I, AUGUSTA

When Joan Collins swept into that courtroom as an 11th hour witness to DYNASTY's 1981 murder trial cliffhanger, she brought with her a whole new look for two problematic classics: the middle-aged woman and the villainess.  The solution was combining them both in a modern upgrade of an old trope and creating a new face for feminism: the matriarch sexualized, the femme fatale maternalized, pre-meditated woman politicized, all-in-one.  Women's roles on the domestic front were undergoing a change as well.  Washing windows became passé, for there were glass ceilings downtown to smash.  Ladies of the 80s were drinking martinis for power lunches instead of mixing them.  Soon, one fictional woman's dramatic use of a courtroom setting became the hope of a new reality for women in the workforce of America.  Henceforth, Alexis Carrington became the top model of a new kind of character, and every soap followed suit to offer up its own contestant in a drag race for the ultimate diva.       

She had made her grand entrance on the onset of the 80s, and her popularity grew quickly to an international phenomenon.  It was a decade that would be marked by the rise of unprecedented materialism and consumerism in a new emerging global market that was unparalleled in world history.  "Big, bold and brash" became the brand mantra for the signature staples of a  new economic imperialism: monumental moussed-up manes and music marketed as mini-movies; tell-all tabloid media and quicker-than-ever fast Mcfood; for-you-Xanadu shopping malls and electric-neon-dream cityscapes; star quarterback shoulder pads and multi-million-dollar personalities - all as big as they could get … the kind of big that made Rome an empire.  

While Washington was being displaced by Wall Street, Fortune 500 wolves became the new trailblazers of one of the world's most unique expansionist enterprises that had long ago been founded by 1800s frontier mountain men.  The raw grit of the 1970s was being smoothed out and polished into something shinier and chromatic.   The strong and silent cowboy-types were now armed Schwarzenegger terminators; open highway renegades became monosyllabic Rambos; out with counterculture revolutionary mustangs and in with glossy infrastructure mavericks with names like Cruise and Sheen.  Meanwhile, an old ancient archetype was thinking big too … or, to be more accurate, she was re-thinking things.  

As a new kind of Madonna was turning the Mystic Rose into a Material Girl, the kitchen variety homewreckers and drawing room assortment of passive-aggressive troublemakers that were a staple of soap opera melodrama were getting a modern-day makeover that included a re-branded new mindset.  In the 1956 film THE OPPOSITE SEX, showgirl Pat (played by Carolyn Jones, who would later become one of CBS daytime's Alexis-contenders in 1982 on their new soap opera CAPITOL) warned her homewrecking friend Crystal (played by none-other-than Joan Collins … yes, her character's name was Crystal - with a "C") that "smart girls take what they can get," to which the ambitious sexpot shot back, "smart girls get what they can take."  In the 1950s, the kind of woman who followed that kind of logic always lost out in the end (husband-stealing Crystal lost her man, while June Allyson's jilted wife Kay - lucky girl - got him back).  In the 1980s, however, that moral standard of female impropriety became old-fashioned thinking.  Instead of learning her lesson, she was going to teach a few.  The marginalized bitch found her new home right in the center of the action in the 80s, becoming braver and bolder with each passing year.  

 

Our ancient feminine upped the ante and transformed sexual slur into sexual self-empowerment.  The Superbitch burst onto the scene in 80's blockbuster Technicolour to start a whole new political enterprise in reinventing the villainess as anti-heroine.  It would take a few more decades to truly work out this new psychology of feminine theology, but the Superbitch was as much of a packaged novelty to the 80s as the Rubik's Cube, Cabbage Patch Dolls and MTV.  Facetiousness aside, this 'new' kind of character was more than just the latest fashion … hers was an ongoing story that was as old as the Ice Age (which is probably the one thing patriarchy has strangely missed out on blaming her for).   The mature villainess was finally finding her place in the new scheme of things outside the traditional great chain of being, presenting a whole new purpose best served chilled.  And she banked in on all her rich mythology.  

80s pop girl trio Bananarama didn't just dust off an old 70s ditty about a goddess on a mountaintop and polish it into a modern neo-feminist anthem about a man-eater named Venus; intentionally or not, they reached deep into centuries-old mythology that had shaped powerful woman-as-sexual-object from earliest antiquity.  Responding to their own siren song, these gender-defining myths were reawakened from their tombs to reclaim their birthrights and become spirits of a new age.  The phoenix-like Lilith rose from the embers of all her ancient former selves with revenge on her rolodex; sister Eve put post-lapsarian thinking behind her to find a lost paradise regained in the Pepsi generation.  As the angel in the house was once again thrown into a culture war of words and worries over the ever-changing role of the feminine, the devil on her left shoulder disengaged from the virgin-whore complex to become its own complex personality.  Standing on her own two stilettos, she offered all the wit and wisdom she could milk from a reservoir of deep historical experience to make her case while proudly stating the obvious: woman was and always would be a force to be reckoned with.  Like the Mona Lisa who has occupied so much of our psychological mindset by claiming her own space in it, sitting, smiling, looking us dead square in the eye and knowing we can never turn away from her, this not-so-new but regenerative Bitch wasn't going anywhere.  

As rumours of Alexis spread like wildfire across the 81-82 season and the very ideal of her gained traction, suburban housewife Val Ewing of KNOTS LANDING was beginning to realize that women of that ilk actually existed in real-life - and they lived directly across the street in her cozy little cul-de-sac.  "I think I better keep my eye on you - all the time," she angrily declared to her neighbor Abby Cunningham as she became more and more aware of Abby's intentions toward her husband Gary Ewing.   "Do ...", an unabashed Abby whole-heartedly encouraged, her sweet agreeable smile just barely hiding her agenda, "… how else are you going to learn?" (S03/E17)

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Midway through her career, Joan Collins not only witnessed the turning of a tide, but she also helped navigate it by never altering course in a long illustrious career that began in the 50s and was built on being typecast as "Britain's Bad Girl".  That signature onscreen persona didn't change through her three decades of perfecting the archetype - the times changed with her.  The woman who played THE BITCH in the eponymous 1979 softcore classic stayed a constant through every wave and ripple of a changing consciousness.  Heading into a brave new world, the shamed scarlet woman of the modest old one was ready to shine her true colours with pride, turning blush into hot pink cheek contours.   The bad girl once shamed by the moral majority was lining up for a corporate promotion.  With her commodity value steadily rising in the sleek and shiny 80s, the villainess would make a move up the ladder that would be nothing short of stunning in its sheer audacity by taking full ownership of the most derogatory label that could be leveled  against her or any woman, one that was due for a complete rebranding by the simple capitalization of one letter.   

Second Wave feminist Jo Freeman's 1970 epoch-defining essay "The Bitch Manifesto" is considered to be one of the earliest arguments for the reclamation of the term "bitch" as a mode of celebration for all those women who "rudely violate conceptions of proper sex role behavior".   This was the first time Bitch was explored for the multi-dimensional ideology that it truly was, beyond the one-note pet name that was a favorite go-to device to dehumanize, demonize and demolish a woman who dared to rise above her allotted place in man's great chain of being.   Bitch was more than an idea - it could be an ideal.  Flipping the bird by flipping male narrative, Freeman proposed that if it makes a woman a bitch to want to better her place in the social order, then "a woman should be proud to declare herself a bitch, because Bitch is Beautiful".  

Bitch has come a long way, baby.  From pre-history to biblical history, from textbook history and on through to postmodern history, Bitch has been there, causing our falls, creating our foibles and being our flaws in an otherwise perfect world.  At least that's how our long narrative was supposed to be read.   Now we have a different vocabulary with which to read the world by, allowing us to see things from a more broader point of view.  Looking back on our history with a bigger lens, we can see man's greatest nightmare was actually woman's:  used and abused by a man who promised her the world, social outcast Medea had nothing else to lose but break the chains of male genealogy by slaughtering the children they shared; Clytemnestra was no longer a wanton woman who murdered her husband for power, but an avenging angel for her youngest child who was slaughtered as sacrifice by a king looking for an easy in with the Gods.  One man's bitch could be another version's heroine.  Whether it was trailblazers who dared to speak out or write it down, innovators who forged new paths or warriors who won women their choices and their voices, the heroine has been another version's bitch every single step taken forwards.  Freeman's Bitch wasn't exactly a new concept; she had always been there in all her multi-faceted masquerades doing her thing in every corner of cultural consciousness.  It wasn't whimsy that put Wonder Woman on the 1971 cover of the first issue of Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine; this mythical heroine was busting balls in a bad-ass way that visionaries understood long before comic book fans grew up and realized exactly what was going on.  Until then, the villainess would carry the burden of bitchhood, and the more adversarial Catwoman came to embody the feminine mystique in all its darkest tones to little boys and girls growing up while Wonder Woman got away with murder because she was an agreeable heroine. 

"I think men like bitches better," proclaimed Morgan Fairchild in a 1981 Us magazine article seven months before Joan Collins made her courtroom debut.  "Men love to be shoved around.  But why do they want me to do it?"  With her cat-like features and feline dynamism, Fairchild built a brand name for herself as the go-to bitch for all the directors of the small screen casting calls.  "I happen to look like the rich, spoiled predatory type," she once boasted early in her career, "... because of my pointed nose, I look like a predator.  I've been told that all my life."  Positioning herself as an updated version of Marilyn-as-bad girl long before anyone heard of a Michigan-bred pop-tart named Madonna, the beautiful but brainy Fairchild perfected a bad girl persona that made her a familiar bitchface in everyone's living room in the 70s.  Her roles weren't meant to garner audience sympathy: psychotic other woman (SEARCH FOR TOMORROW) to catty homewrecker (DALLAS), mean-girl sorority sister (THE INITIATION OF SARAH) to sitcom temptress who tried to take Mork away from Mindy.  Viewers relished in Fairchild's make getting punished: mental asylums, public humiliation, even telekinetic fury (in which her INITIATION character's beautiful visage shrivels and cracks in a rapid aging process that resembles an Old Testament kind of comeuppance).  Fascination for the devil had always been a part of our psychological make-up, but sympathy started to sneak into the way people regarded villainy while wallflower 70s moralism underwent a renovation for the bold and brash 80s - as long as said villainy upheld the revered aesthetics of beauty, wealth and glamour ... and having a good sense of humour about it all didn't hurt.  Like Collins, self-effacing Fairchild remained true to her perfected-persona self and just waited for the world to come around to her.  

Her born-to-play performance of scheming Floridian socialite Constance Weldon Carlyle (more bedroom politics than boardroom) gained her a phenomenal popularity in the press in the early 80s that unfortunately didn't mean a long run for her short-lived NBC prime-time soap FLAMINGO ROAD (which is a shame because it really was a delightfully written show with one of the best casts of actors at the time).   This was something bigger than a TV show, for she captured the zeitgeist taking bodily shape in those initiatory years of a new era.  Her sex appeal was a sure sell for copies - not since Marilyn did an actress appear in little more than lingerie and other bedroom attire in the public eye, gracing the cover of mainstream magazines in soft-core poses usually reserved for Playboy.  But it wasn't her obvious physical attributes that were the only reason she was a permanent face on all the covers at the time - her modern take on the blonde bombshell was much more canny than the cheap postulation of male erotica.    Her drag went beyond pornography and tickled something more olden, something strangely familiar that reached deep into the reptilian brain and evoked whispers from a forgotten time when ancient man worshipped goddesses of love and the hunt.  Our hierarchical psyches have always reserved an exalted place for a mother goddess, and what was once a totem of ancient ritual worship for pastoral mindsets still had drawing power in the modern age of Madison Avenue marketing.  A one-woman PR machine, Fairchild knew exactly what she was playing up.  She had intention, dangerously teetering on parody without ever losing her eye on the booby prize.  Unlike the equally smart and ambitious Jayne Mansfield, she never played the bimbo but, like a woman of the world, she never took herself too seriously.   She was credible, confident, candid, and constantly winking at us through her come-hither-but-can't-touch kitsch.  With her broad tongue-in-cheek humour, she could be more Mae West than Marilyn, contributing a tried-and-true moxie with a modern twist to a growing cultural discourse long before Collins would inevitably take the bitch out of the bedroom and into the boardroom.  One could argue before Collins (or BC), there was the period of MF.  Fairchild was slowly but surely capitalizing the B in the B-word right before our eyes before Collins would later heroize (some would counter cartoonize) a byname into a Super-Being.  

 

 

Throughout the 80s, titillated audiences still nervously tittered whenever that word was brought up during the customary talk show appearance with the latest contestant in what seemed like a never-ending pageant taking place on the world stage, but slowly and surely the word bitch would become a more acceptable term in the everyday lexicon to now describe the kind of lady one can't help but love to hate.  Traditional heroines began to take a back seat to their historical  alter egos, as actresses clamoured to play 'those kinds' of roles because they were marked as much more interesting to play, living out woman's most extreme revenge fantasies.  "I was bored of playing the virtuous but vulnerable woman who was pursued by villains all the time," said KNOTS LANDING's Donna Mills in a 1981 TV Guide article, reflecting the growing sentiment at the time among actresses in Hollywood, "... I enjoy playing the aggressor.  It's much more fun to make things happen than to have them happen to you."  The growing disdain for the traditional heroine was shared by fellow vixen Morgan Fairchild: "Good girls are put on pedestals where they can't move.  If they do move, they usually fall off and become victims."  

This new female elitism turned into retro'd female cultism, producing glamour queens not seen since the 40s during the Golden Age of Hollywood when carefully crafted personas like Dietrich and Garbo, Hayworth and Harlow provoked subconscious desires in dreamy black-and-white.   Exhausted from the riotous and demonstrative 60s and 70s, the 80s tapped into something complexly nostalgic, striving for a bright and shiny utopian future while yearning to return to a glorious past that only existed in the movies.  This escapism began in the early 70s when Watergate wrongdoing and Helter Skelter horror turned illusions into delusions, and disastrous overseas combats took its toll on the popular psychology, losing money, motivation and meaning with each passing day.  A wave of nostalgia for things simpler and more innocent rewrote the 1950s as the "nifty fifties", a time remembered for diners and drive-ins, classic cars and rock n' roll.  Hollywood captured vintage mental snapshots from this manufactured bygone era in decade-bookend movies like 1973's AMERICAN GRAFFITI and 1978's GREASE, as well as immensely popular shows like HAPPY DAYS (1974) and LAVERNE & SHIRLEY (1976) on that increasingly powerful propaganda tool called television.   The 80s went deeper into its conceptualized nostalgia, keeping cozy 50s suburbanization and merging it with post-war 40s promise and prosperity, amalgamating two decades of nation-building enterprise into one big myth from which to rebuild and regenerate the American Dream for a whole new decade.   

The development of a shared national narrative that was agreed upon by a battle-fatigued collective consciousness - and patterned by its selective memory - can be traced through the Hollywood mind machine, illustrating how that ultimate manufacturer of day dreams grew into the ultimate fabricator of reality.  That cultural malaise that had set in by the time the 60s was coming to an end can be seen in the 1967 film THE GRADUATE, which ends with our alienated young lovers Benjamin and Elaine (Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross) sitting at the back of a bus, their exhilaration from escaping all the great empty expectations for them slowly fading into ambivalence, uncertain for what the future holds.  Ten years later in 1978,  the blockbuster GREASE - that musical romantic comedy which takes place at the close of the 50s - ends the 70s with another pair of young lovers Danny and Sandy (John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John) also heading off into their future, but this time with the promise of something better as we see them lifting off into the clouds in their dream convertible to a happily ever after.    Incidentally, 1978 was the same year Richard Donner took the comic book trade - an industry once generally regarded as children's entertainment - soaring into new heights with his major motion picture event SUPERMAN with all its 50's-style sentimentality banking on a booming late-decennial nostalgia among adult baby boomers for a simpler time - and super escapism.  The late-60s malaise had developed into a fatigue by the end of the 70s, and audiences were drawn to a return to a 50s-style flight of movie-making fancy.  We last see Sandy - matured from virginal ingenue into hot pink lady with intention - turning to the audience and waving goodbye to two very difficult decades of existential crisis.   Freefalling Danny and Sandy were ostensibly heading straight into the 80s, where magic realism and dream-factory fantasy would become a new way of life. 

