By JOSÉ D'ASSUNAÇÃO BARROS*
Preface to the recently released book by Soleni Biscouto Fressato
1.
In this beautiful book, Soleni Biscouto Fressato – historian, sociologist and visual arts scholar – develops an intriguing reflection on the interaction between television soap operas and the social, everyday, political, cultural and psychic lives of human beings articulated in their collective living.
The title, from the outset, is already quite enlightening: Soap operas: magic mirror of life (when reality is confused with the spectacle). From the first pages, the work shows us how real life and soap operas mix in the daily lives of most of its viewers. Both viewers see themselves, in some way, in soap operas, and many fail to make a clear distinction between the soap opera and the real world.
In these cases, they become involved in the practices that are established around these productions: watching the soap operas, commenting on them, taking them into their daily lives, imagining the actors as part of real life and imagining themselves as parts of a novel. On many occasions, when the opportunity presents itself, they confuse the soap opera actor himself with his character, even when they are seen on the streets. At times, as the author tells us in the introduction to her work, “the day after a chapter, we wake up with the strange feeling that what was seen on the screen is still parading around us”.
This important book shows that soap operas – and television realities – are capable of fascinating, but also of alienating, of chaining people to a fictional world that can prevent them from seeing their own reality, their surroundings, and the possibility of understanding and transforming the social world in which they live.
In the world of spectacularization and ultra-neoliberalism, soap operas follow the possibilities of falsifying reality, which are already present on the economic level, and enhance them on the cultural level. How can we grasp and decipher the true social world, with all its contradictions, in the falsified spectacle brought by soap operas?
At the same time, as the author tells us, the soap operas also contain records, traces and clues that reveal what they hide. They can also show us the interests of those who produce or watch them. As fictitious records that simulate realities, they still portray a material culture – the way people dress, eat, live their daily lives – and the social relationships that surround them, unfolding into very real feelings, such as love, fear, loneliness, the feeling of success or failure, the feeling of inclusion, of social rise or fall.
Soap operas talk about the fears, hopes and expectations of ordinary people, as they are the ones they address. For all these reasons, soap operas are historical sources, or become historical sources under the watchful eyes of historians. If the television images of soap operas form the spectators, they also inform them, in reverse of a dialectical movement, in which the spectators, ordinary human beings, also inform (and form) the soap operas. And all these interconnected processes will later inform historians, who seek to understand society through different sources, including soap operas.
2.
It is this attentive look of a historian and social scientist that the author reveals in the analyzes she develops in the various chapters of her thought-provoking book. Soap operas, as contradictory artistic achievements, in their ability to portray and distort reality, interfere with social life and are affected by it. They act on the social reality that surrounds them, in the world of spectators, at the same time as they are products of this same reality.
Soap operas are realizations of history itself: they are produced by a specific group of directors (directors, screenwriters, actors, various professionals, financiers), but they are also produced by a broader collective reality, as spectators and the surrounding world, reality social politics, what happens or can happen in everyday life, the common man and woman who watch the soap opera or who hear about it from those who watch it, this entire collective and multidimensional human world, ultimately, is the true author of the soap operas , which comes to us on television.
Therefore, here is the dual possibility of analyzing society through the soap opera and, conversely, analyzing the soap opera through society. It is this rich interaction between the novel and society – between these two very real worlds, each in its own way – that constitutes the path of analysis developed by the author.
The historian is given the opportunity to examine the projects of acting on society that are forwarded by the different soap operas. Whether these are projects of domination and alienation, as occurs in many of the soap operas of Globo, a broadcaster whose journalism was in tune with the military governments in the second half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s; whether projects of resistance, denunciation or progressive vision, such as those in Dias Gomes' soap operas (Rock Santeiro, Saramandaia, The Beloved e The Espigão) or the theme of agrarian reform brought by O King of Cattle.
Inserted in the context of a large broadcaster that, on several occasions and since its foundation, has collaborated with the military regime, capitalist business projects and agribusiness, the broadcaster's most progressive soap operas can present themselves as important contradictions, which herald an internal diversity to be considered by researchers. Furthermore, despite the role of individual creators (such as directors and screenwriters) in these projects, it is worth remembering that, with television soap operas, we are dealing with collective works, produced by many hands, which also gives a social role to the projects in question. left and right brought by soap operas.
3.
There are important implications in perceiving the soap opera as a collective production – not only because a very complex network of professionals is necessary to transform the soap opera into an effective television production, but also because, in addition to its creators and directors, the viewing public itself also brings its power to redefine the direction of a soap opera, and, therefore, recreate it in directions not foreseen by the directors and screenwriters.
