Life As Tedious Melodrama–And How Soap Operas Help Us To Get By

As The World Turns which ran from 1956-2010 was one of the most popular soap operas of all time.  It like many others (Guiding Light, Another World and The Edge of Night among them) was formulaic and entirely predictable.  Of course no one knew exactly how Harold would deceive Martha nor with whom, but everyone knew he would.  Laura would always be shrewish and unmanning, but would she get another man? How long would Adele put up with her husband, trapped as she was in a marriage to which she never consented but agreed to out of family loyalty and respect for her father, one of the wealthiest men in Boston?



Women hurried home from the hairdresser’s, cooked dinner early, sent the children outside to play, took the phone off the hook, pulled the blinds, turned on the television, and waited for the opening bars of the theme song they knew so well and had waited a long week to hear.

Soap operas are not uniquely American – Brazil, Mexico, and most recently Turkey produce them regularly – but they feel American.  They are the perfect combination of Hollywood beauty and melodrama and real life.  Husbands always cheat on their wives, but are never as handsome and alluring as those on the soaps.  A woman might just might put up with her derelict husband if he looked like Lance Sebring, the surgeon on Our Lives, Your Lives.  She might even forgive her sister for beguiling her dying father if it meant keeping a house like Fair Oaks, the family mansion in A Brighter Day.  A world of troubles if led by beautiful people is always far better than the routine, boring lives that most of us lead; and that has always been the key to the success of soaps.  They reflect the same deceit, arrogance, greed, and selfishness as real life, but they bundle all of them in an irresistibly fanciful package.

The key to successful soap operas is viewer complicity – i.e. the viewer knows the tricks, deceptions and lies the serpentine heroine has played, but the naïve, unaware, and generously loving hero does not.  At every encounter between them, we wait for her venality, greed, and deception to be exposed; but it never is.  Lies are mounted upon lies, tears upon tears, and the hero – in a willful suspension of disbelief ignores all clues, suggestions, and innuendos.

There is nothing mysterious or surprising about soap operas – they are predictable, formulaic, and expected.  No one is surprised at family  suspicions, jealousies, and backhanded reprisals.  Of course daughters-in-law are compromised, spurned lovers after revenge and retribution, mothers-in-law determined and territorial.  It is the genius of the screenwriters which always surprises.  They know exactly when to suspend the plot and the dialogue; exactly at which moment to shift the story from heroine to ignored suitor; from murderous husband to calculating cousin. They juggle ten different characters in as many dramas with as many unsuspecting results for heroes, heroines, and associate players alike to fill fifty soap operas; yet they balance, calculate, measure and finally produce show after show of suspense and curiosity.



We all hope that the serpentine comer will be outed and will have her comeuppance; that the sweet ingenue and the innocent, trusting suitor will marry.  That the psychopathic governor will be sent the the gallows; that the absurdly, defiantly mercenary villain will be discredited and isolated; and that all villains sent to their proper gallows. There are many episodes to a series.   We will have to wait to see if justice, honesty, and righteousness triumph or whether the villains, their dirty tricks, and their amoral ambitions succeed.

The genius of the British series Downton Abbey is that it allows good, democratic-minded Americans, salt-of-the-earth and intellectuals alike to enjoy themselves.  They can admire, desire, and romanticize about the lives of the rich and famous, and revel in their fall.  We Americans idolize our movie stars.  Although their glitzy, glamorous lives are far beyond our reach, they are not that far. Thousands of women have looked in the mirror and seen a face as classically beautiful as Angelina Jolie or as pouting and sexy like Scarlett Johansson. With a little luck and a few connections, one might be in Hollywood too.

Aristocratic England is all the more appealing because it is remote and impossibly unattainable. We would fumble and drop our forks at Downton Abbey or trip over the Persian carpet at Montpelier.  English Lords and their estates, fox hunting, understatement, and chauffeurs are way beyond us.  We can imagine having a beer with Matthew McConaughey, but not the Third Earl of Hereford.

Downton Abbey is America’s “Gone With the Wind.”  Viewers enjoy the wealthy’s excesses because they know they will not last.  Either by their own aristocratic arrogance or the inevitable intrusion of history they will have their comeuppance. Better still, when it comes to class, privilege and wealth, “Downton Abbey” lets us have our cake and eat it, too. The show gives us a voyeuristic peek at the pleasures of being an Edwardian aristocrat, but it also allows us to feel smarter and better than the blue bloods of that period.