If we believe Esther Shapiro, who along with her husband Richard created the definitive 80s flight of fancy in DYNASTY, this flight-instead-of-fight response was motivated by an all-consuming need for romance.  "In the 60s, there was a terrific sexual revolution," Shapiro said in a 1983 article regarding the comeback of old-school sentimentality and glamour.  "There was no commitments, no real relationships.  People want more than that.  They want romance, adventure, warm, loving relationships, cold champagne and steamy desire.  If they can't get it in reality, then what is a TV storyteller for?"  Indeed, an April 1984 cover story of TIME magazine declared the sexual revolution officially over, and sex in the 80s was about searching for an intimacy the counterculture movements of the 60s and 70s proclaimed dangerous to personal self-evolvement.   "We're in a 50's period again," one psychiatrist argued in the article, as another sociologist observed that society was "going through a sober, responsible phase." 

 

Indeed, 1984 saw the end of the swingin' 70s sex farce THREE'S COMPANY and the premiere of the more conservative family-oriented COSBY SHOW.   The traditional family sitcom had undergone a major alteration in the 70s with producer Norman Lear's innovative combination of controversy and comedy, introducing a coarse new language of laughter that was heard in everyone's living rooms with the game-changing ALL IN THE FAMILY, which brought the working class to the TV forefront and politics to the genre's usually-neutralized formula.  THE COSBY SHOW reaffirmed those 1950's nuclear family values that ALL IN THE FAMILY and its orbiting spin-offs MAUDE, GOOD TIMES and THE JEFFERSONS deliberately deconstructed.   It was not the first show to star an African-American family (GOOD TIMES), and it wasn't the first to feature an upwardly mobile black family (THE JEFFERSONS), but it was the first to present the black family living an idealized upper-middle class experience without challenge or controversy, the kind of post-war picture-perfect world that FATHER KNOWS BEST defined for the 50s and THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW contemporized for the 60s.  Old-fashioned bigot Archie Bunker wasn't colorful enough for the bright new 80s, and in a poetic twist, THE COSBY SHOW successfully renovated the American Dad into an affluent upper-middle class black man.  And it did it by paradoxically certifying the 50's style sentimentality that drove much of Bunker's own conservative values, the difference being the romanticization of those old school sentiments remade with modern twists, left unchallenged by the socio-political realities that made the Bunker household a combat zone.  It all fit perfectly in the new vision of things, validating the 80s obsession with success, wealth and privilege.   

         

That same year COSBY premiered to become the new gold standard of the family sitcom, the familiar sombre and dismal tones of that other TV mainstay the police procedural drama received its own cosmetic makeover with the 1984 debut of the sleek and stylized MIAMI VICE, which captured if not created the hue of the mid-80s.  Taking image and sound to a whole new level of storytelling and pastel tones to a whole new level of neo-noir aesthetic, MIAMI VICE brought cinematic sophistication and film-budget glamour to the small screen.  Its neon-lit underworld of organized crime and politically-driven drug cartels gave the show an edge never walked before on TV.  Its resort culture of sun, sand and speedboats - along with the impeccable designer men's fashions and finely-groomed face stubble for its primped and primed male cops - helped transform even the darkest material into an exhilarating flight-of-fancy that could be traced back to Danny and Sandy's takeoff into transcendence.  The 70s dealt with the psychology and gynecology of sex.  The 80s escaped into sexiness.  This was not the misty water-colored memories of 70s romance.  This was something better-lit.  This luminous realm of make-believe does require a certain kind of blurring of vision, however - a kind of squinting of the eye in the glare of all those bright lights - as well as a kind of smudging  that veils the Mona Lisa's secret behind a smoky smile of sfumato and creates a charisma of mystery and romance.  After a disorganized decade of lectures and lessons, audiences now wanted to be wined and dined by simple sex appeal and glamour, and leave academics to the academics.  For a nation seeking intimacy, this kind of seduction of the visual senses could be quite overwhelming - and too promising to resist.  Esther Shapiro's old school notion of seductive movie-style romance isn't new.  Audiences have always craved escape.  This just wasn't about being romanced.  What was extraordinary about this state of affairs was the collective agreement on a whole new social sensibility for romanticization, the kind that repackaged realities as art that told lies to recreate truth.   

When it first premiered on the cusp of the 80s, Shapiro's DYNASTY was still embedded in a 70s realism that portrayed its oil-rich patriarch as a marbled-face white-collar thug who reaped the benefits of raping the land - and even at one point his new younger wife who dared to challenge his tight-fisted rule over his self-made kingdom.  This brutal commentary on the American Dream is what set ABC's new prime-time offering apart from its predecessor DALLAS, which never truly critiqued a complex US class system perverted by a country's inherent puritanism and its magnificent obsession with power like DYNASTY's first season.   The writers' most controversial critique's were usually reserved for Pamela Sue Martin's original powerhouse Fallon Carrington, who once quipped her gay brother was born into an elitist class where "culls, cripples and homosexuals are taken out behind a barn and slaughtered before they get a chance to breed"; her pronouncement that in the highest ranks of her father's corporation there were "no blacks, no Jews, no Eskimos ... and no women" still stings today.   The modern Western DALLAS reaffirmed masculine privilege as an inevitability; the more midwestern minded DYNASTY had a social conscience in its beginning that portrayed wealth as the problem, the oil industry as perpetrator, and patriarchal power as criminal and corrupter.  Themes such as imperialistic greed, Victorian era-like gender and sexual inequality, and domestic Upstairs/Downstairs politics made DYNASTY's first season high-brow material, but this classical interpretation wasn't going to be magical enough for a new era shaping a bright and shiny future.  If 70s television belonged to social revolutionary Norman Lear,  80s television belonged to Aaron Spelling, whose early niche successes in the 70s with LOVE BOAT, FANTASY ISLAND and CHARLIE's ANGELS foresaw a future steeped in the escapist entertainment of celebrity culture.  Luckily, DYNASTY was a Spelling co-production, and in order to survive the changing tides of an ever-changing needs of viewership, it and its creators the Shapiros had to be Spelling-corrected (the second season marked the first onscreen credit of Aaron Spelling and Douglas S. Cramer as the show's executive producers in every episode's closing scene, colonizing the Shapiros' first season closing freeze frame status, indicating DYNASTY had been officially "Spellingized").

DYNASTY's early modification reflected exactly the transformation an entire nation worldview was simultaneously undertaking in order to survive itself.  Emerging from the 70s in a Phoenix-like rebirth, the American Dream underwent a systemic PR makeover through the dreamwork enterprise of a new conservative landscape that married politics with corporatism and Washington with Hollywood.  Embodying all this multi-layered matrimonial bliss and dynastic alliances was a new kind of president for the Free World, a role now played by a former actor of the silver screen who repurposed policy as persona through the lens of cinematic symbology rooted deep in nostalgia and nationalism.  Reprioritized values and a replenished vision marked a reboot for a nation tired of its own disillusionment, for there was no more room to indulge in failures and flaws anymore.  

Introduced as an American version of something one would see on MASTERPIECE THEATRE, DYNASTY would be redrafted into something that would go pop!  On cue, a whole new start began for its second season.  Gone were the lower-to-middle class characters and their mortgaged modest homefronts in order for the show to narrow its focus on its one opulently rich family.   Once a diverse canvas of palatial mansions, suburban homes and roadhouse bars, brothels and oil fields, the expertly multi-structured show pared everything down to an exclusive circle that most of the viewers could only dream of being given access in real-life.  Action was centralized within the walls of that magnificent triumph of Georgian revival architecture nestled in the wilds outside city limits and its complementary corporate towers of power situated in mid-downtown Denver.  With its barrel vaulted corridors, iconic grand staircase and high-ceilinged drawing room drama, the house itself became its own character.  It was the show's centerpiece, serving as a microcosm of the conservative political worldview that was shaping the perception of a new decade.  Reality was ostensibly shut out behind the wrought iron gates and the walled English Renaissance gardens of the otherworldly turn-of-the-century manor estate that was an escape into a forgotten colonial past.  The lone survivor of this class purge - Pamela Bellwood's little-girl-lost soul Claudia, that middle-class mother who was much of the heart of the first season with her struggle back from a mental breakdown - would be kept purely for the purpose of plot like the winner of some lucky-girl lottery.  Invited into the inner sanctum of this bottled up bubbled world of champagne and servants, odd-woman-out Claudia became the proverbial houseguest, patronized by her wealthy hosts as a duty and charitable obligation, and was slowly denigrated for the entertainment of sexual melodrama into the token madwoman in the attic.  Her fellow soulmate Steven, the homosexual scion of upper-crust privilege who likewise struggled to keep his head above water in a cruel unforgiving world, would be revised as well, made more gender-fluid for the sake of more entertaining - and more conveniently hetero - storytelling.  

These casualties trapped in the social cracks trying to navigate their way through an uncertain world had no place in DYNASTY's new winning circle; those kinds of characters so common in the 70s would be replaced by the more colorful and more glamourous survivor of the 50s and her operatic quest for vengeance.  This grand English lady with her monarchial mindset and penchant for memorable entrances was perhaps more fitting for a changing audience looking not to be reminded of times of deep divide that kept the Bunker family spinning around and around in the muck of ambiguity.  Chasms no longer needed debate - the masses were craving leadership, subconsciously desiring royalty's romance by consciously embracing the promise of imperialism.  If Esther Shapiro and the academics of TIME's telling cover story were both right, the embattled audience's renewed need for romance and the intimacy that that implies meant they had no desire to relate any longer to lost trodden souls.  They instead preferred role models that chose not to sink but swim at all costs - even if it meant trodding over a few lost souls themselves in order to make that win.  It wasn't enough to keep one's head above water.  The best revenge was sailing on top of it in your own private yacht.    

DYNASTY's second season officially left the recent past behind in its own ruthless bid for survival.  Scathing social commentary was unceremoniously thrown over for celebrity and camp, and the brutal truths lurking behind wealth and power so well fictionalized in the first season were revised into a fairytale rendering of Robin Leach's lifestyles of the rich and famous.   Hence, like the country itself, John Forsythe's Blake Carrington underwent his own  corporate-cinematic makeover: first presented as tyrant, misogynist, and rapist with anger management issues that resulted in first-degree manslaughter, Blake's sharp edges were slowly but surely glossed over to become the show's classic romantic leading man by the end of the third 83-84 season.  He evolved (some might argue devolved) from complex villain to silver-toned anti-hero to one-dimensional knight-in-shining-armour who could do double-duty outside the show's forth wall as a spokesman for his own designer cologne.  With the help of television, the 80s redrew the capitalist as cultural hero, while the CEO was crowned as Father Knows Best.   

It was this romantic reconstruction that shaped the 80s popular psyche.  It was how the 50s were remembered for its swirling sock hops, pelvic-powered hula hooping and pubertal hormonal hijinks rather than the segregated claustrophobic nightmare it was for anyone who wasn't a white heterosexual upper-or-middle class Christian male.   It is what turns the drunken rape of a young ingenue by an older rogue on an after-hours disco dance floor into seduction - with a little help from some soft-core easy listening by Herb Alpert; it's what can help this sordid business be reimagined by group rethink into a marketable love coupling that became one of the biggest international 80s TV phenomenons that has ever come out of daytime - and ever will; it's what also led reasonable and normally sensible women of all ages and backgrounds to cry out to be raped by said daytime rogue-turned-unlikely sex symbol at mobbed publicity junkets.  It is what turns villains into vanguards - for J.R. to be celebrated as a cultural role model of all-American privilege, allowed to do any nefarious, disgusting thing he pleased because he shot for the top and always came out smiling from ear-to-ear ... not to mention richer and even more powerful.  This permissively survivalist landscape was the perfect breeding ground for the villainess to boil and bubble, toil and retool.  She could now be counted among her male adversaries as a fellow survivor - as long as she reaped the financial rewards for all her trouble in creating trouble for everyone else.   The evolutionary advancement of bitch to Bitch to Superbitch (with a capital $) was a development of a cultural archetype into a capitalist icon. 

Capitalism not only painted a romantic picture for the 80s, but it was repurposed as the manifestation of romanticism itself.  It perfected the Madison Avenue art of seduction on the masses through the advertising power of persuasion, sublimation and suggestion, whispering sweet nothings through the stereo airwaves that promised anything and everything, offering endless money-back guarantees of more and more instant gratification through Coca Cola fantasies and MTV wet dreams.  This grand passion between corporate capitalism and popular culture reshaped the body politic.  While a former leading man of the 40s and 50s was in the White House acting like a real-life president, starry-eyed Baby Boomers jetpacking their way into their 30s and 40s eschewed grit and naturalism for glitz and glamour.  Changing audience taste was and always will be the truthful barometer of what exactly is going on behind broader social and cultural shifts.  Blue collar anti-hero Archie Bunker was deemed outdated and replaced by white collar villain J.R. Ewing; meanwhile, Archie's beleaguered wife Edith only paled in comparison with the Krystle Carringtons of the world.  Viewers preferred role models that would embody that new imperialistic aesthetic that was shaping their lives through an increasingly all-encompassing media, looking at themselves and the world around them through its fascist lens.  The media was not just the message it was also the mirror.  The one thing kept intact from the 70s was the rising individualism of the Me generation and its perennial search for self, adapting the remaking of one's own personality through 70s self-help to the 80s pursuit of self-interest.   Self-importance underlied the meaning of Self-identity, which became more and more commodified and commercialized through the visual image.  

Saturated in mass media (nearly all households had a television by the end of the 70s with multiple sets being added to different rooms in most private residences throughout the 80s), the 80s became more acutely aware of itself than any other decade, its own image constantly reflected back onto itself through its growing 24-hour media rotation.  "Hey - it's the 80s!" became a contemporary free-pass very early on, as if the world had been waiting for this one particular decade since the beginning of time.  It was the decade that began to self-referentially make history in live performance.  And the whole world watched as vicarious-participants in fairytale weddings real or fictional that captured the hearts of global romantics; in cliffhangers that kept the minds of drama addicts worldwide on the edge of their seats over summer-long hiatuses; in a 24-hour music concert starring every famous musician imaginable taking over the international airwaves to raise money for those in need in another continent; in victories across the seas like the symbolic wall of fascism literally crumbling down right before our eyes or tragedies on the home front like space programme missions gone disastrously wrong ... all were captured live in real-time for all to watch and could be claimed as not just milestone moments of the most captured-on-film era yet at that point in history, but also as defining moments in one's own personal history as being part of something bigger and better than ever before.  A song just couldn't be a song, a toy just couldn't be another toy, a movie just couldn't be another movie - they had to be Events, bigger and better than the last.  In this novel age of the blockbuster, America was the biggest megahit to watch.  And it promised to make everyone famous for at least fifteen minutes. 

As politicians, producers and populace looked to Hollywood for inspiration, it would be the cinematic exhumation of the late Joan Crawford through the 1981 film adaptation of MOMMIE DEAREST - now universally regarded as an accidental camp cult classic - that would provide the first glimpse into the new aesthetic of what would be the politics of the 80s' image.  The film's opening sequence taps into a Freudian wonderland for every Oedipal and Electra complex in the audience as the viewer is given a glimpse into the sacred temple space of the mother's boudoir:  a faceless woman wakes from her pre-dawn slumber to undertake a ruthless regimental process of ritual self-cleansing before stepping out into the real world and straight into the world of make-believe to have her mask applied by a make-up artist; only then does she show the audience the face to be seen as if it were a public unveiling.  The all-natural 70s, now the aging morning-face hidden behind a head scarf, sunglasses, and shadows, is remade into 80s artifice through a 40-style makeover right before our eyes, ready for the dawn of a new day.  The sequence is about process, preparation, performance, persona.  It introduces the audience of this latest era to the possibility of the post-modern art-as-personality.  Patriarchy may have been recast with a neo-romantic performance of old Hollywood masculinity befitting a state-of-the-art political theatre, but the Drama Queen was the new star of the 80s.    

