|
The (South) American Soap Opera: History, Revenge, and Fictive Thinking In 2005 Claudio Villarruel, artistic director and programming chief at Argentina's television network Telefé/Canal 11, found himself with a pleasant programming problem. Telefé had the country's most sought-after actor, the rabidly popular leading man Pablo Echarri, on contract for a new telenovela — a show which, at the moment, did not yet exist and yet was slated to compete against rival network Canal 13's popular primetime offerings (the soap opera Sos mi vida and Bailando por un sueño , a more sequined South American version of Dancing with the Stars) . The show, Villarruel understood, needed to be a vehicle for his star Echarri, who had taken a 2-year sabbatical from television after starring in the prodigiously successful telenovela Resistiré in 2003. The network wanted something that would be an unqualified popular success, preferably an adaptation of an already existing story (so as to save the effort of creating an original — and thus risky — storyline): Villarruel suggested as the departure text Alexandre Dumas's classic novel of betrayal and vengeance, Le Comte de Monte Cristo . Villarruel had cannily recommended an old gold-standard of popular success: the French public went mad in 1844 for Dumas's Monte Cristo , published as a magazine serial (a folletin ) in the Parisian Journal des Dèbats . Crazed fans sent in a flood of threatening letters to the editor demanding to know the outcome of the (admittedly epic) story, which follows the misadventures of Edmund Dantès, a promising young captain in Napoleonic France. Dantès is betrayed on the eve of his wedding by his closest friend and wrongly sentenced to life in an impenetrable prison on the island of If. While in prison, Dantès befriends a wizened priest-sage who equips him with the knowledge and resources necessary to escape the prison island and to carry out a carefully plotted revenge on each of his betrayers. In the meanwhile, his former fiancée has married his best friend and given birth to a son; and two of his friends' chief accomplices have grown rich and powerful in the 14 years Dantès spent languishing in the Chateau d´If. The chief portion of the novel occupies itself with Dantès's tortured search for justice in the face of his enemies' undeserved prosperity — a theme that Telefé exploits in its own ambitious version, which attempts to speak beyond the level of individual hurt to the larger stage of social injustice. Like Dumas´s novel- folletin , the South American telenovela recounts the personal betrayal of hero Santiago, played by the overinsistent yet stubbornly adored Echarri; but its villains are no longer the merely marginally menacing officers of the French navy. Montecristo ´s traitors are members of the military elite of Argentina's 70s dictatorships — torturers, murderers, and rapists responsible for tens of thousands of civilian disappearances that occurred throughout that decade. Santiago's own love interest, interpreted by the tarantula-lashed Paola Krum, is discovered to be one of the lost children of the disappeared (“ los desparecidos ”), adopted, as was the custom, into a military family without ever being informed of her origin or identity. Villains in the new Montecristo aren't individually threatening manifestations of ruthless self-interest and ambition; they have become larger symbols of a more pervasive and more devastating perniciousness: villains capable — indeed, already guilty — of harm to the viewing public. Dumas's villains had but one victim; Montecristo 's villains count the entire national audience in its roster of casualties and injuries. So it came as a bit of a surprise, then, that the show was an instantaneous hit, one of those rare blockbuster specimens in a genre not exactly known for its cross-generational appeal. Despite its obviously sensitive, heavily historical discourse, Montecristo draws in over 3 million viewers four nights a week and has inspired a massive threefold spike in inquiries made at the offices of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, a grassroots group of civilians dedicated to the search and recovery of the desaparecidos and their lost children, and to protesting government-perpetrated human rights violations. It's been rightly said that Montecristo is less of a television show and more of a cultural phenomenon — less of an entertainment to absorb passively than an event in its own right, something in which to participate with the neighbors on a slow Tuesday night. What's perhaps most extraordinary about Argentina's Montecristo, however — what distinguishes it from other popular shows that have come before — is that its popularity in the current telenovela form seems to have no neighborhood limit. For all its success in its début Argentine market, Montecristo is actually a global franchise; it is not one but a host of adaptations tailored for similar rock-star popularity in a cornucopia of national markets. Telefé/Canal 11 recently sold in mid-October the story