Presentation// Left Futures for the (Melodramatic) Soap Opera: Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives

Clip: Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives, 1984. Part 3: "The Bank (Victimless Crime)": 

http://www.ubu.com/film/ashley_perfect_03.html
Suggest starting 1:23 for ~5 min.

Finding revolutionary potential in the soap opera form is not exactly new, but I’ve had to ask myself several times over now why that feels so familiar a notion. Network TV’s audience has always been, for the most part, notwithstanding, because a certain formula was working for its soaps: where would a politics that did anything beyond parody or adjustment actually enter when the intention was to meet a mass audience; and this is not to mention its flamboyant characters, who veer from rich to working-class in upstairs-downstairs theatrics that eschew nuance and substance for conflict after conflict after conflict. Yet I’ve almost put the soap opera on a pedestal, as if it were the perfect open text, its difference in repetition serving as the utopic gap between goal-oriented narrative and stylistic excess, to use Jane Feuer’s articulation (and also Linda Williams’s), much as melodramatic film warrants.

I think of Raul Ruiz’s The Wandering Soap Opera, of which it’s been written: “The film’s central premise is that the best approximation for Chilean reality following the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship is that of a soap opera or telenovela; after all, what other narrative form is flexible enough to accommodate all the pent-up collective spasms of seventeen years of repression?”[1] And Rainer Maria Fassbinder said in an interview:[2] “Take a film like [Douglas] Sirk’s Written on the Wind: what passes on the screen isn’t something that I can directly identify with from my own life, because it’s so pure, so unreal. And yet within me, together with my own reality, it becomes a new reality. The only actuality that matters is in the viewer’s head.”

Melodrama, then, as Fassbinder proves, might make room for transformative thinking (or the spectator, as Jane Feuer reminds) moreso than political messaging per se. So if we can move away from linguistic theories of structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, might we find ourselves instead in nomadic, rhizomatic territories that seek to place aesthetic works on a continuum wherein the distance, the gap itself between mise-en-scène and content is crucial; and politics is emphasized as dispersed, non-masterly thinking and being? Perhaps this gap is represented best by the “indefinitely expandable middle” of a serial drama that Feuer mentions in “Melodrama, the Serial Form, and Television Today.” Yet I also think of Edward Said on in-betweenness, about which he says, “There is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position.”^[3] Any insistence risks closure, resolutions, and “[a]ny ultimate resolution—for good or for ill—goes against the only moral imperative of the continuing serial form: the plot must go on,” as Feuer says.

For a nomadic theorist, the soap characters involved in their complex familial plots and networks would be as important for the gap between texts as they are to the dominant text, to the straightforward narrative. Feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti reminds us that subjects in the nomadic state “work to disrupt conceptions of linear time, to subvert set social conventions and power relations,” and that, importantly, they are not metaphors, but “expressions of different socio-economic and symbolic locations.”[4] And if “the ‘openness’ of TV texts does not in and of itself represent a salutory or progressive stance,” as Feuer writes, perhaps it is crucial to simply move, or place, these subjects outside the mainstream (including niche television in the main/stream here), and look at experimental modes of distribution, such as public access TV. These platforms, less subject to regulation and advertisement, also allow for the collapse of genre. For wouldn’t the Brechtian mode of distanciation at hand here not circle back or around, so that these aesthetic works, these modes of narration and influence that have given us the serial melodrama, eventually hybridize? I.e., if melodramatic theater  has influenced à film à television à web à theater? (Radio drama is in here too.)

I put pressure on this because I still want to make a case for the televisual serial form’s inclination toward progressive politics, despite Jane Feuer’s wonderful summation that it can be interpreted in either direction. “The emergence of the melodramatic serial in the 1980s represents a radical response to and expression of cultural contradictions,” she writes. “Whether that response is interpreted to the Right or to the Left is not a question the texts themselves can answer.” She also notes that only the elite reader/audience, already committed to subversive ideas, would drag out a consciously subversive “secondary text” from any melodrama. Like reading Twitter for confirmation bias, seeing the form as uniquely suited for leftist/progressive politics may say more about who is seeing (me); or rather, looking, than it does about whatever content, dominant or secondary, is being parsed.

These two last points bring me to Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives. I am not positive that bringing modes of distribution into the argument, if a televisual soap opera has been partly defined by its existence on network TV, does anything but continue to interpret. Still, across a few ponds in the 1980s of Dallas and Dynasty was a parallel universe: public access. First staged and broadcast by American avant-garde composer Robert Ashley for UK’s Channel 4 in 1984, Perfect Lives was an opera made for television. It confronts its audience with “exaggerated, [sung] delirium, providing a challenge to our perception, [with] the excesses of behavior narrated by Ashley himself.”[5] While this narration-by-author made it difficult to reproduce “faithfully,” after Ashley passed in 2014, younger experimental performers took the opera off-screen to different sites. This allowed for content written for TV to resonate with other built environments as it re-became a performance. 

For instance, Perfect Lives Manhattan took place during Occupy Wall Street's encampment at Zuccotti Park, in the financial district. We had discussed doing ‘The Bank’ episode at Zuccotti Park, but eventually decided against it because of our need for amplification (and the complicated politics between the Occupy movement and the city) and the desire to be within walking distance of the Performa headquarters, around which the other episodes were located. However, with that in mind we chose to perform the episode in front of a Citibank, near Washington Square Park (Fig. 5), that had received a lot of press a few weeks earlier for locking patrons in the bank during an Occupy protest that was mishandled by the police.²¹ Our hope was that the generic idea of the small-town bank would resonate with the politics surrounding big-name banks in the city, and this Citibank in particular.[6]

            To sum up: It’s my take that political futures for the TV soap opera include, in the end, moving off-air to take advantage of banalities that we know now—having narrowed down living to our living rooms—are in fact excessive: e.g., being present, in a place, thinking.

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[1] https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4831-locarno-2017-ra-l-ruiz-s-the-wandering-soap-opera

[2] https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/rainer-werner-fassbinder-1974-primary-need-satisfy-audience

[3] Said, Edward W. “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals.” Grand Street, no. 47 (October 1, 1993): 116.

[4] Braidotti, Rosi, “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11.2–3, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 180.

[5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/tempo/article/story-of-the-huge-face-of-an-arrangement-varispeeds-adaptation-of-robert-ashleys-perfect-lives/1C984DF239C53B625A0281B94494CC75/core-reader

[6] ibid.