OLTL: Dorian/Adriana question

[TC]

I'll never get that one. Tina could have left in so many different ways. I'll never understand why it had to be on such bad terms with her only living sister.

[Vee]

Women were getting raped and otherwise mauled and abused on daytime long before 1995. Prior to the '95 story, I think it was Marland who'd cornered the market on a variety of rape/incest stories. It seems like every other woman in Oakdale got diddled at one point. I don't think we can lay all OLTL's future works on that one tale, because I think the preoccupation with gritty sexual violence started not only with possibly Marland or some stories on Days, but also with Todd and Marty and the gang rape. And the question is would you rather have not had that story or this story, and in most cases, for me the answer is no, they were too good to miss.

I think on a certain level, OLTL has always revolved around damaged, neurotic women - Viki/Niki, Dorian and Melinda the orphan sisters living alone in symbiosis, Carla/Clara, Karen, Marty the rebel, and so on. That's part of why it was the show I loved instantly. It went places no one else seemed, for the longest time, to understand or really push the envelope on. More often than not these days it can also take that 'hall pass' for granted.

[Scotty]

That's true, but my point was how OLTL just can't seem to let it go. Even turning Todd into a sex symbol and one of the town's leading citizens.

[Vee]

Yet even before Todd we had Luke Spencer - rapist turned mayor and savior of the world - as well as Bill Horton, Michael Baldwin, Roger Thorpe, Lawrence Alamain and Jack Devereaux, Jake McKinnon. We had Marco the lovable pimp, and Brad Vernon, that delightful scamp who raped his wife's sister and left married to Liz Keifer with a spring in his step and money in his pocket. It goes way back.

[Scotty]

I realize that. But the problem I have is what they have turned Todd Manning into.

[DRW50]

I don't think it's just about rape and abuse so much as changing the culture of the Lord family. Everything about the family zeroed in on Victor raping Viki for years. It was a huge story with plenty of drama and fireworks, and it cemented the image of Viki raging against the monster that was her father.

This has proven irresistible for the show, because again and again and again, they have gone back to add more trauma, more pain, more rape and molestation. Viki raped by Mitch. Victor wanting to cut out his granddaughter's heart. Jessica's molestation. Tess returning and Jessica losing her baby as Natalie is trapped in the secret room.

Jessica has become defined by what abuse she will suffer next. Viki has become defined by reacting to what abuse will happen next, and going to the crypt to yell at her father a little more.

Then the main man in the family is Todd, who is a rapist and woman-beater, and while I agree that other men in OLTL history have raped, he is the first to re-rape a woman and have it sold as some sort of love story.

[Vee]

But I don't think the 1995 story can be held liable by other creative teams' poor choices. It opened a door, perhaps, but it treated things responsibly. And while Jess is defined by abuse, I don't think Viki is. Not in a long time. She triumphed in '95 and despite a few other poor DID stories, the character remains fairly strong to me. One of the very best scenes the show and RC has done in a long time was Thanksgiving '08, when Viki went to the crypt and wept and told Charlie no one would remember her for anything but what her family and her father did to her and to each other, and Charlie told her she was wrong.

I think that secret was always a part of the family, or at least the idea of that Oedipal romance ran through the text of the show. Robin Strasser saw it long ago, and even as a young viewer, prior to the reveal, several years before, when I learned about the family itself and Victor and Viki, I thought it seemed very suspicious. I was shocked when they revealed he'd molested her, but not surprised.

[Scotty]

He's probably also the first rapist on daytime to also be raped himself.

And here is what Robin Strasser told TV Guide Canada in 2009:

I was so happy that [head writer Ron Carlivati] addressed that mythology [during the July 2008 40th Anniversary episodes]. I was very invested in the hopes that Ron was going to dismantle [former writer Michael Malone’s] revised back story. This is just my opinion as Robin: I believe Dorian killed Victor. I didn’t play the part then, but I watched those scenes, and I thought they were wonderful, in a Little Foxes sort of way. Dorian just didn’t give Victor the medicine fast enough. When Michael was head-writing our show, Viki and Dorian had been simmering on the back burner. They didn’t quite know what to do with us at that time. At the time, I was doing research on multiple personalities for an acting class, which prompted me to suggest to Erika Slezak that over 90 per cent of DID cases have multiple personalities, not dual alters. Also, DID almost always results from childhood abuse. The next day, we pitched it to Michael Malone. What ensued was that Michael took the story on, but it was also at that point in which Michael had re-wrote history, revealing it was Viki who had killed Victor, not Dorian. That led to my no-good-deed- goes-unpunished moment. Oh, nuts! But I have quietly held the opinion that that decision was revisionist history, and hopefully one day that will be straightened out. I’m sure you have seen the intensity in which I play Dorian protecting and guarding the Cramer women. That’s the luggage I bring to the show. You can’t erase that kind of history because it’s embedded in the tapestry of the show. I always played that Dorian killed Victor because she knew he was a pedophile and suspected him of abusing Viki.

