ABSTRACT
Upon the death of soap opera actor Don MacLaughlin, who played Chris Hughes on As the World Turns for some thirty years, the program’s producers elected to have his character die also. Consequently, an episode was presented in which the news of the character’s death was announced. At the conclusion of this episode, a framed photograph of him, placed on the Hughes family’s piano, dissolved into a montage of shots from previous episodes – some of which were black and white kinescopes dating from the days when the program was broadcast live. A memorial was chromakeyed over the shot of the framed photograph: “Don MacLaughlin, 1906-1986.” In so doing, the death of MacLaughlin was elided with the death of the character, Chris Hughes. The photograph – set within a diegetic “frame,” literally and figuratively – served to signify two complementary, almost contradictory, signifieds: the actor and the character. Was the photograph wholly within the fiction (Chris Hughes) or was it a signifier of “reality” (Don MacLaughlin)? Was it within the diegetic world or without, or could it have been somewhere in between, drawing on both reality and fiction?
