Soap fights!

Fights, especially cat fights, are an essential part of the soap opera genre. Exciting, funny and shocking, they are a brilliant way to keep viewers hooked.

Cat fights occur when pressure and unresolved tension builds between two characters. It can happen over a number of  months or years, as one character deals with the actions of the other.

Female characters are represented through dialogue, performance and costume as either the vixen and the sweetheart so the audience know who to side with. One of the main pleasures of consuming soap operas is that entire families or communities can unite in hatred of a single character: is this cathartic?

The cause of the tension could be something like:

- cheating with your best mate's other half
- stealing money
- telling a secret
- keeping a secret

The dialogue during a fight is used as exposition: it tells the audience clearly what has happened in the storyline to make these characters fight. See the clip from Emmerdale below: before the fight relationships and events are loosely outlined. Once the scene moves outside though, lines become shorter and more detail is revealed so the audience can take sides.




Fights diffuse tension between characters and act as a form of escapism for the viewer as we take sides and cheer on our favourite. They can also be cathartic as the viewer invests in the scene and imagines fighting their own battles with people who have wronged them.


In the example below from Coronation Street, as the fight begins and intensifies the camerawork changes: steady mid shots during the exposition, hand held during the fight. By zooming in during the fight the cameras are forced to pan quickly to follow the action: this makes the audience feel as if they are in the room whipping their heads back and forth so they don't miss any of the action. The addition of blood, a cheap bottle of vodka and the working class costumes and set emphasise the social realism of this scene and make the fight more shocking.



The scene from Eastenders shows two of soap's archetypes: the tart with a heart and the vixen. Janine's performance and costume compared with Stacey's position her very clearly as the antagonist in this scene.