Faye Dunaway's diva-upon-diva performance of Joan Crawford took method into meta.  "It's deeper than an impersonation,'" writes film critic Pauline Kael of Dunaway's performance, "she turns herself into Joan Crawford … but she's more Faye Dunaway than ever."   The film's story is eclipsed by its star's own transformative presence, her own personal experience of becoming someone or something else.  This metamorphic process was more than cosmetic.  The delicate borderline between reality and supra-reality melted into ambiguation, and the point where one persona ended and another began was lost in translation.  Method acting went beyond mimicry and memory and delved deep into the marrow of a dead woman.  Dunaway talked to reporters of a kind of possession that had overtaken her, speaking of a "presence" that haunted her performance as if "Joan was not at rest".  Meanwhile, cast, crew and critics marveled at the seeming reincarnation of a legend.  This wasn't the kind of demonic possession that gave 70s audiences nightmares from watching that other film about a mother-daughter relationship gone to hell in Friedkin's THE EXORCIST (although Dunaway's cold-cream kabuki-nightmare moment in MOMMIE DEAREST could find comparison).   It was an ethereal transfiguration, the molecular merged with mystery.  It was a complete immersion in that fourth dimensional place that houses the combined vibrational energies of the conscious, subconscious and unconscious, all fused together into one big superconsciousness.  It's a process akin to the metacognitive state of lucid dreaming in which the dreamer is conscious of being the dreamer of a dream, watching oneself as the watcher who is being watched in a perpetual hall of mirrors that keeps on giving and receiving reflections.  There is no beginning and no end to the incorporation of dream logic and wakefulness, no clear definition of what is. Kael's description of this "new form of folie à deux" between Dunaway and her subject-turned-object could just as easily be applied to Collins-as-Alexis and every other media actor and social actor that followed (as well as every reality TV star, pseudo-politician, and social media influencer that would follow in the next century), those supra-realists who birth a reflexive persona through a performance art that blurs fact and fiction and blends truth with camp.  Breaking out of the confines of the flat-dimensional boxed-in screenscape, the 80s Superbitch transcended the perimeters of the imagination and found new subtexts that hit closer to home for self-expression.  She was emerging as a role model for the new era persona. 

It's important to truly understand this complex model of persona to understand the impact the Bitch had on the 80s that just kept on evolving into the succeeding decades.  This was more than just a stock villainess.  Jessica Walters, one of the contenders for the role of Alexis before it was offered to Collins, went all-out and over-the-top chewing the scenery as Southern-bred mommie dearest Ava Marshall in the 1983 short-lived NBC soap BARE ESSENCE, based on the CBS mini-series the previous year in which Lee Grant played the role.  During the 83-84 season, Jill St. John vamped it up as the ripe and the restless Deanna Kinkead on CBS's EMERALD POINT N.A.S., brought to life from the creators of DYNASTY that attempted to glamourize the US Navy as a potential potboiler and turn another B-movie actress into a prime-time sensation.  Looking great on paper and even better in person on-screen, none of these viable actresses made a dent in the demographics.  There have been endless imitators and wannabes, but the obvious copycat posturing only indicated there was more to an archetype than just turbans and temper tantrums.  

The Superbitch is a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, every state of lucid dreaming come true.  It is Dunaway owning her own monstrous ego and colliding headfirst with her craft, turning it into neo-conceptual performance art that's too big for the film that barely contains it; it is Collins owning being over-40 and turning aging into her success story; it is Fairchild owning the bitchface God gave her and turning it into a successful brand; it is Mills owning the innocent face nature bestowed upon her and turning the tables in her own personal Sandra Dee-to-Hot Pink Lady career move.  It is going from being a footnote in male history to being their own herstory that, in turn, can be anyone else's.  Through a remodeled postmodern romantic sensibility, it can turn characters who abuse their children, deliberately cause other women's miscarriages or steal other women's husbands into Mother Courages run amok and gone foul; not dime-a-dozen bitches who are born bad because the plot demands it, but individual humans who are hardened by a common feminine experience: one either sinks or swims.  This reinterpretation of the feminine spirit forced not just the reconsideration of the classic villainess, but, just as KL's Abby had challenged Val to look at life through her eyes, also forced their good girl antithesis to grow up.   

Later, in the 90s, traditional heroines who had been around since the 70s and set the standard for female heroics throughout the 80s were knocked down off their pedestals as they were subjected to initiatory rites of passages into a different kind of womanhood that was less pristine and less perfect.  Anything went in showing that stable state of perfect womanhood was in a state of cultural flux.  Long-time stalwart matriarch Viki Lord (Erika Slezak) of ONE LIFE TO LIVE and heroine Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall) of DAYS OF OUR LIVES both took walks on the wild side by developing darker alter egos due to forces beyond their control:  the former disappearing behind several destructive multi-personalities that reflected this new crisis in female identity, the latter becoming possessed by the Devil in a life development that threw conventional notions of credibility to the winds of change.  The normally level-headed Marlena had been primed a couple of years before for such supernormal transformation by giving into her illicit passions with a man who was not her husband; meanwhile, GENERAL HOSPITAL's ethereal Laura Webber Spencer (Genie Francis) went from one-note to multi-dimensional overnight when she was forced to reveal she had a secret son stashed away somewhere in the Mediterranean that she had had during one of her many long intervals off the show.  Good girls were undergoing their own modern makeover; showing they weren't perfect did wonders for their cred.  It also paved the way for a new kind of leading lady to take center stage.

  

Venturing into a new century, Luciferian Lilith was finally successful in her bid to retransform herself into a Promethean Eve.  The late 90s would see a fashionably new open concept kind of  anti-heroine (like GH's Carly or BOLD & BEAUTIFUL's Brooke) wriggle - not wiggle - her way into the top spot; by the 2000s, they were centralized in the hearth of heroinism that once housed only the good girls of the golden age.  Meanwhile, scarlet women of the glory days like ALL MY CHILDREN's Erica Kane (Susan Lucci), YOUNG & RESTLESS' Nikki Newman (Melody Thomas Scott) and GUIDING LIGHT's Reva Shayne (Kim Zimmer) had survived so many foibles in their long careers (sometimes the same foibles over and over and over again) that they ended up assuming the mantle of matriarchy without ever pretending they were worthy successors to the stalwart stewarts of soaps' past; the thought never crossed their worldly minds to make one iota of apology for their less-than-pristine track records, which only made them more fitting mother bees for a more imperfect feeling world, post-Sept 11th.  Whether that is progress or not is completely subjective.  It does display, however, a broadening of opportunities that weren't there when the villainess was still in her place as second fiddle in that cusp-period of transition between the 70s and the 80s in which the mainstream still thought they needed to invest in notions that bad mothers and worn women couldn't possibly ever be considered role models - before someone with impeccable timing and the taste to match convinced them they were just being old-fashioned.   

Take in point the case of Beverlee McKinsey.  Throughout the 70s, the Cristal champagne-voiced McKinsey reigned supreme on the daytime screen as ANOTHER WORLD's sublime villainess Iris Carrington, the deliciously decadent and cosmopolitan creation of famed soap scribe and playwright Harding Lemay (whose friends Esther and Richard Shapiro, incidentally, modeled their Alexis character upon).  Dripping in mod chic, the over-40 Iris worked as a successful villainess for her time because she was perpetually caught in a state of arrested development as spoiled daddy's girl, unnaturally in love with a dashing father whose affections she would jealously manipulate.  When NBC spun off their popular daytime star to headline their new soap TEXAS in 1980 as her equally popular character, McKinsey was given star billing but Iris was regrettably rewritten as a more mature, conventional heroine because the time's moralistic logic was that an unsympathetic woman could not possibly be the central star of a show (despite Larry Hagman enjoying headlining success as the man everyone loved to hate on prime-time's red-hot DALLAS, the zeitgeist show whose phenomenal popularity NBC had hoped to capitalize upon with their new soap).  McKinsey's vocal reservations about Iris' drastic revision (she once declared that "basic character doesn't change") proved right in the show's less-than-stellar ratings: audiences did not want to watch a defanged Iris, whose carefully-crafted madness and motivation were completely altered all for the sake of a puritanical principle of propriety that, given just a couple of more years, would be proved outdated.  Despite yet another revision mid-story in which Iris returned to her old scheming ways, the damage had been done and McKinsey chose to leave the character behind for good after the show's first full year.  Interestingly, McKinsey would make her final appearance ever as Iris on November 30, 1981, almost three weeks after Alexis made her first appearance on November 11th that same year.  The double standard embedded in the heroine/villainess complex that damaged Iris' credibility was to be worked out by the successor she had inspired: the over-40 villainess could and would be the star of the show. 

Before the Superbitch, a story couldn't get off the ground without a good heroine who kept the social order intact; now her antithesis was at the centre of the storm of almost every woman's story to be told.  When she asked why her request to play the good girl in a TV project was turned down, Fairchild was told by a director, "We can find an ingenue anywhere … but a good bitch is hard to find."  

                                            

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Before moving on, there is one scene in MOMMIE DEAREST that must be considered as a critical juncture in the evolution of the Soap Opera Diva.  Inserted late in the film's morbidly decadent narrative as its own singular self-sustaining moment, this scene takes the movie temporarily out of its insular narrative of maternal monster and transforms the Goddess-turned-Gorgon into an Amazon who strikes a valiant blow against sexism, ageism and classism all at once.  The only woman sitting at a conference table with the board of directors of Pepsi's mighty corporation, a middle-aged Crawford faces down an organized phalanx of anonymous suits enveloping her.  They plan to force their late president's widow and famous spokeswoman into retirement and write off the fading star as just another minute put down in their annual meeting.  Cagey, calculating, and contemptible of the male dominated establishment under which she has long had to earn her way only for that world to always inevitably turn on her, Dunaway's Crawford turns the tables on them and leaves no prisoners.  Like the MGM lion ripping out of the celluloid veil in full-on 3-D, this over-the-top parody bursts out of her female drag to reveal behind her masquerade every Crawford, every Dunaway, every woman, every mother, daughter and sister that have been pushed under the thumb of the male takedown.  Backed into a corner, the feminine eternal comes out fighting because, like NETWORK's Howard Beale (Peter Finch), she's mad as hell and she isn't taking it anymore.  

"Don't Fuck!  with me fellas!" she bellows at the top of her voice with the terrifying command of a brutal drill sergeant, adding with a perfectly rounded growl, "This ain't my first time at the Rodeo."   Centuries of denied experiences were freed through the portal ripped open by this climatic F-bomb blast, the most effective use of male language by a female caricature ever captured in cinema.   Watching this middle-aged woman demolish a roomful of old pasty-faced empty souls is still rousing after all these years, for there is an authenticity underlying all its operatic melodrama that gives it a certain timelessness.  This one scene becomes more multi-layered and more meaningful with each passing decade.  In this new era of social media, one can find it anywhere online shared by people who weren't even born in the century it was made, extolling it as 'bad-ass', 'ball-busting', and 'epic' as if it were made just yesterday.  With her cool late-70s eye yet to adapt to a changing cultural lens that wouldn't become clear to look through until hindsight set in, Kael breezily dismisses this scene as "merely camp", simply a "release for the audience"; but that release is orgasmic and the camp is a conduit for revelation.  It takes us from the grotesque to the sublime.  It is a hallmark moment in the evolution of Bitch as epic anti-heroine, a declaration of corporate female power that will be repeated again and again throughout the decade, opening gateways into the next century.  Sonic echoes of Dunaway's F-bomb performance can be heard in every soap opera diva that came afterwards.  

Released in September 1981, two months before Alexis would lift her veil for the world to see a new face for a reworked matriarchal courage, MOMMIE DEAREST brought the overarching mother archetype in all her great terror to the forefront of the cultural consciousness.  But this feminine eternal never really went away.  She always seems to make herself be seen in all her glamourous - and usually dangerous - allure during significant shifts in norms and mores that come with times in transition.  Dunaway's maternal monster was successor to Anne Bancroft's la Meré terrible Mrs. Robinson, Snow White's wicked Queen reincarnated as a suburban lady of upper-middle-class leisure in 1967's THE GRADUATE.  Perennially smoking, drinking, lurking, she haunts the vacuous scene of the suburban set as a ghost by day, stalks for new blood like a vampire by night.  Underneath her mythic demeanor is just another bored middle-aged housewife, corrupted by her all-devouring bitterness over an unfulfilled life filled with modern conveniences.  Denied creative self-expression except through marriage and motherhood, she is driven to vicariously experience  political empowerment through sophomore sex play with the all-American boy-next-door; this only turns into another mind-numbing (in)convenience because, as Freeman argues in her manifesto, the cause of woman's frustration is "social not sexual."  

Joan Crawford has creative self-expression and sexual power, yet her career is ultimately in the hands of more powerful but less talented men; likewise, her legend is at the mercy of a male director who will turn her posthumous biopic into a kind of hagsploitation flick befitting Crawford's own late career period. Viewers are denied an explanation by Frank Perry's film as to why Texan-born Lucille LeSueur became the Hollywood horror Joan Crawford because her words aren't her own, lifted and re-interpreted from the pages of her daughter's tell-all book.  Mrs. Robinson, too, is denied her own story; there are hints of a past full of choices not her own because of a teenage pregnancy and its obligatory marriage, but they are kept deliberately vague in favour of her younger lover's more important social aches and pains.  In fact, although she dominates most of the first part of the film, she is conspicuously absent from the rest of it, relegated to the margins, left hanging mid-story, forever an elusive figure in her silence.  Both matriarchal figures are kept isolated in that deafening sound of nothingness that Simon and Garfunkel capture in their signature ode to despair.   When she is brought out of her obscurity for one last cameo at the end of the film, Mrs. Robinson has the chance to let out her rage during the pandemonium that erupts from her daughter's aborted wedding ceremony, but she is strangely denied her voice, muted by the film's selective soundtrack; she is reduced to but a mouth moving in marionette motion in the sound of silence.   Alexis Carrington assuming the role of star witness and taking the stand to tell her side of the story for the whole world to hear takes on a much more symbolic importance than just simple melodrama - her tell-all testimony signals the arrival of the passionate mature woman who controls her own narrative.     

The last we see of Mrs. Robinson, she is violently lashing out at her fugitive bridal daughter, physical abuse we will see repeated by Dunaway's Crawford, who, in turn, will help release over a decade later Mrs. Robinson's silenced rage, a journey culminating in that multi-dimensional F-bomb for Every Woman.  Sex-as-power in their respective times may not have been the answer, but it was the start of a sexual evolution-through-revolution, collecting battle scars for future incarnations to be reshaped into Darwinian trinkets.  Every diamond, ruby and sapphire that adorned the 80s Superbitch was a spoil of war snatched by her cinematic an-sisters.  Each caricature did her part until the collective consciousness agreed that feminist sex  - at first reviled and rejected - could be commodified along with everything else as big business.  The materialistic 80s was the era where these ladies-lying-in-wait could finally find their creative self-expression and be lauded as a new kind of heroine, marketed as something new and improved while using the system to their own advantage - this time, being invited through the front door as the must-have guest on everyone's wish list, owning the room by the time the boys in the back room come around and end up being guests at what is now her party.  It has taken over fifty years for Mrs. Robinson to undergo a complete re-evaluation by a new generation of academic theorists and armchair academics, some even regarding the domestic jungle cat as THE GRADUATE's only real hero; likewise, Dunaway's meta performance continues to haunt, fascinate and bewilder, begging for more  deconstruction and deeper exploration.  Again and again and again, these two fascinating modern creatures with roots in ancient lore would be revisited, reinvented, and remolded into cultural milestones.  

