Chapter eleven
On the critical abilities of television viewers
The status of the viewer has been upgraded regularly during the course of communications research. In the early days, both major schools of research – the dominant, so-called, and the critical – saw the viewer as powerless, and vulnerable to the agencies of commerce and ideology. Gradually, the viewer – and indeed, the reader and the listener – were accorded more power. With the rise of gratifications research, the viewer began to be seen as more selective and more active than was originally supposed, at least in the sense of exercising choice in the search for satisfaction, and less isolated.1 The new-Marxists, for their part, have recently acknowledged that the media can be consumed oppositionally or in a mediated sense and not only hegemonically, thereby adding the notion of conscious decoding to counter the instrumental and even intuitive matching implicit in gratifications.2 It appears that recent literary theory has followed a similar course, abandoning the idea of readers uniformly fashioned by the text in favor of readers as members of interpretative communities that are in active “negotiation” with the text, both aesthetically and ideologically.3 Although it may seem that the reader posited by gratificationists is most powerful of all because s/he is free to bend the text in any way s/he sees fit – indeed, virtually to abolish the text – the fact is that her or his seeking is determined by her or his needs, and these needs – so the critics say – may well be determined by the media.4
In short, the reader/listener/viewer of communications theory has been granted critical ability. The legendary mental age of 12 which American broadcasters are said to have attributed to their viewers may, in fact, be wrong. Dumb genres may not necessarily imply dumb viewers, or, in other words, there are creative options within formulaic popular culture which may challenge both producers and readers.5
Empirical evidence for critical ability is still very sparse: Neuman and Himmelweit have made a start toward classifying viewers' reactions to programs and their critical vocabularies.6 So far, one can say only that there is a growing consensus among these and other scholars that the operational definition of “critical” coincides with an ability to discuss programs as “art” or constructions, that is to recognize or define their genres, formulas, conventions, narrative schemes, etc. We would give equal credit for critical ability to viewers who are able to perceive a “theme” or “message” or even an “issue” in a fictional narrative, such as the message “there is room at the top,” for example.7 We would code such a generalization as critical, all the more so if it takes a more complex form such as “the program says that mobility is possible because this is what the producers have been paid to tell us.” We would also credit as critical viewers who are aware that they themselves are using analytic criteria – such as “schemes,” “scripts,” “frames,” “roles,” and other notions of viewer processing and involvement in their own responses to the program.
Two of these categories relate to the viewer's awareness of the text as a construction either in its semantic aspect – themes, messages, etc. – or in its syntactic aspect – genre, formulas, etc. The third category relates to the viewer's awareness of the processing of the program by her or his cognitive, affective and social self. This third form of criticism, we shall call pragmatic.
We attempted to identify these three categories of criticism in viewers' reactions to the television series Dallas. Our data consist of some sixty-five focus-group discussions of an episode of Dallas among three married couples who are friends or neighbors and who share the same ethnic background. Four of the ethnic communities are Israeli – Arabs, recent Jewish immigrants from Russia, Moroccan Jews, and second-generation kibbutz members; a fifth is second-generation Americans in Los Angeles; a sixth consists of Japanese in Tokyo where Dallas badly failed.8
The Israeli groups – some ten from each one of the four communities – were assembled by asking a host couple to invite two other couples from their intimate circle to view an episode of Dallas together, at home, at the time of its broadcast on Israeli television. The serial is subtitled both in Hebrew and in Arabic and broadcast with the original English-language soundtrack. An interviewer and a technical assistant joined the group to make notes on the interaction during the viewing, and to conduct and tape the post-viewing discussion which lasted approximately one hour. Interviews were conducted over a period of four weekly episodes; ten to twelve groups, from each ethnic community, saw one of the episodes.
The ten American groups were recruited in similar fashion and similarly interviewed, except that they were shown tapes of the same episodes that were seen off-the-air by the Israelis. Since the American Dallas was two seasons ahead of the Israeli Dallas, we chose to show the Americans the same episodes, even if many of them had seen them before.
An effort was made to achieve ethnic homogeneity within each group, and on the whole this was successful, partly because of a tendency to ethnic homogeneity within neighborhoods, partly because of the natural tendency to ethnic friendships, partly because the person who contacted the host couple made clear that the discussion would be conducted in the shared language of the group. Thus, the Russians and the Arabs were interviewed in their native languages; the Moroccans and the kibbutz members were interviewed in Hebrew. A similar effort was made to achieve homogeneity with respect to age and secondary-school education, since the aim of the study was to compare cultural differences in reaction to the program. This was intrinsically more difficult, however, given the real-world variations among groups as to education level. Accordingly, in order to make certain that the differences we attribute to ethnicity are not better explained by education, we have double-checked our conclusions by introducing rough statistical controls for educational level.
