Who needs Hegel, Heidegger,or Derrida when you’ve got Douglas Sirk? Once again, Robert B. Pippin shows that philosophy still has a lot to learn from the movies. In the bold colors and improbable plots of Sirk’s melodramas he finds important lessons not just about race, class, and gender, but also—and perhaps more importantly—about the limits of moral inquiry.

Martin Woessner, Associate Professor of History & Society, Center for Worker Education, The City College of New York (CUNY), USA

Professor Pippin’s book provides extraordinary and perceptive insights into Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood films. The book unravels a range of arguments with admirable clarity while paying attention to Sirk’s visual style, as well to as his uses of story and character. Pippin argues that characters in these films often perform actions in ways that are beyond their understanding. This provides these films with a very particular moral atmosphere in which good characters do ‘wrong’ things, but in ways that, for the most part, engage our sympathy and admiration.

Richard Rushton, Senior Lecturer in Film, Lancaster University, UK

In this wonderfully provocative study, Robert Pippin explores three of Sirk’s most famous American melodramas, finding in their excesses and irony a philosophical rigour. Ingeniously, Pippin explains how Sirk’s sumptuously pessimistic world forecloses, for the characters, any real possibility of love, mutuality and self-knowledge, despite the putative happy endings. For viewers willing to give Sirk’s films a “second” or “third thought”, however, Pippin teaches us to see past the surface of bourgeois morality and discover a more difficult but worthwhile reckoning with “the politics of American emotional life” and our own complicities with its sympathetic registers.

Jennifer Fay, Professor and Chair of Cinema & Media Arts and Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, USA