format of Montecristo to 20 other countries at Mipcom Cannes 2006, the annual international conference of television, satellite, and cable companies. Numbering among those are Israel, Peru, Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, Colombia, Armenia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Lithuania, Ecuador, Macedonia, and Puerto Rico, each of which will employ its own writers, directors, and actors to produce its own locally-tailored version of the Montecristo story format. Adaptation taken to this level of internationalism is rare — perhaps even unprecedented; for if we were to examine the underlying scientific metaphor of adaptation, we'd see that the idea is both simple and local: a work of literature is thrown into new circumstances, a new media environment that requires tweaks (or even monumental changes) to be made in the original material for the work to maintain its coherence. These new circumstances could, in general, be anything: a new genre (novel to soap opera), a new medium (book to television), a new set of characters. ¹ More often than not, however, these circumstances are historical. Adaptations tend to bill themselves as “updates” of historically distant works (“relevancy” being, as ever, a value most prized in media). But relevancy is usually measured with a single audience in mind — one particular media environment. When Leonard Bernstein chose to rework Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (c. 1597) into the 1957 Broadway musical The West Side Story , he did so with a uniquely American audience in mind. When Clueless (1995) screenwriter and director Amy Heckerling selected Jane Austen's Emma (1816) for adaptation, she did so with a very specific (teenage, female) demographic audience in mind; and so forth. Montecristo, meanwhile, is less of an adaptation in its traditional target specificity than a generalized algorithm, a conglomeration of production procedures and operations designed with the object of producing a particular product — in this case, a popular television soap opera. The genius of this adaptive system is that regional tastes — at times very particular local cultural appetites — can be accommodated in the production of a single, universalized template. The use of locally-tailored detail to hook an audience is so clever, it's practically common sense: a Chilean television audience will flock to see their own celebrity darling, Gonzalo Valenzuela, over a strange Argentine leading man. And references to Argentine military history will have no resonance with a Mexican public. Instead, writers and TV studios will replace all possible variables with familiar elements from the story's new regional environments as a strategy for survival. While the general structure remains the same in each version, the content matter — the variables of the algorithm, taken from one specific national and cultural setting — ensures relevancy. The assumption is, of course, that history is integral to relevancy — that the trappings of time and place have an inherent pull, and that setting, in the traditional sense, establishes an instantaneous connection with audiences. It seems no small coincidence that in Spanish, the word historia is used to refer to both a literary story and to the subject of disciplinary study. When Argentine sociologist Luis Alberto accredits Montecristo 's appeal to being “buena historia”, it's hard to know which sense he is chiefly signaling. To the Argentines, what is remarkable and rich about the adaptation is the inclusion of historical elements in the telenovela story structure, the splicing of history onto fiction, the unwavering scrutiny of real-life horrors and societal ills in a serious, responsible, and moving way. Yet from a more international viewpoint — keeping in mind how easily the “integral” historical discourse is replaced during country-to-country adaptation with the regional subject de mode — history is mere window-dressing. The story format's facile incorporation of historical elements as authenticizing narrative seasoning (for that flavor of relevance) applies history to entertainment as if it were a topical ointment. This cosmetic treatment implies that it is not a particular history itself that matters, but rather the idea of history in the abstract, as a necessary structural element in the telenovela . In that sense, the historical element goes the same way as the plot itself: it is a part picked not for its particular content but for its properties — a stellar track record of popularity, for example, or a certain perceived relevance to a modern public. Each bit, gear, and lever is selected for performance in the well-oiled machine of the story format; it seems to matter little what each part might actually contain in the way of content. Literary adaptation, an altering process rooted in the particular mechanics of the content of a piece, suddenly seems an ill-formulated metaphor for this kind of content-blind chimeric media production. (“Literary engineering ” would be a closer fit.) Yet