A Strange Mix of "Ewwww" and "This Isn't All Bad"

[shipperx]

Ever find yourself watching something that totally revolts you and still somehow find yourself thinking that it's got some interesting aspects to it?  That's been my issue with One Life to Live in the last few weeks.   I'm sickened and revolted and think if OLTL keeps doing this they're doing something really bad... and yet I also have to admit that what's on screen has been pretty fascinating.

I freaked out when I read the spoilers, and now those spoilers have aired.  And they went there!  They really, really went there! 

And it was revolting!

I also savored the schadenfreude when Canadian TV guide outed these spoilers to a rape advocacy group who then strong-armed ABC into airing not one, but three public service announcements about domestic abuse and rape following episodes focused on this storyline.

(Brief tutorial for anyone wondering what in the hell I'm talking about.:
 
OLTL is a daytime soap.  Seventeen years ago they penned a story about teenaged Marty Saybrooke drunk in a frat house.  A teenaged boy (Todd Manning) that she'd sexually rejected sought revenge on her by locking her in his room and raping her.  Then he goaded two other fraternity brothers into raping her as well. It was realtively graphic and extremely realistic.  It was horrifying. 

Cut to now: seventeen years later. Marty had suffered brain damage in a car accident and had become basically a blank slate.  Through various circumstances, Todd happened across her and decided to use and mislead her in order  to seek revenge on Marty's son and Marty's boyfriend.  Said son and boyfriend were led to believe that Marty was dead. In this storyline, Todd has manipulated Marty into falling in love with him while painting himself to her as woebegone and misunderstood.  His 'evil' wife left him (she kicked him out of the house when he tossed their daughter down a flight of stairs). His 'evil' ex-wife 'stole' his children (she was granted custody because... did I mention that he tossed his daughter down a flight of stairs?)  Todd presented himself as heroic, nurturing and misunderstood and the show had Marty fall for all of it.  And then... they went one step too far.  The show had Marty sleep with him. Cue fandom outrage.  Cue rape victim advocacy group outrage.  Cue my outrage!  I refused to watch the consummation of this storyline. )

The thing is...  (gulp)  The thing is, the fall out from this has actually been kind of sickly fascinating.  (I feel ashamed to admit that).

They had someone tell Marty the truth about Todd almost immediately afterward and the actress rocked the reaction.  Her revulsion and fury were huge... and kind of magnificent to behold. It was root-worthy as she brandished a gun around and threatened to kill him. And her boyfriend -- who I've never liked -- beating the absolute shit out of Todd is probably the first time I've ever rooted for that boyfriend character.  Hell, I even sort of liked the way the boyfriend stood to the side and did nothing to stop Marty from waving the gun around threatening to kill Todd. She'd earned it.  And his "WTF?  Todd, I thought you were nuts, but you. are. nuts!!!" faces as he was told the breathtaking magnitude of Todd's lies and manipulations were totally hilarious.

But that's not even the really sickly fascinating part. The thing that kind of leaves me watching with my mouth hanging open is that somehow, some way Todd has actually convinced himself that he 'loves' Marty, that she's his 'soulmate' and that she had 'changed' him... and -- WHOA! -- I think Todd has at long last totally and completely broken from reality.  Because what he's done is a few worlds away from even really dysfunctional 'love'.  It's sick.  And... it's kind of fascinating to watch (or would be if I was certain that the show wasn't just yanking our chains in recognizing just how twisted and sick this is.)

This last week has been a series of people confronting Todd with varying degrees of outrage.  From Marty's son threatening to smother Todd (who is in the hospital due to the smackdown beating of Marty's boyfriend) in his hospital bed with a pillow.   To his ex-wife visiting him and telling him that he's the scum of the earth who will never have access to her children ever again. To his favored teenaged daughter (the one he tossed down the stairs) confronting him over all of this.  This seventeen year old actress has been on the show since she was literally four years old, and thus has grown up before the audience's eyes as 'daddy's little girl' who, due to her age and idolization never really, really got on a visceral level how reprehensible her father truly was.  She knew his misdeeds, but she loved him.  She kicked him out of her life after he tossed her down the stairs, but she'd still occasionally voiced hopes that he'd change and she could love him again.  And, while this teen actress isn't particularly strong in many cases, she was quite convincing the other day as she this "OMG! My father is really, really fucked in the head!" expression as she listened to him say that he 'loved' Marty and that she'd changed him and that she was the perfect, most wonderful thing to have ever enterred his life. It was like watching every illusion the child had be stripped away as she heard her father's totally batshit bullshit.  And yesterday, Todd's sister arrived in his hospital room to read him the riot act and correctly identify him as a pathological narcissist while pinpointing not only his crime against Marty, but what he had done to his daughter, to [i]her[/i] daughters, and how ludicrously, impossibly screwed up Todd is.

