Description

« (…) the public's complicity with the genre is in part due
to the soap opera's permeability to the transformations of
modern life. Of course, the modernization of customs is
disguised by perennial values and strait-jacketed by
multiple rituals. Changes make their appearance
sheltered ideologically by their links to the myth of
progress and development. However, what is important is
that a certain kind of soap opera has made room for
itself: a soap opera in which social hierarchies lose their
rigidity and in which the social fabric of loyalties and
submissions is more complex. The distances between the
poor and the rich, men and women, adults and young
people are both exposed and turned topsy-turvy by the
introduction of mediations and movements which show
the other side of the tangled web of humiliations and
revenges. Even in the "lowest" social sectors, the struggle
for survival is shown to be also a struggle to be someone,
for neither dignity nor opportunism, are found on only one
side. »