We Are All Ugly Betty Now
Janet McCabe & Kim Akass (eds.), TV's Betty Goes Global: From Telenovela to International Brand
IB Tauris, 272pp, £19.50, ISBN 9781780762678
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
Ugly Betty has changed her name many times in recent years as she travelled and was reborn in South Africa, Greece, Spain, China, Israel. But unusually she first appeared on Colombian television screens, as Betty la Fea, between 1999 and 2001, in a soap opera – or telenovela – which was to become, more than any other Latin American series, a global franchise. This collection of essays explores the reasons for its enormous (and continuing) success in so many different cultures. At one level it is evidence of the increasing globalisation of culture – a visual world dominated by variants of CSI, Law and Order, and the irrepressible and eternal Friends. While the US version of Betty was less successful after its initial two seasons, what distinguished it was its Latin American origins. In fact it was Salma Hayek, the Mexican actress, who appeared in its Mexican remake, and produced and promoted the programme in the US.
Soap operas in Latin America began in the 1920s, and by the following decade were part of a powerful drive to capture larger audiences by promoting popular culture. Carlos Gardel, the icon of tango, was enormously famous not just in his native Argentina, but across the Spanish-speaking world. Paramount wanted to promote him across the continent, until his untimely death in an air crash in Colombia put paid to their plans. In Mexico, Maria Felix, Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete were the singing idols of a new Mexican cinema that celebrated a rural Mexico caught in the throes of a revolution. And across the region, but most successfully produced in Cuba, radio soaps opened and closed with popular music and told and retold their familiar tales to huge audiences. The most famous, El derecho de nacer (‘The right to live’), reached every radio-owning household in Latin America. The first TV soaps, in the 1950s, were produced in Mexico, followed by the emerging broadcasting corporations of Venezuela and Argentina, to be joined later by the massive Globo cartel of Brazil. Their audiences were resolutely working class; the poorest areas fell generally silent when the soaps came on and you could follow them along the street through open windows. The first Latin American blockbuster was probably Simplemente Maria (‘Just Maria’), written by the prolific Spanish romantic novelist Corin Tellado.
The enormous popularity of the soap opera must stem in part from the familiar stories they tell. Simplemente Maria is a classic tale of a poor girl arriving in the city from the country to work for a wealthy family. She is seduced and then abandoned by the family’s eldest son. There are certainly prevailing formulas, but the best are more than mere melodrama. In some senses they pick up on the great themes of classic theatre, jealousy, desire, exploitation, greed, the Oedipal response, machismo, heroism, sacrifice. They are, it is true, character rather than text driven. But if the characters are archetypes, they resonate with some common experiences shared by their devoted audience.
And even in this global age, their shared stories are nuanced through the local and popular references provided by music or folklore or urban myth. In a neoliberal age, where television programmes are global commodities, the history of Betty might represent a different phenomenon, as Janet McCabe suggests in her introduction. ‘Glocalization’ is an awkward neologism,but it points to a fruitful contradiction that Dana Heller discusses in the final essay, ‘Our Betties ourselves’. For global products are often adapted and changed in their transition, and in that tension the global may be questioned and the local and the popular reaffirmed. Heller suggests that this is the case with Ugly Betty.
Colombia is a relative latecomer to the world of TV soaps; its series are characteristically urban in setting and reference and their central figure is often a strong and confident woman; they also tend to use comedy more subtly than their earlier counterparts. But Colombian soaps are also courageous in confronting difficult social issues. One of the most famous was Sin tetas no hay paraiso (‘Without tits there is no paradise’), which confronted the widespread phenomenon, directly associated with drug culture, of women submitted to invasive plastic surgery in order to transform them into the doll-like Barbies their newly wealthy boyfriends yearn to possess. The industry is huge and the display of silicon ubiquitous. But it is the most poignant and powerful testimony to the dominance of a global culture where white, thin and blonde are the signals of success. To resist the surgery is to risk marginalisation, rejection and loneliness; to submit to it is the most brutal form of exploitation, albeit the resulting chains will be wrapped in roses.
