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Watching Dallas 149

discussion, to make them fluid. And in that game an imaginary participation in the
fictional world is experienced as pleasurable’ (ibid.).
Whatever else is involved, part of the pleasure of Dallas is quite clearly connected to
the amount of fluidity viewers are able or willing to establish between its fictional
world and the world of their day-to-day existence. In order to activate Dallas’s tragic
structure of feeling the viewer must have the necessary cultural capital to occupy a
‘reading formation’ 32 informed by what she calls, following Peter Brooks (1976), the
‘melodramatic imagination’. The melodramatic imagination is the articulation of a way
of seeing that finds in ordinary day-to-day existence, with its pain and triumphs, its
victories and defeats, a world that is as profoundly meaningful and significant as the
world of classical tragedy. In a world cut loose from the certainties of religion, the
melodramatic imagination offers a means of organizing reality into meaningful con-
trasts and conflicts. As a narrative form committed to melodrama’s emphatic contrasts,
conflicts and emotional excess, Dallas is well placed to give sustenance to, and make
manifest, the melodramatic imagination. For those who see the world in this way (Ang
claims that it demands a cultural competence most often shared by women), ‘the plea-
sure of Dallas ...is not a compensation for the presumed drabness of daily life, nor
a flight from it, but a dimension of it’ (Ang, 1985: 83). The melodramatic imagina-
tion activates Dallas’s tragic structure of feeling, which in turn produces the pleasure of
emotional realism. However, because the melodramatic imagination is an effect of a
specific reading formation, it follows that not all viewers of Dallas will activate the text
in this way.
A key concept in Ang’s analysis is what she calls ‘the ideology of mass culture’ (15).
The ideology articulates (in the Gramscian sense discussed in Chapter 4) the view that
popular culture is the product of capitalist commodity production and is therefore sub-
ject to the laws of the capitalist market economy; the result of which is the seemingly
endless circulation of degraded commodities, whose only real significance is that they
make a profit for their producers. She quite rightly sees this as a distorted and one-sided
version of Marx’s analysis of capitalist commodity production, in that it allows
‘exchange value’ to completely mask ‘use value’ (see Chapter 10). Against this, she
insists, as would Marx, that it is not possible to read off how a product might be con-
sumed from the means by which it was produced. The ideology of mass culture, like
other ideological discourses, seeks to interpellate individuals into specific subject
positions (see discussion of Althusser in Chapter 4). The letters suggest four positions
from which to consume Dallas:(i) those who hate the programme; (ii) ironical viewers;
(iii) fans, and (iv) populists.
Those letter-writers who claim to hate Dallas draw most clearly on the ideology.
They use it in two ways. First, the programme is identified negatively as an example of
mass culture, second, as a means to account for and support their dislike of the pro-
gramme. As Ang puts it, ‘their reasoning boils down to this: “Dallas is obviously bad
because it’s mass culture, and that’s why I dislike it”’ (95-6). In this way, the ideology
both comforts and reassures: ‘it makes a search for more detailed and personal explana-
tions superfluous, because it provides a finished explanatory model that convinces,
sounds logical and radiates legitimacy’ (96). This is not to say that it is wrong to