the screenwriting equivalent of interchangeable parts is what enables the telenovela 's easy transition across political borders and what explains its uniformly enthusiastic reception by national audiences facing such varied historical issues as drug trafficking, slavery, prostitution, child trafficking, and state-sponsored terrorism. The maintenance of a single unifying structure preserves the emotional core of the story; while everything else — actors, plot twists, local scenery — may change, the audience engages with the telenovela in the same intrinsic fashion — that is, through emotional contact with key characters and central themes (betrayal and the thirst for justice). For it is through the interface everyday things that history — especially taboo history — comes alive. The soap opera mimics how we experience political turmoil and history in real life — as people, affected not so much by looming abstract entities (terms such as “axis of evil” or “weapons of mass destruction”), but by concrete realities: waiting in daunting security lines at the airport, practicing new evacuation drills at the downtown office, using past tense instead of present to refer to a family member killed in service abroad. This is how we experience history. What comes through to us on the scale of the personally tangible, the individually comprehensible, constitutes our historical and sociopolitical engagement; it is this world — the world accessible and at hand — that we concern ourselves with. This is especially true when a particular historical topic is too enormous, too terrible, or too abstract to deal with. Until buildings filled with real human beings — one's neighbors, family members, or friends — come crashing down in one's own backyard, the threat of terrorism isn't real: it is not immediately present, it is not discussed; it does not exist in a direct, day-to-day sense. Likewise, for Argentines, state-sponsored terrorism didn't exist — except in certain activist circles — until the topic was made emotionally available to the people it affected. Which is where fiction does its necessary and valuable work. Fiction's function is, essentially, to trick: the fictive soap opera or revenge story promises engagement with people , characters who themselves are not inherently political — “just folks”. The genre itself promises something relatively predictable, and in that sense, benign: familial drama, love complications, mistaken or missing identities, a dash of crime, your run-of-the-mill soap opera standards. As a member of audience, you relax: this is your comfort zone; you are invited to enter into emotional involvement with characters in a way that is familiar and comfortable. If before the second commercial break the drama has opened up into ugly or painful historical complications, it is too late — you are enmeshed, involved firsthand. Your interest in the outcome and fates of the characters onscreen outweighs any reservations against plunging in. These small deceptions are necessary — the switch-and-baits (fiction for history, an imaginary character for a real political situation) draw in audiences who would otherwise remain inert or turned off by the enormity or the graveness of embedded sociopolitical issues. It is a secret that activists know well: put a human face on a cause, engage the public with an irresistible story — preferably one with a dash of suspense, one that can be told in installments, with cliffhangers and plunging twists — and they are yours. Why else bother with the demonstrations, the theatrics — the drama, for example, of camping in a tent outside the President's vacation ranch, as Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq, promised to do until the President granted her a private audience? Of course, politicians themselves know the game of history and fiction just as well; the flip side of the switch-and-bait is the possibility of being offered sober history — not as entertainment or escapism, of course, but as obligation or call to action – that turns out to be merely wishful thinking. The irony of the historio-fictive form is that it is capable not only of engaging real history but also of offering an escape hatchet of unreal fantasy for those who might need it to serve their own needs and ends. In the case of the American comic book (our closest structural parallel to the literary folletin ), invented political and social crises — along with their spectacularly protagonized resolutions — satisfied a deep psychological itch in a war-beleaguered public. The Golden Era of American comics, along with the invention of the superhero in tights, coincided with the advent of World War II. Superman and his competitors — Batman, Wonder Woman, and a host of other costumed characters — emerged as updated Edmund Dantèses (that is to say, sophisticated and accomplished revenge machines), providing the American public satisfactory fictional resolutions to battles for justice and fights against evil parties — even when real wartime skirmishes didn't. Indeed, Dantès's