Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
The admission of the reality of this pleasure [my own] . . . formed the starting
point for this study. I wanted in the first place to understand this pleasure, without
having to pass judgment on whether Dallas is good or bad, from a political, social
or aesthetic view. Quite the contrary; in my opinion it is important to emphasise
how difficult it is to make such judgments – and hence to try to formulate the
terms for a progressive cultural politics – when pleasure is at stake (ibid.).
For Ang’s letter-writers the pleasures or displeasures of Dallas are inextricably linked
with questions of ‘realism’. The extent to which a letter-writer finds the programme
‘good’ or ‘bad’ is determined by whether they find it ‘realistic’ (good) or ‘unrealistic’
(bad). Critical of both ‘empiricist realism’ (a text is considered realistic to the extent to
which it adequately reflects that which exists outside itself) (34–8) and ‘classic realism’
(the claim that realism is an illusion created by the extent to which a text can successfully
conceal its constructedness) (38–41), she contends that Dallas is best understood
as an example of what she calls ‘emotional realism’ (41–7). She connects this to the
way in which Dallas can be read on two levels: the level of denotation and the level of
connotation (see Chapter 6). The level of denotation refers to the literal content of the
programme, general storyline, character interactions, etc. The level of connotation(s)
refers to the associations, implications, which resonate from the storyline and character
interactions, etc.
It is striking; the same things, people, relations and situations which are regarded
at the denotative level as unrealistic, and unreal, are at the connotative level apparently
not seen at all as unreal, but in fact as ‘recognisable’. Clearly, in the connotative
reading process the denotative level of the text is put in brackets (42).
Viewing Dallas, like watching any other programme, is a selective process, reading
across the text from denotation to connotation, weaving our sense of self in and out of
the narrative. As one letter-writer says: ‘Do you know why I like watching it? I think it’s
because those problems and intrigues, the big and little pleasures and troubles occur
in our own lives too. . . . In real life I know a horror like JR, but he’s just an ordinary
builder’ (43). It is this ability to make our own lives connect with the lives of a family
of Texan millionaires that gives the programme its emotional realism. We may not be
rich, but we may have other fundamental things in common: relationships and broken
relationships, happiness and sadness, illness and health. Those who find it realistic
shift the focus of attention from the particularity of the narrative (‘denotation’) to the
generality of its themes (‘connotation’).
Ang uses the term a ‘tragic structure of feeling’ (46) to describe the way in which
Dallas plays with the emotions in an endless musical chairs of happiness and misery.
As one letter-writer told her: ‘Sometimes I really enjoy having a good cry with them.
And why not? In this way my other bottled-up emotions find an outlet’ (49). Viewers
who ‘escape’ in this way are not so much engaging in ‘a denial of reality as playing with
it . . . [in a] game that enables one to place the limits of the fictional and the real under