Belén Esteban's rise to stardom is better understood if her story is extrapolated to the narrative of a soap opera and the impact it can have on the viewer. Let's remember that courageous 26-year-old mother who puts the world on her back to raise her daughter alone. She is the figure of the heroine as a victim so typical of televised melodramas, and it is easy to affirm that Esteban has been narrating her life story for 24 years in installments, sequels and prequels.
The so-called princess of the people for her resounding success on television turns half a century today at a time of great professional changes. The program of her life, Sálvame, disappeared last June and now it has had to be recycled on Netflix. Tomorrow the new format, Every Man for Himself, will premiere, with Esteban, one of the most famous characters in our country, as the undisputed protagonist.
To better understand how Esteban's media phenomenon began, we spoke with María Lamuedra Graván, professor at the Department of Journalism at the University of Seville and author of the academic study Hybrid formats and melodrama on television: the case of Belén Esteban as a postmodern heroine, 2005. .
For Lamuedra, “Belén is really a heroine, but she is not a classic heroine that represents high merits and who achieves the love and approval of everyone around her. She is a hero who is there because she sells.” In her study, Lamuedra conducted interviews with several groups of women and concluded that the interviewees articulated a discourse very similar to the postmodern discourse that the literary theorist Fredric Jameson defined as the logic of late capitalism. In this sense, the logic of savage capitalism is applied in the triumph of this character: “Traditional values per se lose importance and what prevails is what sells and gives results.”
Lamuedra remembers that when Belén Esteban appeared on the screen, the audience increased, “there was verified data on this.” The reason for this attention to the character was, according to the study, the soap opera-like story of her and the visibility of social changes and changes in references in terms of the value system with which the audience connected.
“She connected with the general public through her direct way of speaking and language, but above all it was the story that captivated the audience. What she was telling was a soap opera, a story with many soap opera elements, and that is a genre that generates a lot of empathy.”
Belén Esteban must be recognized for other types of capabilities for having lasted so long in the television business. Since her landing in the media, she has collaborated in more than thirty programs while many of her colleagues were left in the box of broken TV toys.
Everyone knows that he rose to fame for his relationship and fatherhood with the bullfighter Jesulín de Ubrique. And she established herself in the media by telling the story of her daughter's upbringing with iconic phrases like “Andreíta eat the chicken.” But years ago he removed the young Andrea from the media circus, and she no longer needs the rest of the cast that gave her fame to continue generating new headlines.
Hero or not, time puts everyone in their place, and for now Esteban will continue to enter the homes of all Spaniards who want her through that small mirror of reality that is television.
