Book Review : What’s ‘Dallas’ Doing to Dutch Women?

Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination by Ien Ang, translated by Della Couling (Methuen: $25, hardback; $8.95, paperback)

This volume, first published as “Het Geval Dallas,” was written in the Netherlands, “to intervene,” the author tells us, “in the heated debate on ‘Dallas’ in the Dutch media, which, to my mind, was characterized by a certain measure of ignorance, whether deliberate or not, as to the cultural specificity of this popular but controversial TV serial from the United States.” There are four chapters here: “Dallas Between Reality and Fiction,” “Dallas and the Melodramatic Imagination” and two more--on “The Ideology of Mass Culture” and “On Feminism.”

To garner material for this intellectual assault on the TV show and “the wider social context of the postmodernist media culture,” Ien Ang placed this ad in a Dutch women’s magazine, Viva: “I like watching the TV serial ‘Dallas,’ but often get odd reactions to it. Would anyone like to write and tell me why you like watching it too, or dislike it? I should like to assimilate these reactions in my university thesis. . . . “

Ang received 42 replies--only three from boys or men. (Ang is already making an assumption that “Dallas” is a women’s show, one of what she will later annoyingly refer to as “women’s weepies.” Her feminist conclusions, all her conclusions, might have drastically changed had she put an identical ad the Dutch version of Penthouse.)

‘Sweet Nothing’

But women of good heart wrote to try to put into words why they liked “Dallas,” and shows like it: “A Programme it’s nice to sit/lie watching, intellect set at nil, the rare luxury of doing sweet nothing.” The writer of “Letter 19” wrote that passage, and many times during this short but intense volume you find yourself wishing for the writer of Letter 19 to come back with a little more of “sweet nothing.” Ang’s prose style is so convoluted and jarring that it’s like brushing your teeth with a plugged-in curling iron.

On the other hand, Ang can write like that if she wants to. Maybe the corrugated language offsets the slick-and-sticky quality that characterizes the media product she’s writing about. And her points are simple and sometimes even poignant. Her correspondents yearn for something that they label as “genuine” in the show, and on television in general. They yearn for the pleasure of “recognition.”

Sometimes Ang seems a little off in her judgments: “A Hollywood-story is always about individual characters who want or desire something.” (Most stories share that, don’t they?)

Or, “Everything we see or hear in . . . film has a narrative function: ‘meaningless’ images and sounds are deemed redundant and tend to be excluded . . . the narrating instance has been effectively eliminated.” What about voice-overs? What about “book-ends” (a particular character “remembering” a story)? And what about the greasy-lens flashback, which always takes place in another person’s mind? One senses uneasily that Ang has read her Juneau and Adorno, her Barthes and her Bourdieu, but hasn’t put in quite enough time in front of the tube.

Awareness of Limited Lives

Be that as it may, if I read correctly, “modern” women viewers (according to Ang), are all too aware that their lives are limited, suffering from a dearth of feeling and intensity. This sense of lack, she suggests, points to a “tragic sense of life”--not in the way that Miguel de Unamuno used that phrase, but in the sense that women know, in contemporary society, that they are pawns in a “patriarchal game.” Given her own intensity of feeling about this political and philosophical phenomenon, Ang finds heavy significance in what we may take for granted: “The essence of a (TV) situation is not expressed, but lies as it were concealed behind the facial expression of the character who at the end of a scene--as so often in “Dallas”--is shown in close-up and held for a few seconds, before the first shot of the following scene. This melodramatic method produces an enlargement of the tragic structure of feeling: Close-ups emphasize the fact that the character ultimately does not have control of her or his own life, not so much because of the machinations of some superhuman divinity, but because of contradictions inherent in human society itself.”

Does a close-up involve a tragic sense of life? I wouldn’t want to bet on it. But it is fairly certain that Ang has slanted her arguments by (1) soliciting letters only in a women’s magazine and (2) choosing “Dallas” rather than “Dynasty” to pin her theories on.

Yes, it’s true the women in “Dallas” have to put up with a lot, but if Ang tried to pass off--just for instance--Tania Modleski’s “hermeneutic code” on Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter, the scholarly Dutch feminist might get beaned by a bottle of Dom Perignon or caught in a close-up that doesn’t imply a tragic sense of life at all. There’d be hell to pay in Denver, and in Amsterdam, too.