soap operas! I love soap operas!
Sep. 28th, 2008 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceruseeSoap operas can be hauntingly beautiful. American TV soaps air about forty minutes worth of content for most of the three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, so they have a lot of filler; they recast frequently, they retread ground often; they revisit the spectacular enough to choke on it. But they still sometimes achieve moments of haunting beauty, as in this scene here, at 3:48.
It's a very sad scene (in the verbose, drawn-out style of soaps) and probably would seem to sad to anybody, given that it's a conversation about the miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy, but what gives it spectacular kick is the audience's knowledge of the background. This a conversation between an ex-husband and wife who once loved each other intensely, but whose relationship crashed and burned in a spectacular and emotionally scarring way, with lots of guilt for both parties; they refer several times to incidents from the process of that breakdown. Both are now married to other people; she's in love with her new husband, but he's publicly known to still be in love with her.
It's such a gorgeous thing, the interplay of emotions--her, almost at peace with the past, with the mistakes she made and the wounds she suffered, trying now to comfort him; him, feeling raw, guilty and exposed by the collapse of his present marriage, and the miscarriage just suffered by his present wife. Although she loves him, she's trying to keep those feelings under control, so as not to torpedo her current, happy life, yet everything he says is the stab of a dagger--every confession of guilt for his failures of his present wife is also a sorrowful apology to her for having made them first with her.
It's a beautiful dance, graceful and poignant, danced with elegance by people who stumbled through the steps years ago, and now, somehow, find themselves dancing it again. They know the score, know how it ends, and are trying so hard not to move to that rhythm again, but are propelled onwards by the weight of intimacy, the memory of deep feeling.
It's sort of fucking awesome.
It's a very sad scene (in the verbose, drawn-out style of soaps) and probably would seem to sad to anybody, given that it's a conversation about the miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy, but what gives it spectacular kick is the audience's knowledge of the background. This a conversation between an ex-husband and wife who once loved each other intensely, but whose relationship crashed and burned in a spectacular and emotionally scarring way, with lots of guilt for both parties; they refer several times to incidents from the process of that breakdown. Both are now married to other people; she's in love with her new husband, but he's publicly known to still be in love with her.
It's such a gorgeous thing, the interplay of emotions--her, almost at peace with the past, with the mistakes she made and the wounds she suffered, trying now to comfort him; him, feeling raw, guilty and exposed by the collapse of his present marriage, and the miscarriage just suffered by his present wife. Although she loves him, she's trying to keep those feelings under control, so as not to torpedo her current, happy life, yet everything he says is the stab of a dagger--every confession of guilt for his failures of his present wife is also a sorrowful apology to her for having made them first with her.
It's a beautiful dance, graceful and poignant, danced with elegance by people who stumbled through the steps years ago, and now, somehow, find themselves dancing it again. They know the score, know how it ends, and are trying so hard not to move to that rhythm again, but are propelled onwards by the weight of intimacy, the memory of deep feeling.
It's sort of fucking awesome.