The Japanese, of course, were in an entirely different situation. Since Dallas survived only for a few months on one of the private television networks in Japan, and almost none of the focus-group members had seen it, it hardly made sense to show them the episodes that the other groups had seen; instead they were shown the very first episode of the serial, dubbed for broadcast in Japanese.
It should be noted that each of the ethnic groups uses the program more referentially – as a connection to real life, including their own lives – than they use it critically or, in Jakobson's sense,9 metalinguistically. Overall, referential statements exceed critical statements by a ratio of more than 3:1. The ethnic communities, however, vary considerably in this regard. About 30 per cent of the framing statements made by western groups – Russians, Americans, and kibbutz members – are critical, compared with only 10 per cent of the framing statements made by Arabs and Moroccans. This difference holds even after educational differences are accounted for; indeed, among the lower-educated, the only metalinguistic statements are made by the more western groups.10 Japanese viewers made, proportionately, the most critical statements of all.
If most referential statements are “hot,” by our definition, most critical statements may be considered “cool.” But just as we find “cool” involvements in the referential frame – in playful responses to the reality of the program, for example – so we find “hot” involvements in the critical frame. These “hot” responses concentrate in the semantic realm, as we shall see.
Using an altogether different coding method, we attempted to validate this pattern by analysing replies to the more specific question: “Why all the fuss about babies?”11 Some participants told us that the program dotes on babies “because they are needed by dynasties as heirs” – a statement we coded as referential. Others told us that babies are good for soap operas because they permit parents to fight over them – a statement we coded as critical, or metalinguistic. Consider the following quotes, illustrative of referential or metalinguistic “babies,” respectively:
Table 11.1 Function of babies
Table 11.1 reports on these differences in relating to babies. The referential divides in two: statements which speak of the function of babies for “life,” and statements which speak of the function of babies for the characters in the story, as if they were real. Metalinguistic babies speak of the function of babies for the producers and writers.
In the analysis of these data, the three western groups again exceeded the others in their use of critical explanations, but the Americans this time showed a marked preference for this kind of framing; they made almost twice as many critical statements as the Russians and the kibbutzniks and six times as many as the Moroccans. The Arabs gave almost no metalinguistic explanations for the fuss about babies. Further examination of these data by educational level (of the group) shows that the higher educated make most of the critical statements, but that the ethnic differences persist.
The higher rate of making critical statements about television programs among the western groups may reflect their greater experience with the medium, or their greater training in criticism, or perhaps their greater familiarity with the society being portrayed. That the Americans are strikingly more critical in response to the more specific question about babies suggests that they do, after all, have more experience with television genres and their production than even the other western groups. The Americans seem especially able to respond to specific questions of this kind, although we do not know why. Thus, in the discussion of babies, they seem to be aware of the difference between the function of a baby for the story (whether it is seen or only talked about) and its appearance on the screen – both critical framings.12 They are also the only ones who sometimes perceive a demographic message in the appearance of babies, apparently because Americans are having to struggle between the ethic of self-fulfillment vs. the ethic of altruism.
With this basic distinction in mind, we devote the rest of the paper to analysis of the critical realm. As stated at the outset, the critical involves awareness either of the semantic elements of the text and/or of the roles of the reader as processor of the text. Accordingly, what follows is a discussion of the critical statements of Dallas viewers in each of these realms. Obviously, the analysis must focus disproportionately on the three western groups who participate most in the metalinguistic realm, but it is important to bear in mind that most of the statements of these viewers, too, fall into the referential realm, and thus that the sophisticated viewer should be seen as a commuter between the referential and the critical, and not just as one or the other.13
We now consider these critical categories, illustrating each by reference to viewers' statements. The critical categories employed by the Japanese groups are included here as well, at which point it should be noted that the Japanese have hardly any referential statements at all since they had no opportunity to get “into” the program.14
Most of what we want to say is illustrative. We wish to show how ordinary viewers frame everyday television critically, or metalinguistically, and to map the several ways in which they subdivide the frame. We draw on three different data-sets to provide an overall context to what is primarily a qualitative analysis. First, in Table 11.2, we present a glimpse of differences among the ethnic communities (the four Israeli groups and the Americans) in their use of the semantic and the syntactic, that is in the proportion of their critical statements about content and form. A second set of data, to be introduced as Table 11.3, is based on a reanalysis of the critical realm, in order to compare the critical statements of the Japanese with those of the others, and, while we were at it, in order to operationalize the critical categories we had developed in the course of the qualitative analysis presented in this paper.
