Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been binge-watching one of the most innovative series on television. Like many of the gems of the current TV renaissance, it features extended narratives with complex plots, intricate backstories, and layered characters. Its approach to storytelling is remarkably adventurous, shattering television, and even cinematic conventions.
I’m speaking, of course, of General Hospital.
General Hospital, and soap operas overall, are usually not considered especially innovative. On the contrary, they’re thought of as melodramatic and clichéd.
And yet, it’s likely longform television dramas like The Wire wouldn’t exist if soap operas hadn’t paved the way. “Daytime soap operas were the first instances of serialized narratives in television,” Elana Levine, associate professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told Quartz. “It was in daytime that TV writers, producers, and directors figured out how to create moving-image stories that had no set ending, that had characters that changed over time and had histories and memories.”
Soap opera’s popularity in the 1950s encouraged networks to try serialization in prime time, which led to classics like Peyton Place, Dallas, Dynasty, and Hill Street Blues—eventually leading to today’s highly regarded series like Mad Men.
I’m not the first to make the connection between Mad Men and soap operas, but still, it isn’t often discussed in any depth, probably because most critics who write about prestige television aren’t interested in, or especially familiar with, soap operas. “There are a lot of assumptions about soap operas in our culture,” Levine explained. “Most of the ideas people have about them are influenced more by stereotypes and assumptions than by the programs themselves.”
In that context, watching a soap opera as a newbie like me can be a revelation. As I said, I’ve been following General Hospital for a couple of weeks now, viewing around ten episodes. That’s barely a drop in the soap’s fifty-year-plus history, but it’s close to an entire season of shows like Orphan Black, Daredevil or The Wire.
Those shows are all known, more or less, for narrative complexity and sophistication. But compared to General Hospital, they might as well be toddler picture books. Two weeks into GH, and I’m only just beginning to get a grip on who’s married to whom, and who is the child of whom. New characters I’ve never seen pop up every episode, complete with complicated backstories and intricate, never-quite-fully explicated lies. Did Nicholas shoot Hayden to keep Jake from learning that he (Jake) is really Jason? Who on earth are Nicholas and Hayden and Jason anyway?
The confusion is in part due to the fact that it’s almost impossible for a curious contemporary viewer to start watching soaps from the beginning. Levine says that soaps were among the first shows to move to digital in the 2000s. I’ve been watching General Hospital on Hulu in the evenings, not on broadcast during the day. But episodes are only available for about a week before they drop offline, and there’s no systematic DVD reissue.
Forget Netflix—Levine says episodes from before the 80s are basically lost forever. Those after that are hard to find and collect. Everyone watching General Hospital is a newbie in some respect; no one can see the whole thing.
The lack of an easily accessible catalogue is due to technological limitations and a perceived lack of demand. But I think it also is emblematic—inadvertently or not—of the soap’s thematic obsession with secrecy and confusion. Everyone on General Hospital has something to hide. He’s unfaithful, she’s disguised as her twin sister, he stole a baby for a cancer bone marrow treatment and framed his ex-wife (no, really). The viewer’s job is to seek out a truth that’s never complete or whole. The dramatic, meaningful rhythms of film or television, with their focus on characterization and plot, are largely abandoned. The moral arc of Breaking Bad or Orange Is the New Black, where you see the true, real iniquity of the main anti-hero, doesn’t exist in soaps. You never find out the true inner core of anyone.
Instead of truth, you get deferral. Scenes are short, and often interrupted in the middle. Genres, too, are chopped up and scrambled; there’s a murder mystery, a gang war, a romance, a domestic drama. One jumps to the other with a kind of glacial frenzy. Plot points are repeated, drawn out, multiplied, and never concluded.
The lengthening of narrative is part of what gets praised in shows like The Wire or Daredevil or Buffy. From soaps, these shows have learned to juggle multiple characters over season after season, creating an engrossing sense of continuity and depth. Watching General Hospital, though, it becomes clear just how timid prestige television can be.
The desire for endings, for meanings, for morals, is powerful in television today. The scheming Vee is defeated at the end of season 2 on OITNB; Walter White meets his just fate at the end of Breaking Bad; Omar Little goes from folk hero to an anonymous corpse in The Wire.
General Hospital is remorseless in comparison. In GH, the world is confusing. An endless array of characters pass through with their own stories and secrets you can’t begin to fully understand. The past disappears and can never be recovered. The soap opera, in this sense, has no beginning, no end, and no final meaning. Despite the present-day experiments in cutting-edge television, it will be a long time before HBO, or Netflix, or anyone else manages to come up with television as odd, or daring, as the soaps that started it all.