[SFK]

My mom watched OLTL during the '80s, but my memories of it are spotty... I have clearer memories of Tina, Cord, and Maria than Viki and Dorian. So for me (when I started watching regularly in '93), Victor was such a fascinating figure because I was going by what I was seeing played out on screen and my mother filling me in on what he and his girls were like back in the late '60s and '70s. What was missing for me at that point was all of the sci-fi of the '80s, so the DID story had this darkly sophisticated tone that it probably wouldn't have had for me had I been constantly reminded of his underground city, hypnotizing his daughter to forget her baby, et cetera. I think it's pretty amazing what they've done with Victor over the years, the buck stopping in 2003 of course. Erika Slezak thinks they killed Victor off too soon. I really can't say if I agree with that or not, but I do feel that he is probably daytime's most fascinating (and most written for) character in death.

[DRW50]

You're right, it's unfair of me to hold the DID story liable. I don't mean to take away from the quality of that storyline, because it was and still is an astonishingly good story. When I talk about the long term effect I'm only saying I feel like that story opened a door for people. I don't think they would have had the very ugly rewrite of how Jessica was truly conceived by Viki, or the stuff with Tess, without this feeling that they want to get in on this tragic backstory and make a part of it their own. I just think that this story set a tone for the Lord family which has hurt them in the long run. Perhaps that would have happened even without the story.

Viki I think has become such a passive character, which is down to Frons not wanting to show middle-aged women, but I think it's also down to the show making it easy for Viki to just be this woman who stands by and has to watch Victor, or Mitch (who is so heavily tied to Victor), assault her family. Then there's the whole thing with Todd and his close ties to Victor and Mitch which just makes the family seem even more dominated by these men.

[Vee]

But the family is predominantly represented by women today, and the Cramers are also a matriarchal clan. Kevin and Joey, sadly, have always been an afterthought. Todd isn't really part of the family and hasn't been in ages. I understand part of your point though, particularly in terms of say, Mitch.

[DRW50]

Todd has always sort of been on the outside of the family but when they have Viki counseling him even as her daughter is missing, it sort of brings up all those issues I have with the way he behaves and how this is tolerated by the Lord women (aside from Natalie, who barely interacts with him). I feel like in his own way he has abused the women of that family as well so seeing Viki counsel him just takes me back to what other men have done to them.

I guess this will always be the way it is unless Kevin ever returns. I think Kevin is probably the only one who would have refused to let Todd be back in their lives, if Viki had listened.

[SFK]

The DID s/l is my favorite s/l of all time and I wouldn't take it back for anything, but I DO feel that it put periods at the end of a lot of Viki and Dorian's sentences. So much of their animosity has been put to rest that it's particularly annoying for me when we're always doing petty "Dorian wants to BE Viki" stuff with these two. DID was the climax of their relationship and simply put, it will take something huge to once again reach those heights of interest. You know, like Viki's lesbian alter who turned out a hesitant Dorian back in '73 and left a twenty on her nightstand. Burn. The secret "died" with Melinda who was listening in the next room. Or did it... I kid with that, but with the right material, these ladies can carry the show with their pinkies. They need at least one more great s/l... grown up, dark, deep, masterfully written.

[SFK]

I've always resented it, but just now I'm thinking that I actually like Viki's bending over backwards for Todd, often in direct opposition to Kevin's feelings. I like it because it reminds us that even "in her right mind" Viki is flawed. She has a weakness for this broken little brother of hers. She won't even give her sister Tina, who falls on the side of naughty rather than pure evil, the same respect. I'm probably giving the writers too much credt, but i think she sees Victor in Todd, the monster who she still cannot help but love, and maybe even the man child she could have been as Victor groomed her as his firstborn son. And like herself, Todd suffered a father's abuse even though it wasn't at the hands of Victor, an abuse that Tony was spared.

[Vee]

I think Viki's bias is human, too, and realistic - it was also wisely exploited by both Malone and Todd in the Todd/Kevin feud of 2004, a brilliant, aborted story that was tossed for no reason. The crucial scene, a fistfight between the men which Todd engineers to show Viki Kevin getting the upper hand and 'beating him for no reason,' encapsulated the relationship.