A glance at Table 11.2 suggests that the several communities differ in the target of their critical statements. The Arabs and the Russians give greater emphasis to the semantic – to the thematics of the program, its ideology, and its message – while the Americans concentrate on statements about form.15 The Americans (and the Arabs, although the absolute number is small) give rather more emphasis to statements about the functions of characters in the dramatic construction, showing awareness of the dimensions in terms of which the characters are polarized (good-bad, strong-weak, etc.).16
Semantic criticism
Theme
The form of criticism closest to the acritical referential realm is the ability to discern and generalize the theme of the narrative. Viewers who say that the program reflects the egoism of the modern world are taking a first step away from the referential where they would say: “J.R. tricks people. This is interesting because it is the only way to succeed. I, for instance, am going to do the same thing myself. I am going to accumulate money, acquire land and use my cunning” (Arab Group #46). As hegemonic theorists would expect, the referential viewer takes for granted that J.R. is real, and speaks as if Dallas were some sort of documentary. The critical viewer – even at this elementary level – shows awareness of the program as separate from reality and is concerned with the accuracy of the relationship. In this realm, there are notable similarities between Arabs and Russians who see the program as representing “moral degeneracy” or “rotten capitalism,” although the Russians somewhat more than the Arabs question the accuracy of the representation.
The Arabs are more likely to blame moral degeneracy for the ills of modern society, whereas the Russians see more political causes. But it is often very difficult to separate the two; indeed, several (four of ten) of the Arab focus groups employ Marxist rhetoric to assert that the program reveals that capitalism is to blame for the moral and political degeneration of the west. For example:
| Anise | “[Dallas] embodies western capitalism and shows that the more freedom there is for people, it becomes too much because it has already led to anarchy”. (Arab Group #43) |
A possible explanation of the high sensitivity of Arabs in Israel to the dangers of western culture is offered by Samooha who claims that (1) Israeli Arabs are at a different stage in the modernization process (with respect to the status of women); (2) western culture is associated with the colonial administration under which they suffered, and which, in their opinion, favored the Jews over the Arabs; (3) even after the withdrawal of colonialism, western culture continued to be associated with it, and Israel itself is considered a present-day colonial power; (4) capitalism is perceived as a threat to the traditional social system.17 Arabs therefore have more reason than others to dissociate themselves from the culture of Dallas.
Some of the Japanese viewers claim that Dallas is compatible with a sense of a creeping recession. In an America which has come to realize that it is past its prime, “bitter,” unhappy, unharmonious dramas express the Zeitgeist. Put differently, one Japanese participant sees the adventures of the Ewings as demonstrative of the end of the era of the American rich (Group #5). Indeed, some of the Russian groups go so far as to wonder whether the text is not itself critical of western society and its economic and moral order, reminding us of Fiedler's contention that the best of popular culture is subversive.18 Hanna, a member of one of the Russian groups (#68), claimed that Dallas is a “socialist text.”
Messages
These discussions of theme may appear either as inferences of the viewers or as intentions – “messages” – ascribed by the viewer to the producers. Thus, the most frequent theme perceived in Dallas – that the rich are unhappy – may be mentioned as the viewers' own conclusion or may be thought to be what the producers are trying to teach us. Yet a further step – one particularly characteristic of the Russians – is not only to ascribe intent to the producers but to ascribe manipulative intent, in the sense that the producers are telling us something they want us to believe but do not necessarily believe themselves. For example:
| Alona | I started to wonder why the series is so popular. What happens there? Why does it attract the middle-class person that much? It's nice for him to know that the millionaires are more miserable than himself. Sure, a miserable millionaire is a nice thing because everyone within himself wants a millionaire to be poor, and nevertheless, he himself wants to be a millionaire. Here he sees the millionaires portrayed as if they were real. (Russian Group #62) |
Thus, we are dealing here in three levels of thematics – the elementary, the one closest to the referential, in which viewers make an inference about the theme of the program; a second level in which viewers make an assumption about the producer's didactic aims in introducing the theme (“message”); and a third level, in which viewers suspect the producer of trickery, even if they themselves see through the trick. Some of these statements are as “hot” as many referential statements are. In other words, critical statements are not simply “cool” and contemplative, but can express intense feelings.
