Soap

By Crispin Sartwell

Brenda is having a bad day. She has to choose between her three boyfriends: (a) the male model/millionaire, (b) the mafia don, (c) the arms dealer. All are beautiful, charming, accomplished men. Her choice is complicated by the fact that (a) and (b) think she's dead, while (c) is holding her prisoner aboard his yacht, which is on fire. And she's terminally ill.

This scenario, directly out of General Hospital - of which am an aficionado - is par for the course on the soaps. For Brenda, it's just another day at the office after returning yet again from the dead.

In fact, no one on a soap opera is ever really, definitively dead, even after the open-casket ceremony. The actor is liable to come back six years later as his own cousin, after which it slowly dawns on everybody that he never really died at all.

Meanwhile, AJ caught his wife Courtney stripping at a seedy bar. This caused a relapse of his alcoholism, and he lit the bar on fire. Fortunately (b), who is also Courtney's brother, bought everyone off and kept AJ out of jail.

Laura recently killed her father, went mad, and was written out. Skye thought she killed her grandfather, who after suffering a stroke actually pulled the plug on his own life support system in an effort to frame Skye for his murder. Skye had fallen off the wagon too, after having betrayed and broken up with (a), so she wasn't sure whether she executed grandpop or not.

And so it goes. The life of the average soap character has been quite the roller coaster: to begin with, most of them have been both the victims and the perpetrators of murder, often in that order. Many have been replaced by their own evil twin, played by themselves, while others have continued to be the same person even while being played by different actors, suddenly displaying a completely different face and personality.

Sometimes, in fact, it never quite becomes clear who's who, as when, after Brenda's death, she was replaced by an amnesiac look-alike played by another actress. As far as I can tell, no one including her ever really determined whether she was Brenda or not.

This summer, Luke and Laura were on the run again, just like in 1977. I've lived with a number of these characters on and off for a quarter century. You see them every day. You know them intimately. They become your dearest - indeed your only - friends.

I had a crush on Alexis Davis back in the late eighties, when she was on Santa Barbara. But now I fear that our love can never be, as - fine upstanding lawyer though she is - she's about to give birth to (b)'s love child. Ned has agreed to pretend to be the kid's Dad, even though he's still in love with Alexis's sister, recently deceased due to a bomb that went off in (b)'s warehouse, set off by (c).

In fact, paternity is a soap opera obsession, which may show something deep about the psyche of the mostly-female viewership, or perhaps not. Other central themes include hairstyling and cleavage.

Think about this: General Hospital and other soaps produce almost 300 hours of television every year. Being a major actor on these things has got to be the hardest job on TV. The best actors - such as Nancy Lee Grahn (Alexis) and Anthony Geary (Luke) - are astonishing. Being one of the characters, on the other hand, is about the hardest job in the history of the world.

After another traumatic day at the office, or watching the carnage on CNN, one wants to kick back and relax with...why, trauma and carnage, of course. This is why the advent of the cable network Soapnet, which shows GH starting at 9:30 PM, is such an important innovation.

One enjoys watching soap characters fall in love and coo affectionately at one another as they recline. In general, this lasts only a moment before they are back in a soup of suffering, which is what we've really come for.

Human beings are dark, dark. We love suffering, even our own, but especially that of other people, and especially if those people are rich, beautiful, and famous, or are pretending to be.

Yet surely watching General Hospital is a relatively innocent way to live in this darkness, and redemption always beckons. I'm betting that if Brenda gets off the burning yacht away from (c) and checks herself into General Hospital, she can be cured and live happily ever after, or at least for a week or two.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.