Soap Opera
35 Years Later, This Sally Field-Whoopi Goldberg Classic Still Gives New Meaning to an Old Soap Trope
‘Soapdish’ hilariously tackles a soap opera back-from-the-dead plot that even ‘Days of our Lives’ has never attempted.
Back-from-the-dead plots are de rigueur on Days of our Lives — and soap operas in general — and have been since the genre’s inception, which gave the Sally Field–Whoopi Goldberg comedy Soapdish a lot to work with. Filled with a bevy of soap tropes, some of which you can see here, the flick featured a back-from-the-dead plot no soap fan has seen yet.
‘Soapdish’ Gives a Soap Writer a Big Dilemma
In the 1960s, Days of our Lives’ Marie Horton had to deal with falling in love with her presumed-dead brother, who had plastic surgery to look completely different. That was a run-of-the-mill back-from-the-dead plot. More than 60 years later, the same soap had Stefan DiMera (Brandon Barash) return from the dead after his heart had been transplanted into Julie Williams (Susan Seaforth Hayes). But no soap has ever had a character return from the dead after decapitation, until The Sun Also Sets, the fictional soap featured in Soapdish, tried it.
In the film, Whoopi Goldberg’s Rose Schwartz, the head writer for the fictional soap, is tasked with finding a way to bring back a dead character when the producer chose to re-hire a former actor just to make his co-star, Celeste (Sally Field) — also his ex-lover — quit. When David Barnes, played by Robert Downey Jr., told Rose his plan, she nearly had a conniption because of the way the character died. He was decapitated, a fact that led to one of the funniest rants in the film, per IMDb:
“The guy was killed in an auto accident! I looked it up! He was driving in the Yukon, in a pink convertible, to visit his brother, who’s an ex-con named Frances, when a tractor-trailer came along and decapitates him. You know what that means, it means he doesn’t have a head. How am I supposed to write for a guy who doesn’t have a head?”
Rose was told to resurrect him anyway by claiming the head was put on ice and reattached in an experimental procedure. That sounds like a plot even Days of our Lives’ Dr. Rolf could love, having just brought a character back who had been dead for 15 years.
