SOAP OPERA SOAPBOX

I've watched reruns of the original 1966-71 DARK SHADOWS twice before this, but only in this third re-watch that I've started attempting to analyze the series in terms of its mythicity. But to even make the attempt, it's necessary to dwell on the way the series told its stories, particularly in terms to the topic of structural length.

I introduced my CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH last year, in which I made one reference to the form of melodrama known as the soap opera, in my section dealing with "the long arc:"

the long arc also takes place within a larger continuity, but like the short arc doesn't entirely stand on its own. The American "soap opera" did not originate the long arc, but it's the genre best known for particular plot-lines that could be extended for weeks, if not longer.

Now, I should specify that there are two different subspecies of soap operas, and that when I made this statement, I was speaking of what I'll term the "weekday soap" rather than the "weekly soap." While there may well be any number of other subspecies of which I'm not aware, I think of "soap opera" as productions that appear five times a week on daytime television. (I presume that early radio dramas of this type, of which I know nothing, followed this general tendency.) For most of my life, television dramas that aired on a weekly basis-- almost always in the evening-- tended to be episodic stories with only marginal continuity between one another. Eighties serials like DALLAS and DYNASTY weren't the first "weekly soaps" on television, but since then they've provided a storytelling model not only for serials in the exact same mold but also those that alternate between long arcs and self-contained short stories, like most of the seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.

Despite the fact that I'm now going to generalize on the structure of the weekday serial, I confess that I've only followed three in my lifetime: the supernatural soap DARK SHADOWS, the spoof-soap MARY HARTMAN (which was technically a "weeknight" serial), and PASSIONS, which was a little of both. Still, I believe that the typical weekday serial consists almost entirely of long arcs, short arcs, and the occasional vignette. The narrative appeal of the soap opera is that for the most part it forestalls pleasing resolutions-- perhaps very loosely comparable to the Freudian notion of disavowal-- with the result that even when a given problem seems to be wrapped up, a new problem ensues so quickly-- often one introduced through the uses of subplots-- that there's no real pleasure from the first difficulty's solution.

If it's accurate that the first American soap was a 1930 radio drama called PAINTED DREAMS, then it may be that newspaper comic strips like 1924's LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, began utilizing the essence of the long arc first. Yet even though a number of comic strips appeared on six out of seven weekdays-- and sometimes on Sunday as well-- the comic strip doesn't make heavy use of subplots, except to lead into the very next ensuing storyline. The weekday soap comes closer to the jumble of real life, in that neither long arc, short arc, nor vignette has dominance. The viewer seems to be seeing regular lives-- even those of 18th-century vampires-- to be unfolding before them.

Following the innovations of Stan Lee's Silver Age Marvel comics, the comic-book medium was able to master many of the rudiments of the weekday soap. Nevertheless, even though comic books had a greater potential to master narrative forms than did comic strips, they weren't published as often. Even the rate weekly comic-book feature could not develop its narrative any more quickly than could a weekly television serial.

Because there's so little resolution in the weekday soaps, the writers behind the scripts tend to repeat themselves a lot. Thus a serial like DARK SHADOWS exhibits not Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" but an "eternal recursion," going by this American Heritage definition of the word:

A method of defining a sequence of objects, such as an expression, function, or set, where some number of initial objects are given and each successive object is defined in terms of the preceding objects. 

With this in mind, a serial like DARK SHADOWS doesn't have "continuity" so much as endless variations upon a theme, which become more and more complicated as new information is added.
The serial starts out in 1966, and its central Gothic mystery seems to be the familial background of Victoria Winters, who may or may not be related to the Collins family. Victoria's relation to the Collins past shifts into a new phase with the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. Though the two of them originally have no direct relation to one another-- Barnabas is searching for the reincarnation of his long-dead lover Josette, and thinks he's found her in Maggie Evans-- but eventually Victoria becomes identified, however imperfectly, with Josette. At the same time, when the actress playing Victoria leaves the show, the serial simply shifts into exploring other mysteries of the Collins family, with or without involving Barnabas.

It's almost impossible to analyze a single episode of a weekday soap like DARK SHADOWS, because the incidents of one episode are designed to lead quickly, albeit often not seamlessly, to yet more and more incidents, with hardly a breath taken to reflect upon the Meaning of It All. Rather, SHADOWS can only express any mythicity in its primary structural forms of the long arc, the short arc, and the vignette-- which I'll attempt to show in a forthcoming review.