ABSTRACT
Bill Anderson is watching television in a bar. The news reports that an unknown longhaired man wearing only a lap-lap has got into the zoo and castrated one of the animals. Bill reports this to Sharon, who is working behind the bar:
Bill Anderson is one of the original characters of the Australian soap opera Chances. He was a neighbor and best mate of Dan, head of the Taylor family. They were in Vietnam together, where Bill heroically saved Dan’s life. But in the postrealist world of Chances all this doesn’t matter: Bill is just a bloke trying to live his life and make the best sense he can of things. Not that there is a lot to make sense of – now that family values and common decency have “gone to the shit house.” A Tarzan look-alike castrating an animal in the zoo: well, it just happens in Chances, hitting the news today and forgotten tomorrow, and life goes on anyway. In Chances, the moral order based on family values and common decency, which guarantees the thin tissue of civilization, is no more. In this respect, Chances signals a qualitative departure from the familiar world of soap opera, a genre that has been traditionally founded precisely on the naturalization of a repertoire of moral values which is claimed to underpin social order, modern “civilization.”