       

Without Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson, there may never have been Dunaway's Joan Crawford (quite literally - Bancroft was all set to play Crawford right down to wardrobe fittings before backing out due to creative differences; some of the dresses already made for Bancroft's body had to be retailored to fit Dunaway).  And without Dunaway's Crawford, there may have been a Madeline Carrington, a character originally intended for a limited story arc, but there may not have been an Alexis Carrington Colby, a revised version based on a whole new vision, and who, two years after the Great F-Bomb blast of 1981, would take on the all-male board of directors of her ex-husband's oil empire and enforce a corporate takeover upon them in a scene reminiscent of MOMMIE DEAREST's epiphanic moment, albeit with a cooler head and a language more fitting for standards and practices.  The other main difference was that where Crawford stood alone against the world, Alexis had two of her main corporate officers - both male - seated behind her as she forced herself upon the patriarchal body.  She had the support system that Dunaway's Crawford didn't - the support of a changing world, of loyal viewers who relished this woman's audacity and even supported her getting her own in the name of all that's been done to her.  From that misty malaise that was the 60s and on through to the 80s, the darker side of the feminine was working its way through film, sorting out all the problematics associated with the middle-aged woman as bitch goddess in the psychological mindset.  Into Danny and Sandy's bright future, we go - determined not to take things so seriously.  From tragic-comic figure to a tragic-campy icon to full-blown soap opera diva, the drag just got deeper and the bitch more colourful - and more confident - with each landmark re-invention, one vampiric representation succeeding the other, each absorbing the changes taking place within their respective generations … changing but always staying the same. 

NOTE:  These nudging little Jungianesque synchronicities are what make the soap world a bastion of poetic ironies: in what would have been a case of the prodigal Mother coming home, things almost came full circle in 1986 when Faye Dunaway was offered the role of the Shapiros' new superbitch Sable Colby for their DYNASTY spin-off THE COLBYS, an offer that couldn't match Dunaway's asking fee and truthfully may have been just too big for prime-time.  In Donna Mills' case, however, the circle did become complete with her successful Sandra Dee-cum-Pink Lady career metamorphosis, as she was the inspiration for the character of Sandy in the musical GREASE, co-written by her former high school classmate Jim Jacobs (who I wish I could say is related to KL creator David Jacobs, who cast Mills in the role of Abby - but I can't because he wasn't, but we can leave these strange coincidences to incubate in our imaginations about that elusive enigmatic way things work themselves out in the web weaved by the always playful Soap Gods).  

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It is the year 1984 that academics like to mark on their calendars as when the 80s as we remember it really began.  Perhaps this is because of the ironic value of novelist George Orwell choosing 1984 as the title of his 1944 nightmarish scenario that depicts a futuristic dystopian wasteland.  Orwell's prophecy was bleak, but he couldn't have predicted the profound power of the American propaganda machine, for the future was going to be theirs - not his.  Born from those early frontier fables and tall tales shared by cowboys around the campfire and passed down through centuries of likeminded dream-weavers and dream-sharing, that myth-making monster grew into an amalgamated three-headed dragon fed by Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood.  Orwell's year became the inauguration of something new, something big, something the whole world had to take notice.  The 1984 Summer Olympics held in California was commenced by the arrival of a lone futuristic man in a jetpack who flew into the Los Angeles stadium as the avatar of a Brave New World.  Yes, advancements in public transportation by jetpack have never panned out since then, but it's the ideal it represented that was most important.  The promise and potential of defying gravity was enough for audiences to believe in the possibilities of what was once regarded as impossible.  

A brash new upstart known only as Apple used the 1984 Super Bowl XVIII to unveil its vision of the future, introducing to the masses its revolutionary Macintosh computer in an ad that was directed by neo-noir filmmaker Ridley Scott.  The commercial satirizes Orwell's dystopian pessimism.  Overseen by Big Brother, Orwell's regimented black-and-white police state full of helpless blank faces is invaded by a female Olympic-style athlete in all her colorized blonde splendor; she charges into its insular prison world and hurls her sledgehammer into Big Brother's screen visage, releasing a bright new future like a coming storm.  It's an American reversion of Leni Riefenstahl's TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, fascist authoritarianism defeated by Aryan glamour, a mind-twisting paradox that only the bastion of capitalism and democracy could manage to get away with.  Orwell's critical narrative was rewritten with a one minute big budget cinematic override now considered a landmark moment in the new age of advertising: 

The appropriation of one man's artistic vision through the all-pervading lens of a new imperialism worked its movie-making magic by methods of bright blonde sex, crass irony and unabashed moxie: "... you'll see how 1984 won't be like "1984"," the ad declares with a hint of patronizing mockery.   Technology is crowned as the liberating force that will put power back into the hands of the people.  Fascism may be defeated in the commercial, but it is only replaced in real-life by consumerism.  The colonizing power of commercialism ushered in a whole new era of innovation and futuristic advancements that was once only possible in the movies.  From 1984 onwards, life would never be the same again.  Incidentally, this was also the year the world's first actor-cum-president won a second term in a record-breaking landslide, a stage triumph that validated his theatrical-style of political methodology as the new way of doing things as well as affirming the cinematic vision he helped shape through which to look at the world as the new way of seeing things.       

   

1984 marked a kind of reset.  That project nostalgia that had commercially amalgamated the sentimentalities of the 40s and 50s to shape the political and personal sensibilities of a new modern decade had accomplished what it set out to do by 1984.  With conservatism firmly in place, the nifty fifties had served its commercial purposes, and those vintage mental snapshots that filled the last part of the 70s and the early 80s began to disappear to make way for modern updates that suited a jetpacking future outlook.  The 50's graffiti-style HAPPY DAYS symbolically came to an end in 84; its sister show LAVERNE & SHIRLEY had ended the year before in 1983, having had essentially abandoned its 50s aesthetic before its cancellation for a more ambiguous contemporaneous 80s feel.  It was no longer necessary to sublimate the longing for something better when it suddenly became the best time to be alive.  The 50s ceased to be a bygone era - it now became a new lease on life.  That magical numerical signifier was successfully updated from simply nifty to be reinvented as something sexy.  By 1983, 50 year old TV sensation Joan Collins had become the embodiment of the empowered modern woman, breaking new ground that year with her celebratory Playboy pictorial layout.  She paved the way for a regenerated generation of middle-aged trailblazers.  In 1985, audiences were more than ready to embrace the sexual reawakenings of four over-50 golden girls who all moved to Miami not to retire but to reinvent themselves, breaking the mold for how women would laugh, love and live their lives on the TV landscape forever.        

The same year Bill Cosby was giving the American Dad a total makeover, 50 year old Diahann Carroll brought a whole new hue to the Superbitch.  As DYNASTY hit no.3 in the ratings by the end of its 83-84 season (to zoom to the number one spot the following year), it stepped boldly into the future by closing its season with another 11th hour addition of a new mature Superbitch to its mix.  Already considered a television pioneer for playing TV's first African-American professional career woman in her own starring vehicle entitled JULIA (1968-71), Carroll rewrote the rules again 13 years later with her novel casting as black barracuda Dominique Deveraux, the self-made diva made possible, in fact, by Carroll's own initiative - and self-fecundating imagination.  Taking matters into her own hands, Carroll crashed a party held by DYNASTY's executive producer Aaron Spelling to pitch her desire to be "the first black bitch on television", her exact words reflecting the rebranded vernacular of the day.   By then, it went without saying: once branded as mere troublemaker and nuisance, bitch now implied not just sex and glamour, but power - the kind of power that enabled woman to navigate and negotiate at will.  Bitch now had a seat at the table.  On May 2, 1984, new lady in town Dominique Deveraux swept into a hotel lobby with the same fierce intention as Alexis entered that courtroom three years before her, marching into frame with military-like precision complete with an army of luggage that required its own suite and a limitless supply of emotional baggage that promised to unpack the patriarchal closet of all its secrets.  This Bitch had a brand new story to tell and everyone was going to hear it.  

This was more than impossibly decadent melodrama and perhaps even grand stunt casting; this belonged to that new kind of storytelling and performance art that could be traced back to Dunaway's meta d'art.  Recalling the fateful night she pitched her idea to Spelling, Carroll recounts getting ready for a Golden Globe stage appearance hours before inviting herself to Spelling's post-awards party; knowing Spelling and his associates would be in the audience, Carroll worked with her dressers to manifest the unrealized character that had been percolating in her mind, a meticulous process of creating persona that calls to mind Dunaway's ritualistic transformation into Crawford during the opening sequence of MOMMIE DEAREST:  "[it was] preparation, preparation, preparation," Carroll remembers, "... we worked forever on how she would look.  I was creating a DYNASTY character in my head and when I walked on stage, Aaron said to everybody "she looks like DYNASTY"."  Months later, that muse that Carroll intimately personified as 'she' - as if she were speaking of an actual separate person outside of herself - would be given a name, a purpose and an unlimited budget in wardrobe by a team of writers and producers who all followed suit in helping Carroll materialize this new persona into being, all knowing the time was right for Dominique to make her grand entrance in the scheme of things.  In fact, it was Dominique's qualifying meta element that made this Superbitch long overdue.  Dominique's story was Diahann's herstory, which could be Every Black Woman's story which, in turn, could be Any Woman's story, regardless of race.   Dominique Deveraux took bitch power to a whole new level of universality and sister solidarity that a woman of white privilege - no matter that woman's background or station in life - could never do.   

This curious case of Carroll's self-creation also helps open up discussion regarding the secret behind the Superbitch's sexual construct.  "Write for me as you would a white male," Ms. Carroll instinctively instructed the producers once she was hired.  The canny artist in her recognized the cross-sexual element in this upgrade diva-figure, a performative gender transversal that can found hidden in every bitch goddess from Venus to Mona Lisa,  Snow White's Evil Queen to Mrs. Robinson.  Masculine performance had always been at the root of the male persona - men dressed as men were expected to, talked like men were expected to talk and acted like men were expected to act according to the dictates of social scripting; the so-called New Bitch took her cue from her historical oppressors and re-scripted gender narrative, writing a whole new version that could be regarded as a satire.  Appropriating manspeak and transvesting its hypermasculine persona, her bisexual performance revealed a telling hypocrisy long hidden in the male masquerade; it also shone light on an unspoken truth hiding in the proverbial patriarchal closet, one that has actually been in plain sight since the Kubrickian dawn of man and that first war waged among our ancestral primates over a monolith of nothing.  Underneath the crowns and armour, clerical collars and three-piece suits, five o'clock shadow and mile-high stetsons, there has been no bigger drama queen than a power-hungry king or a raging general, a puritanical preacher or a fascist dictator, a Jack the Ripper or a J.R. Ewing.  

This grown-up's version of playing grown-up is what gave the 80s diva her greatest weapon: sexual irony.  Understanding man's deepest darkest secret, she could hit below the belt with it - right on target.  Accepting the bi-gendered circular wiring of gender politics, she had less to lose in embracing androgyny than her male counterparts who remained oblivious to what Jung termed their anima because of an ever-pervading fear of emasculation - especially being branded as effeminate.  Her unisex frame of mind thrived in its dualities, giving her a leg up in the survival of the mentally fittest.  She was a cerebral gymnast, thinking fast on her feet and running circles around her opponent.  She could deliver an expertly timed and perfectly crafted retort on the spot, manufacturing bon mots as bombshells at will and turning cocktail hour into combat with the cleverness and wit of an acid-tongued Wildean aesthete or the verbal acrobatics of a perennial Noel Coward dinner guest.  She benefited by having both feet dangling respectively on both sides of the fence, toeing the line like a cat balancing on a high wire with death-defying ease.   A hierarchical enigma, she was both snob and outcast, elitist and outsider, tyrant and thief, reactionary and revolutionary, fascist and feminist.  Mixing the polished ego with predatory primal instinct, she plotted and plundered with a terrifying purpose that can be traced all the way back to when we all crawled out of the ancient primordial swamp.  And she did it with style, never failing to look impeccable while doing it.  The Superbitch was the most ironic, most alive, most serpentine androgyne a gay playwright could find lurking in the furthest reaches of his hermaphroditic imagination.  

 

It isn't surprising the gay community found its new heroes in these neo-feminists who embraced their otherness, derived their strength in their displacements, and used their disadvantages to their advantage - all in the name of revenge.  In this Brave New Age of Bright Lights and Big City, the ugly reality of AIDS at an epidemic level didn't fit the brave new vision, and with gay men in particular carrying the burden of responsibility of this new sexual social threat by a frightened and misguided moral majority, the 80s Superbitch  represented not just escapist entertainment for the social pariah but provided lessons in survival.  Always demonized as an extension of the problematic feminine by a prejudicial masculinist system, the gay man found a kindred spirit in the Superbitch who was changing embedded social prejudices by acting and even talking like a man - while exploiting and exaggerating everything sublime about the feminine mystique.   Emulating the Superbitch, the sexualized gay man could derive empowerment from his branded otherness.  The advent of the Superbitch was concurrent with a new level of sexual stigmatization of the gay man, and each helped the other to ultimately redefine sex and sexuality.   As Eleanor of Aquitaine and any other embattled queen in history will attest, owning the sexual trump card is the coup d'etat in any high stakes game of survival.  Sexuality is the ultimate expression of self-empowerment - you control sex, you control imagination; you control imagination, you control destiny.  Out and proud bisexuality would take a couple of more decades to make its pride statement in this new scheme of things, but the 80s loved to flirt with androgyny, perhaps more erotic because of what was not being said in this new discourse which these new femme fatales dictated in how it was being said.      

Blake Edward's 1982 film VICTOR/VICTORIA (a film that couldn't have been more perfectly timed) brilliantly captured the gender politics that was involved in this male masquerade with its labyrinthine maze of sexual identities built into its title dual character - make that quadrupled character.  Like Dunaway's layered-upon-layered Mommie persona, art-as-personality in VICTOR/VICTORIA works on a dizzying array of levels:  Victoria (Julie Andrews) pretends to be not just a man (Victor), but a gay man who is in turn a female impersonator named Victoria; names, sexual constructs and genders going around and around in an endless circular loop that just keeps traveling back into itself.   Needless to say, the audience to Victoria/Victor's own particular brand of persona theatre becomes caught up in a mind-bending trip of endless gender-bending possibilities and unsolvable sexual conundrums.   In the end, heterosexuality wins out (it was the 80s), but the gateways have been opened to a mainstream audience for a new way of looking at things. 

"The Look" was the best stated expression of Self-as-Sexuality.  So-called "power dressing" was not just corporate - it was cross-cultural. And anything was up for grabs in attaining the desired presentation: old Hollywood glamour met new pop punk through Paris fashion house sophistication and middle-class thrift store chic.  Nothing was off-limits - lace that once denoted a demure young lady could be paired with Lolita-type precociousness; the white wedding dress that connotated purity and innocence was rebranded as just as much of an erotic accessory as the frilly underlings reserved for more private matters.  Brassieres weren't being burned but could be worn as outerwear, mixed easily with the new "power suit" - that lycra-based armour for the new Amazon, borrowed heavily from the 1940's utility wartime slim-waisted tailor-suit, updated with broadly overstated shoulders, double-breasted contours and cutting edge silhouettes to make the figure loom even larger on the battlefield.  For added weaponry,  Grandmother's pearls could be thrown in - with maybe an odd crucifix or two because, as 80s fashion dictated, "more is bolder ... and bolder is more".    

All the old familiar patriarchal symbols were being recoded, their identifications turned inside out and upside down.  Athletic wear went from butch to unisex as women sweated it out in gyms, which now rivalled the nightclub scene as the place to be seen.  Fur - that emblematic kink of masochist male fantasy - was no longer just the dressing of a trophy wife or a placated mistress; it was the mark of a woman's success as an independent self-sufficient huntress … self-made Venus in Furs' that were figments of their own masturbatory manifestations.  Once reserved only for wild boy rebels without a cause, leather was becoming a favorite fashion statement for these feminist rebels with purpose.  With all their bold broad brashness, these new women warriors were still playing a hide-and-seek game with their own costume changes by stripping down gender-play to its most naked form: playing a woman was just as much of a masquerade as men playing at being a man.  Like Dunaway's performance as Crawford, they were exploring and exploiting the transvestite value of being a woman - the Nietzschean superwoman of their own autoerotic imaginations.  They were traveling down whole new avenues, but ancient male tropes about woman-as-object were still fueling the fantasy, the difference being that this time around it was about woman's fantasies about being woman.  The stronger and more bolder a Bitch's personality-as-art, the more transvestite the presentation.  Is it any wonder that the urbane drag queen - a niche art based on persona, performance and sexual plundering that has since become a mainstream mainstay - found so much inspiration in the enduring images of what has become the iconic 80s diva?  

