Melodrama has been one of the film genres that have been extensively studied and analyzed in the past two decades. Because of the enormous popularity of this generic form in the classical period of the American film industry, the examination of melodramatic film seems to contribute to a general study of the Hollywood cinema as an institution of industrial capitalism. Because women have been the major focus of melodramatic film both as the audience and as characters, a study of melodrama also constitutes an important part of feminist film theory. And some critics have chosen to study melodrama in order to reexamine the relation between the masses and mass culture. They try to demystify the popular belief that melodrama is nothing more than a vehicle of escapism for the masses; they have uncovered in melodrama's stylistic hyperbole and exaggeration not the logic of escapism but a critique of ideology that melodramatic film is said to be propagating. In his classic essay on melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser demonstrates how a critique of American middle-class ideology of the 1950s is made in the films of Douglas Sirk through the process of condensation and displacement found in the hyperbolic use of objects and colors. He goes beyond a mere formal analysis of Sirk's films by placing them in a specific sociopolitical background of the 1950s' America. What Elsaesser's essay teaches us is that the examination of melodrama as a generic form becomes meaningful only if particular texts of melodrama and their subtexts are analyzed simultaneously.