, ‘‘The Guerilla Girls’ Comic Politics of Subversion.’’ Women’s Studies in Communication 23 (Spring 2000): 133 !156; Gregory Desilet, ‘‘Nietzsche Contra Burke: The Melodrama 258 S. Schwarze [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] in Dramatism,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 65 !83; Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki, ‘‘The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Matthew Shepard Murder,’’ Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5.3 (Fall 2002): 483 !505; Kimberly A. Powell, ‘‘The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching: Strategies of a Movement in the Comic Frame,’’ Communication Quarterly 43 (Winter 1995): 86 !99; Caitlin Wills Toker, ‘‘Debating ‘What Ought To Be’: The Comic Frame and Public Moral Argument, Western Journal of Communication 66 (Winter 2002): 53 !83. Desilet, ‘‘Nietzsche,’’ 76. For one analysis of melodrama in contemporary popular culture, see Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘‘The Melodramatic Moment,’’ The New York Times, March 23, 2003. Available at http:// www.nytimes.com. Terence Check, ‘‘Condemning a Corporation: Exxon as Scapegoat,’’ In Proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment, ed. Susan L. Senecah (Syracuse, NY: SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 1997), 133 !144; Mark Meister and Phyllis Japp, ‘‘Sustainable Development and the Global Economy: Rhetorical Implications for Improving the Quality of Life,’’ Communication Research 25 (August 1998): 399 !422; Tarla Rai Peterson, Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Toker, ‘‘Debating.’’ Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), 41. Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent: Tragedy and Melodrama on the Modern Stage, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 49. Osborn and Bakke, ‘‘Melodramas,’’ 223. Osborn and Bakke, ‘‘Melodramas,’’ 224. Osborn and Bakke, ‘‘Melodramas,’’ 230. Osborn and Bakke, ‘‘Melodramas,’’ 232. Carlson, ‘‘Limitations,’’ 312. Christiansen and Hanson, ‘‘Comedy,’’ 160. Steve Schwarze, ‘‘Juxtaposition in Environmental Health Rhetoric: Exposing Asbestos Contamination in Libby, Montana,’’ Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.2 (Summer 2003): 313 ! 336. Carlson, ‘‘Ghandi,’’ 448. Carlson, ‘‘Limitations,’’ 319. William Lewis, ‘‘Of Innocence, Exclusion, and the Burning of Flags: The Romantic Realism of the Law.’’ Southern Communication Journal 60.1 (1994): 4 !21. Christiansen and Hansen, ‘‘Comedy as a Cure for Tragedy,’’ 158. Christiansen and Hanson, ‘‘Comedy as a Cure for Tragedy,’’ 169. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 25. Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Ways of the World: Comedy and Society, ( Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 94 !95. Heilman, Ways of the World , 96. Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993): 16. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984/ 1976): 15. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 20 !21. Heilman, Iceman , 52. Osborn and Bakke, ‘‘Melodramas,’’ 224. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, ‘‘Performing Critical Interruptions: Stories, Rhetorical Invention, and the Environmental Justice Movement,’’ Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 1 !25. Andrew Schneider, ‘‘A Town Left to Die,’’ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 18, 1999. Available at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/uncivilaction/lib18.shtml. Environmental Melodrama [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] 259 David F. Latham, ‘‘Libby presents united front to governor,’’ The Montanian, August 15, 2001, pg. 8. One month later, at a field hearing in Libby that included EPA director Christine Todd Whitman and Montana’s congressional delegation, speakers were calling the actions of W.R. Grace ‘‘criminal’’ and one suggested that they be charged with homicide. Available at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/uncivilaction/. (The title of the series plays off the book and movie ‘‘A Civil Action,’’ which recounted the toxic contamination situation in Woburn, Massachusetts *also involving W.R. Grace.) In addition, the documentary film Dust to Dust visually performs this juxtaposition by showing document as well as extensive footage of Margaret Vatland (Gayla Benefield’s mother) on her deathbed, coughing and gasping for air as a result of asbestosis that she contracted through exposure to her husband’s work clothes. This footage helps develop monopathic identification with victims and with Benefield. Michael Brown Productions, Dust to Dust: A Documentary Feature, dir. Michael Brown, 2002. Lawrence Buell, ‘‘Toxic Discourse,’’ Critical Inquiry 24 (1998). Lois Gibbs, Love Canal: The Story Continues . . . (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1998). Osborn and Bakke, ’’Melodramas,’’ 229. Check, ‘‘Condemning,’’ 134. For one recent study, see Christine Harold, ‘‘Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 21.3 (September 2004): 189 !211. For contrasting perspectives on the politics of green consumerist discourses, see M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, ‘‘Liberal and Pragmatic Trends in the Discourse of Green Consumerism,’’ in The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, eds. James G. Cantrill and Christine L. Oravec (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996) and Timothy Luke, ‘‘Green Consumerism: Ecology and the Ruse of Recycling,’’ in Ecocritique: Contesting The Politics of Nature, Economy and Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For a discussion of discourses that rhetorically homogenize and singularize interests, see Celeste Michelle Condit, ‘‘Hegemony in a Mass-Mediated Society: Concordance about Reproductive Technologies,’’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11.3 (September 1994): 205 !230. This sense of community, especially among mine workers, is depicted vividly in the beginning of Dust to Dust. The idyllic descriptions and depictions of social unity against the backdrop of the rugged, pristine beauty of northwest Montana sets up a powerful contrast to the rest of the film’s portrayal of the mine’s devastating effects on the community’s wellbeing. Lawrence Buell argues that these motifs of ‘‘pastoral betrayal’’ and an ‘‘Eden lost’’ to pollution are typical in the rhetoric of toxic contamination; here, they heighten the sense of villainy and moral rupture characteristic of melodrama. Buell, ‘‘Toxic Discourse,’’ 639 !665. Upon W.R. Grace’s announcement in January 2000 that they would pay for medical bills, former miner Les Skramstad reflected, ‘‘In the past, everything that Grace has touched involving health problems at the mine has wound up hurting the miner and his family. Many people need the medical help that (Grace is) offering, but you can understand why some are frightened about the company being involved.’’ Andrew Schneider, ‘‘Grace to pick up medical bills in tainted town,’’ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 22, 2000. Available at http:// seattlepi.nwsource.com/uncivilaction/libb221.shtml. Subsequently, victims have seen several unannounced cutbacks to the insurance coverage provided by Grace. At the August 2001 public meeting, ‘‘Skramstad presented to Martz a quart-size jar of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite that he said he scooped up the export plant after W.R. Grace & Co. had supposedly cleaned the area. ‘I didn’t do any excavating, all I did was look under a piece of plywood. I could have gotten a five-gallon bucket but I thought this would do.’’ David F. Latham, ‘‘Libby presents united front to governor,’’ The Montanian, August 15, 2001, pg. 1. 260 S. Schwarze [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] http://www.ewg.org/reports/asbestos/facts/index.php Phaedra Pezzullo, ‘‘Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.4 (November 2003): 345 !365. Schwarze, ‘‘Juxtaposition.’’ Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report. Public Affairs Television, Inc., 2001. Brant Short, ‘‘Earth First! and the Rhetoric of Moral Confrontation,’’ Communication Studies 42.2 (Summer 1991): 172 !188. Jonathan I. Lange, ‘‘Refusal to Compromise: The Case of Earth First!,’’ Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 473 !494; see also Short, ‘‘Earth First!’’ Robert Patterson and Ronald Lee, ‘‘The Environmental Rhetoric of ‘Balance’: A Case Study of Regulatory Discourse and the Colonization of the Public.’’ Technical Communication Quarterly 6.1 (Winter 1997): 25 !40. Robert Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006): 344 !346. ‘‘One of the strengths of the [environmental] movement has been its ability to build on the frustrations and rage of people who see their quality of life threatened by technological systems and perceive themselves as victims.’’ Fischer, Citizens, 111. See Brian Plonka’s ‘‘Living and Dying in Libby,’’ which won First Place in the Issue Reporting Picture Story category of the 2002 Pictures of the Year International competition. Images available at http://www.poy.org/59/16/1601plonb01.html. However, their heroism is bolstered by victimage, too. Both Benefield and Skramstad have asbestos disease, and such disease is pervasive in their families. Benefield has dozens of relatives who are affected; Skramstad’s commonplace, echoed across multiple texts and in his own testimony, is that it was bad enough that he has asbestos disease but absolutely wrong that he ‘‘had to bring it home to his wife and kids.’’ Patterson and Lee, ‘‘The Environmental Rhetoric of ‘Balance.’’’ G. Thomas Goodnight, ‘‘The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,’’ Journal of the American Forensics Association 18.4 (Spring 1982): 214 !227. Osborn and Bakke, ‘‘Melodramas,’’ 230. Osborn and Bakke, ‘‘Melodramas,’’ 231. This position is consistent with other rhetorical scholarship on polarization, which explains polarization as a tactic that invites audiences to ‘‘abandon the middle course’’ and take sides on some issue. William D. Harpine, ‘‘Bryan’s ‘A Cross of Gold:’ The Rhetoric of Polarization at the 1896 Democratic Convention,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 87.3 (August 2001): 295. This instrumental view is explicit in one classic statement in the rhetoric of social movements, Bowers, Ochs and Jensen’s The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control. By defining rhetoric as the rationale of ‘‘instrumental, symbolic behavior,’’ the constitutive potential of agitation is obscured. Polarization is again treated simply as a means ‘‘to force a conscious choice between agitation and control.’’ John W. Bowers, Donovan J. Ochs, and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993), 34. In contrast, Charles Stewart’s study of Stokely Carmichael’s rhetoric illustrates how polarization not only offers audiences stark choices, but also can recast social identities and constitute moral issues. Charles Stewart, ‘‘The Evolution of a Revolution: Stokely Carmichael and the Rhetoric of Black Power,‘‘ Quarterly Journal of Speech 83.4 (November 1997): 429 !446. For example, one ‘‘Citizen’s Guide’’ to the World Trade Organization produced in the run-up to the 1999 Seattle meeting describes how ‘‘corporate interests trample workers’’ in a trade dispute over bananas. The guide insinuated that ‘‘huge campaign donations by Chiquita CEO Carl Lindner’’ influenced the US to argue for trade sanctions against Europe on account of their preference for Caribbean bananas over those grown in Central America (where Environmental Melodrama [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] 261 Chiquita owns plantations). The guide positions this affluent CEO’s interests at odds with the livelihood of indigenous farmers. Quoting unnamed Caribbean womens’ groups, the guide explains how the European market provided ‘‘’thousands of families in the sub-region of the Windward Islands a measure of security and has afforded us dignity and self-reliance. The loss of this security through a sudden change in market opportunities would leave us without resources to build a future for our families and our countries.’’’ Working Group on the WTO/MAI, ‘‘A Citizen’s Guide to the World Trade Organization,’’ July 1999. Available at http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/documents/citizens_guide.pdf. Communication scholars are giving increasing attention to how discourses circulating around globalization are problematizing agenda issues, social identities, and the very forums of public participation; respectively, see Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, ‘‘From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (June 2002): 125 !151; Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde ‘‘Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (June 2002): 172 !189; and J. Robert Cox, ‘‘’Free Trade’ and the Eclipse of Civil Society: Barriers to Transparency and Public Participation in NAFTA and the Free Trade Area of the Americas,’’ In Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment, eds. Marie-France Aepli, Stephen P. Depoe, and John W. Delicath (Cincinnati, OH: Center for Environmental Communication Studies, 2001), 172 ! 181. Jonathan Lange and Mark Moore’s studies of the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest are instructive here. Melodramatic rhetoric surely reified the existing conflict between loggers and environmentalists. It is questionable whether any rhetoric could have ameliorated this conflict successfully, but as Moore suggests, advocates might have reclaimed the symbol of the owl to generate new modes of consubstantiality. Jonathan I. Lange, ‘‘The Logic of Competing Information Campaigns: Conflict over Old Growth and the Spotted Owl,’’ Communication Monographs 60.3 (September 1993): 239 !257; Mark P. Moore, ‘‘Constructing Irreconcilable Conflict: The Function of Synecdoche in the Spotted Owl Controversy,’’ Communication Monographs 60.3 (September 1993): 258 !274. Toker, ‘‘Debating.’’ Powell, ‘‘Association of Southern Women.’’ This is clearly the case throughout Osborn and Bakke’s delineation of the distinct traits of melodramatic characters; among other things, such characters are ‘‘incredibly simple representations of humanity.’’ This observation quickly leads them to flatly assert, ‘‘Indeed, melodrama denies complexity’’ (222). Burke, Attitudes, 5.