Soap operas and nostalgia

One day my Instagram feed unexpectedly gives me a clip of Stephanie Forrester, an unforgettable specimen of soap-opera matriarch, slapping the insatiable Brooke Logan, one of the small screen's best-known femmes fatales. The women's haircuts don't lie: we're in the Nineties. The mother-in-law was no more than sixty, but looked every one of those years, and with her aquiline face and sharp eyes, and a very talented Italian voice actress recruited from the theatre as was the custom then, she addressed Brooke in implausibly heated tones, with generous quantities of abuse: ‘you're the slut of Beverly Hills!’ The thirty-year-old Brooke, with her angelic face and hair, doesn't take it lying down: it's cat-fighting. I watched the whole clip: it unlocked memories. And then, I have to admit it, I liked the cat-fighting in soap operas. The rule of the feed is clear: watch one, and a thousand will come your way. So, periodically, short videos reach me straight from the producers of the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful (in Italy, simply Beautiful), this time concerning the current season, in which Brooke, the same actress, is nearly sixty but is still a femme fatale (who, rather than sleeping with her partners' parents, has now decided to try it on with her daughters' partners), and the rest of those present are more recent characters, with a few exceptions.

The marketing move was interesting: a clip from a past that seemed buried reaches a Millennial, a notoriously nostalgic generation, to show them that the product in question is not dead at all, but lives and fights on in its old medium (television). Beautiful thus goes fishing for new viewers and users in a more modern medium, among members of a generation (Millennials) who have abandoned television for social media or streaming platforms, but who, as we know, are missing something in today's world: perhaps a gamble, but the accessibility of Instagram and TikTok for this kind of use makes it worth a try.

The reasons for the success of that kind of product deserve investigation, and perhaps now that they have reached a certain age and have partly been superseded, the time has come to do it. At both my grandmothers' houses, we watched Sentieri, in English Guiding Light: a more interesting soap opera than Beautiful, to tell the truth. The series began in 1937 as a radio story aimed at American housewives tuning in between one soap commercial and the next (hence the expression ‘soap opera’). During the short episodes, the Reverend Ruthledge dispensed advice to his community. Later, the Bauer family would move to the centre of the series, its younger offspring still on television in the 2000s when the series ended. At first, the idea of Guiding Light had something pedagogical about it: through radio, and then television, audiences were given good advice for dealing morally with the more uncomfortable family problems addressed by the various episodes. And then, little by little, the producers realised that viewers liked the uncomfortable problem more than the moral sermon. The small screen finally gave faces to these formulaic, repetitive characters, fixed in a type and a role. Their types and roles are those of our families and workplaces: the ambitious younger brother ready to do anything to show off; the secretary who seduces her employer; the mother-in-law defending the honourable marriage of her daughter, who, the poor thing, falls in love with the bad boy; the bad boy who mistreats the girl until, redeemed by her, he reveals a great heart; the good girl who doesn't give herself to the bad boy straight away, but if she happens to do so feels she must keep it secret to protect her reputation, even though, very probably, despite the casual nature of the encounter, she will find herself pregnant; the nice boy, the one next door, who hides unspeakable secrets; the mafia boss, because the exotic is always round the corner; the unscrupulous businessman or politician who is, at the same time, the object of the gravest moral disapproval and unquestionably the most interesting character; the mother-in-law or aunt, strictly of a certain age, sour and often a spinster, who feels duty-bound to defend her family and her children (mostly male) from scandal.

They are the same characters as in the comedies of Plautus and Terence: psycho-sociological roles, ‘persons’ (which in Latin means ‘masks’, literally used to perform in the theatre) whose ‘typical’ traits are heightened, those least dependent on each individual's psychological depth and most determined by social expectations and stereotypes. The nature of the comic, as an aesthetic category, has always been linked to a certain typification of human psychology. Typically, a soap-opera character's psychology is flattened onto the function they must play in the plot: perhaps this is also why we don't feel too guilty laughing at him or her. A lightweight psychology keeps attention on behaviours rather than their motivations; and behaviours produce the events that keep viewers glued to the screen. These behaviours and events staged by the soap opera are, in every respect, compressions and exaggerations of behaviours and events that, in real life, most viewers encounter or enact rarely, but which are at the same time anything but foreign to the ordinary dimension of life. Sooner or later, we've all had an argument with our mother-in-law similar to Brooke's; and perhaps secretly wished it had ended a little worse than it probably actually did: because a scene is liberating, because shouting things in people's faces just as they come to us (and just as we hear them said on television) releases endorphins even if it isn't socially appropriate, because drama is a way of dealing with one's own reality as well as television's. The comic makes us laugh, and therefore lets us vent, because laughter is also a release: soap narratives, in their trashy aspect, are continuous with the noble aesthetic category of the comic.