And these scenes have all had a great deal of impact, as the confrontation with his daughter and his sister -- his perennial support system through whatever batshit he'd done over the years -- were long overdue.  They had been his safety net and his enablers through whatever insane thing he'd done. . . in the past.

And all of this sounds like support for the storyline, but I tell you, as fascinating as it is to watch his enablers at long last turn away, as much as it seems clear that the show realizes that Todd is not okay.  It seems like they've written him as at long last having had something close to a psychotic break because he isn't tethered tightly to this world but has gone into whole sale construction alternative one with a population of only himself.  As much as it seems that the show gets that he's one sick fuck...  I don't trust 'em.  Reading writer interviews, I doubly don't trust them.  I'm not sure that having riled substantial portions of their fan base, the media, and a couple of victim advocacy groups that they aren't having characters correctly identify that he is abusive as CYA action, while still planning to have Marty be the soulmate who 'understands' the 'real' Todd beneath all his batshit crazy narcissistic and abusive nature.  I fear this.  I truly do. And it robs the satisfaction out of the long overdue moments where his usual support system crumbles out from under him. It also robs the fascination of seeing Todd exposed as being truly batshit crazy, because... are they really?  It seems like the show has reached a tipping point with the character where they've concluded that this time he really is full-gone nuts.  But... I don't trust them.

However, at least for the moment it's been bizarrely, almost sickeningly fascinating watching Todd completely lose hold of what is real because as much as he's deceived everyone around him, the person he's deceiving most at the moment is himself.

That said, honestly, I don't know where in the hell they go from here.  At this point, they should just kill Todd off or ship him to a prison for the criminally insane (and not cushy St. Anne's sanitorium with the oh-so-lovable and sympathetically crazy, Iraq war vet with post traumatic stress syndrome Brody.  With Brody it's easy to believe that beneath the post-traumatic stress issues, he's a genuinely good guy who deserves to find health and peace, whereas with Todd, after seventeen years without any sustained improvement, I think it's okay to say that he is bad to the bone.   I really think the show should bite the bullet and kill Todd off.  There's little left to be mined from the character.

Comments

[sdwolfpup.livejournal.com]

O.o That is quite the storyline. Sounds like they should kill him off, though.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Heh. And I didn't even list everything he's done. Not just in his 17 year history on the show, I mean done in this storyline. Things like his grieving pregnant neice (who also has a toddler) having a complete emotional and mental breakdown over her husband's death. Todd knew that his neice had totally flipping lost her mind but didn't tell anyone because that might mess up his own plans...and this led to his neice not having proper medical treatment during her pregnancy which led to her baby dying.

Things like the fact that the teenaged daughter that he threw down the stairs was pregnant at the time that he threw her. And because the daughter was going to put her child up for adoption (and he didn't approve) he decided to blackmail her OB-GYN into a scheme where the plan was that she'd steal the baby for him so that he could raise it (ith his victim Marty... who he had convinced to marry him. The plan also stipulated his daughter being told that her baby had died at birth. (Joke on him... babyswapping incident has led his neice (unknowingly) ending up his grandchild and his daughter still being told that her baby died. Oh, and the OB-GYN that he'd blackmailed into this? Committed suicide today by blowing her brains out.

And that's just the stuff that he's done in the last year!

This is a character that needs killing.

[cindergal.livejournal.com]

Now I'm going to have to go to Youtube and watch those scenes. Darn you! ;-) It's hard for me to accept anyone but Howarth as Todd (even though the character he plays on ATWT is annoying in the extreme).

But yeah, I think they are going to have to kill him off. Someone's going to find him dead in his hospital bed, and now there is now a whole long list of suspects to choose from. Classic soap whodunit.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether or not to be greatful that RH isn't playing Todd. I mean, on the one hand RH never would have agreed to the rapemance (that's what it's being called) with Marty. That was something he was willing to quit the show over before and so this storyline would never have been broached if he were still in the role. And there's also the fact that RH is, quite simply, the better actor. If he were in the role, Todd might come off as nuts but there would be layers to it where you actually saw some guilt and he'd be more sympathetic (and Todd really shouldn't be). Trevor St. John does everything in such an infuriatingly off-handed, detached manner that Todd is really coming off as psychotic!