This is the context of Betty la Fea, and Sin tetas owes her a debt. Betty is brought up in a poor lower middle class neighbourhood by protective parents whose background is provincial. She studies hard, at considerable personal cost, and gets a top degree in Business Administration. But the conservatism of her parents, loving as they are, and their protection shields her from the brutal reality of a Bogota deeply divided by class and dominated by a white bourgeoisie that sets the standards of beauty. In the opening shots of the soap opera, we see her arriving in the offices of a fashion magazine where she is looking for work. We see only what she sees, the slim and beautiful women in the lifts and offices looking with scorn at a Betty we have yet to encounter.
They and the magazine are the manifestation of a global culture of success that Sin tetas also sharply exposed. And when we do get to see Betty it is clear that she is the very opposite of those fashionistas: she is highly intelligent but wears braces on her teeth and thick glasses; her clothes are old-fashioned and shapeless and her hair obscures much of her face. For very particular reasons, and despite not filling any of the requirements of a woman worker in a country where employment adverts openly specify physical requirements for the job, she is taken on by the failing magazine. She is used and abused by everyone, beginning with the editor, the owner’s son, with whom she falls in love. In the end, however, she saves the magazine and becomes its editor. Her appearance does change, but her ugliness was always as much about her class and her marginality as her physical appearance. It was a parallel divide to the division between the powerful and the powerless, the urban and the marginal, the global and the local.
When Ugly Betty is translated to the US, Betty (played by America Ferrara) is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant; he is a widower and we later discover that he is an ‘illegal’ and is deported. Betty lives with him, her sister and her son Justin, in a poor suburb. In her case Mode (modelled in every way on Vogue, whose internal life was as pernicious and manipulative as its fictional counterpart) takes her on in preference to her fashionable rival because they need her skills and intelligence. It is, in a sense, a Cinderella story – but here it isn’t wickedness that holds her back or mere jealousy, but prejudice, racism, machismo, and her implicit challenge to a uniform global culture that sells beauty by the ton and whiteness by the lorry load. In the end Betty does overcome the wicked stepmother figure, played by Vanessa Williams as the ambitious and absolutely unscrupulous rival for the editorship. But as an audience we are drawn to Betty’s view of things, to sympathy and solidarity with her family and with her nephew Justin, who comes out of the closet while a teenager in a joyful assumption of his sexuality in a re-enactment of the transgressive musical, ‘Hairspray’.
Is this an incorporation of the marginal into the mainstream, or a critique of its values and stereotypes? The decline in viewing figures for the US series may suggest that, in moving to centre stage, the programme has lost contact with the wider audience who could enact their resistance or their discontents through Betty or identify with an ugliness which describes the rejection by white America of the real diversity of its world. Much of this volume of essays seems more concerned with issues of the trade in programmes than in their content – at the same time, where soap does deal with the great themes of human existence, as it often does, it is more powerful for locating them in the detail of real and recognisable lives.
Soap operas in Latin America began in the 1920s, and by the following decade were part of a powerful drive to capture larger audiences by promoting popular culture. Carlos Gardel, the icon of tango, was enormously famous not just in his native Argentina, but across the Spanish-speaking world. Paramount wanted to promote him across the continent, until his untimely death in an air crash in Colombia put paid to their plans. In Mexico, Maria Felix, Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete were the singing idols of a new Mexican cinema that celebrated a rural Mexico caught in the throes of a revolution. And across the region, but most successfully produced in Cuba, radio soaps opened and closed with popular music and told and retold their familiar tales to huge audiences. The most famous, El derecho de nacer (‘The right to live’), reached every radio-owning household in Latin America. The first TV soaps, in the 1950s, were produced in Mexico, followed by the emerging broadcasting corporations of Venezuela and Argentina, to be joined later by the massive Globo cartel of Brazil. Their audiences were resolutely working class; the poorest areas fell generally silent when the soaps came on and you could follow them along the street through open windows. The first Latin American blockbuster was probably Simplemente Maria (‘Just Maria’), written by the prolific Spanish romantic novelist Corin Tellado.
The enormous popularity of the soap opera must stem in part from the familiar stories they tell. Simplemente Maria is a classic tale of a poor girl arriving in the city from the country to work for a wealthy family. She is seduced and then abandoned by the family’s eldest son. There are certainly prevailing formulas, but the best are more than mere melodrama. In some senses they pick up on the great themes of classic theatre, jealousy, desire, exploitation, greed, the Oedipal response, machismo, heroism, sacrifice. They are, it is true, character rather than text driven. But if the characters are archetypes, they resonate with some common experiences shared by their devoted audience.
