Earlier today, clairedsfield posted a gifset that tracks Marta’s current trajectory of queer grief: indirect letters, too many drinks, secret diary entries. No one and no space to talk about her pain fully and openly; having it belittled by people around her until she breaks down in the office, desperately sobbing and drunk.
(And then I had some thoughts.)
While this story arc drives us, collectively, over to the de la Reina liquor cart on a level of narrative because it hurts to see Marta suffer; and while it makes us repeatedly extol the prowess of Marta Belmonte on a level of performance (which sends us right back to the liquor cart again because she is staggeringly good in how she puts her skin out there for this story and this character), there is also a bigger picture of queer representation at play for which both the performer and the show overall deserve recognition.
Because while Marta de la Reina is currently traveling down a bleak arc of despair, it bears repeating that it is queer despair, and that it is taken seriously as that. Marta, at the moment, cannot even function because she’s so heartbroken, and it’s not just a break-up portrayal like any other (it’s a soap. People fall in and out of love and beds all the time).
Other than other characters, Marta cannot talk openly about her loss – sure, one of her employees disappeared, but she cannot state openly that said employee was, to her, her wife – and there is no queer community and no queer representation around Marta to echo her pain. So it matters that this processing can only happen in hiding: in secretly written pages of a diary, on the bottom of a bottle and then another bottle, and in hushed conversations (if at all) in spaces that are never quite Marta’s own (not even her bedroom) – and that is not far-fetched as an analogy for queers in conservative environments today.
Yet the audience gets to witness this grief, and Marta’s struggle to find space and forms for it, and that matters (to quote Marta: ¡esto es importante!). And it is different from showing gays – of all genders – as miserable because they are gay, or because deviants deserve to suffer and die and must do so to earn their humanity.
That was, for a long time, the only narrative we, as queers, had in media. But what Marta is going through right now is very much not that.
Of course it is revolutionary to show queer joy. (Still. Sadly.) But it is also revolutionary to show queer pain. Not as atonement or as a spectacle, but as a right to depth and a full life that is allowed to grieve and go on. And up until the very late 20th century, media did not afford our pain that kind of space. We weren’t given a language for it, and struggled to build one, against that invisibility and that relegation to the sidelines (and look at how spaces are taken away again at the moment, from Florida to Hungary and others).
In the early 1990s, when AIDS tore through (mainly) the gay male community, there was a staggering loss of life. But that loss was doubled in how mainstream and its media made so little space for it, and for grieving it. And if it did, in cinema or mainstream TV, then gays were noble, elegiac, and tragically dying to Callas running in the background. (remember when “Philadelphia” came out and how it had to be told through the eyes of the straight ally? That was in 1994.)
The gays of the 1990s were not breaking down messily in their office over a bottle of scotch and then walking unsteadily into a work meeting with their voice too loud, embarrassing everyone else in the room. And getting this now, on the daytime small screen, says a lot about space gained across the past thirty years (it also says a lot about the care with which this show is run when it comes to queerness).
But still there is a specificity, and an added invisibility, when it comes to the intersection of queerness and being a woman: because traditionally, in media representation, women don’t desire. They merely are desired (male gaze and all that).
There is a media history of transgressive women having to die at the end of their stories (or, often, at the end of someone else’s stories, to which they are merely the foil) to be accepted into a pantheon of respectability. And if a woman character’s transgressiveness is queerness, there was a rule about either dying grotesquely as a villain, or – if it was a sympathetic figure – about dying beautifully on the threshold to heteronormativity for moral acceptance into its fold, as the final apotheosis.
But that has changed. And at the moment, we are here to witness one instance of such change.
Marta de la Reina is a very sympathetic figure. And she is queer. And she is allowed to grieve her loss on afternoon TV, messily and unapologetically. And that is an incredible win.
(We need to take a brief detour into Dafne’s past to make a point here. Sorry.)
In the early 1990s, in the middle of AIDS, I was desperately trying to stave off the realization that I was queer.
We’d just barely gotten off the WHO list of pathologies and there was no one to talk to, no one who could have been trusted with that kind of a secret that was still marked by so much shame. I remember, most of all, the crippling loneliness of that situation. There wasn’t much media representation back then. If the library had books, you had to check them out under the distrustful gaze of the librarian (if you dared). There was no internet.
