Page 82 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Melodramatic identifications: television fiction and women's fantasy 73
apparently a very negative representation of ‘woman’ indeed. Despite this, the Sue Ellen
character seems to be a source of identification and pleasure for many women viewers of
Dallas: they seem not so much to love to hate J.R. but to suffer with Sue Ellen.
An indication of this can be derived from the research I reported on in Watching
Dallas (Ang 1985). Through an advertisement in a Dutch weekly magazine, I asked
people to send me their views about Dallas. From the letters, it was clear that Sue Ellen
stood out as a character whom many women viewers were emotionally involved with.
One of the respondents wrote:

…I can sit very happy and fascinated watching someone like Sue Ellen.
That woman can really get round us, with her problems and troubles. She
is really human. I could be someone like her too. In a manner of speaking.
(quoted in Ang 1985:44)

Another wrote:

Sue Ellen is definitely my favourite. She has a psychologically believable
character. As she is, I am myself to a lesser degree (‘knocking one’s head
against a wall once too often’) and I want to be (attractive).
(quoted in Ang 1985:124)

It is interesting to note that another Dallas character whose structural position in the
narrative is similar to Sue Ellen’s has not elicited such committed responses at all.
Pamela Ewing (married to J.R.’s brother, Bobby) is described rather blandly as ‘a nice
girl’, or is seen as ‘too sweet’. In fact, the difference of appeal between the two characters
becomes even more pronounced in the light of the findings of a representative Dutch
survey conducted in 1982 (around the time that the popularity of Dallas was at its
height). While 21.7 per cent of female viewers between 15 and 39 years mentioned Sue
Ellen as their favourite Dallas character (as against only 5.9 per cent of the men), only
2
5.1 per cent named Pamela as their favourite (and 4.2 per cent of the men).
Clearly Sue Ellen has had a special significance for a large number of women viewers.
Two things stand out in the quotes above. Not only did these viewers assert that the
appeal of Sue Ellen is related to a form of realism (in the sense of psychological
believability and recognizability); more importantly, this realism is connected with a
somewhat tragic reading of Sue Ellen’s life, emphasizing her problems and troubles. In
other words, the position from which Sue Ellen fans seemed to give meaning to, and
derive pleasure from, their favourite Dallas character seems to be a rather melancholic
and sentimental structure of feeling which stresses the down-side of life rather than its
happy highlights: frustration, desperation and anger rather than euphoria and
cheerfulness.
To interpret this seemingly rather despondent form of female pleasure, I shall examine
the position which the Sue Ellen character occupies in the Dallas narrative, and unravel
the meaning of that position in the context of the specific fictional genre to which Dallas
belongs: the melodramatic soap opera. The tragic structure of feeling embodied by Sue
Ellen as a fictional figure must be understood in the context of the genre characteristics of
the Dallas drama: just as Christine Cagney is a social-realist heroine and Maddie Hayes a