Our coding of “messages” does not permit us to distinguish easily between “the program teaches us” and “the producers are trying to tell us,” although we did code manipulative intent separately.19 Messages, like themes, are sprinkled throughout the discussions, although many are concentrated in reply to our explicit question: “What is the program/the producer trying to say?” Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the Russians and the kibbutzniks (to a lesser extent) are most active in spotting messages, anticipating our explicit question long before it was asked. As Table 11.2 shows, the Arabs and Moroccans – not the Americans – follow the Russians and kibbutzniks in the frequency of themes and messages, although most of their replies are in answer to the explicit question. From the nature of these replies – Arabs give particular emphasis to the theme “the Americans are immoral” more than to the theme “the rich are unhappy” – it seems safe to infer that the Arabs are responding in the realm of themes rather than intentional messages.
But what happened to the Americans this time? In the domain of messages, the Americans tend to be resistant. Not only do they offer fewer messages than any of the other ethnic groups, they also protest that Dallas can have no message for them since it is just entertainment, only escape. Paralleling their playful statements in the referential, the Americans refuse to acknowledge that there can be anything serious about Dallas. When the Americans do acknowledge a theme or a message, they tend to say that the message will be so perceived by foreign viewers who do not know that the program is just escape, and not about anything real. When the Americans perceive messages for themselves – and this is relatively rare – they ascribe didactic and meliorist intent to the producers; e.g. the producers think that it is important to have a strong father figure in society, or that babies are a good thing after all, and that one can have babies and go on being egoistic.20 In this realm, at least, the Americans are surely less critical than the others, and thus perhaps more vulnerable to manipulation. They believe that the producers do good homework, and that they have a sense of responsibility on which the viewer can count.
Archetypes
A higher level of thematic criticism might be labeled archetypical in that generalization about the narrative is based on the perception of an underlying theme that unites a class of texts or performances. The image of the good sheriff entering the enemy camp unarmed and staring the villain into surrender to justice and civilization is equally applicable to the classic western movie, President Sadat's heroic visit to Jerusalem, and an American detective shaming a mafioso off his private island.21 The essence of this form of criticism is intertextual, revealing an awareness of similar dynamics among different texts; at its most classic, it is archetypical in the same way as Oedipus, or Joseph, or Cain and Abel. This form is not very frequent in our data, although the occasional archetypical allusions are dramatic indeed. Thus, we heard J.R. compared to Arab sheikhs in the Persian Gulf, and – by both Arabs and kibbutzniks – to General Sharon. Of course, the reference to classic sibling rivalries in a dynastic context is much more frequent, although most of these do not make explicit mention of the various pairs of biblical brothers.22 A Japanese viewer notes that the image of an ancestral father bestowing his blessing on that son who will deliver a first heir also figures in Japanese stories of dynastic intrigue.
At the extreme of archetypical themes, the viewer is saying in effect that the theme must have influenced the narrative, consciously or not. Semioticians sometimes speak as if the writer or producer is merely an instrument through which these classic stories retell themselves. This structural aspect of storytelling, therefore, stands on the borderline between semantic and syntactic criticism: in so far as it deals with themes, it belongs in the domain of the semantic; in so far as it alludes to a classic sequence of actions or to themes that are elements of an identifiable narrative genre, it belongs in the domain of the syntactic, to which we now turn.
Syntactic criticism
Critical ability in the syntactic domain reveals an understanding of the component elements of a genre or formula and the nature of the connections among these elements. Almost two-thirds of the critical statements of each of the four Israeli groups are of this character – relating either to Dallas as a soap opera, or to a comparison of Dallas and other genres, or to the rules of storytelling which dictate the behavior of characters and the sequence of events in the corpus of Dallas episodes. An even larger proportion of the critical statements made by Americans are of this type but rather than be impressed by this syntactic ability of the Americans one should be impressed by the high level of similar ability shown by the non-Americans who are far less experienced with the regularities of American television drama. It should be noted, in this connection, that Israel has never seen a proper soap opera; Dallas is the closest they have come.
