Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
dislike Dallas, only that professions of dislike are often made without thinking, in fact
with a confidence born of uncritical thought.
Viewers who occupy the second position demonstrate how it is possible to like
Dallas and still subscribe to the ideology of mass culture. The contradiction is resolved
by ‘mockery and irony’ (97). Dallas is subjected to an ironizing and mocking commentary
in which it ‘is transformed from a seriously intended melodrama to the reverse:
a comedy to be laughed at. Ironizing viewers therefore do not take the text as it presents
itself, but invert its preferred meaning through ironic commentary’ (98). From this
position the pleasure of Dallas derives from the fact that it is bad – pleasure and bad
mass culture are reconciled in an instant. As one of the letter-writers puts it: ‘Of course
Dallas is mass culture and therefore bad, but precisely because I am so well aware of
that I can really enjoy watching it and poke fun at it’ (100). For both the ironizing
viewer and the hater of Dallas, the ideology of mass culture operates as a bedrock of
common sense, making judgements obvious and self-evident. Although both operate
within the normative standards of the ideology, the difference between them is marked
by the question of pleasure. On the one hand, the ironizers can have pleasure without
guilt, in the sure and declared knowledge that they know mass culture is bad. On the
other hand, the haters, although secure in the same knowledge, can, nevertheless, suffer
‘a conflict of feelings if, in spite of this, they cannot escape its seduction’ (101).
Thirdly, there are the fans, those who love Dallas. For the viewers who occupy the
previous two positions, to actually like Dallas without resort to irony is to be identified
as someone duped by mass culture. As one letter-writer puts it: ‘The aim is simply to
rake in money, lots of money. And people try to do that by means of all these things –
sex, beautiful people, wealth. And you always have people who fall for it’ (103). The
claim is presented with all the confidence of having the full weight of the ideology’s
discursive support. Ang analyses the different strategies that those who love Dallas must
use to deal consciously and unconsciously with such condescension. The first strategy
is to ‘internalize’ the ideology; to acknowledge the ‘dangers’ of Dallas, but to declare
one’s ability to deal with them in order to derive pleasure from the programme. It is a
little like the heroin user in the early 1990s British drugs awareness campaign, who,
against the warnings of impending addiction, declares: ‘I can handle it.’ A second strategy
used by fans is to confront the ideology of mass culture as one letter-writer does:
‘Many people find it worthless or without substance. But I think it does have substance’
(105). But, as Ang points out, the writer remains firmly within the discursive constraints
of the ideology as she attempts to relocate Dallas in a different relationship to
the binary oppositions – with substance/without substance, good/bad. ‘This letterwriter
“negotiates” as it were within the discursive space created by the ideology of
mass culture, she does not situate herself outside it and does not speak from an opposing
ideological position’ (106). A third strategy of defence deployed by fans against the
normative standards of the ideology of mass culture is to use irony. These fans are different
from Ang’s second category of viewer, the ironist, in that the strategy involves the
use of ‘surface irony’ to justify what is in all other respects a form of non-ironic pleasure.
Irony is used to condemn the characters as ‘horrible’ people, whilst at the same
time demonstrating an intimate knowledge of the programme and a great involvement