Melodrama is deeply concerned with "allowing us the pleasures of self-pity and the experience of wholeness," [89] and the 'primal scene' either begins the initiatory ordeals which the major characters undergo in order to confront, re-configure, and integrate their moral perceptions, or is the climatic break-through in which motivations are clarified under the harsh glare of Manichean truth. This clarification of boundaries between self-and-other enables a dis-identification from the paralysing trauma originally caused by the 'primal scene'.

In A Simple Plan (1998), the discovery of the crashed plane, and the recovery of contraband money delineates the major characters' different moral universes. In Get Carter (1971), Carter's discovery of his dead brother's discovery of a child pornography ring precipitates an existential moral crisis that reinforces his quest for vengeance (an emotion tapped by the Ellulian propagandist).

Effective propaganda can data-mine cultural symbols to bridge our individual moral universes, and one way to achieve this is by parable. Peter Brook states that a parable is a metaphor "that refer us to the realm of spiritual reality and latent moral meanings." [90] Director Sam Raimi presented a simple parable in A Simple Plan (1998), of a fox stealing chickens and then being hit by the protagonists' passing utility truck. This split-second scene occurs just before the fateful discovery of the crashed plane, foreshadowing the parable's function as "the evocation of more and more fantastic possibilities . . . pressuring the surface of reality." [91]

A second method to achieve this goal is to 'misdirect' the audience about which character personifies the film's 'moral voice'. Raimi paces-and-leads us to identify with Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), yet delivers a sting in the end-game. This misdirection undercuts classic melodrama conventions, and also the audience identification needed to create catharsis. When Hank Mitchell (Billy Bob Thornton) murders Farmer Dwight Stephanson (Tom Carey), we realise that the film's sentimental Capraesque imagery is a cover for a relativistic and complex universe. This tragic moment is evident when Sarah Mitchell (Bridget Fonda) reveals her boredom with small-town life to her shocked husband. The finale does not deliver to its audiences the cathartic feelings that typify classical melodrama; in this way, A Simple Plan is closer to post-classical films.

Hyperbolic Figures and Primal Scenes

More problematic are the 'primal scenes' in Crash (1995), Fight Club (1999), and The Usual Suspects (1995), which all undermine melodrama's agenda "about virtue made visible and acknowledged, the drama of a recognition," [92] creating ambivalent audience reactions. In the first two films, inner conflicts (Paraphilia and Dissociative Identity Disorder, respectively) are acted out but not completely integrated, whilst the third film exposes its Manichean universe as an artificial construct created by Kaizer Solze's narrative voice. This trend suggests that the Freudian 'primal scene' is knowingly undermined in independent and alternative post-classical films.

David Cronenberg's adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel Crash (1995) opened with three consecutive sex scenes, featuring "hyperbolic figures, lurid and grandiose events." [93] This sequence established the existential crises of James Ballard (James Spader) and Catherine Ballard (Deborah Unger), who, after a subsequent car crash, meet the fringe researcher Vaughan (Elias Kotas). The re-enactments of this 'primal scene' are hyperbolic, because as Peter Brooks observed, "we know the characters essentially; we are, if not in the domain of reality, in that of truth." [94]

The Ballards' exploration of paraphilia (meant to be symbolic of internal trauma, claimed author James Ballard, not literal) encompassed the hyperbolic expressionist form in a banal and postmodern landscape, directly opposed to the moral sense evident in classical melodramatic conventions. [95] As audiences have become more sophisticated, and self-aware of classical melodramatic conventions, propagandist filmmakers have been forced to 'evolve' new techniques.

Conspiracy and Political Thrillers in the 1970s

Karen Horney's insights are most applicable to the 1970s post-Watergate cycle of conspiracy and political thrillers, such as All The President's Men (1976), The Parallax View (1974), and The Conversation (1974), and to several mid-1980s anti-nuclear films. This is because propaganda film's "truth is not the semantic truth of what it speaks about but, rather, the rhetorical or performative truth of the way it speaks." [96] Peter Watkins makes this process explicit in The Journey (1988), which "critiques conventional systems during the process of production." [97] Scott MacDonald argues that Watkin's narrative also deconstructs objectivity, for "it is nearly unheard of for a narrator to openly declare "bias," and to emphasize this bias in his tone of voice." [98]

Conspiracy thrillers capture the propagandist's mind-set, for "he cannot even share that ideology for he must use it as an object and manipulate it without the respect that he would have for it if he believed it." [99] Alexander Cockburn claimed that Oliver Stone's JFK (1992) does this by "tapping a mother-lode of historical paranoia." [100] The cathartic scene (hence monopathic) where New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) gives his final 'Hamlet' speech is not only overtly propagandistic because it never happened historically, but also because it expressed "the truly fascist yearning for the 'father-leader' taken from the children-people by conspiracy." [101] When "Oliver Stone looks back on the assassination as the gravestone of all the bright hopes of the early 60s," [102] he is committing a subversive act, for "it does no try to take possession of the individual or dominate him by devious means, but simply to transmit certain beliefs and ideas." [103] Stone was susceptible to this, Cockburn argued, because his "history is literary and self-absorbed and his reading of the 60s deeply romantic: Jim Morrison is Chatterton or Keats: JKF is the revenant from Wagner." [104]

Analyzing Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), Larry Gross regarded the prevailing critical judgment that the film's "satirical attacks on media and prisons pedestrian and all too easy." [105] Rather, he contended that Stone had created a complex parable about "how an 'image culture' has taken over from immediate experience. Violence is a secondary symptom of a primary disease, the sheer pollution of representational imagery." [106]

The melodramatic mode, Adam Barker observed, was the palimpsest for "the 'heroic quest' model of conspiracy thriller, where virtuous protagonists pursue evil men whose activities are finally revealed." [107] Warren Beaty's Parallax View, that echoed Hitchock's early 1940s espionage thrillers, "is much more sinister than the didactic simplicity of JFK and All The President's Men." [108] This spectrum, which echoed Robert Heilman's differentiation between melodrama and tragedy, reached its extremes with Francis Ford Coppola's deconstructionist masterpiece The Conversation, [109] which is intertextual, and unlike All The President's Men, "has no final ironic resolution." [110] Rather, "The Conversation sermonizes on the dangers of a naive faith in technology." [111] It also foreshadowed the shift from bipolar Cold War to post-Cold War uncertainties. Whereas the former films are monopathic, The Conversation suggested that conspiracies are polypathic in nature, destructive to both conspirators that those foolhardy enough to unmask them.