Genre
Nevertheless, Israeli viewers often volunteer quite precise definitions of what we would recognize as soap opera even when they cannot name the genre. Consider the following examples from two members of kibbutz groups:
In Japan, on the other hand, viewers say that they will stay with a series only if all the characters are reasonably satisfied at the end of the episode. In comparing the formula of American soaps to the brand they themselves produce, viewers claim that, unlike Dallas – where an episode races at a fast tempo to end at the height of conflict after fifty minutes – the Japanese “home drama” goes on for two hours, at a much slower pace, ending on a note of harmony. According to the discussants, Japanese cannot bear family conflict to drag on from one week to the next as this would spoil “the mood of relaxing” at home. This incompatibility between the formula and viewers' expectations gives a clue to the reason why American family dramas have failed in Japan.
It is interesting to compare these statements with Thorburn's analysis of the television melodrama which argues that since the story's end is never in sight the dramatic tension inheres in the short conversational segments with their heavy emotional loading.23 The steady barrage of these crises is what makes for the melodrama. Members of a kibbutz group and a Russian group put it rather similarly:
| Ze'ev | I don't remember one scene which did not consist of a conversation between a man and a woman, not necessarily married. He talks to that one, then they change the scene and she talks to that other one. There is a lot of tension in these conversations, actually in every scene. There is no sex in the program but the relationships between the sexes are very prominent. (Kibbutz Group #81) |
| Sasha | Normally, the series of events would be sufficient for a hundred families; suddenly everything fell on the family…. We forgive Katzman [the series' producer]. It's true he has to hold the audience, to drag the time. (Russian Group #63) |
Attention is also given to the repetitiveness of the story. The point that the story is always the same was proposed in one of our Moroccan groups. Thus, Yossi (#20) counters the interviewer's request that the group relate the story by saying “the same as last week; believe me, [they are] the same faces.” But the group ignores him in favor of a detailed discussion of what the story is about. The Americans, on the other hand, are much more insistent about the formulaic aspect of the story; they point out that J.R. has a weekly trick with somebody as his intended victim.
Apart from identifying Dallas as a soap opera, there is occasional awareness of the way in which Dallas is not a soap opera. The Americans specialize in these nuances, emphasizing that Dallas is in prime time, and that the leading character, in his devil-like surrealism, is somehow different from soap opera characters. “Without J.R.,” someone says, “the rest of it is soap garbage” (Group #14). Comparisons are made between Dallas and successors such as Dynasty, in character delineation, geographic location, dramatic inventions and rhythm.24
Sometimes Dallas is perceived as belonging to less obvious genres. A number of comments compare Dallas to Godfather stories, noting the similarity to the adventures of a family mafia, just as Mary Mander does in her academic analysis of the program.25 Japanese viewers prove more familiar with American culture than Israelis, and several of them join Michael Arlen in associating the Ewings with the legendary oil dynasty of Edna Ferber's Giant.26 Made famous in its Hollywood film version, this saga depicts intrigue and sibling rivalry of a wealthy family living in an isolated, large, gloomy ancestral mansion. One Japanese discussant recalls Gone With the Wind, describing the attachment of southern gentry to Tara and the land.
Many comments compare Dallas to the genres of their own cultures, emphasizing differences. The Russians, in particular, make pejorative comparisons to the family sagas of Pushkin and Tolstoy for example, while Japanese also make analogies to the family dramas of Chekhov, defining Dallas as a “family collapse story,” molded on the pattern of The Cherry Orchard. Americans mention The Forsyte Saga and The Brothers, pointing out that the stories of these families, unlike that of the Ewings, are interwoven with political and historical process. Dallas characters are afloat in space and time. They do not even age. Comparing Dallas with Forsyte, an American group member remarks:
| Norman | If you watched it [Forsyte] for six to eight weeks, and you started when they were twenty and you ended when they were sixty, the whole life went through what was happening in the country at the same time – the strikes in 1926 and so forth. Here, nothing. I mean the atom bomb could be blown up somewhere and the people in Dallas wouldn't care. (American Group #4) |
The syntactic critics see the program as a story of endless turn-taking between the good guy and the bad guy rather than as a developing narrative. Indeed, one American went so far as to say that it is not so much a moral struggle as amoral entertainment, like wrestling, he says.