extraordinary abilities – the Count is an expert swordsman, a consummate actor, an intellectual, and the possessor of unimaginable wealth — serve as an early prototype for his superbly equipped American counterparts. Most importantly, however, the Count anticipates their fictive function by indulging a collective societal fantasy of vengeance, enacted through one unusually talented individual who, unlike his dreaming readership, has the power and potential to fix situations beyond a single self's control. Indeed, the prevalence of the comic-book constellation — sociopolitical turbulence, superhero fantasy, and a serial media format — in a host of modern genres suggests that the stop-and-go structure of suspense in the folletin is particularly well-equipped (we might even say well- adapted ) to achieving popularity. In the form of 20th-century popular media — television — we have living proof of the folletin 's success and the triumph of the serial suspense story. Television smash hits, such as CSI and 24 , all follow a basic, episodic, folletin format that is so ubiquitous that it seems unremarkable. It's hard to conceive of television done differently — in long swaths of time, for example, like movies, with resolved endings; or in chaptered acts, like live plays. In any case, the fact that the storylines of these cliffhanger blockbusters all center around remunerative action — the righting of wrongs — suggests that revenge (or at least the search for justice) in the real world follows this same halting, stuttering rhythm. New crises and new injustices arise, and if there is someone present to right them, that someone will find his or her hands full before the next episode rolls around. (In this sense, the fiction in the real world would be to claim that the work has been finished, or that definitive victory is attainable.) The close alignment of history and fiction in these popular media structures provides ample opportunity for self-delusion, or worse, outright deception. The little fiction-based ruses necessary for the solicitation of an audience's emotional engagement with serious contemporary sociopolitical issues are themselves tricky things to manage. It's one thing to appeal to comic-book escapism, a little harmless self-trickery; it's entirely another to call on the histori-fiction's powerful ability to tap into the emotional and, by extension, motivational reserves of the public for political or personal ends. Combining fiction and history calls for the highest vigilance on the part of authors, screenwriters, activists, politicians — anyone who wields power with the word. It can be difficult to conceive just how powerful the combination of history, wishful (or fictive) thinking, and the desire for revenge can be — whenever the sentiments and reactions of real people are invoked, there are bound to be real-life consequences. A few months ago, while watching an episode of Montecristo filmed at the offices of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Marcos Suárez, a 30-year-old viewer, recognized an old photo of himself as a child posted on the wall of the missing. DNA testing proved him to be the lost son of Hugo Suárez and María Rosa Vedota, two desparecidos who disappeared during the era of the dictaduras . Suárez's mother — the woman he had believed to be his mother — was a nurse who had passed away without ever telling her adopted son about his past; he woke to his reality thanks to the serendipitous sweep of a television camera. Meanwhile, the city agitates for the search and discovery of Jorge Julio López, a missing key witness and testifier in the trial of a former dictadura repressor, Miguel Etchecolatz. Suárez is not the only individual stirred awake by the movement of a fantastical telenovela plot: the equally dramatic twists and turns of the real-world search for justice are bringing Argentines onto the pavement and into the Plaza de Mayo to share hard words with their government. History, revenge, and thirsty thinking: it's a combination that has the power to move people — individually, and in special cases, en masse. When it is well done, it can bring real relief and resolution to a troubled country — the missing are found, and the dead are laid to rest. When it is badly done, people go missing, and it is those left alive who are restless. ¹Many adaptations feature combinations of these categories -- or better yet, are adaptations of adaptations themselves. Even Dumas´s Count of Monte Cristo was an adaptation of a history taken from the memoirs of Jacques Peuchet, an archivist in the Parisian policial prefecture in the early 19th century. The polymerization effect -- that is, the long chains upon chains of adaptive works of adpative works -- is probably best explained by the fact that what´s good to adapt once will likely be (at least in the eyes of a studio executive or a Broadway musical producer) good to adapt twice. Hence the seemingly endless parade of Pride and Prejudice movie incarnations as of late. back to Winter 2007 Table of Contents |