9 9. Ken Garner, “Would You Like to Hear Some Music?’ Music In-and-Out-of-Control in the Films of Quentin Tarantino,” Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K. J. Donnelly (New York: Continuum, 2001), 189.
10 10. Joanne Jay Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
11 11. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Robynn J. Stilwell, “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic,” in Beyond the Soundtrack, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
7
One Life to Live
Soap Opera Storytelling
ABIGAIL DE KOSNIK
Abstract: Few genres are as associated with the television medium as the soap opera, which has populated daytime schedules for decades, often with the same shows running for more than the lifetimes of their characters. Abigail De Kosnik provides a long-term view of One Life to Live and the lifelong story of one character to highlight the unique narrative possibilities of soap operas and call attention to what might be lost if the genre continues to disappear from television.
In 2012, only four U.S. daytime dramas, or soap operas, remained in production, while as recently as 1999, twelve soap operas were broadcast daily. The last decade has witnessed a wave of cancellations of soaps, most of which enjoyed tremendous longevity, especially in comparison to primetime TV programs, which rarely reach a tenth season. In recent years, four of the most venerable soaps were terminated: Guiding Light ended after seventy-two years of continuous broadcast (fifteen years on the radio and fifty-seven years on television); As the World Turns concluded after fifty-four years; All My Children ran for forty-one years before its last episode aired; and One Life to Live was forty-four years old by its final broadcast. With four soap operas still airing daily on broadcast television (as of this writing in 2012), and soap-like genres growing in popularity outside the United States, the long-running serial television drama is not yet obsolete.
However, the cluster of recent forced finales indicates that U.S. television networks no longer believe that soaps are worth significant investment. The years 2009–2012 have been a “twilight” period for the American soap opera, with the genre’s ranks diminishing swiftly and audiences beginning to accept that soaps, which had always presented themselves as “worlds without end,” are headed for extinction. It is possible, even likely, that all U.S. daytime drama production will shut down in the next ten to twenty years.
Therefore, now may be an appropriate time to reflect on what soaps have been uniquely able to present in their extended runs—namely, lifelong stories, or stories that span some characters’ entire lives. Even though soaps have large ensemble casts, and regular soap viewers follow the plot arcs of dozens of characters, only a handful of characters on each daytime drama have “lived” their entire lives on the show. These characters, in most cases played continuously by one actor, form the core of their respective soap operas, serving as touchstones for all other characters and the fulcrums for many major storylines. On All My Children, model-turned-mogul Erica Kane was the most prominent lifelong character; on One Life to Live, it was the aristocratic-but-tortured Victoria (Viki) Lord; Guiding Light’s most prominent lifelong character was probably attorney Tom Hughes. Erica and Viki were integral to their respective shows from the premieres, and Tom was born five years after the show’s debut, but other lifelong characters appeared on their soaps at much later points in the shows’ runs, such as General Hospital’s Robin Scorpio and Lucky Spencer, Days of Our Lives’ Hope Williams Brady, and Guiding Light’s Lily Walsh Snyder. What defines lifelong characters is that they are featured on their shows for decades, so that many viewers have a sense of witnessing their entire lifetimes, or a very large portion it. Most of the aforementioned characters started as children or teens on their shows, so viewers feel as if they watched those characters “grow up,” or, if they started watching soaps at an early age, that they grew up with the characters. Different generations of soap viewers may attach to different generations of soap characters, and people may miss out on several years of characters’ lives if they stop watching soaps for a period of time and then resume regular viewing, but the intergenerational community of soap fans is available to fill in knowledge gaps. Oral histories relayed from fan to fan, as well as elaborate character histories published in book format and online, make it possible for a soap fan to follow, or retrospectively learn about, every major event in a soap character’s life.
This essay focuses on the lifelong story of Viki Lord, the central character of ABC’s One Life to Live. Viki’s expansive narrative offers clear examples of three key elements of soap opera lifelong storytelling: (1) the deep seed and long reveal, (2) continual reverberation, and (3) real-life temporality. Each storytelling technique, as illustrated with examples from Viki’s fictional life, highlights the unique narrative power and possibilities of the soap opera genre. Soap operas are best known for sudden and improbable plot twists, but not all revelations on soaps seemingly come from nowhere. Some “reveals” come after years of story-building and character development. I use the phrase “deep seed and long reveal” to refer to such plot arcs. Soaps have the ability to hint at plot points for decades, heightening tension around certain secrets or hidden aspects of characters’ lives that the audience knows about, but that the characters are unaware of until at some point; often many years after a narrative arc begins, the secret explodes in a ferocious climax with severe narrative ramifications. On One Life to Live, the unveiling of the root cause of Viki Lord’s psychological illness was the show’s most notable deep seed and long reveal.
Viki was shown to suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) from One Life’s start in 1968. Viki’s most dominant “alter,” the alternate personality that emerged and overtook Viki’s life most often throughout the show’s run, was called Niki Smith. Viki’s father, millionaire newspaper magnate, Victor Lord, raised Viki strictly, with high expectations, as she was the heir to his fortune and his business empire. As a result, Viki grew up to be elegant, well-spoken, and incredibly responsible in all matters; in contrast, her alternate personality, Niki, was a loud-mouthed, manipulative, promiscuous party girl. Each time Niki surfaced, she wreaked havoc, and each time, Viki successfully suppressed her and repaired the social damage Niki had done. What caused Viki to develop such a destructive alter?
In the late 1960s, Viki uncovered a repressed memory of her mother accidentally falling down a staircase to her death. Viki believed that the trauma of witnessing this horrible event led her psyche to create “Niki.” But in the 1990s, Victor Lord’s widow and Viki’s enemy, Dorian Lord, began to insinuate that the cause of Viki’s DID lay in other childhood experiences involving her father, Victor, the memories of which lay buried in Viki’s subconscious mind. For almost thirty years, One Life to Live viewers had seen Viki refer periodically to her domineering father’s rigid expectations and impossibly high standards as sources of psychological pain. During those decades, the audience watched dozens of moments when Viki told stories about, or simply made mention of, Victor Lord, as well as numerous flashback scenes of a young Viki interacting with her father. Over this extended period of time, the viewer gathered many impressions of Viki’s relationship with Victor, such as the fact that Victor was obsessed with his daughter, and had an unhealthy need to exercise complete control over every facet of Viki’s life. Therefore, when Dorian began to imply that Viki was repressing memories about her father that led to her developing multiple personalities, most viewers heard Dorian’s veiled warnings as confirmation of what they already suspected: that Victor had sexually abused Victoria.
In 1995, Dorian finally revealed the truth about Victor’s having abused Viki during her childhood, and the knowledge shook Viki to her core. But for the longtime viewer, this reveal was an extraordinary reward for having faithfully followed One Life to Live for as many as twenty-seven years. For the possibility that Victor had been an abusive monster to Viki had been planted in the minds of audience members in the 1960s, and that seed of suspicion