There were a few movies I managed to catch, secretly, in late-night reruns on TV, while still living with my parents (who would then threaten to throw me out over coming out) – movies that had lesbians! And those lesbians, few as there were, were beautiful, tragic figures whose love was doomed and who gained moral acceptance only by dying for their desire, and because of their desire.
I remember: the first was Girls in Uniform, with the teenage girl in love with her teacher; it ends with the lesbian’s broken body at the bottom of the staircase from which she has flung herself. Then there was The Children’s Hour. Shirley MacLaine pining after Audrey Hepburn, and that last image of MacLaine: faceless, available only through the horrified gaze of Hepburn as the straight woman, while the audience only gets to see, on the floor, the shadow of the lesbian dangling from the ceiling beam, hung by her own hand.
Those two movies were old. But then it was 1993 (the year Brunet was born, to put this into a perspective) and a smaller French film came out: „Le cahier volé“ [The Stolen Diary] – a girl between two siblings wooing her, a boy and a girl. The girl chooses the other girl (and how incredulous was I at seeing that!), but the diary gets stolen; shame; the threat of separation. And, again, the image of a lesbian – little more than my own age – hung, by her own hand. Killed by her own desire.
That was the panorama, and it did something to the way I could imagine my own desire for women and its rightfulness. I doubted it for a long time, and there are many places on this planet where that is still no different today.
But today, there’s at least internet and cellphones (and Tumblr). And if I were young Dafne today, I might see a desperate Marta de la Reina who is grappling with the loss of Fina. Who is spiraling downwards, day after day. A Marta who drinks, and slacks off at her job, and has lost much of her will to live, but who doesn’t have to hang herself any longer to make herself sympathetic to an audience, or to mollify a heteronormative society about her queer desire.
If anything, the show – and it bears repeating that this is, incredibly, a telenovela de sobremesa – makes space for queer desire, not just in happy fulfillment, but also in ugly, desperate grief. And that matters perhaps even more.
Marta gets space to suffer through the loss of Fina, and that matters so much in terms of visibility and queer rights. Because with the way it is written and performed, it is, for once, not suffering that has to be paid as a price for loving another woman. It is, for once, not dying tragically (and prettily) as an entrance ticket to social acceptance – which is still the position of the Catholic church: “you can be gay as long as you don’t act on it, but you also should feel dutifully ashamed of it.” It is, for once, not suffering beautifully so that a heteronormative majority can get off on our pain, as something exotic at a distance. No. This time, there’s ugly sobbing and the second-hand embarrassment at Marta walking into the store unsteady on her feet, with her voice just that telltale bit too loud. It's real, and it’s raw, and it’s unapologetic. The show, at no point, makes the viewer think that Marta has no right to her grief, or that she would deserve it as a punishment for being gay.
Which brings me to the performance of Belmonte, which is fearless. It gives the representation of queer female desire a dignity that is not about being pretty (within the confines of a pretty pastel daily soap, but still) or amenable to heteronormativity. And with “dignity” I don’t mean “appearing dignified” because Marta de la Reina is very much not that kind of dignified at the moment, even though that poise is central to her character. But what is also central to the character of Marta de la Reina is her queerness, and her being in love as a queer person. And, again, it means so much how this is shown as outweighing Marta’s attention to poise.
When I say that this performance gives a dignity to our community and to our loving (and we probably cannot thank Belmonte enough for that), I mean that it is claiming the right to queer struggle. The right of not having to die beautifully to atone for being queer.
This performance is carving out a visibility for queerness not as a consumable struggle (even as much of it is also so very pretty. It’s still a soap), but as lives lived that should be recognized as such. To not die quietly but live messily. To not be the shadow dangling from a rope, but to be ugly sobbing, in an American shot, at the center of her own story, for weeks on end.
And while I of course want Marta to walk off into the sunset with Fina eventually, this central arc of being queer and miserable (but not ‘miserable because of being queer’) and of being alive (and still queer) to tell the tale may hold even more significance in terms of queer representation, and queer survival.