Page 83 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 74
postmodern one, so is Sue Ellen a melodramatic heroine. In other words, articulated and
materialized in Sue Ellen’s identity is what American critic Peter Brooks (1976) called
the melodramatic imagination.
Of course, fictional characters may be polysemic just as they can take on a plurality of
meanings depending on the ways in which diverse viewers read them. Thus, Sue Ellen’s
melodramatic persona can be interpreted and evaluated in several ways. Whilst her fans
tended to empathize with her and live through her problems and troubles vicariously,
others stress her bitchiness and take a stance against her. In the words of one Dallas
viewer:

Sue Ellen has had bad luck with J.R., but she makes up for it by being a
flirt. I don’t like her much. And she’s too sharp-tongued.
(quoted in Ang 1985:32)

Others have called her ‘a frustrated lady’. One of my respondents was especially harsh in
her critique:

Take Sue Ellen. She acts as though she’s very brave and can put up a
fight, but she daren’t make the step of divorce. What I mean is that in
spite of her good intentions she lets people walk over her, because (as J.R.
wants) for the outside world they have to form a perfect family.
(quoted in Ang 1985:90)
According to Herta Herzog, who interviewed German viewers about Dallas in 1987,
older viewers tend to see in Sue Ellen the woman ruined by her husband, while younger
ones tend to see her as a somewhat unstable person who is her own problem (see Herzog
1987). However, despite the variation in emphasis in the different readings of Sue Ellen,
a basic agreement seems to exist that her situation is an extremely contentious and
frustrating one, and her personality is rather tormented. This is the core of the
melodramatic heroine. But while many viewers are put off by this type of character, some
are fascinated, a response evoked not only by the dramatic content of the role, but also by
the melodramatic style of the actress, Linda Gray. As one fan disclosed:

Sue Ellen [is] just fantastic, tremendous how that woman acts, the
movements of her mouth, hands, etc. That woman really enters into her
role, looking for love, snobbish, in short a real woman.
(quoted in Ang 1985:32)

As a contrast, the same viewer describes Pamela as ‘a Barbie doll with no feelings’!
It is not my intention to offer an exhaustive analysis of the Sue Ellen character as
melodramatic heroine. Nor do I want to make a sociological examination of which
segment of the audience is attracted to characters like her. Rather, I use her as a point of
departure to explore women’s pleasure in popular fiction in general, and melodramatic
fiction in particular. Women who use Sue Ellen as a source of identification while
watching Dallas do that by taking up, in fantasy, a subject position which inhabits the
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melodramatic imagination. The pleasure of such imaginary identification can be seen as