That same year Carroll was breaking all kinds of barriers with her return to weekly television, over-40 Tina Turner was making a career comeback of her own, reappearing from memory like some familiar mythical bird of vengeance.    Stepping out from the murky misty night realm of domestic abuse and male oppression, Turner led the regenerative 80s into the dawn of a new day.  Marching the inner-city streets in her high heels as a leather-pencil skirted Amazon, Turner challenged the hoi polloi one by one on their sweet old-fashioned notions of love's second-hand emotion.  Revived by a whole new look that reflected a whole new attitude, this self-proclaimed Empress commanded her audience with the mature, fierce  sexuality of a Cleopatra risen through wisdom and reborn through battle-wearied experience.   Her own personal Battle of Actium ended up being her victory, not her defeat.  The no-holds-barred music scene of the 80s celebrated a whole hostess of strong new feminine perspectives on love's double standards; or a girl's right just to have fun - even with herself through the act of 'she-boping'; or a self-proclaimed boy-toy's wherewithal to feel like a shiny and new virgin again regardless what Papa or any Pope may preach.  These big brothers may have been busy watching bad little girls, but they, along with all good little girls (and even some good little boys) were too busy watching a Big Sister who suddenly emerged on the main scene in 1984.  

Lurking around the periphery of the Billboard mainstream for the first few years of the decade, Madonna used Orwell's year to introduce herself to the entire world.  This debutante-gone-wild held her coming out party at the very first MTV Awards, blatantly exploiting the artistic license of musical performance as a marketing ploy for the new age, reshaping promotion into Event.  Elvis became King overnight by using the power of his pelvis to declare his coup over the airwaves of 50s television sets; Madonna went from pop princess to self-made Queen just as swiftly by using a much more expanded media and a much larger domestic audience at her disposal, using not just her entire body but her brains as well.  What could have been dismissed as a popalicious one-hit wonder revealed herself to be something much more than anyone could have expected, inaugurating what would become her long career of marketing controversy and challenging every notion of female sexuality that could possibly be explored.  On that landmark night in September 1984, Cyndi Lauper walked away with the first-ever Moonman Award for Best Female Video for her all-girl anthem "Girls Just Want To Have Fun", but it was Madonna who showed them all how just one girl could do it her own way.   

If Katharine Ross' fugitive bride distorted the pristine image of the archetypal blushing bride by fleeing the sacred ceremony and climbing onto a city bus, Madonna blasted the remnants of that soiled sanctified image into smithereens with her carefully choreographed presentation as burlesque bride who did everything but blush.  Appearing alone on the top of a wedding cake, a veiled Madonna announced the marriage to herself in a goddess ritualization of self-worship.  Plunging straight into the ecstasy usually reserved for the honeymoon, she descended from her Olympian confectionary to offer herself to the masses, claiming them as her own - whether they liked it or not.  As she assaulted the stage like a cat on a hot tin floor, she proclaimed her own parthenogenetic ability to rebirth herself from whore to virgin and back again at will.  The captive world sat and watched, having been cordially invited to witness - whether they wanted to or not - the coming together of person and persona, and of Warholian pop art with socio-political theatre.  The goddess lifted her veil and it was Every Woman.   The brilliance of this high-heeled step into the future of feminism is that it dangerously teetered on parody if it weren't for the authentic celebration of everything wonderful and mysterious about the female ego.

And in 1984, the female ego was given a never-ending assortment of adrenaline boosts by all the significant strides women were making in male-dominated places: Geraldine Ferraro took one giant step forward for womankind as the first female vice-presidential ticket nominee ever in US history while astronaut Kathryn Sullivan became the first woman to walk in space and runner Joan Benoit won the first staged women's marathon at the Summer Olympics.  The 80s woman is defined by a new mobility, of constant movement, of using her body for more than decoration but as an instrument for moving forward.  That new mode of action is recorded in the take flight-and-fly feeling of Irene Cara's gravity-defying theme song "What A Feeling" for the 1983 film FLASHDANCE, in which an exotic dancer strives to legitimatize herself by becoming a ballet dancer, stripping female sexuality down not to its rawest reality but to its most classical form.   Jennifer Beal's internal striptease in which she successfully removes her bra out from under a peekaboo one piece sweatshirt/dress like a rabbit out of a hat without once interrupting her casual conversation - or batting an eyelash - is a milestone moment of not just feminist cinema but also women's fashion.  Clothes help - not hinder - a woman's progress.  Like the scene itself, fashion is sexy with a lot of cheeky humour but still romantic enough to leave some air of mystery ... and just a tad hint of vulgarity to challenge age-old classism and old-fashioned sexism.  FLASHDANCE's fashion statement captured the entire feeling of 80s casual romanticization, just as its iconic theme song hinted at the secret of the 80s art-as-personality, that "being" is "believing" in not just your own self, but your own self-created image - or your recreated image.  It was in 1984 that Elizabeth Taylor entered the Betty Ford Center for alcohol and substance abuse rehabilitation and walked out a new person, shedding addictions like she did extra pounds and trading victimhood for survivordom.  Vices could now be victories; what was once regarded as sins could now be someone's own personal wins.  Like Tina Turner's own '84 Amazonian makeover, Taylor's regeneration marked a stunning career comeback that looked forward to a new era defined by the idea of the makeover, as well as a meta-celebrity that relied no longer on sheer talent but on one's own personal herstory.  

   

 

The makeover became the signature method of metamorphosis that went beyond just skin deep.  Women's magazines and morning television banked on the appeal of telling women how they could be better by looking better.  No longer was the ideal the perfectly preserved pristine woman - it was now the perfectly empowered woman in charge of her own destiny.  Beauty went from a time consuming recreation to the key to one's re-creation.  The classic Cinderella complex showed more and more of its leg in trajectorial milestone moments in cinema like Olivia Newton John's Hot Pink Lady reinvention in the forward-thinking GREASE (1978); Madonna's sexy street chic style refashioning a new generation's frame of mind in director Susan Seidelman's impeccably timed instant feminist cult classic DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985); and 70's icon Cher's triumphant career - and cosmetic - regeneration starting with 1982's COME BACK TO THE 5 & DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN (taking place in the 70s dealing with repercussions of events in the 50s) and evolving into 1987's modern fairytale rendering MOONSTRUCK.  Meanwhile, another 70's icon Farrah Fawcett took the opposite path in her own reclamation of image when she deconstructed the golden-haired  naturalism that made her the poster child of every boy's bedroom during the 70s  and made herself over as a battered blue collar wife in the critically acclaimed 1984 TV-movie THE BURNING BED.  Based on a true story, THE BURNING BED left its mark on audiences, pushing to the forefront the complex issues regarding domestic abuse and women's basic human rights, taking social discourse beyond the escapist entertainment of woman's revenge fantasies and into the brutally honest realm of woman's desperate bid for survival.  Two years later in 1986's motion picture EXTREMITIES, Fawcett continued cultivating her new persona as empowered modern woman when she took on the harrowing role of a rape victim who turns the tables on her assailant and subjects him to a psychological mind-game of torment and abuse.  Like Cher, Fawcett's career gamble afforded her a stunning career makeover, gaining her a newfound respect and credibility within the industry and a new generation of fans who saw her as more than just a pretty face.  She was now a trailblazer who had evolved through her own personal herstory through the films she now chose and the characters she wanted to play; any woman could be Fawcett and Fawcett could be Every Woman.  These actresses and the projects they chose and the personas they picked were playing out art-imitating-life personal victories that gradually pushed Pygmalian more and more into the background and revealed Galatea as her own true work of art shaped - and dressed - by her own self-determining psyche.  

 

While the 80s woman experimented with remodeling her own image, the Statue of Liberty underwent its own makeover in a two-year $62 million dollar conservation-restoration project that began in 1984 (the image of the grand lady covered in scaffolding will forever be appropriately preserved in some of the background scenes of DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN).  "If you still believe in me, save me" the fund-raising Keep the Torch Lit Project ad campaign dared, the seemingly embattled grand lady challenging not just a country's collective consciousness but also burrowing deep into double meaning for all women on a subconscious level.  The remodeling of the American Woman was an integral part of the entire mythic rebuilding of a nation.  In the increasingly image-conscious 80s, First Lady Nancy Reagan knew exactly what she was doing for herself and for the female ideal when she waved to the cameras from the top of the Free World through the opened observatory windows of the Statue of Liberty's crown to promote the real First Lady's centennial restoration. 

Meanwhile, AVON promoted its participation in the funding of the project in a 1984 TV ad campaign that proclaimed its commitment in "Helping keep the face of America beautiful".  Like MOMMIE DEAREST's opening launch of Dunaway transforming into Crawford, the graven image of liberty is touched up here and powdered there, the feminine broken down into parts and condensed to but a palette. 

  

This process of sexualization is further animated by the overlaying appearances of an impossibly beautiful model drifting in and around her own otherworldliness, seemingly defying gravity like she were her own Olympian jetpacking avatar, the winds of change blowing through her overly styled statuesque hair.  The ad's subversion of individual personality to establish persona is captured in both idol and her priestess, a female humanoid who is but a representational ideal of beauty for beauty's sake.  This should-be every woman is a bust come to life; like her role model, she, too, is subjugated to the bigger picture of which she is only a part.  The commercial closes with the new American Woman superimposed onto the Statue itself, both looking forward to the future that is theirs - and through them, ours.  The subliminal closing image reaches deep into the subconscious for inspiration from our ancient archetypes.  Divine mother and daughter cloned in twin sisterhood, Demeter and Persephone reunited as patriotic idealizations of generative duty and beauty's obligations.  Condensed into one nationalist ideal, the feminine has been ordained patron saint and protectress of the pursuit of life, liberty and loveliness.    

Nearing her 100th birthday, America's classic lady of copper and steel - designed and built by France as a gift to the United States in the late 19th century - was remodeled in this magic-making decade as the mythic American goddess protecting the part-and-parceled polis of its Brave New World.  Centuries before, the Greek Athena had already been remade into the Roman Minerva for the purpose of westernizing empire, and now she was officially reborn in the USA.  From Liberty's standpoint on the edge of history's horizon,  Goddesshood was imported into her harbour as a new type of produce.  While self-proclaimed Queen of Pop Madonna continued to pillage Hollywood's Golden Age of Goddesses for a dizzying array of image makeovers that were dressed up as homages and a burgeoning but bigger-than-life comic named Roseanne Barr insinuated herself onto the mainscene with a schtick built around the notion of the lower-to-middle class 'domestic goddess', the message that any woman could be her own divine recreation was seeded in the realm of modern age possibilities.  

The term 'bitch' was also undergoing a transformative phase in its ever-evolving restoration.  Although that word was heard in feature film for years, there was an illicit mystique that surrounded it as it was part of the restricted world permitted to mature audiences only.  It would occasionally peep out in some publications every now and then, especially when the subject was associated with the world of the continuing daytime drama and its scarlet women that viewers hated to love.  There was a conservatism in place, however, that was collectively agreed upon by the mainstream audience that prohibited the use of that word in "civilized" everyday society.  A January 1981 issue of Us magazine promoted its cover story on daytime bad girls with the more prudent headline "Super Witches of the Soaps"; a 1982 issue of Us again chose to use the term Superwitch in reference to Joan Collins on its August cover.  This tongue-in-cheek

modesty indicated a trepidation still present in the moral majority in exploiting for entertainment purposes what was then regarded as a vulgar slur - at least in the magazine shelves in the checkout aisles of the supermarket.  As that new decade jetpacked toward its mid-mark, there was a subtle shift in the collective consciousness for what was now deemed acceptable within the context of mainstream drama that signaled something had changed in our attitudes towards the term 'bitch' - and it happened sometime in that revisioned Orwellian year of 1984.  That subtle shift was signaled by no-so-subtle bitch bombshells strewn all across the television landscape that took place that year.    

 

Other than 1980's "Who Shot J.R.?" (or possibly Clara Peller's 1984 advertising behemoth demanding to know "Where's the Beef?"), no other question in television history seemed to fire up the popular imagination as when Phoebe Cates' vengeful Lili asked "... which one of you bitches is my mother?" on ABC's enormously popular 1984 mini-series LACE, revolving around a young woman's search to find which one of three former boarding school mates conceived her.  In fact, it was becoming more and more common for women to refer to one another as bitch rather than a man using it to put a woman in her place.  Today, it's salt and pepper to everyday conversation; it's not uncommon, for example, for girlfriends to proclaim their solidarity in friendship by referring to one another affectionately as "bitches".  In the 80s, however, it was something cutting edge for women to use the word against another woman.  It was an unfair advantage when a man denigrated woman by labeling her as a bitch, but it went somewhere different - and was something deeper - when Krystle called Alexis out for what the expatriate schemer was before jumping her and landing them both in the lily pond (which took place, incidentally, in 1984).  Before any kind of sisterhood could be merged between the heroine and the anti-heroine in the decades to come, this battle within the sex was working out the complex psychology of the new modern woman by first sorting out the problematics of that word.  Feminists spent the last few decades pounding out essays on their typewriters about sexual re-identification appropriation, but it took only a  few short years of this brave new decade to map out the reclamation of bitch by an army of the most powerful women ever portrayed up to that point on television, reshaping an old familiar trope for the soap genre.  Seemingly overnight, bitch went from slur to chic.   

Despite the political, economic and personal advancements being made by women, however, there was one thing in 1984 that was still regarded as impossible for the fairer sex seeking a fair shake: the top spot.  The August 1984 cover story for U.S. News & World Report magazine entitled "She's Come A Long Way - or has she?" reports:  "What still eludes the American woman, for the most part, is the room at the top: Chairman of the Board, senior partner, police chief, Army general."  As women were making baby steps forward, television shot boldly in leaps and bounds where no man - and woman - had gone before, exploring strange new worlds where women reigned supreme.  It was television that became the experimental environment where all of the liberated feminine voices sung in pop music's siren songs, spoken in political trailblazer's speeches and written about in feminism's revolutionary treatises would find fictional embodiment in the so-called mature enlightened woman.  These worldly female characters were found everywhere on television steamrolling these melodic sentiments of multi-faceted female empowerment into practice.  During the year 1984, these women - these madame fatales, if you will - were must-see TV: smart, ferocious, sexually liberated revolutionaries that didn't sneak in through the back door, but charged full sizzle ahead on a realigned playing field to fight a whole new battle of the sexes.

 

Going from a bohemian jet-setting cosmopolitan who dabbled in painting to the CEO of one of the world's most powerful oil corporations in just three years, black widow Alexis was giving the Art of the Deal a cosmetic makeover.    Her contemporaries were following suit in their designer sheaths and shields.  The always reliable Morgan Fairchild ruled the roost on the new prime-time sudser PAPER DOLLS as manipulative modeling maven Racine (boardroom and bedroom), the role originated by Joan Collins in the highly-rated 1982 TV-Movie of the same name;  legendary cool customer Beverlee McKinsey was coaxed back to daytime to create GUIDING LIGHT's Ice Queen Cometh Alexandra Spaulding, who would unseat her brother as head of the family empire as a final revenge against their late father (and, continuing the weird game of musical chairs that cosmically linked these two actresses in their soap careers, a role Joan Collins would play as a recast in 2002 for a two-month run); and Elizabeth Hubbard began her legendary run on AS THE WORLD TURNS that year as prolific corporate  powerhouse Lucinda Walsh, manipulator extraordinare.  Backstage, Jo Ann Pflug quickly vacated her role of rich bitch Taylor Chapin on the new syndicated soap RITUALS because it conflicted with her Christian beliefs and was quickly replaced by the more secular-thinking Tina "Ginger the Movie Star" Louise.  Incidentally, a year before, Cher had signed on to appear as a glamourous Alexis Carrington-style villainess in the short-term role of Ruby Ashford on the NBC soap opera SEARCH FOR TOMORROW, only for the singer to pull out at the last moment and leaving producers to scramble for a last-minute recast, finding what they were looking for in the more sportive songbird Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas fame.  

