cartoons and films, and the Bond movies are multiple-authored texts that depict the same moments in key characters’ lives over and over (a superhero’s origins, his early discovery of his powers, etc.), and only depict a limited range of years for characters (typically, the years when they are at their peak physical condition). No matter how long these male-oriented narratives remain a part of the popular cultural landscape, they rarely allow their core characters to substantially age, or to undergo the significant psychological and emotional crises that accompany different stages of life—by their emphasis on repetition rather than character growth, they lack the kind of narrative journey that One Life to Live writers were able to give viewers who followed Viki’s advancement from youth into middle age.
Of course Viki’s struggle with her mental illness did not end when she discovered its traumatic origins. Lifelong stories on soaps never conclude; as soon as a character resolves one long-running plot conflict, other related issues arise. I call this rippling narrative style “continual reverberation.” On One Life to Live, after having lived for years with DID and repeatedly suffering the dire consequences of the devious actions of her red-headed alter, Niki Smith, Viki made a shocking discovery: her beloved daughter, Jessica, had actually been born a twin, and the twin had been kidnapped from the hospital before Viki even knew of her existence. The secret twin, Natalie, suddenly showed up in Llanview (the fictional Pennsylvania town where One Life to Live takes place) in 2001, and was an entirely different creature than the angelic Jessica. Jessica was blonde, and Natalie was a red-head. Jessica was a kind, polite, good-hearted young woman, and Natalie was a brash, self-centered, tough-talking hoyden. Jessica looked and sounded very much like her mother, Viki—but Natalie looked and sounded almost exactly like Viki’s alter, Niki. Shortly after Natalie’s appearance in Llanview, Natalie’s claims to being Viki’s biological child led Jessica to doubt that she was even related to Viki (Natalie suggested that perhaps she and Jessica had been switched at birth), and Viki attempted to reassure Jessica (and herself) that Jessica was indeed her child by standing beside Jessica in front of a mirror and forcing Jessica to look at the two of them, side by side. “You are my child!” said Viki. “Do you see how much you look like me?” Just at that moment, Natalie entered the room and paused behind Viki and Jessica, and in the mirror reflection of all three of them, Jessica did look very much like Viki, but Natalie’s resemblance to Viki was equally strong.
Although Viki was initially loath to believe that rude, loud Natalie was as much her biological child as sweet, calm Jessica, One Life’s viewers recognized Natalie’s significance right away. Natalie embodied the side of Viki that Viki could never bring herself to accept: the Niki side. For the progression of Viki’s lifelong story, it was important that she be confronted with the physical incarnation, in two distinct bodies that were born of her body, of the “twin” aspects of her psyche. Jessica was a young Viki, but Natalie was a young Niki, and the girls’ coexistence in Viki’s life forced Viki to acknowledge and appreciate the two very different women as “hers.”
The Jessica/Natalie story of the 2000s was not just any “evil twin” plotline, endemic to daytime dramas since the genre’s beginnings; it held special resonance for viewers of One Life to Live because it provided a physical manifestation of the internal war that had been raging inside of Viki for so long. The Jessica/Natalie plot was a continuation of the Viki/Niki arc that spanned the entire duration of the soap’s history. And although Jessica and Natalie became devoted to one another despite their differences, united in a way that Viki could never herself manage to unite the two halves of her personality, the story did not end there. A series of devastating events in 2005 led Jessica to experience a period of blackouts and memory-loss, and Jessica discovered that she, like her mother, suffered from DID. Jessica’s wild and conniving alter, Tess, then repeated some of the same clashes that Viki/Niki had enacted years earlier: Tess loved a different man than Jess did; Tess had very different life goals than Jess; Tess’s ideas of what constituted happiness and satisfaction were almost totally opposite to Jess’s. Moreover, when a pregnant Tess found herself in a crisis, going into labor while totally alone in an abandoned vineyard, it was Niki Smith whom Tess hallucinated to help her through the delivery, as Tess claimed that Niki was the only “mother” that Tess had ever known. In fact, the traumatic event in Jessica’s childhood that caused her to develop the Tess personality was an incident of sexual molestation that took place while Niki was running Viki’s life (Niki routinely neglected young Jessica whenever she was in charge of Viki’s household). The tragedy of Viki/Niki, never fully resolved for Viki, echoed in the tragedies suffered by her children and shaped the trajectories of their lives. For Viki, the knowledge that her beautiful daughter, her greatest accomplishment and joy, suffered from the same horrible illness that had forever plagued Viki was shattering.
FIGURE 7.1. Viki’s twin daughters, Natalie (left) and Jessica (right), embodied two sides of her personality that she could never reconcile.
Although the emergence of Jessica’s alter was one of the more tragic pieces of fallout from Viki’s ongoing struggle with DID, other plotlines that flowed from Viki’s lifelong story yielded more positive outcomes. Natalie and Jessica’s forming a sisterly bond, for instance, was rewarding for viewers who had often longed for Viki to be able to reconcile her dominant self with her Niki personality; the loving relationship that developed between Viki’s twins felt like an analog or substitute for the Viki/Niki integration storyline that never played out. Also, the audience’s (and Viki’s) perception of Dorian shifted dramatically after Dorian informed Viki of her father’s abusive behavior. Prior to the revelation about Victor in the 1990s, the audience had known Dorian only as Viki’s wicked stepmother and archenemy, who had most likely killed Victor Lord while he was ill; although One Life to Live was vague on this plot point, Dorian was always singled out as the most likely murderer. But after Dorian told Viki the truth about Victor, the audience began to see that perhaps Dorian was not entirely a villainess. Perhaps Dorian had facilitated Victor’s death, not only in order to inherit his millions, but also from a desire to enact justice. Perhaps Dorian had long felt animosity toward Viki because Dorian knew that she had avenged Viki’s childhood suffering, but Viki did not know and always treated Dorian with disdain. The reverberations of Viki’s ongoing multiple personality storyline reached far beyond Viki’s life and shaped the stories of a number of other characters on One Life’s canvas. Martha Nochimson argues that the forced reconsideration of Dorian’s nature and past acts had the added (potential) effect of raising women viewers’ awareness of patriarchal stereotypes.1 If viewers reevaluated Dorian’s sometimes ethically questionable decisions as “complex,” stemming from deep and various motives, rather than as the workings of a “simply” cruel woman typical of stereotyped female villains, then it is possible that the continual reverberations of Viki’s long-arc story did more than entertain; they may have promoted a more feminist mode of interpreting media texts in fans of One Life to Live.
One reason that soaps’ long-arc storylines, with their drawn-out plot reveals and unceasing reverberations, can affect soap viewers deeply is that “soap time” approximates “real time.” Unlike the compressed temporalities of a two-hour film or a one-hour weekly series that runs for only a few years, soap opera events unfold in a timeline that mirrors viewers’ lived time quite closely. A soap opera airs five days per week for fifty weeks of each year, usually for many decades, and so viewers have the sense that they live their lives alongside, or in tandem with, soap characters. Even though the events in soap characters’ lives are usually far more dramatic than those taking place in viewers’ lives, the parallel between soap time and real time gives soap operas a certain ongoing realism that other forms of drama rarely match. Viki uncovered her memories of her father’s abuse, not twenty minutes or two hours after she began to manifest symptoms of DID (as would occur on a primetime television program or in a movie), but twenty-seven years later. The time that it took Viki to realize what had happened to her in her childhood is, according to Sigmund Freud, a normal amount of time for any adult to “remember, repeat, and work through” early trauma and heal psychologically.2 Among TV genres, soaps alone have
