The deaths of long-running, elderly characters offer up a chance to consider the ebb and flow and circular nature of soap narratives. This article uses the deaths of three of EastEnders ’s matriarchs to think about the soap opera’s use of aesthetics and space, alongside its layering of memory. Pat Butcher, Peggy Mitchell and Dot Cotton’s deaths – two on screen and one off – saw the programme intensify and disrupt its aesthetic and narrative conventions to signify these deaths as intensely emotional ‘events’. These endings were moments of pause in the ever-onwards flow of soap narrative. Long-running elderly characters embody soap memory, and through these deaths EastEnders revisited deep layers of its past to pay tribute to departing iconic characters by employing ‘practices of self-citations and self-referentiality’ (Holdsworth, 2011: 37). Here, objects and spaces, remembrances and returns are used to enrich the experience of long-time viewers. This article considers the use of Albert Square as a ‘time-rich’ (Lury, 2005:16) space and presents these episodes as examples of how the programme can shift its aesthetic conventions and unsettle its spatial dynamics for affective impact.

中文翻译：

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女族长之死：肥皂剧美学、空间和记忆


长期存在的老年角色的死亡提供了一个机会，让我们思考肥皂剧叙事的起伏和循环性质。本文以 EastEnders 的三位女族长之死为例，思考肥皂剧对美学和空间的运用，以及其记忆的层次。Pat Butcher、Peggy Mitchell 和 Dot Cotton 的死亡——两个在银幕上，一个在银幕外——见证了该节目的强化和破坏其美学和叙事惯例，将这些死亡表示为强烈情感的“事件”。这些结局是肥皂剧叙事不断涌现的停顿时刻。长期存在的老年角色体现了肥皂剧的记忆，通过这些死亡，EastEnders 重新审视了其过去的深层，通过采用“自我引用和自我指涉的做法”向离去的标志性人物致敬（Holdsworth，2011：37）。在这里，物体和空间、纪念和回归被用来丰富长期观众的体验。本文将阿尔伯特广场视为一个“时间丰富”（Lury， 2005：16）空间，并将这些情节作为节目如何改变其审美惯例并扰乱其空间动态以产生情感影响的例子。