Soap operas have earned a bad name among the literati. They are, say the critics,  no more than cheap melodramatic entertainment for the idle – housewives, out-of-work layabouts, and frustrated y0ung women who cannot navigate the waters of their own lives and prefer to see love, passion, desire, jealousy, and family conflict played out on the small screen. Yet these television series are much more, and slices of life at that.  What could be more true to life than family ambitions and jealousies, unrealistic hopes and dreams, and the nasty, greedy, and unconscionable ways  that we hope to attain them?

Is the purpose of art to enlighten? To educate? To move?  A case can be made that the best Turkish television serials do all three.  Winter Sun is educational and instructive for its careful representing of a changing Muslim society.  It is enlightening because of its personal insights into the most common human sentiments – jealousy, envy, revenge, and ambition.  The subject may not be new, but the way the series’ producers and staff have configured it to display a range of moral, emotional, social, and family reactions to provocative events is certainly compelling.  The series is most certainly moving.  There is no way not to feel intense dislike for the vixen, sympathy for the wronged wife, hatred for the evil-minded, greedy, and manipulative father, happiness at the goodness of the hero.

It is probably time to let go of labels and academia and be moved and entertained.

The point is that it does not take an Aeschylus, an Albee, or a Hellman to highlight family drama.  While these artists’ language, tournure de phrase, contest, and plot may be more elegant, less predictable, and more subtle, Turkish soap operas are at least their equal in empathy.  No viewer can finish the many episodes of the Turkish soap opera  Love is in the Air without some sense of universality, a common melodramatic bond, and a similar future.



Like it or not, we all live lives of boring predictability.  Not only are our lives circumscribed by boulot, Metro, dodo but our problems are depressingly all the same – deceitful husbands, ungrateful children, greedy, thankless relatives, abusive bosses, disease, disability, and incontinence.  There is no remove from the cycle; and the views are always the same whether at the apogee or perigee.  Not surprisingly we like to see the our lives repeated on television if  dressed up in beauty, glitz, and glamour. 

Winter’s Bone is a long and depressing movie about an Ozark family struggling through poverty, cold, and inbred mountain family jealousies. This was no Eugene O’Neill country – the brutal terrain of Mourning Becomes Electra where the Mannon family destroys itself in a melodramatic grand guignol and explores the dynamics of greed, jealousy, spite, and power – but a slog through the mud and cold.  Each character was backward, ignorant, and dumb; and their attempt to find some kind of reconciliation and meaning was implausible and impossible.  The family goes through the same predictable crises as anyone else; but why watch this hopeless drudgery when we can see the same misfortunes played out with servants, boudoirs, and silver candelabra?

There is all too much realism in the world and all we really want to do is escape it.  For all the political activism, commitment to causes and progress, and persistent worry, nothing is much fun.  Nor is a two-job, night-shift food stamp family; but at least there are the soaps to get us through.

Men Who Are Irresistible To Women - A Post-Feminist Tale

Littlejohn Parker had been born to wealthy, sophisticated parents – the kind that wintered in St. Bart’s and Gstaad, summered on the Vineyard, and spent the rest of the time between homes in the Berkshires and Carmel. Yet the Parkers financial ease came only partially from private incomes; for Littlejohn worked as hard as his father, expanding the once fledgling Montana mining operation into one of the largest privately owned companies in the United States.  By the time environmentalism and foreign competition had depressed the value of the company stock, Emory had amassed a small fortune, only a small portion of which he had placed in trust for his son, preferring that he make his money through the fruits of his labor just as he had.  Much of the flintiness of his father’s New England upbringing had gone by the time Littlejohn became a man – schooling and camaraderie with like-minded, fortunate, wealthy offspring of the region’s captains of industry had encouraged a more Mediterranean sense of pleasure and enjoyment – and while he had lost none of his father’s persistence and ambition, he was more relaxed about money, its stewardship, and the way it was spent.