Dramatic Function
Analysis of the dramatic functions of the characters is part and parcel of the same kind of critical ability. Earlier we reported on the response to our question, “Why all the fuss about babies?” by which the three western groups – but especially the Americans – revealed an awareness of how babies propel the story along, in generating conflict, for example. The Americans are aware, further, that the babies need not even be seen on the screen; all they need to do is to be present in the minds of the others. In this connection it is interesting to note that some Japanese viewers – it will be recalled that they are not acquainted with the serial – retell the first episode in terms of the potential dramatic function of the two persons perceived as the central characters.27 Thus, the two “keys” to how the narrative will continue are identified as an internal and an external force. From within the family, they predict, J.R. will move the story along by virtue of being a trickster while as an outsider, Pamela, the newcomer wife, will advance the story through her love for Bobby, thus to break the vicious pattern of the rival families' feuds, to transform Bobby and make the newly wed couple into the spiritual, if not material, winners. One of the Japanese viewers speculates on the delicate balance between the central characters needed to make the story interesting: “If Pamela is going to control J.R., the program won't be interesting because what is interesting is J.R.'s tricks.”
The obvious references to the personification of good and evil, or to the function of the minor strands of the story in providing tension release, are further examples of sophistication about how stories are constructed and punctuated.
| Carol | “They kind of use [Ray] as a fill-in … I seem to focus on the hard core stuff and every time they show Ray in there it is just like a side-track when you go and get a cup of coffee” (American Group #16). |
Business
The Americans, again, are the most sophisticated about that other set of building blocks of television narrative, namely the business behind the box. Their critical statements show keen awareness that characters come and go not only as a function of the needs of the story but as a function of the deals they strike with producers and of the accident rate on the Santa Monica Freeway. Two of the American groups contemplate the possibility that Pamela's attempted suicide may be related to her contractual state. The similarities in the narrative of Dallas and Dynasty are also remarked upon and attributed to the “invisible college” of writers and producers. Consistent with such economic and/or gossipy framing, Americans – when asked by us how the serial can ever end – tend to say “by catastrophe,” as if to say that only some deus ex machina can do it. This is in contrast to other groups who say – when asked the same question about how to end the story – either that there will be a happy end for everybody, or that the good and bad will be appropriately rewarded. These latter endings are consistent either with a more referential view of the characters as real or with a metalinguistic view of a traditional story. By their catastrophic ending, the Americans seem to be saying that the story cannot be stopped by inherent or conventional means, and that only radical external intervention will do. The Americans also note that the great climaxes at the end of the season create a tension strong enough to hold the viewer through the summer months, and that the best programs are broadcast during the semi-annual special ratings (“sweeps”).28
While far less knowledgeable than the Americans about what goes on behind the scenes, the Russians know, nevertheless, that “something” is going on. They are interested, however, not in contractual relations at the level of actors but in the business of buying and selling audiences, and in the suspicion of ideological control of the program by elites. Indeed, the Russians, curiously, are the only ones who take the credits seriously. They know the names of the producers, speculate on what motivates them, and sometimes believe that they are being manipulated from on high, and that producers are propaganda mongers.29
There is no question that the Americans are far ahead of the others in the making of metalinguistic statements of all kinds. They are the only ones who show awareness or interest in the business aspect; they are the most sensitive of all groups about the nuances of genre and why Dallas is and is not a soap opera, and how and why it compares with its several spin-offs. The Russians also show a high level of syntactic awareness but their emphasis is rather more on the formulaic aspects of the story and its valuelessness as literature; they are also more likely to suspect that some sort of propaganda is at work. Kibbutzniks tend to pay more attention to the segmental structure of the program as a sequence of two- and three-person conversations interwoven through the episode and its never-endingness.
Pragmatic criticism
Awareness of the nature and causes of involvement in the semantics and syntactics is what we call “pragmatic criticism.” Some groups express this awareness with respect to the nature of their involvement in characters and themes; others are aware of the ways in which the structure of the program captures and occupies their imagination.
The naturalness of the characters is remarked by a number of discussants, particularly Americans. It is the awareness that the characters are acting “themselves” – that it is very difficult to separate character from actor in the ubiquitous genre of soap opera – that puts people in this particular kind of critical mood. For example:
| Janet | This guy is such a jerk I really get mad. You know I always thought that these women that saw actors and actresses in airports and called them by their stage names or whatever was the last part they played … but I honestly feel that if I saw this guy in the airport -1 would be tempted to tell him off – even knowing actually that this is a part I would really like to ram him hard. (American Group #9) |
Viewers are also aware of the way in which their involvement may result from the similarities between family problems in the story and family problems of their own. For example:
| Eitan | I would say that somehow we enjoy it because the problems the Ewings have evoke some of the dark secrets which exist in every family. I used to say that my family was a zoo until I discovered that every family has different animals but everybody has a zoo at home. |
| Helen | If you will take your own family and create a series for us every week … I would not like to hurt you. |
| Eitan | No, you don't hurt me. I agree with you, this is my own family zoo, but I think every family has such zoos. (Kibbutz Group #80) |
The genre, too, is recognized as a source of involvement. A number of discussants mention the built-in compulsion to find out what will happen next week or, better, to spend the week inventing possible solutions to last week's problems or to next week's continuation. This participatory function is well known from the earliest research on radio soap opera and, indeed, from literary research on novels published in installments in popular magazines, such as Dickens.30
Altogether, the point of this pragmatic criticism is that it connects reflexively between the text and the readers' definition of their own experiences or of their roles. Thus, the ludic viewer fancies himself in the role of putative writer as well as reader, or of a sports spectator placing bets on likely outcomes. Indeed, one viewer called Dallas a game of “risk” and another called it a wrestling match.
