As one way of initiating the process of re-examining Sirk's cinematic corpus in terms of a broader examination of the relationship between art and film, I will briefly summarise Michael Fried's influential analysis of the two fundamentally different ways in which a pictorial object may attempt to address its ‘beholder’, since this seems to me to have some bearing on the current scholarship on melodrama. In particular, many ‘1950s family melodramas’ have been portrayed as either totally incorporating the viewer's grief-stricken body (Fried's concept of ‘absorption’) or as precluding the viewer's psychological entry into the depicted space (the countervailing notion of ‘theatricality’). Sirk's contributions to this genre have often been consigned to the latter category (due to the so-called ‘Brechtian’ alienation effect that is said to result from their formal stylisation). Yet neither of these polarities can fully encompass the complexity of the spectator's response to this director's best works, which more closely resembles a third model of aesthetic reception that was proposed by the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl during the late nineteenth century.

Fried has traced the origin of the opposition between ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ back to the eighteenth-century Salons of Denis Diderot. According to the prominent American scholar, Diderot claimed that if the figures within a contemporary picture ‘seemed by virtue of the character of their actions and expressions to evince even a partial consciousness of being beheld’, then their gestures would not be perceived as ‘natural signs of intention or emotion, but merely as … feignings’ that were calculated to deceive the audience. In other words, the viewer would only be convinced of the truth of the depicted events if each of the dramatis personae seemed ‘engross[ed] or absorb[ed] in their actions and states of mind … oblivious of everything but the object of his or her own absorption, as if to all intents and purposes there were nothing and no one else in the world’. Paradoxically, this insistence upon ‘an absolute discontinuity between actors and beholders, representation and audience’ may actually heighten the spectator's response to the painting by transforming it into a quasi-corporeal experience.