i will (not) resist

It’s 9:30 Thursday night and I’m waiting for my soap opera to come on. I can’t wait. And I am not ashamed.

Since February, a new Argentine ‘novela’, Resistiré, has been a constant part of my life. Four or five nights a week, at 10pm , for a whole hour, I am transported into a fantasy world where love and shady business are priorities one and two. It has helped improve my Spanish and, even more fun, I get to learn about Argentines and Argentine society. How they are, how they think, how they act – behind their thin facade of propriety.

Can you imagine, some Argentine guy coming to the U.S. and deciding he was going to learn about American culture from watching soap operas? Ridiculous. So I understand that I am inviting criticism here – first of all, for wasting my time watching a soap opera – but hear me out. Mysoap is good. No, really.

The title means “I will resist!", but the authors must have meant it tongue-and-cheek, because nobody seems to resist anything. I made a list of the characters and as of today (July 12), 77% of the characters – all but 5 of the 27 on my list – have had intimate relations with more than one person since the show began in January. Of the five less ‘active’ characters, two are children, and one is an aunt who was sleeping with her nephew. Even more, 44% of all the characters have been intimate with two people concurrently – or in such quick succession that it would be hard to not call it ‘cheating’. At least one partner from every one of the married and engaged couples has cheated on the other.

So maybe it is a little exaggerated. It may be hard to take me seriously here, especially after I’ve just outlined how everyone is sleeping with everyone else. But it’s not your standard soap opera: one actor (Daniel Fenago) is a well-respected theatre professor at the University of Buenos Aires. One (Fabian Vena) swore three years ago he wouldn’t work on TV again, but when they showed him the Resistiré script he agreed. But more than just being a good show (which I can’t convince you of anyway), Resistiré is an Argentine cultural learning tool.

Let’s take César, for example. He’s a troubled Argentine adolescent, who came into the scene because the main character’s mother (Eladia Moreno) was teaching with César’s father in a school for kids from a villa, a kind of Argentine ghetto. Even his introduction to the scene – when he tried to steal a large sum of money from the Moreno family – was a lesson in current Argentine sociology.

César has a lip ring, has the dirtiest mouth of anybody on the show, and at 13 is already a pot-smoking delinquent. He’s the typification of the Argentine’s fears of the worst effects of the newly entrenched poverty of the past 10 years. Argentines have already incorporated a common phrase for people like him – “pibes chorros", child thieves – into their daily vocabulary. When the Moreno family – a working-poor family with a brave, moral matriarch struggling to keep everyone together – decides to take César into their home, they confront all the pibes chorros and show that the moral deterioration is reversible.

César’s love exploits also reflect Argentine society. First he dates a “china” (say “cheena"), an Asian teen whose parents, following the stereotype, own a grocery store. Being Korean, she battles with everyone who calls her family “Chinos", the word Argentines use to refer to all nationalities of Asians and their grocery stores as well. As César tires of the constant battling and her swearing at him in Korean, he meets what all Argentine men dream of: a Brazilian woman. Whenever my home state of Wisconsin is mentioned in the US, people mention its famous product, cheese; here in Argentina, whenever Brazil is mentioned, someone invariably alludes to its famous product, the legendary Brazilian women. César, of course, goes head over heels over this particular exemplar of sex appeal.

The plot of Resistiré is too full of these cultural vignettes to mention them all. There is a beautiful but capricious woman (Julia), an almost solid but fundamentally explosive girlfriend (Martina), and a corrupt businessman with ties to both the mafia and a senator (Mauricio). The Moreno family drinks mate all the time and the father – a taxi driver – has the strange Argentine custom of carrying his radio with him everywhere.

The show is a smash hit here in Argentina. The main male protagonist is played by Pablo Echarri, who has in his own history – his working-class roots, the recent kidnapping and ransom of his father, his recent conversion to the most desired Argentine man – an Argentine fairy tale. But even with the show’s success, when I mention that I watch the show, half the people are disgusted and wonder why I waste my time on such trash.

The other half want to know what happened last night.

previously there was staring back
afterwards you have Argentina's Eichmann trial?

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