More traditional viewers refuse to play games and insist that they are viewing – licentiously perhaps – as persons with moral convictions that predetermine their response to the program. The Arab groups, for example, regularly speak of the program in terms of “we” and “they,” and although this polarity is by no means metalinguistic, it does imply a self-consciousness about the “role of the reader.” The following quote from Machluf makes the same point:
The Japanese also explain their non-involvement in the program in terms of the difference between the two cultures and in terms of their attitude toward American society;31 indeed, the incompatibility they experienced was enough to dissuade them from viewing. As one non-viewer claims, the Japanese could have been affected by the series “some years ago [when] Japanese had admired American life and society.” Now that they are more critical of the Americans they see beyond the glamor into the violence within the family, and it only makes them wary.
By contrast, the Russian and American viewers show their self-awareness in the viewer role by explicitly excluding themselves from the kinds of effects that they attribute to others. In pointing out the ideological manipulation they perceive in the story, the Russians are saying that others, not themselves, will be affected. Similarly, the Americans who insist that the program has no message or moral for them are equally insistent that the rest of the world will misread Dallas as an America full of neurotic people walking on streets paved with gold.
Conclusions
It should be reiterated, in conclusion, that these types of critical statements about Dallas emerged in the course of focus-group conversations that did not require discussants to use the critical register.32 Indeed, the two more traditional groups in our study volunteered only a small number of the sort of metalinguistic statements we have analysed in this paper, and all six ethnic groups excepting the Japanese talked more referentially than critically. It is important to note that even the most critical groups speak referentially as well.
Critical reactions do not necessarily imply distance; indeed, some of them are genuinely “hot” in the intensity of their involvement and, sometimes, outrage. Indeed, the “coolest” kinds of critical framing – the syntactic statements – may lower the barrier to the penetration of unchallenged messages. In this sense, the Arabs and Russians are better “protected” than the Americans. When the Arab groups speak critically, they express awareness of the politics of the program and of a theme or message to which they are opposed; this parallels the “normative opposition” of Arabs and Moroccans in the referential realm. Some Russian groups go even further and perceive conspiracy; they think the producers may be willfully distorting reality in order to influence us.
The Russians also reject the program on aesthetic grounds, by comparison with the literary genres with which they are familiar. This “aesthetic opposition” takes its place alongside “normative opposition.”
| Referential | Critical | |
| “Hot” | moral | ideological |
| “Cool” | ludic | aesthetic |
It is worth noting, again, that the forms of opposition are diverse. Thus, moral opposition may be either referential – when it accepts the message as reality, gives it “standing,” and argues with it – or it may be critical, when it betrays an awareness of the (manipulative) construction of an ideological message. Indeed, all critical statements – certainly including “aesthetic opposition” – may be deemed oppositional in the sense of rejecting the referential reading.33 This may clarify a confusion in some of the literature on oppositional readings.34
The types of opposition may be presented schematically, by cross tabulating the hot/cool dimension with the referential/critical. Thus, Table 11.3 shows that the combination referential/hot may produce “moral opposition” to the content of the programs while critical/hot, through awareness of the manipulative construction of the message, may produce what we have called “ideological opposition.” Within the cool mode, referential/cool is associated with the ludic, and critical/cool may produce “aesthetic opposition.” Each of these forms of opposition, as we have said, constitutes a different kind of “defense” against the message of the program, and, by implication, as we have also noted, a different form of vulnerability.
We have said at various points that each type of “opposition” may both defend a viewer and cause her or him to be open to influence. Thus, moral defense is based on giving a program standing, and so deeming it worthy of argument. Ideological defense is vulnerable because it is based on automatic transformations, as if to say that the opposite of the message is the truth. Aesthetic defense risks letting the ideological message slip by, while the playful escape of ludic defense may fail to bring one back to earth.
