#sunset beach 1997

[flock-of-cassowaries]

“But we’re not the only people that know about that room.”

Understatement of the century, Doctor H.

At this point, the allegedly-secret room in the mausoleum is basically the seaside sex cave grotto from Sunset Beach. Every character’s been there at some point.

None of them have had sex there, because this is a classy programme, but you know. Otherwise. It’s the goddamn beach grotto all over again.

[flock-of-cassowaries]

Absolutely breaking my brain that this is the same actress.

I watched half the movie on the left, and 200-plus episodes of the soap opera on the right, and only made the connection from recognizing her name in the movie’s wikipedia.

It’s not even like anything unusual happened to her face - just mild aging and harsh 90s makeup.

(And mousse. So. Much. Mousse. )

But damned if I recognized her at all, despite her playing a major character on the soap opera that has lived rent-free in my brain for the last three decades.

[flock-of-cassowaries]

It is Father’s Day, and I am meditating on my mom’s lack of agency in her own life and marriage, and how that subconsciously informed my first blorbo.

So one of the first media properties I ever got really, really rabidly into was a short-lived daytime soap opera called Sunset Beach.

There was a lot to like, from 11-Year-Old Me’s perspective - a recognizable Jane Eyre retelling, an idyllic California setting, and a tall, dark, handsome, inexplicably British love interest.

But as much as I shipped the golden couple - said tall, dark, handsome probable-wife-murderer and his pure-hearted, utterly-deserving, ray-of-sunshine girlfriend - and rooted for them to get together (despite the fact that, you know, the dude was probably a wife-murderer… 🤷🏻‍♀️), it wasn’t either of them who was my favourite character.

Instead, that honour went to the chief obstacle to that ship - the villainous, more-than-slightly-pathetic, frequently-misunderstood Annie Douglas.

I loved her.

I don’t think I’m unique in that regard - I think she was a lot of people’s favourite character, the writers included. Re-watching it as an adult, I’ve realized that whole second half of the show literally bends around the need to give her more screen time.

But being that this was 1997, and I was a child, I did not know I was supposed to like her. And while I had always loved a villain (my takeaway from seeing the Lion King in 1994 was “Scar Redemption Arc NOW!!!”), Annie was the first femme villain I’d ever identified with, and the degree to which I identified with her kind of shook me.

Because I had always seen myself as the good girl. The rule-follower. The one who was worthy of So Much More Appreciation Than She Ever Got.

(Does this sound like how incels think about sex? Yes, but I would ask you to cut me some slack, because what I wanted was friendship, and also, I was eleven.)

Annie, on the other hand, was just like “Fuck it, if I can’t get the love I desperately need by just being me, I’m going to manipulate people into giving it to me. I don’t care if I have to [checks notes] drug a pregnant woman, deliver her baby, and then steal it from her to do so!”

And like… objectively, that’s not a pro-social thing to do.

But seeing a woman do anything other than just passively wait to be judged virtuous enough was just… such an antidote to the passivity I’d always seen modelled by my own mother, and which had served me so poorly in my own attempts to make friends.

Of course, because I’m not a psychopath. I channeled this will towards agency into developing a life-threatening eating disorder, which… not recommended, but also, unsurprising when you look at the actresses on Sunset Beach.

But yeah.

For a long time, I secretly wondered if there was actually something evil in me to like such a sociopathic character so much…. but I think I just couldn’t stand the box I’d been slotted into, and into which I could see my mother had been slotted; and seeing a femme character who represented an alternative to that - any alternative, even if it was feloniously antisocial - was just such a relief.

Thank you for your services, queen. Perhaps re-examine your taste in men, though. And definitely stop stealing babies.