Not only had Littlejohn inherited the family genes of intelligence and good looks along with his portion of its fortune, he had inherited the sense of supreme confidence which comes with wealth, influence, and universal respect.  While not always the case – Billy Thornton, the heir to a steel fortune and the child of an equally well-placed family, was a bumbler, shy, and  lackadaisical – more often than not privilege begets privilege and a sense if not noblesse oblige then noblesse a ses droits, the assumed right of the upper class to lead, attract, and influence.

So it was no accident that Littlejohn – by now ‘Johnny’ – was irresistible to women and had been ever since the eighth grade, a time well before sexual maturity, when girls were still in pinafores and boys were interested only in cars and football.  Girls, without their own sexual maturity to know why, were attracted to him.  They wanted to be with him.  They looked at him over their schoolbooks, followed him up the stairs, brushed against him in the coatroom.  He was aware of this attention, and always acknowledged it.  He was never shy, nervous, or impatient.  His directness was never demanding but understanding.  He knew that these girls – like all the women in his later life – wanted acknowledgement, interest, and affection. 

By the time he had reached high school – or rather an exclusive New England prep school, feeder to Harvard and Yale to which, well-before the age of inclusivity, boys of the best families matriculated – his premature sexual awareness had become mature, physical, and seductive.  Girls were just as attracted to him as they were in eighth grade, but now it was a physical and emotional.  They wanted him, not just to be with him.

Littlejohn was as aware of these new sexual dynamics as he was in middle school.  He intuitively understood women and the nature of his attractiveness to them.  More than good looks, physical ability, intelligence, and social grace, it was confidence – an absolute, irrevocable sexual promise.  No matter who the girl, and regardless of their looks, allure, or vivacity, he was theirs. 

Not surprisingly he was attracted to women of the same ilk – women who were irresistible to men and who understood the nature of their allure.  “What I am is sexy”, says the Scarlett Johansson character in the Woody Allen movie Match Point, not as beautiful as her sister or as elegantly poised as her mother, but irresistible to men.  Marilyn Monroe was not classically beautiful like Ava Gardner, Hedy Lamarr, or Vivien Leigh, but had an unmatchable sensuousness and sensuality.  She had allure, an immediate, unmistakable and undeniable sexual appeal.  She  embodied sexual desire.  Men wanted her not for her beauty but to make love to her.  Nabokov understood this well when the wrote Lolita. There are some young girls – ‘nymphets’ – who are sexual long before they are aware of their sexuality or sexually mature.  They are born sexual.



he theme of sexual harmony is not new.  Every man and woman hopes for a mutually satisfying sexual relationship and at least some intellectual, physical, and emotional satisfaction if not all three; and if one can believe popular romantic fiction, not an insignificant number of women hope for the best of all possible worlds, a spiritual union, D.H. Lawrence’s epiphany.  Serious fiction and drama are no different.  The brutal bloodletting of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is all about finding sexual equilibrium, stripping pretense down to the marrow and starting over.  The Taming of the Shrew is perhaps Shakespeare’s only real love story.  Kate and Petruchio need each other,
complement each other, and form a perfect equilibrium.  Kate’s long soliloquy about adoring and respecting her husband has often been misread as Shakespeare’s angry misogyny; but it is just the opposite.  Petruchio has liberated Kate from her patriarchal father and abusive sisters, and she has given him the  strong, determined, willful, sensual woman he has sought for years.

Especially in this gender-sensitive, feminized age, the Lawrentian vision is looked at with some criticism.  There is no such thing as sexual mutuality, say feminist critics.  Male misogyny is deeply-rooted, hardwired, and inescapable.  The Idea of mutuality and equilibrium can only be a fiction in a patriarchal age.  Lawrence, they go on to say, is only feeding his own immature male sexual fantasies.

Lawrence’s conviction that such sexual epiphany can only come from a heterosexual union is also against the progressive polemic.  There is no such thing as sexual bi-polarity, only sexuality on a gradually defined gender spectrum. Matching any two of the hundred possibilities of sexual identity has nothing whatsoever to do with Lawrence’s insistence on heterosexual orgasm.   Lawrence is irrelevant to today’s woman, so the polemic goes.

