Page 85 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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require that such clichés be regarded and assessed not for their literal, referential value—
i.e. their realism—but as meaningful in so far as they solicit a highly charged, emotional
impact. Their role is metaphorical, and their appeal stems from the enlarged emotional
impact they evoke: it is the feelings being mobilized here that matter. An excess of events
and intensity of emotions are inextricably intertwined in the melodramatic imagination.
Sue Ellen’s recurrent alcoholism is a case in point. Even though she has stayed away
from alcohol for a long time loyal viewers are reminded of this dark side of her past
every time she is shown refusing a drink. Do we detect a slight moment of hesitation
there? Alcoholism is a very effective narrative motif that, in a condensed way, enables
the devoted viewer to empathize with her feelings of desperation. She is married to a man
she loathes but who has her almost completely in his power. In other words, Sue Ellen’s
propensity for alcoholism functioned as a metaphor for her enduring state of crisis.
Such a state of crisis is not at all exceptional or uncommon in the context of the soap
opera genre. On the contrary, crisis can be said to be endemic to it. As a result, Sue
Ellen’s predicament, as it is constructed, is basically unsolvable unless she leaves the
Dallas community and disappears from the serial altogether. Here, a third structural
characteristic of the soap opera makes its impact: its lack of narrative progress. Dallas,
like all soap operas, is a neverending story: contrary to classic narratives, which are
typically structured according to the logic of order/disorder/restoration of order, soap
opera narratives never reach completion. They represent process without progression and
as such do not offer the prospect of a conclusion or final denouement, in which all
problems are solved. Thus, soap operas are fundamentally anti-utopian: an ending, happy
or unhappy, is unimaginable. (And when Dallas eventually did end, mainly for
commercial reasons, it was in an absurdistic fashion which did not provide any clearcut
resolution to the narrative.) This does not mean, of course, that there are no moments of
climax in soap operas. But, as Tania Modleski has observed, ‘the “mini-climaxes” of
soap opera function to introduce difficulties and to complicate rather than simplify the
characters’ lives’ (1982:107). Here, a basic melodramatic idea is conveyed: the sense that
life is marked by eternal contradiction, by unsolvable emotional and moral conflicts, by
the ultimate impossibility, as it were, of reconciling desire and reality. As Laura Mulvey
has put it:

The melodrama recognises this gap by raising problems, known and
recognisable, and offering a personal escape similar to that of a daydream:
a chance to work through inescapable frustrations by positing an
alternative ideal never seen as more than a momentary illusion.
(Mulvey 1978:30)

The life of the Sue Ellen character in Dallas exemplified and dramatized this
melodramatic scenario. She even expressed an awareness of its painfully contradictory
nature. In one dialogue with Pamela, for example, she states:

The difference [between you and me] is that you’re a strong woman, Pam.
I used to think I was, but I know differently now. I need Southfork. On
my own, I don’t amount to much. As much as I hate J.R., I really need to