What Luke and Laura Mean

With the recent month-long re-wedding stunt on General Hospital, it seems appropriate for me to weigh in more substantially (albeit belatedly) on the decades-long Luke and Laura phenomenon. In all the mainstream press surrounding the soap genre’s most famous couple, much is made of the original wedding’s impact on popular culture and of the public’s enduring captivation with their relationship (“enduring” being extremely relative in the years of dwindling soap viewership). Mention is frequently made of the improbability of the union, considering all the villains the couple has faced over the years, the frequent years-long absences of one or both of the actors, and Luke’s genuinely disturbing hairstyles. But, we are always told, no circumstances have been able to defeat completely the “greatest love of all.”

Which has been, for 25 years, an illusion.

The Luke and Laura relationship is one of the most subversive stories ever told by a soap opera. Given the number of cooks in the GH kitchen over the years, it’s likely many of the creators never realized this. Ostensibly, it’s a story of love overcoming all obstacles, of unlikely partners uniting and reuniting. But all that is a Trojan horse for the real theme that underlies their drama, day after day, year after year.

Love does not conquer all. It’s only a desperate, temporary refuge from tragedy.

No soap opera couple is a happy couple, I know. All of them, especially the long-lasting ones, go through affairs and breakups and court battles and and remarriages and presumed deaths. This is the nature of the daytime drama, and Luke and Laura have been no different. But two things make them distinctive from the pack: 1) the essential nature and consistency of the characters, which have been nurtured and protected by probably the best acting partners in soap history; and 2) the violence of GH’s universe, which has frequently invaded the couple’s happiness and forced them to deal with problems that often have mortal stakes. Unlike almost every other soap couple – who face adversity from exterior forces and sometimes lose – Luke and Laura are defeated time and again because the external circumstances fuel the internal conflict at the heart of their incongruous pairing.

From the beginning, Luke and Laura’s relationship was clouded with darkness. Mobbed-up clubowner Luke raped innocent Laura, who had been seeking adventure outside her suffocating marriage to golden boy-turned-lout Scotty Baldwin. Whereas only a couple of years earlier Guiding Light punished marital rapist Roger Thorpe by tossing him off a cliff, GH sought to redeem Luke, and the story was reworked so that Laura’s forbidden attraction to him only grew. Their romance was set against a backdrop of adventures with upper-case names: The Left-Handed Boy. The Ice Princess. They were lovers on the run, contending not only with disapproving parents and jealous exes but vengeful mob bosses, hitmen, crooked politicians, and eventually, yes, world-conquering megalomaniacs.

Through it all, hero Luke remained true to heroine Laura, and they wed. And then she disappeared. Without Francis, GH’s writers kept Luke in the superhero mold for a couple of years until Laura returned to usher him out stage right. Apart from an appearance here and there, they were out of town until the mid-1990’s, when the most extensive and realistic cycle of breakup and reconciliations began.

The cracks were apparent right away. Laura had grown into an earth mother in her absence; after years on the run, she longed to nest. Luke found himself drawn back toward the mob, placing his family in harm’s way yet again. Luke’s attraction to danger continuously reveals his unease with his marriage and family life, as he is only able to bond with Laura through mutual fear and hatred of a shared enemy. He exploits external problems for them both to face to mask the problems between them as well as insulate himself from his most tender feelings.

While Laura was subconsciously complicit in this impulse as the young girl Luke married, as she matured and became a parent she no longer found deferment of conflict safe or acceptable. The arrival of her secret son Nikolas, heir to their enemies the Cassadines, exposed the key flaw in their marriage. Luke needed a villain to feel connected with Laura; Laura wanted her bond with Luke to eschew this superficiality.

Now that the Cassadines were no longer their common enemy but family, Luke felt betrayed on two levels: Laura had kept a crucial secret from him for many years, but had also removed from their relationship the common adversary through which they could bond. He no longer had a fellow-hater, and thus drifted away from Laura (and toward his son, who shared his enmity).

While Luke had always attempted to deny the internal obstacles to their marriage, Laura’s insistence that her family be safe led her to rebuff the external forces threatening them. As the years wore on and the stories found their trajectories, it turned out that, generally, Luke had been right – the Cassadines, save Nikolas, remained the Spencers’ enemies, and sought time and again to hurt Laura, Luke, and their children. Laura’s eventual psychological retreat from reality – although brought to fore in a ridiculous plot – was nevertheless a natural evolution from her character’s own need for the ever-mounting life-threatening circumstances facing her family not to be real: For her to still be in her house, with her children, safe and normal. And with Luke as well – although, perhaps, stripped of the self-destructive impulses he had come to embrace.

Which brings our heroes to last November in a story that was a microcosm of their 25 years together. As Laura came out of her catatonia, Luke was relieved but also immediately guilty; he would lie to her about the length of her recovery, of course, but that was, in miniature, a manifestation of his guilt over having raped her, and even having ever met her and drawn her into his world. As they rekindled their romance (which had been dead when she slipped into the coma; they were divorced), this guilt tinged all their scenes together, hovering over them. The audience knew this reunion was not meant to last. Helena Cassadine even reappeared at the couple’s new wedding, which was a pretend-show, a fantasy – one that Laura believed and one that Luke desperately wished were true. He put off telling her the truth because he didn’t want the fantasy to end – he wanted it to go on forever—for his own selfish benefit more than hers, as he eventually confessed to her. But the fantasy always ends, because that’s the story of Luke and Laura.

I thought the reunion was brilliant because it was their story in miniature – passionate love clouded with guilt and denial of each individual’s essential nature. Fundamentally, Luke and Laura are opposites – he is an insular, reckless soul who needs Laura to feel complete and worthy and love; she is a fragile creature who longs to be stable but has chosen a partner who can only expose that fragility. But instead of really addressing these differences and coming to a real, difficult understanding about why they are together, they borrow the clothes from the mannequins and dance down the aisle of the department store.

Luke and Laura are the heroes in a story about a beautiful kind of denial. No matter what turns lie ahead, this tale does not end with a happily ever after. Even if it ostensibly did on-screen, we would know the truth – that wherever they are, Luke and Laura are constantly on the run, fleeing not only their enemies but the deep secret they harbor – that no matter how much they love each other, they will never let themselves be happy.

So why do we all believe in Luke and Laura, invest in them, want to be like them? What makes them so special if they will never last?

Maybe it’s because they try.