Elisabeth Anker's study takes as its starting point the delineation of 9/11 as a melodrama, portraying dramatic events through polarities of good and evil, overwhelmed victims, heightened affects of pain and suffering, grand gestures, feats of heroism, and the redemption of virtue. Like all melodramas the story is about good people and their unjust persecution by evil villains. Where previous studies of melodrama have concentrated largely on fiction and film, Anker's major focus is national political discourse: various presidential speeches, broadcast and print news, and television, with some discussion of theatre and film. More than twenty pages, for example, are devoted to discussing the Fox News coverage of 9/11 between the hours of five and six in the evening. In contrast to other theorists of melodrama, Anker does not see the form as inherently democratic (a memorable chapter on “left melodrama” cites The Communist Manifesto, and the works of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as prime examples), nor as primarily oriented towards female audiences, with a domestic location. Political melodrama tends to be rather more action-packed and, in contrast to the pathos and tragedy of literary melodramas, the storyline of political discourse tends to end with the achievement of freedom.

This is a very wide-ranging study, supported by intricate discussion of a battery of heavyweight thinkers, featuring Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Weber, Walter Benjamin, and Foucault, inter alia. At times, melodrama begins to expand well beyond its own already capacious scope. The definition of the virtuous nation-state as innocent victim attacked by evil villains intent on destroying its freedoms would have fitted the Elizabethan response to the Armada. But on the whole Anker keeps the argument tightly defined, and makes some very sharp observations. Anyone with a serious interest in political discourse will benefit from an acquaintance with her analysis (which is nuanced, subtle, and sophisticated), though the book is not a fast read. There is a tendency towards lists (the five conventions of melodramatic political discourse, the five sections analysing legitimation, for example), plus a detailed chapter roadmap and many short sections with headings, all of which interrupt the flow.

The argument goes right back to the origins of melodrama on the French stage, where it dramatized the suffering caused by class inequality. Anker offers detailed discussions of early examples, such as Gilbert de Pixérécourt's Coelina, ou l'enfant du mystère (1800) and Valentine, ou la seduction (1821), moving on to Dion Boucicault's The Poor of New York (1857), itself adapted from Les pauvres de Paris (1856) (unfortunately, Anker misspells this title throughout). The differences are instructive. The French original rejoices in a suicide scene in which every female character attempts her own destruction in order not to burden the others, whereas the American family members embrace a can-do spirit, with their virtue established not by self-sacrifice but by the work ethic. (Boucicault introduced a fire truck onstage and helped launch the stereotype of the heroic Irish firefighter.) Indeed, most American melodramas tend to have protagonists who fight back vigorously against the slings and arrows of misfortune, without much external assistance. The mould is set from the start. Even the archetypal image of the melodrama (the female tied to the railroad tracks waiting for the male to save her) featured in its first American version (Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight (1914)) a hapless male attached to the tracks and a female rescuer. Melodrama can be surprisingly flexible, even at times countermelodramatic, as in the example here of the film Three Kings, which remains firmly within the conventions but nonetheless exposes the legitimating processes for political action, and thoroughly unsettles the spectator.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion is that of affect. Taking her title from Nietzsche, Anker argues that melodramatic political discourse traffics in intensified affect as a means of displacing chronic experiences of constraint, fear or vulnerability, which are routinized in contemporary political life. An affective fact may then replace an actual fact: a feeling of threat may be enough to legitimate preemptive strikes, even if the actual threat (weapons of mass destruction) does not exist. Felt legitimacy incorporates the sense that feeling the pain of national injury is equivalent to feeling the legitimacy of the state power that responds to it. The book nonetheless closes on a note of cautious optimism, reading George W. Bush's performance of “mission accomplished” not as a heroic fantasy of sovereign freedom, but as squarely within the conventions of the “woman's weepie” scenario of obstructed agency (as exemplified in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), also analysed in some detail.) In Anker's persuasive argument, melodramas of failure offer the possibility of new modes of social critique and new imaginaries of freedom.