Scholars examining the link between moral codes, melodrama, and propaganda have reinterpreted 1950s domestic melodramas in a new light. Echoing Karen Horney's thoughts on neurosis and indignation, D.N. Rodowick has argued that domestic melodramas have social and psychic determinants. [114] He further observed that "domestic melodrama thrives on the multiplication of silences, alibis, and misunderstandings generated in the characters' incomplete comprehension of the melodramatic situations in which they are implicated." [115]

This incomplete comprehension mirrors an audience trying to interpret propaganda film, and also foreshadowed the Tavistock Institute-sponsored research of R.D. Laing and others into unhealthy family structures that create conditions where individuals are susceptible to irrational indignation and misinterpreting moral codes. It is more evident in domestic melodrama films that "the contradictory emotional wrenchings of melodrama are generically motivated." [116] They are microcosms of "inner turmoil" [117] that post-World War II American society was undergoing.

Domestic melodrama films are not 'obvious' propaganda, but 'sociological', concerned with family, marriage, and social status. "Direct propaganda," Ellul noted, "aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be preceded by propaganda that is sociological in character, slow, general, seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favourable preliminary attitudes." [118]

Roger D. McNiven noted that Douglas Sirk exploited, just as Leni Riefenstahl had, shot framing and lighting techniques, to heighten the audience's emotional intensity and involvement in Sirk's films. McNiven found that Sirk utilised "entrapment imagery . . . aided by frequent parallelism in the particular architectural or lighting features used in adjoining scenes." [119] Since the "most basic loyalties and relationships become a source of torture" [120] in domestic melodramas.

This deployment of propaganda film technique is evident in the final image of All That Heaven Allows (1955), where the audience are voyeurs, peering through the window at Ron and Carrie. McNiven reads this image as a "devastating indictment of the entire society's world-view as essentially artificial." [121] It is an image that is also polypathic, for as Robert Heilman noted, "tragedy is polypathic in that we have to experience the impulses of the divided man . . . contradictory emotions force themselves upon us . . . The polypathic experience is complex, troubling, burdensome, as gaining knowledge must be . . ." [122]

Similar contradictions are experienced by the kamikaze pilots in Chris Marker's San Soleil (1982), foreshadowing Cyberpunk's ambivalence, and the assimilation of propaganda film by the 'New Hollywood' to sell Virtual Reality and other synergistic consumer technologies.