Co-opting the Soap Opera Narrative: dissertations in miniature part 2

I always know when I really love a book, because before I even finish it, I begin to dream in its syntax. I dream the narrative structure—beyond the page—extrapolating it to greater depth and distance. I conjecture the visceral, essential element of the words.

It is said that fluency in a language is hallmarked by dreaming and counting in that language. When you are able to co-opt a linguistic structure , to elegantly violate that structure if you wish, you have become entitled to call it yours.

It's the same reason poets are afforded license to verbify nouns, doff punctuation, and to privilege sound over meaning if they see fit to do so within a given poetic space.

Without fail, when a narrative place (book, song, poem, life-experience) becomes sacred, two things happen: there is first the ardent devotion to committing it to memory through repetition, and the inevitable desire to put it in relationship to one's own existence and understanding of the world. Part and parcel of the second step is theory-making, the commenting upon. Shortly after that, inference-making and the solidifying of opinions on the implications of the narrative—writers' intentions, ostensible meaning vs. subjective meaning –all come to the fore.

Narratives heal.

As I said in part 1 of this exploration, when I found my beloved supercouple construct's narrative footprints alive and well on YouTube in the summer of 2010, I was in a singularly terrifying place. I was desperate for some way to be tethered to the earth again. I'm an avid reader of books, but there were no physical pages I could worry with thumb and index finger at that time that would do a tenth for me what finding Frisco and Felicia again did to ground and reorient me to my life.

I started off passively. I simply viewed clips completely oblivious to what the comments said. Oddly, happily, I remembered much of the dialogue word for word, but in this new context, the experience created a sense of déjà vu. I knew what would happen, but it was still unfamiliar to navigate the serialized material this way. The serialization was happening on two levels now: as a soap opera, the stories unfolded in a recursive, clipped fashion anyway. But on YT, I had to determine which posters had posted the continuation of the stories, whether or not they had, or would, and where storylines crossed in one person's playlist with another person's clips. I was becoming a sleuth. I had to internalize the various naming conventions, comb my own memory for the year that certain narrative strands were in play, and search accordingly.

I was also a researcher. User handles made it clear what characters were privileged more than others in certain groupings. So I watched many videos on fast forward until I caught a glimpse of something or someone who interested me.

Then, it happened. I suddenly wanted to interact with the material. I wanted to talk to someone about it. I yelled at the clips. "Oh, Shut Up, Character I Don't Like!" or, "You've got to be kidding me, this is bullsh*t!"

I started to read the comments. Some of them were staggeringly astute, or simply said exactly what I'd been thinking. They were by turns funny, invigorating, enraging, or just plain stupid. I wanted to talk back to these people—whoever they were—but some of them had left the comments 1 or 2 years before. I worried, too, that it might be presumptuous. I could detect certain threads of relationship among the recurring commenters. They had a clear vibe going, and I was a newbie—someone whose understanding of F&F in particular, and of soap opera idiosyncrasy, in general was untested.

It also meant that I would have to get an account—commit to the idea of myself as someone who not only watched these clips, but who was invested in them—and play for real.

Something fairly significant was afoot. But how to explain this to my sister, who is also my roommate, and my best friend who were increasingly worried about my seemingly obsessive proclivity?

More to come in part 3.

dissertations in miniature

for the past several months now i have been caught in a youtube vortex. as is the case with most rabbit holes, it was some combination of accident and curiosity that made me peer in. and of course, what i started out looking for was not the ultimate point in terms of what i found.

contextually speaking, last summer, when i became tethered to the youtube experience, i badly needed an escape. after almost dying in car accident (with both of my sisters) and other uncomfortable situations related to my apartment, i was in a fairly constant state of anxiety and depression of the soul.

i'm usually too intellectual--far too rational a creature--for true down-in-the-dumpedness. what i cannot solve by puzzling out and analysis, i tackle with activity. there's something healthy in that. i'm also wonderfully capable of compartmentalization, which sometimes bleeds over into being denial's pusher/runner on the streets of my own perception.

anyway, i knew what youtube was before last summer, of course, but it wasn't a go-to venue for me. i'd watch clips people sent me, but i didn't hawk it for entertainment. it wasn't yet in the fabric of my paradigm to proactively search for things there. in any event, it became a delightful distraction.

i'll never forget the oppressively hot night (no central air in this apartment) this all started. a general perusal around the Internet like a turn 'round the parlor room in a Jane Austen novel, and i happened upon a thread of intrigue. oh, this thread i sought to worry might not tempt me today if i saw it. i don't remember exactly what it was, except that it was.

so, there i was looking for something very specific on youtube all of a sudden: "general hospital opening credits, 1963." suddenly, i was enamored of and overcome with the importance of my task. yt was not really forthcoming on this score. the search yielded all manner of "related videos" instances. the thing about that feature is that it is practically impossible not to click on something--even if you know it's not what trail you want to be on. yt is very meta in that way. and self-referential.

i have not watched general hospital since early summer 1991. and i have not thought to go checking on it in the interim. but there was a period of years prior to going off to college when i held court with a handful of characters--two in particular. this was roughly 1984-1991.

well, by way of that seemingly innocuous search i was portalized to the past. the lion's share of all the narrative pieces i cared about as a twelve-year old and eventually, a teenager, had been preserved and posted by a number of people who obviously still cared. i was soon to realize that i did, too, desperately. i thought i had rather nonchalantly let it all go 16 years before.

i was heartless toward my pre-college self and her preoccupations, and moved effortlessly into the next phase of my life. i had other worries: my own legion of heartbreaks, remarkable tomfoolery, and well, other rabbit holes it took years to climb out of.

somehow, though, on that night in july of last year, hours went by before i knew it, and i was deeply enmeshed in a gh storyline from the fall of 1985. at that time, those two characters were at the height of their fraught love affair, and this would all be further informed on a meta-level by a foreshadowed offscreen marriage and two children.

so. double-helix narratives, hinting at themselves, all twisty and presciently delicious. as a narrative deconsructionist, this was even more impossible for me to resist now than it had been when i was a child. i didn't have the vocabulary then to describe all that i was sussing out, all that was teeming beneath the surface.

then, it was about the sheer mystery and impact of watching two people kiss differently than other people were kissing on tv, it seemed to me. always an analyst, even at 12, i leveraged the rewind button on the vcr to try and determine the moment an unscripted look passed across a face, to determine the precise moment when a kiss left the page, and became about a transference of energy between two people that couldn't possibly be scripted.

so, in the summer of 2010, for weeks, i watched favourite clips over and over again--enjoying them on a purely visceral level, to be sure--with the informed mind of an academian and narrative poet now more solidly in place. come fall, i was still at it.

youtube is a curious thing in that it is about the visual narrative, but has made a way for the written, metanarrative thoughts of viewers to companion that visual piece. the comments feature is democratic. you can write any banal thing there you want, and most people do. you can write effusive appreciation for what you see, or express extreme disgust. you can also discuss the implications of the video, the poster's intentions as you conjecture them, and if you are dealing with serialized subject matter, those comments become a string of dissertations in miniature.

later, i'll get into what happened between me and a handful of metanarrators on these boards when after months i was still viewing, favouriting, and new posters began to emerge to post to meet the requests of those who clamored for the gaps in the overarching narrative of those two characters to be filled...