You can follow Noah on Twitter at @hoodedu. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
The Americans with Disabilities Act turned 25 years old last month. It was enacted by U.S. Congress with the goal of ensuring that people with disabilities had access to “reasonable accommodations” so that they could participate wholly in public life.
Did it work? Consider the New York City subway. SupraStructure featured these two maps. The one on the left is the NYC subway map of the 490 stations in the system; on the right is the accessible subway map, including only the 100 or so accessible stops:
“Essentially the NYC subway system is useless if you use a wheelchair,” writes Bad Cripple about the map. He continues:
Access to mass transportation for a person such as myself that uses a wheelchair is routinely difficult in the extreme. … Wheelchair lifts on buses are somehow broken or the drivers refuse to use the lift often claiming ignorance. Accessible taxis are as rare as diamonds in many cities. Subways in the vast majority of cities are grossly inaccessible. Rental car companies often do not have the car with hand controls rented weeks or days in advance. Shuttle buses at airports are not always accessible. Hotel shuttle buses are also typically not accessible.
He adds that discount travel is “pure folly” and that newer options like AirBnB and Uber seem to have no interest in accommodating people with disabilities. Not to mention the many places he travels that have broken lifts, elevators, and strangely non-accessible “accessible” accommodations.
As with much civil rights legislation, passing the ADA was just the first step in gaining equality. People have often had to sue piecemeal to get accessibility. A person identifies a restaurant without accessible bathrooms, for example, and begins legal proceedings to force the business to comply. Slowly, little by little — thanks to lawsuits, building codes, and other means — the world is becoming more accessible, though not nearly as quickly as people with disabilities need it to.
So I was going to write a post talking about Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Swing, which is, as you all know, business as usual around here. Now, the first step in any art post is finding a high-quality image, which put me on Google, which in turn led me to this.
And this is–I mean. Look, this moment slipped my mind, all right? I saw Frozen once, was deeply unimpressed, and never thought about it again. I forgot that it contained a blissfully unaware nod to a dirty painting.
Yeah. Surprise! The Swing is a dirty goddamn painting.
Duh, you say, that guy’s looking straight up her dress, but that’s mid-range dirty at best, this is eighteenth century France, the aristocracy got dirtier than that on their way to breakfast. And presumably also at breakfast. A swing isn’t good enough! More filth! Better filth, you demand, beating your hands on the table.
Well, let me just assure you that you are looking at genuinely fun dirty, and hopefully that holds you over while we take a little trip into background. Buckle in for a very French story.
Sometime in the 1760s, painter Gabriel François Doyen, fresh off the success of several large-scale religious paintings, was contacted by a “gentleman of the court”, who had seen his work and been moved by it. Pleased by the attention, Doyen went to meet this courtier, and discovered him at what he later described as “a pleasure house”, entangled an an amorous embrace with his mistress. The following exchange, related by Doyen to a writer friend of his several years after the fact, went something like this:
“Monsieur Doyen, I was so moved by your work! The angels, the colors, the piety. Its beauty is unrivaled!”
“Well, that’s–very kind of you. Although I do…that is. If you and your–ah, young lady would rather I returned later–”
“Nonsense, sit down, sit down! You should be as comfortable as we are.”
At which point Doyen, more or less trapped, did pull up a chair, although presumably not without giving it a surreptitious wipe with his handkerchief first.
The young aristocrat, whose identity is unknown, was apparently so impressed by Doyen’s religious work that he hoped to commission the artist for something decidedly less religious.
Just try to imagine it: Doyen sitting on the edge of some louche-looking parlour chair while a young man in a highly noticeable state of undress cuddles with his equally nude lady friend and describes what will surely be a masterpiece.
“I should like to see madame–” (history doesn’t tell us if he booped her nose here, but I like to imagine he did) “On a swing, being pushed by a bishop. But you will place me in such a way that I will be able to see the legs of the lovely girl, and better still, if you would like to enliven your picture a little more…”
Now you’d think, wouldn’t you, that Doyen would have gone a little pale at this and made his excuses, but hilariously, he appears to kind of get into it, all of a sudden suggesting, "Ah Monsieur, it is necessary to add to the essential idea of your picture by making Madame’s shoes fly into the air and having some cupids catch them.”