In prime time, FALCON CREST was attempting to get in on the Alexis action by first casting in 1983 the very British Sarah Douglas to play the perfectly named Pamela Lynch, heavily promoted to be prime-time's newest Superbitch  (one such headline roared "The Best Bitches Are British!").  Interestingly, despite the zeitgeist whirling around all the press and prep, the writers instead ended up giving all of the naughty bits to the more Californian Laura Johnson in her standout role of all-American tramp Terry Hartford, who was more bedroom smart than boardroom chic.  A year later, yet another attempt to offer up their own Alexis contender came with the near-casting of Sophia Loren, who had famously turned down the offer to play Alexis before the role was offered to Collins.  Possibly realizing her mistake, Loren was all set to play what was described in a Lorimar press release as "a revolting newcomer in the style of DYNASTY's Joan Collins.  Sophia will wear the most expensive costumes we can find …".  Negotiations fell through at the last moment, however, and she was quickly replaced by cinema rival Gina Lollabrigida.  Lollabrigida agreed to only a limited story arc and thus changed the game-changing character of Francesca Gioberti from that show's answer to Alexis to a re-casting stunt that revealed what this character really was from its very inception: PR pomp and plot circumstance.   

FALCON CREST eventually gave up their superficial attempts to join the Alexis carousel and continued on just being its own persona within its own niche.  Perhaps they realized having sexagenarian Jane Wyman was enough: her more traditional matriarch Angela Channing excelled in her own delicious brand of queen bee villainy since her own grand entrance exactly a month after Alexis made hers.  Wyman, that screen queen from the 40s and 50s who also bore the pop cultural distinction of being the then-president's ex-wife (in fact, up until then, the first ex-wife of a seated president ever) was enjoying Nielsen success without having to resort to playing the madame fatale … in fact, Angela never had the time to play feminist politics as she was too busy being boss. 

As long as they were true to form and not to fad, FALCON CREST did not have a problem with strong female characters; that other Lorimar show, DALLAS, did.  Although one of television's most fascinating and complex women, desperate housewife Sue Ellen Ewing wouldn't clean up her cycle of self-abuse and victimization until the late 80s to become a force to be reckoned with in boardroom politics, mostly because the producers preferred Sue Ellen as a perpetual masochist.  In the mid-80s, believing it was time for Sue Ellen to change with the times, her portrayer Linda Gray went to the producers and told them she wanted to end her character's endless cycle of alcoholism and extramarital affairs, to which they patronizingly responded, "Yes, darling, but you do it so well."  From the beginning to the end of her run on DALLAS, it had always been up to Gray to make what she could out of what was originally regarded in the initial 1978 episodes as just "the brunette on the couch";  Sue Ellen was but just a hue in the living room wallpaper that the actress was able to turn into a multi-textured palette with fifty shades of grey - all with just the force of one certain unscripted look of venom that Gray shot towards her onscreen husband that inspired the producers to sit up and take a second look at the human room décor they hired.   The rest was herstory.  "It was a very chauvinistic show," concedes Gray in retrospect, "The women were the bookends."  The show's token two-toned villainesses - usually used, abused and easily discarded - could be described as its limited editions.  

During the 83-84 season, Morgan Brittany's scarlet Iago-like villainess Katherine Wentworth had been weaving a masterful web of trickery throughout DALLAS' seventh season with lust as her prime motivation; late that same season, stage and screen actress Alexis Smith was cast as the mysterious Lady Jessica Montfort with revenge as her main driving force.  Both formidable women served their purposes as supporting characters and were then written out by the end of the year as unbalanced and dangerous criminals.  Primarily a masculinist narrative, DALLAS never knew how to handle this new anti-heroine emerging out of the classic trope of female villainy, so it stayed with what was familiar and always punished these insurgents as neurotic madwomen, following Mary Crosby's notorious bulls-eye shot Kristin Shepherd into the show's rogue's gallery of female exiles. Instead of the butler, DALLAS' go-to motto should have been "The Bitch Did It!"  

Incidentally, DALLAS did present one of the coolest ice queens that ever walked on Texan soil in the guise of Susan Flannery's sleek and glossy PR agent Leslie Stewart, the only woman who masterfully matched J.R. in a game of cat-and-mouse that for some reason left viewers cold.  Introduced in January 1981 when Alexis may have been but just a vague idea named Madeline in the early draft of character (DYNASTY was just starting its first season over at ABC), Flannery has the distinction of not being this show's attempt to answer Alexis but to be the first "female J.R.", a sobriquet that would later be haphazardly applied to Joan Collins as a "first for TV".  Successfully putting J.R. in his place without once resorting to female hysterics, calm-and-collected Leslie lasted but one season and then disappeared from the canvas when the show returned the following year.   Strangely, during her entire run, Leslie shared not one scene with J.R.'s wife Sue Ellen or any other woman in the cast for that matter, despite Leslie doing the impossible and capturing the heart of the normally heartless J.R. to the point he was set to divorce his wife to marry her.   The producers stubbornly kept Leslie isolated from the rest of characters, as if she had to be quarantined from the other women on the canvas for fear she may infect them - or influence them.  That failure to fully integrate the more-than capable Flannery into the cast severely limited Leslie Stewart's chances to succeed as the truly groundbreaking character she was.  She was treated like a kind of modern woman-experiment for a show that was deeply rooted in traditional gender roles.  Whether it was the audience's lukewarm reception or the claim made by Flannery herself that she did not want to commit to a long-term contract or something deeply misogynistic embedded in management mindset, Leslie was never mentioned again, and that kind of hardcore female character was never done again on a show where that kind of woman was never a part of DALLAS' make-up (pun intended). 

Over on DALLAS' sister show KNOTS LANDING, its reigning sorceress Abby Cunningham was very much in Leslie Stewart's ice-cold vein, but her sunny California charm melted more than a few cockles and left others hot under the collar in ways Leslie's Icelandic goddess-figure never could.  Abby was introduced in 1980 just as the word bitch was baby-stepping towards its advertising value.  Projected to be the typical threat to happy home and hearth as the dreaded divorcee out for everybody else's man, opportunistic Abby was shaped by the changing times right before the viewers' eyes.  Her true killer instinct for raw unlimited power laid dormant until the world caught up with her, and producers found, as woman's priorities were changing in the real world, they had the right character in the right place at the right time.  By 1984, Abby had been transformed from a bygone 70's-style suburban shark to a fit-for-the-80s killer shark in high finance, busy practicing the kind of Machiavellian bitchcraft in multidextrous boys-club power games that would have run circles around the normally one-track Ewing boys (there was a reason she never visited her in-laws in Texas - and why J.R. probably preferred his occasional bedmate during his visits to California to remain exactly where she was).  

  

 

Meanwhile, Abby's fellow daytime anthropophaginian (i.e. man-eater) Erica Kane of ALL MY CHILDREN had also by 1984 made the successful transition from 70's fashion model and wannabe actress to playing 80's boardroom politics as the owner of her own cosmetics empire.  Decades before the entrepreneurial spirit of a new century would realize the value of self-branding, Erica was making her own self the commodity to build an empire around - as was her portrayer Susan Lucci.  The always opportunistic Erica was not about to let the latest fashion pass her by; nor was Lucci, who was thinking ahead at the onset of a new zeitgeist with the possibilities of making over her 70's-style kitchen-variety troublemaker into a Superbitch for the 80s ... and projecting possibly even further into the future as Soap Icon.  "Women all over the country are hungry for glamour and fantasy.  My character goes … and gets it," she advocated in that above-mentioned 1981 Us  article covering soaps' super witches.   In a chicken-or-egg scenario, she could have just as likely have been setting the stage for Alexis' grand entrance that would take place later that year and, in turn, help take Erica and the pop cultural landscape roaring into the future.   

By 1984, the concept of Alexis became so entrenched in the scheme of things as the schemer of things that the trailblazer was now copying those she was influencing.  In a complete full circle case of karma, it was Alexis who was now charged with the murder of her ex-lover and carted off to a jail cell dressed in a red-hot Nolan Miller original in DYNASTY's closing '84 cliffhanger.  It was a deliciously irresistible image that seemingly wrote itself, but, in truth, blatantly plagiarized Erica's own lock-up for murder over her lover's death the year before, as she had been thrown into a jail cell while donning her own designer gown and crying out for justice.  Such is fame's true nature as an uroboros-like circle of the asp devouring its own queen.

Instead of getting smaller, that circle just kept getting bigger and bigger.  It was July 30th 1984 when NBC offered up its own Alexis-contender with the daytime premiere of SANTA BARBARA, and soap opera cleared its overcrowded aisle to make room for yet another wide brimmed hat to be thrown into the game.  Cue stage direction:

                           

                                                 

                                                                          

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With her doorframe-challenged mad-hatters and avant-garde form-fitting dresses, her Jackie O sunglasses and ankle-strapped stiletto heels, Augusta Lockridge knew how to make an entrance.  She injected any scene she was in with an adrenaline-inducing B-complex shot: big, bold, broad and bitchy.  Very much in vogue, this blitzkrieg of B-bombs was also deliciously retro all-around: a throwback to a 40s film noir femme fatale or a Joan Crawford character of the 50s to those vampire women of 60s horror, while turning Mrs. Robinson from a restless early-70s housewife into an Alexis-like usurper for the fresh new 80s.  Nervously nibbling on that trusty cigarette holder and always accompanied by Breeze, her diamond-collared Doberman and loyal confidante, she plotted her own corner-of-the-world domination, rivalling any classic James Bond villain - or campy 60s BATMAN guest-star.  Given all of her eccentricities, what could have been a ridiculous figure about town was actually a woman that meant business.   With a couple of burly thugs at her disposal to do her dirty work and seducing the very man she was set on framing for a murder she believed her son committed, Augusta was emerging as the show's driving force in its early days.   This modern-day Messalina of Montecito had the potential to rewrite the rules for classic female villainy.  

Those initial few weeks of this brand new soap was shaping a would-be legend.  With her chic short soigné hair and angular sharp contours, androgynous Augusta resembled a walking, talking Nefertiti bust.  Promenading through a despotic private realm of her own making,  she was devotee, priestess and goddess of her own mind cult.  Trailing along with her an air of sublime luxury, she was an urbane lady of leisure whose aura crackled with dissipated decadent energy.  Always dangerously close to crossing over into the realm of the morbid and macabre, she carried with her the threat of something dire, disastrous and apocalyptic like some eschatological aesthete of the pestilent-obsessed fin-de-siècle.  With her genius for juggling spectacle and skullduggery, Augusta was a one-woman show, a law unto herself,  a solitary figure prowling the nocturnal edges and shadowy corners of the canvas in an uncanny display of stealth and exhibitionism.  Underneath the couture fashion and the elegant mannequin frame was the taut streamlined mind, body and soul of a not-so-virginal huntress buoyed by nerves of steel.  She was an all-woman queen with a somewhat (for the audiences at the time) masculine iron will.  For this Nefertiti, it was all in the pyramidal mind of a hermaphroditic brain.  Slinking up next to her trusty Doberman, she mused upon the perverse like the domestic cat, relishing every last morsel of all its most profane possibilities.   

If mythologizing this soap opera character to such Olympian heights and oceanic depths beyond and back may seem over-the-top, consider from where the character was conceived. In shaping their vision for their new daytime project, legendary soap scribes Bridget and Jerome Dobson sought inspiration in the historical roots of drama: myth. "To strengthen our own experience in drama," Mrs. Dobson said in an interview, "we turned to great examples of literature and theater. Day after day, little by little, we scoured and devoured most, if not all, of Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, early cinema, Tennessee Williams, among many others. We gradually eschewed the examples of “typical” families we had experienced on other soaps." As far as I am aware, the Dobsons have never singled out the character of Augusta Lockridge as the perfect embodiment of their mythopoetic mindset, but the evidence was onscreen during those initial weeks of a new soap opera. This strange but fascinating female stepped out from the mists of the archaic imaginary realms of ancient mythology and followed in the weighty footsteps of those Titanic women of great tragedy: Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Lady Macbeth ... all the way up to their modern equivalents from Hedda Gabler to Maggie the Cat. Primitive, primal, present creatures that are their own productions, eternalized by their passions, perversities and Promethean thirst for power.

While on the subject of the primal, we hit here the elephant in the room, so to speak, when dealing with his particular myth-in-the-making.   Augusta has the distinction of doing one of the most despicable, truly most unforgiving acts ever committed on daytime that begs for a suspension of belief, a reminder that soaps exist within their own imaginary contexts and must not be taken too literally.   The original incarnation of Augusta could be quite barbaric:  a fox in the hen house, a prowler in the living room jungle, a force of Sadean nature let loose amongst the domestic sphere; in these contexts, a mother who serves her daughter's pet pigeon for brunch because she disapproves of the boyfriend who gifted it is meant to be taken more for its satire and symbolism than a glorification of violence and animal cruelty.  It is here, however, that Augusta has her defining moment of archetype.  This Augusta is the Wicked Witch of every fairytale memory.  She takes us back to the childhood nightmares of the Brothers Grimm, and even back further to prehistory by evoking  mother goddess cults and their terrifying brutal realities of bloody sacrificial rites.  Like the beloved felines in our lives who maintain the presence of ever-constant ancient myth in our ever-changing world, this pagan goddess performs her own sacrificial rites as a reminder of her own claim to natural selection.  Confronted with her family's horror after they've realized what they've been eating, unapologetic Augusta sits as impervious as the literal cat who's eaten the canary:   

British sitcoms like FAWLTY TOWERS and ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS are about horrible people who do horrible things but within their respective contexts, their loyal audiences allow them creative license to go where no one is permitted to go; in 1984, this was a burgeoning new concept to the soap opera genre.  SANTA BARBARA  - and Augusta - was testing its limitations, pushing the envelope, looking to take soap opera where it hadn't been.  The dark humour that became one of SB's most unique traits (and was a precursor to the cynicism and self-mockery that would come to reshape soaps in the succeeding decades) may not have been for everyone in the 80s, but it gave the show an edge over other soaps at the time, and it gave the show's early answer to Alexis an edge over the competition.   In retrospect, premeditated pigeon slaughter was perhaps not a good creative choice by the writers, but within the context of their premiere vision of who and what Augusta was meant to be, what is cooked is cooked: Augusta wasn't just another token garden-variety troublemaker.  Damn!  This cat on a hot gabled roof was hardcore! 

It was clear from even before the show premiered that Augusta wasn't meant to be just any generic soap villainess.  Originally offered to fan favorite Jane Elliot, the character of Augusta was to be a "name" role.  Having already established a loyal following with her brilliant portrayals of destructive, damaged women on both SB's time-slot competitors, GENERAL HOSPITAL and GUIDING LIGHT, Elliot was a natural choice for a new soap who needed to carve out its own niche in the three networks' scheduling war.  It also indicates exactly who and what Augusta was conceived to be.  There's no doubt Elliot would have been fantastic in the role in her own right, but the always playful Soap Gods had other plans.  

Veteran actress Louise Sorel, a newcomer to daytime, took another actor's discards and turned it into a performance that could have taught the normally gangbuster Ms. Elliot a few tips about the subtle art of irony ... and La Collins a few tricks on not taking oneself too seriously.  From the very start, this show needed someone like Sorel.  In a cast that would be overrun by California blondes, Sorel's Euro-dark look separated the bold from the beautiful (re: the bland).  Most importantly, she quickly proved a natural to this demanding medium that relies so much on the quick-witted instincts and creative spontaneity of its actors as much as it does on their  professionalism and discipline.  The soap medium is more closely kin to the physical raw space of stage and theatre than any other performance-driven platform.  Those with experience in prime-time and film may find the immediacy of daytime soap opera too frightening; likewise, there are performers who come alive in the live-like performance of daytime soap opera but strangely do not translate well in prime-time or film.  Sorel is one of those few who can do well in both.  And no matter what kind of outlandish, out-there material some ambitious writers throw at her, Sorel finds a way to make it work without compromising her authenticity, a valuable personable trait that has been the secret of her success in the fan-driven world of daytime television.  Playing Vivian Alamain on DAYS OF OUR LIVES post-Augusta, Sorel somehow gained a loyal fan following that survives to this day by playing a madwoman who buried her younger nemesis alive and relished in torturing her victim via a microphone built into the coffin for weeks!  It takes someone truly authentic to be able to successfully pull off that balancing act between the acceptable and the inexcusable.  Whether it is from one horrid twist to the other or from one soap to the next, fans follow willingly wherever she will go.  Thirty years after her debut on DOOL, Sorel's annual returns as their favorite Winged-Nut Victory Vivian is still a cause of event and celebration (even Alexis had an expiry date).  

