Experiences and fun facts from videogame practice & research
06 November 2020
Ang is a cultural studies scholar and her study on pleasure as a constituent of the popularity of American soap opera Dallas from the 80s has been highly influential in the field of audience studies. Her questions answered in this book focus on why people watched Dallas and what are the determining factors of the enjoyment, the pleasure, of watching it.
She drew on the 42 letters she acquired through a magazine advertisement from the people who watched Dallas. The nature of the letters spanned from the die-hard fans of the show to casual television viewers. What has emerged as a common phenomenon in them was the ambivalent and contradictory relationship of viewers towards the show itself. The letters also showed how viewers perceived realism of the plot, characters, setting, and other characteristics of the text as well as emotional response to them, which Ang argues are substantial parts of the pleasure of watching Dallas.
Ang draws from the concept of pleasure mentioned by Adorno and Horkheimer, and a Marxist critique of pleasure as a mechanism of mass culture to attract viewers for the benefit of consumption and selling goods to them. By this idea, the production of culture is subject to the laws of the capitalist economy and cultural products are degraded into commodities to make as much profit as possible. However, as Ang argues, citing Marx himself, for the commodity to have an exchange value, it needs to also have use-value; in this case the entertainment value, the pleasure of watching it, is the use-value for the viewer.
She makes an argument that by diminishing entertainment to the mere entertainment we evade the obligation to investigate which mechanisms lie at the basis of the pleasure, entertainment or any other phenomenon building the relationship of a viewer to the text. As she elaborates on further hinting on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory, she also mentions how these mechanisms are the building block of creating a successful TV show by the producers. Overlooking them would mean we would overlook an important part of entertainment production itself.
Further, in the first chapter, Ang points out the contradictory nature of perceiving all components of Dallas as realistic. Even though the plot, characters, and even the setting of the ranch and offices portrayed on the TV show are constructed, the letters showed that viewers find some parts more realistic than others, which influence the level of their enjoyment while watching the show. Ang talks about emotional realism and how the text constructing the TV show can be seen from a denotative and connotative perspective. Both constitute perceived realism on the TV show. Whereas the denotative level points out that there is merely anything realistic in Dallas, the connotative level says that viewers find some sort of resemblance to their own lives, emotions, perspectives, or any other phenomena, making the show more realistic for them.
Related to Dallas on the connotative level, viewers ascribed mainly emotional meanings, thus Ang argues the realism of Dallas is emotional realism. She then points out that the realism of Dallas is produced by the construction of psychological reality. Viewers are aware of the distance between the “real” and the fictional world of Dallas, thus they can indulge in the excessive emotions aroused in Dallas.
Ang, I. (1985). Watching Dallas: Soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. New York: Methuen.
KRSOVA, Lenka. Book to read: Watching Dallas, I. Ang. Https://lenikrsova.github.io/ [online]. 2020-11-06.