A woman reader who, after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover thought differently when she said, “I’ll have what she’s having”.  While she may have dismissed some of Lawrence’s more far fetched notions of Tantric union and spiritual epiphany, there was no doubting that he had struck a very resonant chord when he wrote about female ecstasy and Connie’s profound appreciation of manhood.  The reason why Lawrence is relevant is because he never doubted the Tantric and spiritual nature of sexual intercourse.



To complicate matters further, millennial women are not that far removed from the influence of Daddy.  Even D.H.Lawrence’s incredibly strong and independent Ursula and Gudrun (Women in Love) struggle with issues of dependency begun in childhood.   Ursula, as Lawrence explains in The Rainbow, the story of the women’s early years, was desperately attached to her father, put up with his abuse and indifference, but dependent on his quixotic but passionate love for her, could only achieve distance and autonomy with a struggle. Both women feel they need men, but are unsatisfied with any of them.  The entire story of these women is not one of love, but love sought – a love which could only be the result of the exhausting struggle of wills between them and their partners.

Littlejohn Parker might have been an anathema to feminists – a retrograde, chauvinist Lothario with no respect for women – until they met him.  Except for the lesbian fringe of the movement, many women, while suspicious of men and unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt when it came to sexual seriousness, were as susceptible to male charm, confidence, and pursuit as any.  His reputation, his success with women, his many lovers, and his untethered sexuality was no bar to their interest.  In fact, they were even more attracted to him.  His obvious sexuality, his clear and unmistakable interest in women as women, his respectful pursuit, and his irresistible emotional openness was irresistible.  Their heads and political agenda were turned after meeting  him.  They could no longer accept the received wisdom of the movement that men were universally hormone-driven throwbacks, apes to women’s sensitive, intelligent heroines.

Littlejohn never met his Lady Chatterley, a fictionally impossible character more expressive of Lawrence’s own frail sexuality than anything more real or reasonable; but he was never as compulsive as Lawrence was.  He simply enjoyed women, loved how they looked, behaved, and felt.  If there was to be no Lawrentian sexual epiphany in his future, there certainly would be many happy love affairs with attractive, sensuous, sexual women.

The Saga Of Portia Hamilton–What Glass Ceiling? A Tale Of Beauty, Charm, And Allure

Portia Hamilton had been a beautiful child – dark, curly hair; peaches-and-cream complexion; perfect symmetry,  and Elizabeth Taylor violet eyes.  She was cuddled, pampered, shown off and adored.  A little princess whose mother never discouraged the crinoline dresses, tiaras, and wands she wore at her ‘performances’.  Portia was never nervous or hesitant before an audience.  On the contrary, she wanted to perform before everyone, dancing prettily, showing off her costumes, her choreography (she never just twirled and jumped like other girls, but followed a script), and her music (her songs, like her dance steps were hers and hers alone).  She loved moving, smiling, dancing on tip toes, twirling so her dresses lifted and showed off their sparkles, gold thread, and pinks and purples.  She had her own dressing room – her mother’s walk-in closet which her father had set up with a mirror, good lighting, and a downstairs table; and she spent fifteen minutes fixing her hair just right with a red ribbon and ringlets, a dot of rouge and a touch of lipstick.

Her Aunt Mary – a single woman of late middle age who had forgone marriage for a successful legal career, a former trial lawyer who had won, according to family lore, all her cases, whose clerkship for Judge Harlow of the DC Circuit Court had paid off with a partnership at a K Street law firm and a final appointment to the bench – was unhappy with the way her sister was raising her daughter, Portia.  How, in this modern, feminist age, could she be raising a girl whose attitude and aspirations were – if she had to be honest – retrograde.  A little girl in crinoline, frills, and ribbons, never behind a book, and always primping and being pretty not only could never make it in the world of today, but was an insult to her family’s intellectual integrity.  The Hamiltons were indeed related to Alexander and were a respected Boston family which had lived and ruled following their great ancestor’s principles of freedom, justice, and personal enterprise.  There was seldom in over two hundred years, a breach of family principle or etiquette, and the Hamiltons had always been known as a family of superior rectitude, purpose, and honor. 

