General Hospital's Black and White Ball: Black and Blue
By Jack Myers
In the second week of the General Hospital Black and White Ball, I came to the realization that I wasn’t just watching a take-off on an old Hollywood horror movie. What I had initially thought was The Three Stooges Go to the Haunted House wearing Phantom of the Opera costumes was really a video game disguised as an afternoon soap opera. Call it General Hospital: Gotcha!
If you were a mainGH character like Rick or Lulu or Elizabeth, you turned your back and a silly old man you’d never seen before popped out of the shadows and stabbed you with a sword or pointed a gun and tried to make you jump off a parapet. At random, by surprise and quickly, it was as if one of the four bad “ghosts” in Pac Man suddenly appeared from a corner, gave you a token chase and gobbled you up.
Certainly, it wasn’t the kind of soap opera drama we like or are used to, the kind that features villains as complex, intelligent characters who feel and express a range of emotions and ruminate mightily before they strike. Think Days of Our Lives’ Stefano di Mera. Or better yet, GH's own villainess manqué, Helena Cassidine. Motivation-less (oh, yes) “insane” Anthony Zacchara (played by Emmy winner Bruce Weitz, and what a waste of a first-class actor) was nothing but The Terminator, Guza style.
Fast, anonymous death coming out of nowhere! Just junk! That's what GeneralHospital’s Black and White ball mostly turned out to be!
Take the sequence's centerpiece murder: the offing of Emily Quartermaine by her fiancé Nikolas Cassadine. Was the murder a result of psychological conflict, crossed romantic emotions, pathological jealousy? We were led to believe that Nikolas, who earlier this year had been given a serum that turned him into Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde, murdered his fianceé Emily in fit of unconscious Mr. Hyde-ness. Our beloved Emily had succumbed not to the complex Nikolas we all know, but to some monster who had been drugged. Mr. Anonymous!
What kind of creative, layered daytime drama is this, to lock up 20 characters in an island prison overnight and have a demented old guy in a tux (“Pyscho Pop” as Luke tagged Anthony Zacchara) kill them randomly? What does it all mean? It means absolutely nothing beyond four weeks of sweeps stunt entertainment that was given not one second of mature writing thought or sophisticated scribing skill! Soap operas are not video games! They should be about complex human behavior, not cheap kills.
And seriously, darlings, would you die for love? I wouldn't, but if someone I had watched grow up on screen and become a woman over a 15-year period on a soap opera--namely Emily Quartermaine--was going to be killed, I'd like it to be for a good, psychologically complex or romantic reason, not as a mindless, momentary sweeps month thrill kill.
Of course, about 10,000 other things happened during the four weeks we viewers were stranded at the Black and White Ball on Spoon Island with almost the entire cast of General Hospital. (What do you mean The Black and White Ball was only one night?) A heart attack, a case of appendicitis, a reported drowning, various shootings, sex and declarations of love, verbal cat fighting--in essence, everything but the GH studio sink was included in a month of drama.
Come back later this week, mon cheres, and I’ll review the good scenes and things that were salvaged from this abysmally scripted mess by some of the show’s veteran actors. Believe it or not, some of the year’s finest acting moments by actors like Anthony Geary, Jane Elliot and John Ingle were mined from this sequence.
Mean GH’s scriptwriters, however, should be sentenced to a screening of Ed Wood, the 1994 Tim Burton film about the famously bad 1950s movie director/cross dresser of Plan 9 From Outer Space fame, if they really want to know how a proper schlock horror movie should be constructed. And they should remember to bring their angora sweaters.
Read more Marlena on the GH's B&W Ball at marlenadelacroix.com.
Jack Myers
Media Ecologist, Founder: MediaVillage and Advancing Diversity Hall of Honors Jack Myers is a media ecologist and founder of MediaVillage, the media and advertising community’s leading resource for market intelligence, education, business connection…
