Page 91 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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transcend reality—which is bound to be a struggle, full of frustrations and moments of
despair?
While the melodramatic heroine is someone who is forced to give up, leaving a
yawning gap between desire and reality, the feminist is someone who refuses to give up,
no matter how hard the struggle to close that gap might be.
Christine Cagney too shares more with Sue Ellen than we might expect: Of course, the
manifest dramatic content of Cagney and Lacey is more in line with feminist ideals and
concerns, and as such the Cagney and Lacey characters can provide an outlet for
identification with fantasies of liberation for women viewers (G.Dyer 1987:10). Despite
the fact that Christine Cagney is an independent career woman who knows where she
stands, she too must at times face the unsolvable dilemmas inherent in the lives of
modern women: how to combine love and work; how to compete with the boys; how to
deal with growing older… Often enough, she encounters frustration and displays a kind
of cynical bitchiness not unlike Sue Ellen’s. I would argue that some of the most moving
moments of Cagney and Lacey are those in which Cagney gives in to the sense of
powerlessness so characteristic of the melodramatic heroine.

POSTSCRIPT

Who are the melodramatic heroines of the 1990s? It is clear that suffering characters such
as Sue Ellen no longer loom large on Hollywood television: actress Linda Gray now
plays a very different character in the series Models Inc., where she is the successful
director-matriarch of a models firm. Any intertextual connection between Models Inc.
and Dallas would certainly not fail to notice the disjunctures between the two characters
(although Sue Ellen too became much more ‘independent’ towards the end of Dallas). It
might be a sign of post-feminist times that the most popular female heroines today are
bitchy and devious but enormously seductive characters such as Amanda (Heather
Locklear) in Melrose Place, one of the most popular series among young women in the
early 1990s, and her redoubtable predecessor Alexis (Joan Collins) in Dynasty. In some
ways, these characters embody—like pop singer Madonna—enlarged, excessive
representations of the liberal feminist ideal, but with a post-political twist: the dilemmas
of the melodramatic heroine—i.e. the pains and frustrations that come from having to live
in a still ultimately partriarchal world—no longer seem to bother these new women. The
imaginary power they represent is further articulated in their ironic, camp sensibility,
which tends to downplay any ‘serious’ emotional engagement and privileges an
aestheticizing, theatrical appeal. One effect of this has been that both Amanda and Alexis
seem to have enjoyed a relatively large gay following. All well and good, but does this
mean that ‘we’ don’t need melodramatic heroines anymore?