Page 86 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Melodramatic identifications: television fiction and women's fantasy 77
be Mrs J.R.Ewing. And I need him to be the father of John Ross [her son].
So I guess I just have to lead a married life without a husband.

In general, then, it could be said that the soap operatic structure of Dallas opens up a
narrative space in which melodramatic characters can come to life symbolically—
characters who ultimately are constructed as victims of forces that lie beyond their
control. A heroine like Sue Ellen will never be able to make her own history: no matter
how hard she tries, eventually the force of circumstances will be too overwhelming. She
lives in the prison of an eternally conflictual present. No wonder that she reacts with
frustration, bitterness, resignation and cynical ruthlessness on the rebound. As she neatly
summarized her own life philosophy:

If J.R. seeks sex and affection somewhere else, so why shouldn’t I? All
Ewing men are the same. And for you to survive you have two choices.
You can either get out, or you can play by their rules!

In fact, this frame of mind has led her to give up all attempts to find true happiness for
herself: although she had her occasional moments of joy (a new lover, for example), they
were futile in the face of her biggest self-imposed passion—to use all the power she had
to undermine J.R.’s projects, to ruin his life just as he had ruined hers. She even refused
him a divorce once to keep him from marrying another woman (by which he expected to
win an extremely advantageous business deal). It is such small victories which made her
feel strong at times. But they were ultimately self-destructive and never allowed her to
break out of her cage.
Against this background, identifying with Sue Ellen—as with many other
melodramatic heroines—implies a recognition of the fact that Sue Ellen’s crisis is a
permanent one: there seems to be no real way out. She may experience happy moments,
but as viewers we know that those moments are bound to be merely temporary and
inevitably followed by new problems and difficulties. At stake, then, must be a rather
curious form of pleasure for these viewers. Whereas in other narratives pleasure comes
from the assurance and confirmation of a happy end—as with the romantic union of a
man and a woman in the formulaic ‘they live happily ever after’—involvement with a
character like Sue Ellen is conditioned by the prior knowledge that no such happy ending
will ever occur. Instead, pleasure must come from living through and negotiating with the
crisis itself. To put it more precisely, many female Sue Ellen fans tended to identify with
a subject position characterized by a sense of entrapment: a sense in which survival is, in
the words of television critic Horace Newcomb, ‘complicated by ambiguity and blurred
with pain even in its most sought-after moments’ (1974:178).
If this is true—and I have already given some indications that this may indeed be the
case—how do we interpret this kind of identification, this form of pleasure in popular
fiction?