What had happened, Portia’s aunt wondered, to her sister who had shown as much promise as any of her four siblings, who had been destined for an equally distinguished career in the law, married well, and settled well in the right suburb of Philadelphia? And how could any daughter of hers be brought up in such a silly, common way?  All girls of her niece’s age, it seemed, bought princess outfits, and primped and pranced around the living room; but they were not of Portia’s caliber, carried none of her genes, and had no family histories of any note.  Portia, now that feminism had cleared the decks and made women’s professional and business success as probable as men’s, should by now be well on her way rather than wasting the all-important early childhood years on trifles and frivolity.

“But she loves it so”, replied Portia’s mother to her sister’s insistent objections.  “How can I refuse….and I shouldn’t refuse”.

“Why?”, demanded Aunt Mary.

“Because she has talent”.

Talent, schmalent, thought Mary.  A few pretty dresses, childish ditties, and prancing on stage don’t mean a thing  They mean diversion and distraction.  By the time that Mary was Portia’s age she was reading The Odyssey, computing, and excelling at math.  This girl had to be turned around before it was too late.

Nothing of the sort.  Portia was not to be turned and kept dressing up, making up, fixing her hair, and collecting a closet full of pretty dresses and shoes.  By the time she was in fifth grade, she was the social center of the class, precociously dispensing advice  about boys, girls, and love ‘infecting’ her classmates, according to her aunt, with outdated notions of feminine wiles, allure, and attractiveness.  By junior high, she was prom queen, dating the football captain, and a cheerleader.  Her photo and doings were reported monthly in the school paper, and she charmed her way through her classes.  She was sure to be the first Hamilton to be a disgrace.

Of course she would be nothing of the sort.  Feminism, the broken glass ceiling, clerkships, and professional marriage might be well and good for some; but Portia understood that beneath it all women were women – no different now than they were in Shakespeare’s day.  Beautiful, seductive, appealing, and above all able, thanks to their sex, best them at every turn.  It wasn’t so much that obvious, acquired intellect and cognitive intelligence didn’t matter; it was just that everyone had some measure of those, and few had her particularly sensitive awareness of femaleness and the indisputable – despite current, woke, and diversionary claims to sexual spectra – dynamics of heterosexual sex.  Lady Chatterley, Rosalind, Beatrice, and her namesake Portia were her ancestors; not the flinty, beastly ladies of Wall Street and corporate America.

These women had their place, and no one could take away their pluck and determination; and without their tunnel vision of success her road would be more difficult; but no one had schooled Eleanor of Aquitaine, the wives of Richard II and Henry VI, the heroines of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, or any other of the fictional and historical women who had used their native intelligence, sexual awareness, and will to get exactly what they wanted.  The difference between Portia and these characters was her enjoyment of herself, her sexual politics, and her absolutely enormous appeal to men.

Beauty is destiny is the way one philosopher put it.  Portia would always be looked at as a model, a symbol, and an ideal.  Fame, currency, and wealth were hers for the asking from the high-end of American culture.  Given her preferences she could be a model in Milan, the wife of European royalty, or a Park Avenue socialite.  She had the physical credentials to write her own ticket in those circles who prized her type of beauty and the carriage, confidence, and presentation which always seemed to go along with it.

Marilyn Monroe was not only physically alluring, there was something about her personality which fit her body.  It was an indefinable, impossibly subtle, and completely irresistible quality of femaleness.  Men do not want to admire women.  They want them as sexual partners; and men for generations have wanted nothing more than to go to bed with Marilyn Monroe - not Ava Gardner, Hedy Lamarr, or Vivien Leigh.

Progressive social critics complain about America’s false sense of values, placing Hollywood beauty above all else and in so doing setting impossible standards for young girls.  How can a plain, simple girl possibly compete with the fantasy images of Hollywood, Elle, Seventeen, and Glamour?  She can’t.  Beauty, feminine allure, grace, charm, and winsomeness have been admired, imitated, and honored since the first human settlements.

 

 

Portia Hamilton was one of the lucky few, given unusual beauty as a surprising, unexpected gift.  From a very early age she understood who she was and what she would be and  soon realized her good fortune. She had a very successful career as a fashion model, wearing the best designer clothes on the most prestigious runways of Milan, Paris, and New York; and since beauty is indeed destiny it was no surprise that after her career she married a scion of Wall Street, lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Park, wintered in St. Bart’s, and skied at Gstaad.  She had led a good, charmed life.