This pied piper has something contagiously eternally impish about her.  Underneath an all-lady surface is a child-woman, a vulnerability that gave subtext to Augusta's art-as-personality that suggested this character was a loner who feared being lonely, an exhibitionist who feared being seen for who she really was: a little girl lost who was playing grown-up in mommy's dresses.  Paradoxically, the child-woman also had a maternal quality to her, absolutely essential to the portrayal of the new Alexis-standard that justified every rotten thing this New 80s Woman was capable of doing - even to her own children.  When shenanigans went beyond mere power politics in a battle of the sexes, it was necessary to remind the viewer this new madame fatale was and always would be a mother.  Almost expectantly, Augusta's compulsion for conspiracy and her innate impulsion to cruelty was tempered by a rabid and ravaging maternal instinct that made her an even more dangerous opponent - again, even to the very children she held dear.  "All right,"  Augusta concedes to her disgusted daughter Laken, "maybe I shouldn't have cooked the pigeon, but I am not wrong about you running around with Ted and lying to me about it" (Ep 27).   That Mommie Dearest-Knows-Best logic is appalling, but these new Promethean women knew how to exploit the hidden streak of Machiavellianism in motherhood that has been there from the conception of Time.  In the end, however, it was Sorel's own sense of self-possession and personable style that gave her a long leg up on her competition in this new 80s sweepstakes for female villainy.  She not only fit snugly and sleekly into every requirement but brought her own biorhythmic off-beats to the table.  Who can forget that signature unblinking glare that was at once hypnotic, terrifying and off-kilter, hinting at something slightly mad ... something deliciously, wonderfully mad.  SANTA BARBARA had what other shows would have killed for: they not only had a timeless yet modern character with endless potential that could survive the ages, but they had the actor who could make it all possible.  The rest was daytime history.  

Unfortunately, it wasn't herstory.  Soon, the goddess of her own universe was reduced to a shrewish desperate housewife driven to distraction by a man who couldn't love her fully.  Left with no other purpose but to be a passenger on her husband's journey, Augusta was written into a corner that led to her being written out in the summer of '86.    After an especially uninspiring return in '88 for a brief story arc involving a hunt for aphrodisiacs in a family crypt, she made a surprise return in '89  when she was revealed to be the mysterious veiled widow of an international mafioso; Augusta along with her diamond-collared Doberman appeared to be making a comeback as an homage to her original incarnation of a deadly serious madame fatale, complete with thugs and now hitmen at her disposal - which wasn't out of the realm of possibility for the Augusta with whom we first became acquainted  (we never did learn who had that bomb planted in the Perkins household during the first couple of weeks of the show ...).  However, this regenerated Godmother persona didn't last too long through a change in production regimes and we were then baffled to watch a swiftly dethroned Augusta suddenly careen out-of-control and denigrate into stereotype as a bored - and boring - middle-aged alcoholic.   Then one day, in 1991, she wasn't there anymore; weeks after her last onscreen appearance, viewers were told she was drying out in a private hospital.  And she was never to be seen or heard from again, no fanfare in sight.  Even a morbid Blanche Dubois exodus would have been something, or a macabre SUNSET BOULEVARD swansong with Augusta moving in for her final close-up - anything other than being treated as an annoying afterthought!  How she ended was a far cry from the Lucretia Borgia we were introduced to in the summer of '84, a self-made Empress who walked amongst the ruins of her family's fading glory, still very much a primal player in a big-stakes game of survival of the fittest.  

So what in the name of the Soap Gods went wrong?!  

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It's a rare occurrence to have the right actor in the right role in the right place at the right time.  In fact, while most of SB's roster of not-quite-ready-for-daytime players needed time to flesh out and find their footing, Sorel's Augusta Lockridge was the only character that was solid and ready for action from the get-go.  She was the show's representative zeitgeist.  Parading through her house looking like a cross between a Fellini movie star and a Warhol superstar, butting heads with her equally ornery mother-in-law Minx and having the gall to lecture her teenage daughter on the modicum of appropriate behavior, Augusta was already classic soap opera with a whole new 80s attitude.  Her story was telling itself.  It was a story that had already been been told many times before since paleolithic man started getting bored of drawing bison on the cave walls and began putting the blame of their boredom on the fascinating but fairer sex ... it just needed to be told in the language of this brand new era with its rebranded ideas and ideals.  Then her estranged husband Lionel returned to the family fold, and that self-telling story swerved in a totally different direction: herstory became his.    

Every Cleopatra needs a Marc Antony, and every Dido needs her Aeneas ... again, the Soap Gods were in fine form as they had given Augusta her Lionel by giving Sorel her born co-star - or Coster (Nicolas, to be exact).  These two polished vets were born soulmates, destined to one day find their way to one another to collaborate in one of daytime's most memorable pairings.  Lionel was a perfect complement to Augusta's wily schemer - a ne'er-do-well scoundrel who philanthroped and philandered across the globe by whim and will.  Their sexual chemistry was undeniable and their inability to trust one another just as irrevocable.  This hellish match was pure soap heaven.  It had promise to be daytime's WAR OF THE ROSES, and should have been a rollercoaster ride of cat and mouse between the sexes that would make child's play of THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR.  But instead of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner or Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, we got daytime's version of Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III.   And Augusta, a precursor to the despicable Patsy Stone of AbFAB and every other campy character of the camp-filled 90s,  was suddenly relegated to being Lionel's beleaguered "Lovey". 

Legend has it that the Lockridge marriage was based upon the real-life pairing of the show's co-creators Bridget and Jerome Dobson; much of the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Lionel Lockridge, in particular, were born from Mr. Dobson's real-life character.   One may argue  that Jerry's personality dominated this onscreen marriage portrait of personas.   "Humor is,"  Mrs. Dobson once stated in an interview, "... a huge part of Jerry's personality, our marriage, our lifestyle."  Humour was an absolute must to the success of this ridiculous couple named Lionel and Augusta.    Comic timing was essential to making credible their absurd match-up, for these were two absurd people stuck to one another in a perfectly matched mismatch.  Humour - the darker the better - helped take them outside the perimeters of the ordinary and into something completely different: think Neil Simon rewriting Ingmar Bergman or Mel Brooks staging a parody of Fellini's 8 1/2  ...  with some I LOVE LUCY slapstick and THREE'S COMPANY farce thrown in (it was the famous Frank the Milkman arc that actually drew my normally soap-resistant father into watching SANTA BARBARA).  The brilliant synergy (or sinful-energy) of their portrayers is what ensured Augusta and Lionel Lockridge a place in the soap Hall of Fame as one of the most beloved, most entertaining duos in daytime history.  Behind all the hijinks and gaffs,  however, something very serious backstage was happening.

Although she was poised to be this show's most effective mover and shaker, a seismic shift occurred in Augusta's character that can be traced to SB's infamous onscreen earthquake that took place five months into the show to defibrillate its lagging ratings.  Almost symbolically, we saw Augusta thrown off her proverbial mountain top and hanging on the edge of a literal cliff to commence her new footing on the show's reworked canvas: supporting character.  Augusta's own epic tale officially came to an end before it even got off the show's shaky new ground as Lionel, in the ruins of the near-apocalyptic disaster that surrounded them, confessed all to his soulmate about his own private odyssey with Sophia, the other woman he loved.  From then on, Augusta became a third wheel in her husband's more important journey instead of rambling on as her own driving force.   Once a free agent with her carefully manicured fingernails dipped into many of the other characters' pots, she was now digging them into her husband's arm as the only prop she had left.  Even Breeze seemed to have disappeared from her side.  Along with her canine partner-in-crime, this free agent lost her agency.  From her first appearance as a sauna queen-pin barking orders over her cordless (!) phone, daytime's answer to Dido was scripting her own will-to-history.  Her self-narrative, however, would be highjacked by Lionel's own Quixotic quest.  This champion greyhound's bark became worse than her bite as her teeth were given very little to chew on other than the morsels her husband as story bread-winner threw to her.  On the way to a brave new future, something went suddenly, silently backwards.  A Carthaginian Queen would rather go down in flames than slowly burn out, and taking a Roman scarlet woman like Dido centuries back to be the Greek ideal of a Penelope waiting for her man to come around is just a crime against Mother Nature.  This sudden makeover of their future face of feminism was just one of the many ways NBC's new modern soap opera chose to carry on by readapting itself to some very old-fashioned thinking.       

I I I

From its very inception, SANTA BARBARA was everyone's passion project.  NBC had invested millions into a brand new soap opera; SB's production company New World Pictures had a serious investment in their first foray into daytime as not only a success in the American market but the international one as well (think big, says the 80s!); and its co-creators Bridget and Jerome Dobson had a much more personal, more intimate investment in its success - after taking old war horses GUIDING LIGHT and AS THE WORLD TURNS into the modern age of storytelling, they were given the golden opportunity by NBC to create a whole new soap from scratch, no questions asked.  The Dobsons were living the dream of any writer, given carte blanche by execs to let their imagination go anywhere they chose, permitted seemingly unlimited creative license.  From this abundance of blessings came forth their love child.  Life was good, but would imitate art in that curious way that can only happen in this business.  

As the creators of the legendary Phillip Spaulding baby saga on GL, the Dobsons earned their place in the soap opera hall of fame as one of the most talented storytellers of original and deeply engaging complex melodrama that could stand the test of time.  The Spaulding story in particular was a gift that kept on giving, producing years of story that had carried the show on through the 70s and stretching on through countless different writing teams to the show's finale in 2009.  The initial story set by the Dobsons revolved around the child everyone wanted, the prize to be won in an entangled merry-go-round of alternating pairings between his adopted parents and his biological parents.  Likewise, the Dobsons would find themselves embroiled in one of the most dramatic real-life power struggles in daytime history with their love progeny at the centre as the golden egg that rotating guardians, foster parents and interfering surrogates wanted their share of.  Perhaps no other soap before and since had so much personal backstage drama played out so publicly that dwarfed the Goliath-sized goings-on playing out onscreen.  And every battle and brawl, every whim and fancy, every fix-it and cure-all, every miscue and motive would leave their imprint on the show, no matter how entertaining and engaging it managed to be throughout all this behind-the-scenes turmoil.  Ironically, this embattled love child would be the industry darling that held a charm for everyone - even people who had never even watched the show.  

The on-going battle between the Dobsons and New World reached its most traumatic chapter with the Dobsons literally getting locked out of the NBC studio and forbidden to have anything to do with their issue; ironically, the breaking point was the Dobsons' inability to mesh with the darker vision of their new head writer Anne Howard Bailey, and their disagreement over the casting of Pamela Capwell, a character that had long percolated in the imagination of the Dobsons since the beginning as their show's version of Alexis Carrington (perhaps another reason why the Dobsons weren't that invested in Augusta as their madame fatale?).  While the Dobsons took their battle to a very real courtroom setting, their character of Pamela was brought to screen through another visionary's version and played by the actress the Dobsons objected to; soon that actress was suddenly recast with the incomparable Marj Dusay, the very actress the Dobsons wanted in the first place!  Most frustratingly, the character was soon dismantled completely during a writer's strike when temporary replacement writers turned Pamela into a psychotic murderess so that any chance of redeeming the character was next to impossible when the Dobsons won their legal fight and returned to the creative helm of their long-lost fledgling.  Once again, any chance of having a powerful over-40 villainess who challenged the patriarchal foundation of SB's cosmology had been eliminated.  Strangely, throughout its entire run, that kind of woman was not welcomed to add her own to the mix.  There wasn't a faceless executive, a network suit, an executive producer, a career writer, or even the creators themselves who didn't have a part to play in the mistakes that were made that in the bigger picture, hurt this show in the long run.  And to bring this essay back to its original subject, who didn't inadvertently play a part in the dethroning of the very woman they had from the very start who should have been this show's Queen "B" from A to Z.    

A few months into its run and swimming against the tide of dismal ratings, this promising new soap was struggling to find its course.  Mistakes were being made in a frantic backstage shuffle of creative focus and corporate interest.  In retrospect, this groundbreaking new serial chose some very conservative alterations.  It dropped its front-burner Mexican-American family as recklessly as it recast its green-around-the-edges matinee hero, an appealing newcomer who had chemistry with everyone (including Sorel - in fact, she and Dane Witherspoon supplied the show its first real burst of palpable sexual combustion); he, in turn, was replaced with a more experienced soap actor who had chemistry with absolutely no one (in particular, his matinee leading lady, Robin Wright).  Decisions being made were the safer alternatives, seemingly ready-made fixes that catered to more orthodox thinking in a bid to gain popularity in the mainstream.  The mainstream in the 80s was a strange creature of habit with habits hard to break, slowly accepting little bits of change here and there as long as it didn't upset the safety and security of suburban equilibrium and its cozy compromise between country and city.  The mainstream was also white in colour, Christian by birth, midwestern in mentality and lower-to higher within the middle class, the largest growing sector of society whose fairytale dreams were shaped by the almighty advertiser.  Although unequal partners in this unholy marriage, the mainstream and the media were making the choices that corporate heads listened to in this vicious, incestuous uroboros-like circle of the almighty dollar eating its own trail.  To understand why SANTA BARBARA made the executive choices it did early in its first few months is to understand the anomaly that was the big, bold, brash 80s: behind the rise of punk wave in the playgrounds and the advancements of women in fictional and factual workplaces, this decade in which individuality and self-expression took centre stage was, in truth, a time of extreme conservatism. 

The 80s was trapped in a paradox of its own making.  This whole new era of theatrical permissiveness was also a time of conservative socio-political ideologies known as the Reagan Era,  defined by a resurgence of traditional post-nuclear family ideals and fundamental right-wing Christian beliefs.  It was a counterreaction to the extreme liberalism of the 60s anti-establishment and 70s sexual revolution movements.  The pendulum swung from Dionysian debauchery to Apollonian decadence as wealth and materialism was considered safer, smarter, more sacred.  As Reaganomics bolstered a whole new corporate elite, it gentrified  hippies into upwardly mobile yuppies and fostered the lifestyles of the rich and famous into a brand new American Dream.  With its heroized oil barons, trophy wives (and its signature shameless ex-wife) and their First World problems complicating their always picture-perfect lives, DYNASTY's Carrington clan became the ideal family unit for the Reagan era, all fairytale and fantasy.  Lining itself up as the DYNASTY of daytime, SANTA BARBARA refocused itself on its one lavishly rich, imperialistic modern-size family, the Capwells.  Blue-collar and low-income families of the original premise were phased out, and the Capwells' old money antithesis the Lockridges were slowly picked at over a longer period of time until they were removed from their pivotal spot as equal shareholders of the show's prime real estate.   Thank the Soap Gods for the talent and incredible charisma of A Martinez, for this show could very well have looked just like any other soap if prophetic producer Jill Farren Phelps hadn't suggested the writers do an onscreen chemistry test between Hispanic Martinez and waspy Marcy Walker to see where things could go ... 

Suffice it to say, overall those who had the power to make decisions were choosing to make some very conservative ones.  And women - the new heroes for the 80s - were the first to experience this  creative shift in creed.   The show's showcase Mexican anti-heroine - strong, spirited, fiercely independent, full of so much potential - was suddenly written out mid-story, and casting coup Marcy Walker's ambiguous Eden - who started out determined to break the glass ceilings of her father's patriarchal crystalline hierarchy - abandoned her feminist ambitions to be remolded into a conventional daddy's girl, ensuring all heroines henceforth would be perennial damsels in distress, ready-made for as many stalkers, kidnapers and rapists that could be fit into their daily experiences (ironically , it would be that eroticization of rape that would be the final parting of the ways between SB and Sorel as she voiced objections to plans for Augusta to fall in lust with her sister's known rapist).  For a show that aimed to be so much like DYNASTY, it was actually like the more masculine narrative DALLAS.  SB's pivotal male characters remained consistent throughout its run: C.C. was essentially always C.C. through his many recasts, ditto for Mason; Cruz and Lionel remained quite loyal to who their basic characters were from beginning to end.  SB's women were all over the place, going from one mood to the other, one extreme to the next, written in accordance to whomever was in charge at the moment or what purpose it served a plot.   Many viewers panned the way the show's super heroine Eden Capwell was eventually written out of the show in 1993 as someone suddenly revealed to be suffering from dissociative identity  disorder, split into various different personalities (a story the Dobsons inherited when they returned to the helm of the show in which they tried to work out).  I would argue, however, it was quite fitting for this very fragmented character who actually represented the entire  psychological state of woman on this show.  SANTA BARBARA always suffered from a crisis of female identity (a much more involved argument that begs for its own future essay).    