And really, they should kill him off. I don't know, however, that they'd actually do it. I do keep expecting a "Who Shot Todd?" plot because they have managed to give motive to at least 3/4 of the town to want the sick bastard dead once and for all.

[empresspatti.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the fan reaction was huge - which is what a soap opera wants. I'm betting that they keep him around (17 years already) because it's always good to have a bad guy. They get the ratings.

Is it the original actor playing the role now? I bet he's having a blast...

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the fan reaction was huge - which is what a soap opera wants.

I know. That's the depressing thing. The fan outrage was what they were shooting for.

I did take some consolation that they posted really terrible ratings for the day the sex scene aired (but pretty darn good ratings -- for them -- in the aftermath where Marty was threatening to kill him. I try to convince myself that people just want to see him get it.)

And, no, the original actor is on another soap. Roger Howarth was convinced that Todd was a complete psychopath and grew sick of the character. And the show was frustrated by the fact that RH categorically refused to play Todd as a romantic interest (even after his character married Blair), and wouldn't do love scenes because of it.

They recast several years ago and the actor did a pretty good job of filling in. He's not as talented as RH, but he does sell Todd's creepy psychosis.

[empresspatti.livejournal.com]

I thought I remembered that the original actor was a stand up guy who didn't like the character and put limits on what he would do.

Bottom line rules soaps - and viewership is drastically down in the last two decades and does not pull the ad revenue it used to pull. When I was at ABC News the soap and sports supported the news programming. It's very different now.

Still, it is the one venue where women are consistently head writers and main characters. Also - most soaps are women issue oriented and usually trend progressive on social issues. OLTL really blew this - but maybe they did what they had to do to keep programming...

[sourisvho.livejournal.com]

I've never watched OLTL, but that was a very interesting post about the storyline. I'm sure I'd be quite irate if I were a long-time viewer of the show. It's just ... UGH.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

The thing is, when the outrage hit the fandom, we understood what we were outraged about. The rapemance (as it's been dubbed on boards. Also known as "the grossening"). It was a pure, visceral hate. The thing that's thrown in the confusion is that now that they're in the aftermath and so many characters are reacting with revulsion, it's hard to know whether they're intending us to be revolted by Todd and this is his final comeuppance (which is well deserved)... or whether this is just an interim thing and they're going to go back to playing him as aviable character. If I knew that they really were going forward with this acknowledgement that he really is out-and-out crazy I'd feel far more comfortble with the storyline. I still hgave a suspicion, however, that they aren't through toying with the rapemance.

[sourisvho.livejournal.com]

I understand the distrust of the writers. Believe me, I had many a frustration and "WTF??" times with soap writers when I watched them. It's hard to trust them to do the right thing, because so often they DON'T. I would hope they'd realize there's no going back on this, but, well, who knows if they do.

[lindaseton.livejournal.com]

I love your analysis.

I have been watching because Tea will be back tomorrow. The last time I had watched OLTL was when Tea was last there.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

When he left her on the island?

I really don't quite know how Tea is going to rationalize everything that Todd's done in order to defend him in court. I know someone has to (there has to be a story), but, sheesh, there's a lot she's going to have to swallow.

[nmissi.livejournal.com]

I've been youtubing OLTL obsessively, even though I've got a fever and can hardly bear to be vertical. It's like a train wreck, it's horrible, awful, you can't imagine they'll DO that... and they do, and it's all wonderfully soapy and ridiculous. I'm still Ron's drooling fangirl. The show's far from perfect (Gigi/Rex bore me to tears) but the Grossening has been must-see TV. I'm even dealing okay with the baby switch; it's old hat, but the new hotness is that the babythief doesn't know what she's done. (I'm hoping Chloe grows up a Brennan and that by the time the truth is out, she stays one.) And I can't wait for Tea. Tea, Blair, and Marty- it's a Divafest I never thought I'd see. They need to put Todd in a rubber room and a self-hugging jacket for awhile, and let his womenfolk do the heavy lifting. They can chew scenery with the best of 'em. I could easily get behind a "who shot Todd?" storyline, too.