To understand trash, however, we need to focus on its literal meaning. The word means rubbish: it is no coincidence that, as the aesthetician Andrea Mecacci explains well in his book on kitsch, published by Il Mulino (2014), it was initially associated with Junk Art, an art form that uses scraps and remnants of abandoned or discarded objects to bring something new to life. Practices of this kind are now linked to movements such as Slow Fashion, which make mending and reusing second-hand clothes a point of sustainability and a change of course from disposable consumption. When Andy Warhol gave the title Trash to the film he produced and Paul Morrissey directed in 1970, he still had something very close to the word's literal meaning in mind: Holly, who lives with Joe on the margins of society, collects valuable objects from the rubbish on New York's streets. These artistic uses of trash thus allude to the condition of waste, to which humans in the capitalist and consumerist age are bound by a very particular thread. Waste, in fact, is what we don't see, and all the more what we don't touch, smell or taste; and, on the other hand, waste is always with us, since the capitalist mechanism of production and consumption produces discards as an ineliminable externalisation.

Let us take up this indication from the etymology to observe a further evolution in the term's use in television and media more generally. At a certain point, to encourage audiences to identify still more with programmes and their characters, the format changes radically, in a way destined to have anthropological effects that have yet to be investigated. From soap operas we arrive at reality shows, in which the same types, behaviours and events staged in the safe space of fiction are now sold as real. How many times, again as children, did we ask ourselves: but on Forum, are they acting or are they really themselves? The answer was still relatively reassuring: Forum is fiction, in the sense that the characters called on to stage the disputes are played by actors; but the plots of the disputes are real. The audience's identification was strengthened by the plot's authenticity, which justified asking actors to perform the case without sparing excesses, uproar or aggression. Then came Big Brother; and from then on, over twenty-five years of people going on television to play exactly themselves, according to the expectations and stereotypes of comic types, to arouse identification, laughter and audience attention. Here things start to get complicated: the skeleton is no longer in the cupboard, and the impulses previously placed in the proper compartment of narrative sublimation (the soap opera) are now legitimised as more real and authentic by virtue of their immediacy and lack of reflection. But that historical reality in which those irreverent impulses, those elements of release and that ‘desire for cat-fighting’, if we may call it that, were mostly sublimated in the field of conscious fiction was no less true; and it is certainly no more authentic than a media reality such as today's, in which unrestrained trash is normalised as a market product that ultimately persuades us that life is everything. Because it is true that, in human history, respectability and moralism, and for that matter classicism in art too, have denied dignity to the body's more spontaneous aspects, which include the right to indulge in a good release and then laugh about it. But it is equally true that every healthy society rests on some capacity to ‘manage’ its waste, to make a more balanced and harmonious social life possible and to create the conditions for a different flourishing of individual and spiritual life.

The trash served up on television today, moreover, lives entirely within the very same conventions of respectability it is supposed to negate: in reality shows, people shout and make a scene in public over a betrayal, over a jealousy that legitimises excess. In truth, soap operas did this too: the delicate balance between staging social norms and transgressing them reflects, to the letter, the dynamic that creates guilt, but also the pleasure of transgression, in Catholic and evangelical societies. This too is an aspect of trash's success: the singular, only apparently contradictory coexistence of defending the ethical norm (especially in matters of sexual conduct) and enjoying its transgression. In this sense, trash really is something we cannot do without, because waste is always with us, and the play of guilt / pleasure in transgression still belongs deeply to societies that are little emancipated. Perhaps, for some of us, nostalgia for the trash of Stephanie and Brooke, or Alan and Alexandra in Guiding Light, can also be explained by nostalgia for a world in which the trashy side could be experienced and enjoyed in an explicitly narrative form, without claiming to present itself as a more authentic truth, as happens today through a mere market choice.