As the show's locus relocated to a more WASPish center and away from its more diverse marginalized (re: risky) elements, the original conception of vampiric Augusta Lockridge underwent its transformation from ever-looming threat to something more traditional: a put-upon frustrated hausfrau, albeit smartly dressed and sharply tongued.   Santa Barbara's local Sphinx became a suburban harpy riddled with self-doubt (in this respect, mama's boy Lionel really was SB's Oedipal figure, waltzing into town to conquer the hybrid female monster and reducing a myth into a shrew that just needed to be tamed). 

Narrowed down to one prime family, the reworked canvas offered little opportunity for any villainess to exist outside the Capwell centre.  Without any connection to anyone outside her husband's immediate vicinity, the potential for Augusta to be this show's Queen "B" was lost forever.  That title instead went to the character of Gina, a younger, blonder and more traditional troublemaker; in fact, Gina was a throwback to that same kind of kitchen variety bad girl that soaps loved to sneer at all the way back to its days in radio; almost daily, devious but self-destructive Gina would set herself up to receive comeuppance like a good bad little girl, never learning from her mistakes and seemingly always asking for more and more punishment in a perverse game of S&M - thank you sir, may I have another?  In its bid for popularity, SB forwent the Alexis-standard and opted for something the Reagans themselves might have enjoyed watching in a nostalgic melee for the good ol' days of the 50s ... which is not  outside the realm of possibility, considering the White House sent an official letter to NBC in 1985 addressed to the fictional character of Augusta Lockridge that relayed the First Family's condolences over Augusta's temporary bout with blindness - baffling but true: Augusta's demotion from future woman to a B-movie type was officially sanctioned by the Reagans themselves.   

                                        

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It's strange just how many of Augusta's own personal stories were overlooked or even deliberately ignored, and how this affected so many other stories from being told that could have taken this show through years of solid storytelling.  From my understanding, a secret shared by both Augusta and C.C. Capwell haunted the background of the action in the Dobsons' original bible for the show, a story point that for reasons only known to those with executive decision was dropped before it went to script.  Why the writers continued to pass on developing an unholy alliance between Lionel's wife and Sophia's husband through the years is one of this show's greatest mysteries (especially when they found their quintessential C.C. in actor Jed Allan, who shared incredible chemistry with Sorel).   Forgive my indulgence in my own personal fan fiction, but let's imagine just one altered version of Augusta's story that could have preserved the original incarnation of the character as it was first conceived ... 

This Augusta is rooted deeper in the show's pre-history as a major player whose actions in the past help determine how events will play out in the present.  Years before the show began, C.C. had been the man whom Augusta was never able to have.   She dated his brother Grant to get close to him, but C.C. was more interested in Augusta's best friend and sorority sister Pamela Pepperidge, the woman Grant really loved.  Augusta worked to destroy C.C. and Pamela's marriage by encouraging C.C.'s involvement with a B-movie actress named Sophia Wayne, but Augusta's scheme backfired when Sophia ended up becoming C.C's second wife.  Furious, Augusta married C.C.'s worst enemy Lionel Lockridge, another scheme that backfired because Lionel happened to be the other man in Sophia's life whom Sophia dumped for C.C., an impossibly convoluted quadrangle that eventually leads to Sophia's tragic demise in a mysterious boating accident.  When viewers are introduced to these characters years after these past events, we find Augusta and Lionel have been "locked" in a seemingly loveless marriage of convenience that both feel trapped in, leading separate lives but remaining together for the children.  Augusta and C.C. have somehow bonded in an uneasy alliance through those offscreen years as they share a secret regarding Sophia's death, a mutual understanding between them that C.C. resents but Augusta relishes.  

As the mystery surrounding the present-day murder of C.C.'s prized son Channing deepens, the mystery haunting Sophia's death slowly remerges from the depths of its murky waters and the two events become strangely intertwined as one big story.  Viewers are led to believe Sophia was murdered as well - with suspicion continually alternating between Lionel, Augusta and C.C.  As more and more secrets are unearthed, the battling Lockridges begin to fall in love with one another right before the viewers' eyes, always complicated by her being drawn back to C.C. and Lionel's fatal attraction for the now-very-much alive Sophia.  Thus, we have a convoluted roundelay between four very strong characters and four alternating pairings that provide endless possibilities for story.  Most importantly, this ensures Augusta never loses her agency and isn't dependent solely on her husband's motivation for her own - she has just as complex an emotional stake in these proceedings as he does.  It also matures the Capwell-Lockridge feud from a convenient plot device into a politically-charged battlefield complete with strange bedfellows, unholy alliances and constantly shifting board changes.              

As a woman sustaining herself on revenge, my Alexis-like Augusta channeled her energy into being a drawing room power broker, earning a reputation in social circles as the real head for business in the Lockridge camp, the only Lockridge C.C. would take seriously as a negotiating adversary.  Ensconcing herself in the center of the Capwells' own domestic front, Augusta could have been using Mason as a backdoor ally (and occasional bedmate) in her ultimate game of protecting her own interests in the ongoing Capwell-Lockridge war, using her past friendship with Mason's estranged mother as a way to hold sway over motherless Mason and encouraging the natural chasm between Mason and his father (anything to ensure Louise Sorel and Lane Davies were always kept as sparring partners!).   Playing the Capwells against one another,  Augusta walks the fence between two warring camps, while at the same time positioning herself as the woman who would one day inherit the Lockridge estate.  

On her own domestic front, this positions her directly against a mother-in-law who proves to be Augusta's most serious thorn, a woman of power in her own right who devotes her days to tracking all of Augusta's trails to keep one step ahead of her daughter-in-law and hoping to trap her in the webs she is constantly weaving around them all.  Minx could have been Augusta's worst nightmare, the one person this jungle cat feared the most.  So much was sorely left begging for deeper examination between Augusta and Minx;  an Electra-like dynamic was exactly the kind of prickly psychodrama this otherwise quirk-filled family was missing for it to be taken a little more seriously.   Minx truly was Augusta's biggest obstacle in that 80s sweepstakes for Queen B - the madame fatale is the matriarch sexualized; so what happens when there is already a matriarch in place that's preventing that Freudian transfer of power and keeping the new generation's madame fatale from fully claiming her status in the zeitgeist?   Minx's original portrayer Dame Judith Anderson (a legend of the very world of stage and cinema that the Dobsons plundered for material and inspiration!) shared incredible chemistry with Sorel (who began on the stage before venturing into film and TV); these two theatrically-trained powerhouses could have given daytime something it had never seen before in the Gaian-like clash of two titans for the mantle of matriarch (just picture an older wiser Medea battling her younger self).    

Augusta's relationship with her daughter was likewise left criminally untouched: dropping Augusta's function as this show's master manipulator ultimately hurt Laken's chances to be anything other than a one-dimensional ingenue.  As Lillian Hellman's littlest fox Alexandra Gibbons was to her revolting mother Regina, or AbFAB's Saffy Monsoon was to her despicable mother Edwina, Laken should have been her mother's conscience in a much more enthralling mother-daughter relationship that, with just the right tweaks, could have been as complicated and potentially as tragic as Mason and C.C.'s Oedipal wreck.   

And speaking of ingenues, just what was Augusta's strange penchant for Kelly Capwell's men (Peter Flint and Joe Perkins)?  It has to be heard to truly appreciate Sorel's masterful delivery of such a line as "Kelly Capwell's very pretty ... very sweet ... sticky sweet.  She sort of sticks in your head like molasses sticks in your throat" (see episode 15 if you can).  Sorel captured with that one line Dantean layers of subtext that could have onion-peeled a tangled saga between Joe, Kelly and Augusta for years!  Like a version of the Wicked Queen and Snow White, Augusta could have played a much more pivotal role in Kelly's story as an unlikely nemesis who keeps coming back to haunt her like a recurring childhood nightmare (something that could have drawn Kelly into the Capwell-Lockridge story like her other siblings).  Kelly's particular brand of kissed-by-the-Gods blondeness would naturally trigger a cutting edge dark competitor such as Our Augusta ... that kind of ethereal blondeness that would only remind her more of Kelly's Juno-sized mother.   

And speaking of that ultimate bane of Augusta's existence, Sophia was another gift from the Soap Gods.  The rivalry between these two natural adversaries is exactly what good soap opera is all about.  Women warriors locked in mortal combat is a tried-and-true soap opera trope.  The complicated adversarial relationships between ONE LIFE TO LIVE's Viki and Dorian, YOUNG AND RESTLESS' Kay and Jill, and BOLD AND BEAUTIFUL's Stephanie and Brooke are all hallmark sagas that found their roots in ANOTHER WORLD's Rachel and Alice, DAYS OF OUR LIVES' Julie Olsen and Susan Martin, and ALL MY CHILDREN's Erica and Brooke.   Even though the real story to be told was between DYNASTY's Krystle and Alexis and KNOTS LANDING's Abby and Val, nighttime soaps with its limited time constraints kept it simple and made it all about the men in their lives.  The privileges of more time and space afforded to daily daytime television gave writers the room to explore the psychological complexities that bound two seemingly different women together in a battle of wills; what intrigued viewers most about soaps' most enduring (and endearing) cat fights was not the romantic triangles these women would find themselves in together from time to time, but the twisted-sister romance underlying the relationship between two women using one another as pin cushions (and even sometimes as the occasional punching bag).  All these aforementioned warring women were mirror images of their assigned born nemeses, each reflecting in the other what one hated most about themselves.  Each encounter revealed an underlying fatal attraction that was sometimes beyond their control, as if they were twin souls torn asunder by such factors as class structure, social constructs, deep-seated neuroses, and, most particularly, gold plated human ego.  Soaps' most fascinating female feuds have been built upon the maze-like and murky world of the feminine ego.    

Like any great character, Augusta had her own built-in foil in Sophia, the drowned Venus who reemerged from the mythology of death's deepest waters to make Augusta's life a living hell.  The clash of these Titanides had the potential to be one of this show's most trustworthy cornerstones, something familiar and consistent through the ebb and tides of change.  It is these deeply personal rivalries that viewers come to count on and look forward to, relishing in their vulgarities and vagaries, vicariously wallowing in their emotional overindulgence and worst behavior stratagem.  Augusta brought out the worst in Sophia and vice versa, and anytime they were in a scene together, viewers were never disappointed in what Louise Sorel and Judith McConnell could bring out of one another and to the story.  We were always left wanting more.  What should have evolved over time into a long-running saga between two natural adversaries who perhaps recognized too much of themselves in one another and was persistently and perversely drawn into one another's orbit out of a sadomasochistic need to better the other was dismissed so the primary focus could be on the man-in-question; their potential saga became Lionel the lionheart's, the Ulysses in love with two women.   

Even then, the writers chose to be much too conservative with the triangle that bonded Augusta to Lionel's other woman.  The supposed passion that linked these three passionate individuals together was more theory than practice; much of the physicality of this passion took place in the past, making their story in the present day all about reaction than any kind of action.  Back story is essential, but the Here and Now is cardinal in soap opera.  The viewers needed to be more witness to first-hand moments than eavesdroppers to what happened offscreen in the years before the show premiered.  This kind of emotional story had to earn the viewer's emotional investment, to understand exactly why these three individuals were so drawn to one another in the first place.  For a story built on so much sexual crisis, it was actually quite sexless.  The writers stubbornly refused to go there with an older Lionel and Sophia;  instead, viewers were given a sanitized story of continual retribution, punishment and forgiveness.  Sophia's persona of Angel in the House had to be kept at a certain level of pristine privilege as she paid all the dues necessary so she could once again fulfill the requirements of the patriarchal standards that were sneakily embedded in the fabric of the show.  Not quite the ingredients for good sticky drama.  This whitewashing only deprived these characters (and their seasoned portrayers) of a much more psychologically in-depth character-driven story, and further relegated Augusta into a supporting role in not only Lionel's solipsistic odyssey, but also another woman's more important overarching saga, that of Sophia's quest to regain her sainted motherhood.  

The only other woman this would-be imperial queen should have been supporting was as a player in the overarching saga of her creator, the enigmatic Bridget Dobson herself.   Just who Augusta was to Mrs. Dobson is open to speculation, surmise and conjecture, for if her husband's unique personality is what truly informed the personation of the Lockridges, then it could be argued only a part of who Bridget Dobson was could be fit into the equation, and Augusta became an artistic catharsis for just a portion of all a multi-faceted  woman could offer as a whole.   Defined solely as Lionel's wife and partner, Augusta becomes a part-time muse of all those insecurities and vulnerabilities limited to woman's roles as wife and mother (Bridget Dobson has said the more complex black sheep Mason Capwell in all his fifty-plus shades of gray was more of a muse for her).   Augusta Lockridge had more to offer, however, and it was strangely shelved after giving us a taste of what she could have been in those first months of the show.   Whether it was because it was safer to fall back on more traditional male-female roles to remain popular, or because there were bigger plans in store for Pamela Capwell to be that New 80s Woman, we won't ever truly know.  But the truth is that something funny happened on Augusta's way to being this show's future.  During those initial weeks of a shiny new soap, she was living out every woman's then-forbidden sex and power fantasies, a rebranded idea of villainess as feminist epic hero.   In fact, those fantasies may not have been too far from reality.  It's most likely Mrs. Dobson never cooked her daughter's pigeon for afternoon hors d'oeuvres, but who can forget her coup d'etat as the show's true General - live on stage for the whole world to witness - during the 1988 Emmy Awards like a self-made Empress reclaiming her empire?  That may not be the kind of nerve you'd like to have in your tooth, but that's the kind of Augusta who should have reigned as Queen B from this show's A to this show's Z.     

                                                                                                 AND SO ... 

Augusta's autobiography should have been allowed to write itself from the very beginning, but backstage politics, corporate mishandling, the socio-political ideologies of the time, and perhaps even her co-creators' personal overidentification, transference and projection all ended up determining the tides this Queen's barge would sail.  And oftentimes they weren't the best directions for this Cleopatra.  Fortunately, Louise Sorel got to experience the infamy she deserved when all of her deliciously mad talents were explored and exploited (to beyond and back) by DAYS OF OUR LIVES in the role of Vivian Alamain, an equally iconic character that was, in truth, foreshadowed by the original incarnation of Augusta herself.  But Vivian's Lilith-like notoriety should have been the still much-beloved Augusta's - and the still much-beloved SANTA BARBARA's.  And that's just tragic - on an epic scale.  

                                                                             WORKS CITED:

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Corliss, Richard.  "TV's DALLAS: Whodunit?"  Time Magazine.  11 August 1980,

https://time.com/3834728/dallas-tv-review/

Dobson, Bridget.  "My Exclusive Interview with Bridget Dobson - Part 4" by  Pierpaolo Giovanni, Santa Barbara Blog.  18 October 2013.

https://pierin26santabarbara.blogspot.com/2013/10/my-exclusive-interview-with-bridget.html

Bridget and Jerome Dobson, creators.  Santa Barbara.  New World Productions and NBC-TV.  1984.  

Deutscher Falcon Crest Fan Club.   Behind the Scenes: Season 4 (1984-1985): General Information.  https://www.falconcrest.org/english/master.php?path=show/episodes/ai/bts/4/gi

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Fairchild, Morgan.  "Southern Exposure: Sultry Morgan Fairchild and Christina Raines turn Flamingo Road into TV's New Torrid Zone" by Fred Robbins.  Us Magazine, 3 March 1981.  44-48

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"Letting Go".  Knots Landing.  Season 03, Episode 17.  Lorimar Productions.  1982. 

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The Opposite Sex.  David Miller, dir.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  1956.  Film.