Flying shoes, he said. Essential, he said. Remember that for later.
In the end though, for whatever reason, Doyen decided not to take the commission, and passed it to Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who took the idea, looked at it, decided “too tame.”
Now, the only thing he really changed from the initial idea was the bishop. The man pushing the swing is now just a dude. A significantly older dude than the young man in the foreground, though, which is notable. We don’t know for certain why this alteration was made, maybe Fragonard didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the church. Or maybe he just sucked at drawing vestments.
The old not-bishop is hidden in shadow, holding the rope of the swing, his age and restraint rendering him unimportant. This is an image for the young and passionate. The girl on the swing leaves the trees behind, flying with her knees open towards the statue of Cupid, who holds a finger to his lips, signifying the illicit nature of this encounter. And like, make no mistake, this is an encounter. Our unnamed aristocrat lies on the ground, twined around with blossoming undergrowth, his eyes directed beneath her skirts, and his arm erect, reaching for what he sees. He holds his hat in his hand, a funny little detail until you remember that in late 18th century erotic art, men’s hats (and their bared heads) were often directly analogous with their dicks. No one ever said Rococo was subtle, okay.
The swing (and the young lady on it) are at the peak of their movement, all fluttering pinks and the soft, sinuous curve of her body beneath the glistening silk, and just as she’s gone as far as she can go, positioned over her lover’s outstretched arm, with her toes pointed at Cupid–her shoe flies off. (A missing shoe, by the way, and a bare foot, were neck-and-neck with the broken pitcher in the French Symbols Of Lost Virginity Sweepstakes.)
All of which is to say, The Swing is a painting of an orgasm.
I almost don’t know where to take it from here. Um, let’s see. Well, this became an iconic image of the Rococo period, thanks to the rich colors, freedom of movement and the finished image’s contagious joy. Mostly-contagious, anyway, Enlightenment philosophers hated it, presumably because they weren’t getting laid. But it really is hard not to smile looking at it. That girl’s having a great time.
Such a great time, in fact, that Anna from Frozen probably shouldn’t be reenacting it. Even with both her shoes on.
The modern TV executive is a fascinating bundle of learned impulses, instincts, and complex sensory organs. Like a migratory swallow or a hibernation-seeking bear, their bodies are perfectly tuned to the cultural environment, heads swiveling at all times toward magnetic north (or the latest Shonda Rhimes show, as the case may be). So it’s not surprising that every now and then two zeitgeist-tuned networks will announce they’re developing shows about the same thing, even if the topic at hand isn’t usually as esoteric as, say, Kentucky bourbon production.
So yes, Fox and NBC have both announced that they’re developing one-hour dramas about the excitement-filled world of Kentucky colonels and the sweet syrup that gives them succor. Fox’s show, produced by Hell On Wheels’ Bruce Romans, is just going by The Untitled Kentucky Bourbon Project for now, but NBC’s entry—spearheaded by Empire’s David ...
designed by NOEM, a group which takes its name from its desire to produce buildings with ‘no emissions’, ‘the spaceship home’ was completed for a client who wanted a quickly constructed dwelling to enjoy panoramic vistas of his plot. the project’s polished metallic exterior was the user’s aesthetic choice, with a large terrace oriented to present views of its surroundings. the unit is composed of prefabricated wooden modules attached to a metal frame four meters above the ground. access to the dwelling is via a restored airplane stairway.
That guy who went around painting dicks over potholes so they would be considered obscene and the local govt would have to fill them in did a better job of impacting the world in a positive light than banksy ever did, or ever will
I like making clocks. I’m fascinated by time and time travel. Possibly because of this, I also like Doctor Who (the longest-running Science-Fiction TV series ever!).
The latest seasons feature a new title sequence that has a clock face spiraling into a sort of “time vortex.” Very appropriate and very cool. Amazingly enough, I haven’t found anything like this on the internet yet (at least, nothing I liked), so I painstakingly designed my own spiral clock face for all my timey-wimey needs.
What’s The Doctor without his TARDIS and Sonic Screwdriver? The hands of this clock are sonic screwdrivers, and the second hand is a TARDIS spiraling into the vortex!
“She doesn’t speak up for herself, so I’m afraid if someone harms her she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t learn about things that happen to her until they are reflected in her behavior at home. Recently I found her washing the dishes, and I asked her where she learned to do that. She told me: ‘When I visit my friend’s house, I do the dishes all the time.’”
Super Opinionated.
