Friday, September 20, 2013

It's all coming together!

My initial thoughts about telenovelas was that the class would focus on why Enrique broke Ramona's heart in order to be with Maria, but there's a lot more to the world of telenovelas and it's all starting to connect and come together. It first started when I started watching my telenovela and I could spot some of the concepts from our class lectures within them episode by episode. Then it escalated to being able to connect telenovelas with the real world, and using that connection to captivate the audience. Now I'm seeing telenovelas, not only as a form of entertainment and a method of bringing a family together for dinner, but also as a way to communicate messages to the audience. Like I stated in my first paper, my telenovela "Los Ricos Tambien Lloran", relays the message (it's even in the title) that money doesn't erase all of life's worries. Rich people may not have the same worries that poor people do, but money creates a whole different set of issues. For example, when Esther fakes her pregnancy in order to marry Luis Alberto just so she can have his parents' money or when Irma and Diego try to kill Mariana in order to inherit Mariana's father's money.
The telenovela I chose was the first one to go global back in the early 80s and it started a telenovela "revolution" around the world. Specifically Russia and China would stop and turn on the television to see if Mariana would come out of her amnesia or not (by the way, this is where I am right now. Mariana has just had the baby and she doesn't remember anyone). I can understand why because it has peaked my interested and I only have the abridged version, so it's very fast-paced. Every 5 minutes, something keeps you on the edge of your seat and it's deceptively captivating. Sometimes when I take the DVD out of the computer to do something else, it's like "whoa, real life is so slow and calm".
I really enjoyed the lecture about Hugo Chavez (the day my sister came) because it was amazing to see the impact telenovelas had on the Venezuelan population. The fact that they could just put political topics like that on the air each day was phenomenal. It wasn't just the fact that the telenovela was so polarizing that interested me the most; it was the fact that in Venezuela, you can do that! If you tried putting a sitcom on the air here that made fun of Obama, there would be another world war. The concept of racism would probably be the nucleus of the war. The media has a much larger effect on the country than people think.
What blew my mind was the lecture on "breaking the code" and how so many fans were obsessed with the code. The code was so ingrained in their culture that if someone does break it, they all notice. "Roque is a good actor, but very ugly" is what the general consensus agreed on and it's not uncommon to find remarks like that toward the female protagonist who has a limp. "Not uncommon" was a poor choice of words, a better choice of words would be "so many that it's completely overwhelming". I haven't spotted a code-breaker in my telenovela at all because the telenovela that I chose is very traditional.

1 comment:

  1. I had the same feeling coming into this course - I really didn't expect there to be so much depth in telenovelas! This class has completely changed my perspective on telenovelas and opened my eyes to much more depth and meaning that they possess. I think it would be hard to take this class and remain under the impression that telenovelas are strictly about "why Enrique broke Ramona's heart in order to be with Maria"

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