From examples such as Babel Tower e Babylon – among other productions that occupy the center of the analysis – the author shows how public pressure can redefine the paths proposed by television directors, who seek to win over the audience. If the soap opera can act on society, that same society, in return, can act on it. The soap opera, in this way, literally presents itself as an “open work”, which is being constructed as the public consumes it and reacts to it, with cases in which – due to special circumstances such as the Covid pandemic – being entirely exceptional. 19 – presented themselves as “closed works”, a case of A Place in the Sun, premiered by Globo in 2021.
The novel is examined by the author in all its complexity, in a text that reveals, at the same time, the seriousness of research and the fluency of engaging and stimulating writing. In addition to an approach that examines it as an achievement that occurs at the confluence between the cultural industry and the society of spectacle, interdisciplinarity with psychology and psychoanalysis constitutes a crucial dimension in the analysis, appearing in several chapters, based on dialogue with various theorists linked to knowledge psi – particularly those that deal with love, family, generations and the tensions of the human individual in the face of modernity.
Furthermore, intertextuality, with critical reflection on literature and other media, is important to locate the affiliation between soap operas and their counterparts in literature, in the serial practice of old newspapers and on the radio. Finally, the chapters that address the political and social world more directly – with special emphasis on local figures who become drivers of authoritarianism, such as the colonels – constitute privileged moments for interdisciplinarity with political science, sociology and history, such as the chapter that discusses work (formal, informal or absent, through idleness and marginality), and brings interdisciplinarity with the economy to the main scenario.
Additionally, the interdisciplinary circuit is enriched, especially in the last chapter, with geography and ecology, allowing the incorporation – from the analysis of old boy – the essential and urgent reflection on environmental issues, healthy forms of agricultural production and recognition of indigenous peoples and local culture at the confluence of human rights and the rights of nature.
4.
From the point of view of its structure, the work is organized around the combination of some key figures (which appear a lot in Brazilian soap operas – characters linked to the family, romantic relationships, politics, the local power of the colonels or the diverse social classes) with varied themes, which relate to important issues for contemporary Brazil, linking this combination to a good variety of carefully chosen soap operas and offering a wealth of examples for the analyzes undertaken.
A special flavor is added by the fun interactions that the author brings between her analyzes and the novelistic language itself, such as the creative resource of ending each chapter of the book with “scenes from the next chapter”. Finally, it is also worth highlighting the well-thought-out structuring of the work, which in addition to discussing the various issues explained above, provides, in general, a perception of the history of soap operas in Brazil as a whole.
In the first chapter, reflection is developed on the origin of soap operas and their dialogue with the very context of the founding and development of soap operas. Globo network, considering the processes of interaction with American capital. It is also an additional virtue of the author's acuity in perceiving the historical set of soap operas as a polyphonic space, which brings together different social projects, and which, in the broader arc, reveals a well-conceived and studied general plan of execution, where each type of soap operas and television schedules is aimed at a segment of the population.
We learned a lot about soap operas, but also about how capitalism works, how the cultural industry is planned to reach different social sectors, how the political world interacts with television performances, how society itself creates its specific dynamics and also allows ordinary men and women impose themselves, in some way, on the owners of wealth and power who intend to dominate them. We learn from the work the tense dialogue between alienation and social awareness, and we glimpse the complex relationships between individuals and society, as well as the economic processes that transform culture itself and its achievements into commodities.
We learned a little about the history of audiovisual technologies, about marketing strategies, about mass psychology and about political science and anthropology, applied to a specific case study within the cultural industry. Feelings such as love, rivalry, jealousy, loneliness, suffering from abandonment, social exclusion and the desire to ascend socially are brought to the agenda so that we can also learn, from this work, a little more about the possibility of extending a critical look at understanding the family, the work, generational tensions, inequalities and differences, collective living in cities and in the countryside.
We learned, mainly, a lot about history, and once again we opened ourselves to a new opportunity to develop a critical outlook – always and increasingly necessary in recent times in Brazilian social and political history. The reader, moreover, will certainly have moments of pleasure, remembering scenes that have become classics and representative of the sophisticated art of making soap operas, and that, in some way, are “worth seeing again”.
*José D'Assunção Barros is a professor at the Department of History at UFRRJ.
Reference
Soleni Fressato Biscuit. Soap operas, magic mirror of life: when reality is confused with the spectacle. São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva, 2024, 208 pages. [https://amzn.to/3WtrSQH]
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