Sunday, April 11, 2010

A Tear For Telenovelas

I cheerfully tell a friend that I have bad news.
'What, wait - let me see - you have to leave your apartment?'
'Worse.'
'You have to go back to England?'
'Worse. I've almost finished Yo Soy Betty La Fea.'

Yo Soy Betty La Fea (1999-2001) - I Am Ugly Betty - is a Colombian telenovela that saw massive international success and many spin-offs - one of which is the American series Ugly Betty.

'I understand,' he replied. 'After finishing a novela I always feel a hole in my soul.' And so one should, after all the time one has spent with the damn thing. Yo Soy Betty La Fea aired originally in 338 episodes of half an hour, including advertising - maybe a total of 120 hours. Brazilian novelas are running at eight months of six episodes a week, which is about the same order - 150 or so hours.

You've got to be very careful about how you watch these: if you, say, download them and pause at each interruption so you can see every minute, then you may well become horribly addicted, but you shall certainly be bored. You can't watch too little either: if you don't know a novela, it looks ridiculous. The characters are absurd, the story is worse, and someone is crying. Oh, and if you're a foreigner or don't really speak the language then be as judgemental as you like, but be aware that what you treasure as the world's worst television might well actually be local references and careful social commentary.

The best way is to watch them as they happen, with the television on and you doing other stuff if yoú feel like it. It's OK to have a television in the kitchen and one in the living room so you and your spouse can occasionally pause in what you were each otherwise doing to shout commentaries back and forth. And it's definitely OK to have some weeks where you refuse to go out in the evening when the novela is showing. Novelas sprawl, and you should let them sprawl in your life.

They get everywhere, see. People repeat the novela's phrases in daily life: an ethnic novela [pt] - add sparkly clothes and a soundtrack - resulted in the Brazilian public going about the place saying 'are baba' (Indian for 'gosh'). News-stands are covered in the faces of the novela's stars. I say novela - of course these people don't limit themselves to one at a time - but there is a main one, which airs at 9pm on Globo, after the news. Before there's a period novela and a more comedic novela, and before those in the afternoon there's a re-run of an old novela that's 'worth seeing again'. Fortunately a pretty established monopoly means I don't have to mention the novelas on other channels. The news-stands, though: magazines and newspapers cover what's going on, or do interviews with the actors, or have the actors advertising things. Or they might appear on silly little talk-shows - this latter an indignity that is perhaps a contractual obligation.

But this is important - in the interviews actors are often speaking about their characters: what they are trying to achieve, what they feel the character is and how one might relate to them. Asked how the public influenced his work, Fernando Gaitán, writer of Betty responded [es] that because the novela worked well he didn't have to change anything, 'on the contrary, I had to enlarge some plot-lines and characters'. If the people don't like, a character can be written out or a relationship written in. I've heard that in Brazil there are focus groups the try out plot-lines on.

Populist, pandering to the lowest common denominator, etc. etc. Real art is formed by the force of a single creative imagination, &c &c. There is only one way that Romeo and Juliet goes, and the whole point is that the audience can't point out to Romeo that Juliet isn't dead while he's burbling on about how alive she looks. A telenovela is created alongside and in reaction to audience response. The idea of Betty is of an ugly woman working in a fashion company, Ecomoda; as it happened she becomes pretty toward the end of the show. But Gatián was 'prepared to quickly transform her from the 30th or 40th episode if there were problems with the ratings' (ibid). If his gamble of having an ugly protagonist didn't work out, he was ready to turn it into a more conventional telenovela.

Watching a novela we accompany a group of people for a long time - you could have read slowly several novels in the same period, or watched Romeo and Juliet more than forty times. What this brings to the novela is its ability to experiment in many permutations of relationships between its dramatis personae. Orchestrating a novela is carefully tweaking variables, and it is often one at a time. At the beginning of Betty, Armando is the president of Ecomoda, and Betty starts as his secretary. First it is Betty's ugliness that is the question; then her trustworthiness; a relationship of necessity; a relation of horror; jealousy; love; greed; money; and violence (physical restraint). The novela has space to play all these factors out independently, treating one at a time. One of the techniques for managing these permutations is managing the diffusion of knowledge.

In the theatre a lack of knowledge proves decisive, and Romeo tops himself, reminding us with his words how close it was to being otherwise, how very almost he met a Juliet waking up. In a novela, however, information control is used to show us different aspects of relationships. If all the world were a novela, Romeo would think Juliet was dead, and we would see what he would do if she were. On the brink of committing suicide - he could spend some episodes over this, getting worse and worse - he would discover that she was really alive, and we would discover what they would do then, like live happily ever after (for which it would be helpful if fewer people had died along the way).

In Betty it is only the full disclosure of information to all the relevant characters that allows the ending to be what it is. One of the key elements in this is Betty's diary, which different people get their hands on - her diary reveals all to those who read it. The crucial handkerchief in Othello is opaque, and manipulated by Iago, the only one who knows all; Betty's diary makes everything transparent. Knowledge spreads slowly. First Betty finds out Armando's secret; on this is spent several episodes, and she only shares it with her friend, Nicolás. Then she shows she knows: first to Armando and his accomplice, and then, later, to Armando's fiance. This is done gradually so that we can see what people are in the different situations: when Betty doesn't know, when she does but Armando doesn't know she does, when she does and they both know she does; then later, when all her friends know too. Not only does this experiment in many different configurations, but the progressive revelations allow us to see many characters differing reactions to one event.

Some novelas deal with incest - I've not watched them - and this might explain why. Being related (or not) is a very powerful variable to play with. The ethnic novela I mentioned took it upon itself to talk about the Indian caste system and untouchability: exotic locations give you new turning points. Closer to home, Viver a Vida, currently showing, is socially undiverse - its exoticism is disability. Through a bus crash a model becomes tetraplegic and the portrayal of her disability is run through diverse circumstances (it's known that she'll get pregnant, for instance). The mixing is accompanied by a mixing of camera work, and there were some wonderfully sensual scenes which were close-ups of a hand brushing her face. I'm not really watching it, but people condemn the novela for showing exclusively the uber-rich and for not enough happening.

It is through the production of different situations that a novela makes its characters. What might be - perhaps start off as - exaggerated stereotypes are turned into people through the different arrangements they are put in. Nicolás, is awkward and clowning: it is wonderful that in Betty's hour of need he can, in his own way, be there for her. Their intimacy transforms him. Likewise, showing intimacy had transformed Betty for us: it did not take a physical change to make Betty beautiful but rather - much before - to see her in a situation where she was loving and being loved. It is affection that conducts the novela: in a real sense public affection dictates which way they go, and it is our growing fondness that makes precious what on a casual glance is laughable.

Blah, blah, blah: but look here, in this life business we accompany our loved ones through a lot of things, for good and for bad. A telenovela can take us on a journey - sometimes we can't help but like the bad-guy, other weeks we like someone else; either way we see and participate emotionally in their cycles of ups and downs. This has a completeness to it that is a different type of wonderful than something shorter. 'Sex,' sings Rita Lee [pt], 'is cinema. Love is novela'.

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