And even in this global age, their shared stories are nuanced through the local and popular references provided by music or folklore or urban myth. In a neoliberal age, where television programmes are global commodities, the history of Betty might represent a different phenomenon, as Janet McCabe suggests in her introduction. ‘Glocalization’ is an awkward neologism,but it points to a fruitful contradiction that Dana Heller discusses in the final essay, ‘Our Betties ourselves’. For global products are often adapted and changed in their transition, and in that tension the global may be questioned and the local and the popular reaffirmed. Heller suggests that this is the case with Ugly Betty.
Colombia is a relative latecomer to the world of TV soaps; its series are characteristically urban in setting and reference and their central figure is often a strong and confident woman; they also tend to use comedy more subtly than their earlier counterparts. But Colombian soaps are also courageous in confronting difficult social issues. One of the most famous was Sin tetas no hay paraiso (‘Without tits there is no paradise’), which confronted the widespread phenomenon, directly associated with drug culture, of women submitted to invasive plastic surgery in order to transform them into the doll-like Barbies their newly wealthy boyfriends yearn to possess. The industry is huge and the display of silicon ubiquitous. But it is the most poignant and powerful testimony to the dominance of a global culture where white, thin and blonde are the signals of success. To resist the surgery is to risk marginalisation, rejection and loneliness; to submit to it is the most brutal form of exploitation, albeit the resulting chains will be wrapped in roses.
This is the context of Betty la Fea, and Sin tetas owes her a debt. Betty is brought up in a poor lower middle class neighbourhood by protective parents whose background is provincial. She studies hard, at considerable personal cost, and gets a top degree in Business Administration. But the conservatism of her parents, loving as they are, and their protection shields her from the brutal reality of a Bogota deeply divided by class and dominated by a white bourgeoisie that sets the standards of beauty. In the opening shots of the soap opera, we see her arriving in the offices of a fashion magazine where she is looking for work. We see only what she sees, the slim and beautiful women in the lifts and offices looking with scorn at a Betty we have yet to encounter.
They and the magazine are the manifestation of a global culture of success that Sin tetas also sharply exposed. And when we do get to see Betty it is clear that she is the very opposite of those fashionistas: she is highly intelligent but wears braces on her teeth and thick glasses; her clothes are old-fashioned and shapeless and her hair obscures much of her face. For very particular reasons, and despite not filling any of the requirements of a woman worker in a country where employment adverts openly specify physical requirements for the job, she is taken on by the failing magazine. She is used and abused by everyone, beginning with the editor, the owner’s son, with whom she falls in love. In the end, however, she saves the magazine and becomes its editor. Her appearance does change, but her ugliness was always as much about her class and her marginality as her physical appearance. It was a parallel divide to the division between the powerful and the powerless, the urban and the marginal, the global and the local.
When Ugly Betty is translated to the US, Betty (played by America Ferrara) is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant; he is a widower and we later discover that he is an ‘illegal’ and is deported. Betty lives with him, her sister and her son Justin, in a poor suburb. In her case Mode (modelled in every way on Vogue, whose internal life was as pernicious and manipulative as its fictional counterpart) takes her on in preference to her fashionable rival because they need her skills and intelligence. It is, in a sense, a Cinderella story – but here it isn’t wickedness that holds her back or mere jealousy, but prejudice, racism, machismo, and her implicit challenge to a uniform global culture that sells beauty by the ton and whiteness by the lorry load. In the end Betty does overcome the wicked stepmother figure, played by Vanessa Williams as the ambitious and absolutely unscrupulous rival for the editorship. But as an audience we are drawn to Betty’s view of things, to sympathy and solidarity with her family and with her nephew Justin, who comes out of the closet while a teenager in a joyful assumption of his sexuality in a re-enactment of the transgressive musical, ‘Hairspray’.
Is this an incorporation of the marginal into the mainstream, or a critique of its values and stereotypes? The decline in viewing figures for the US series may suggest that, in moving to centre stage, the programme has lost contact with the wider audience who could enact their resistance or their discontents through Betty or identify with an ugliness which describes the rejection by white America of the real diversity of its world. Much of this volume of essays seems more concerned with issues of the trade in programmes than in their content – at the same time, where soap does deal with the great themes of human existence, as it often does, it is more powerful for locating them in the detail of real and recognisable lives.