Franco is the newest E.F.M. (evil foreign man) on Days of our Lives. He¹s young and good-looking, with quite a chest on him. I prefer my demonic assassins not quite so fresh, it's more effective when the hideous ugliness inside their soul has had time to permeate the outside, leaving fatty pockets of overindulgence under the eyes and around the middle. It's so much worse to be mauled to death by a bloated man with pasty skin and a toupee--like Stefano. And "so much worse" is what the soaps are all about.
When Stefano's complex and evil plot starts to go awry, he cries out: "This is all splattering out of control!" He and Franco are always doing slip of the tongues like that, but they¹ve got to get an hour a day of film completed, so they just go with it. (English is probably a third language for both of them.) It adds to the otherworldliness of it all. And then there are the Americans doing the really, really bad Italian and German accents, which are about ten times as strong as real foreign accents, and which they slip in and out of halfway through sentences. Every element--from language to hairdos to the plantlife of the various "settings" is spectacularly ornate. I love soap operas. They¹re bursting with being. This psychic cried out, "My subconscious received a vibration--it is powerful and SCREAMING to come out!" Soap characters are the only people I know who take their feelings more extravagently than I do, so I end up feeling pretty normal after watching them. People's hearts are always being stirred and "tossed" and manipulated. There's dynasties, prayer, psychology, the supernatural, espionage, the inner workings of the prison system, and everyone being concerned about being "the only woman/man in your heart" before they¹ll "make love"--so many layers of belief and viewpoint, all intricately entwined (everyone knows each other--they¹re either related or have at one point made love, or both), not compartmentalized. They are attacked by emotion and sympathetic knowledge (add imminence and enormity in there in connection to whatever it is you realize you must stop from happening, or stop from not happening, or must but can't stop). They don¹t just say OK to the happenings of life, or to the nature of life. They go too far. They really fuck up. Dostoevsky talked about the need for devastation again and again. The need for complete corruption, complete fall, and complete punishment for complete redemption. Only a great sinner can become a great saint, because only those willing to truly fuck over people will ever, someday, truly throw their love into others: it's all about thrusting into other people, and getting thrust into, getting braided with life. Some people just keep to themselves, are just good-mannered. These people will never do deeds. I love the fighters and fuckers, the gossipers, destroyers; they are people who do deeds. And god willing, one day they will be called on and do great deeds--they will be the ones lancing soldiers' boils without complaint for 24 hours straight, not running to where the war is not.
Stefano says, before the community, that he's trying to redeem himself, that he wants to let the goodness in him come out. Would you believe him? He only drugged, kidnapped, brainwashed, or had unnatural desires for, half the town. Only last year, he actually killed someone with his evil gaze. The guy backed away from him, terrified beyond belief, right out a window, where he fell to his death. Stefano leisurely approached the window and looked with fondness at the inelegant corpse, murmuring "BeautifulŠbeautiful."
The thing is, one of the soap characters does believe Stefano is changing. This is stupid but beautiful. And she might be right. The Tree of Knowledge from which Adam and Eve were not supposed to eat fruit was the tree of duality--the awareness of opposites. Soap operas know what dreams and orgasms, pre-lingual children and ecstatic states know, but that functioning mankind has forgotten: uniality. The good in evil and the evil in good. Failure in success, success in failure. What is SO FANTASTIC about soaps is they are in both states at once: they see opposites, but they see the oneness of the two things at the same time.
A frequent soap demonstration of this is what would you do for love. These people are willing to fake pregnancies, perform experimental laser brain surgery on a kidnap victim, and make a deal with the devil--because they love and need this man/woman in their life. When and how does love become evil, innocence turn to manipulation and deceipt? This is what the characters ask themselves (talking out loud, facing the camera with immaculate full-face makeup on) again and again. They know (and we have forgotten) that change is not really change: it's sliding from one end to another of a single spectrum.
Stefano said to John, whom he trained in the ways of death before John turned from him and became a priest: "You and I are alike, John--both warrior philosophers." Stefano and John love the same woman, and she didn¹t love Stefano, and so he had to do the desperate things he did. Now that John was losing her favor, he¹d find out what "doing anything for love" truly meant. John breathed heavily and knitted his brow, swearing himself Stefano's eternal enemy and opposite. Stefano was right and John wrong and kind of right, too.