We wish to thank the Annenberg Schools, Inc. and the Hoso Bunka Foundation for their support of this project. Professor Sumiko Iwao collaborated in collection and analysis of the Japanese data, parts of which are included here.
Notes
1 See Elihu Katz, “Communications Research Since Lazarsfeld,” Public Opinion Quarterly 51, no. 4; part 2 (winter 1987): S25–S45.
2 R. Parkin, Class, Inequality and Political Order (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1971); Stuart Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128–38; and David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980).
3 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Janice Radway, Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
4 Philip Elliott, “Uses and Gratifications Research: A Critique and a Sociological Alternative,” in J. Blumler and E. Katz (eds) The Uses of Mass Communication (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1974), pp. 249–68.
5 Umberto Eco, “Innovation and Repetition,” Daedalus 114, no. 40 (fall 1985): 161–84.
6 W.R. Neuman, “Television and American Culture: The Mass Medium and the Pluralist Audience,” Public Opinion Quarterly 46 (1982): 471–87; and Hilde Himmelweit, Betty Swift, and Marianne E. Jaeger, “The Audience as Critic,” in P. H. Tannenbaum (ed.), Entertainment Functions of Television (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983), pp. 67–106.
7 Sari Thomas and Brian P. Callahan, “Allocating Happiness: TV Families and Social Class,” Journal of Communication 32 (1982): 184–90.
8 The sample is in no sense “representative.” It is too small, for one thing, and not random in any formal sense. Informally, however, one can make a good case that these are bona fide members of their respective subcultures.
9 Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in DeGeorge and DeGeorge (eds) The Structuralists: From Marx to Levi-Strauss (New York: Anchor Books, 1980), pp. 85–122.
10 Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, “Patterns of Involvement in Television Fiction: A Comparative Analysis,” European Journal of Communication 1, no. 2 (1986): 151–72.
11 We coded every reply to the question “Why all the fuss about babies?” in terms of types of babies (“story,” “real,” “dramatic”) and types of functions (“inheritors,” “pleasure-givers,” “tension-creators,” etc.), paraphrasing statements or parts of statements in the form of codeable nuclear sentences. Thus, the statement: “There are a lot of problems around babies in such a family: the real identity of the baby, sicknesses, kidnapping. Therefore around them there is a lot of scope for the writer to build up a plot.” This is coded: Drama babies function for producers as conflict. The average group provided some ten codeable replies. Japanese groups could not be expected to answer questions about babies since they viewed only the first episode, where the problem of babies does not yet exist.
12 As in the following example (American Group #4):
| Donna | Kids don't play an important part. The only time when you ever see them is when the maid is carrying the baby off. |
| Sandi | The babies play important roles only because of what revolves around them. |
13 Empirical observations lead us to this conclusion, which reinforces the idea that sophistication may be defined as observation of one's more naïve self. Eco, in “Innovation and Repetition,” in our opinion, makes too sharp a distinction between the naïve and the sophisticated.
14 We omit here the pragmatic domain, because our original coding was based only on the semantic and the syntactic.
15 The semantic statements are “hotter” as we shall note again, and sometimes include negative evaluations of the ideology of the theme or message, paralleling the statements of normative opposition to the Ewings in the referential. The former qualify as critical because of their explicit recognition that the program has a theme or message.
16 For an analysis of these dimensions from the viewers' perspective see Sonia Livingstone, “Viewers’ Interpretations of Soap Opera: The Role of Gender, Power and Morality” (paper presented at the International Television Studies Conference, London, 1986).
17 See Sammy Samooha, “Between Two Cultures: How Jews and Arabs in Israel Perceive Their Own Culture and Each Other's Culture” (paper presented at the conference “Attitudes to Western Culture,” The Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, 1984).
18 Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? Mass Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
19 We coded all statements beginning with “the program/the story teaches us” or “they – the writers/producers – are trying to show/tell us” as messages and marked whether this message was manipulative or not.
20 Greg They [the producers] are trying to show a family; a family needs a strong father image. Some of the programs they show today, so many today, are without fathers anymore. That is not good for family entertainment, we need a strong father figure holding everyone together. (American Group #16)
Janet Maybe they are trying to relate to the young people of today, who many of them don't want children because it interferes with their selfish lives, to put across that it is OK to want children, to say that you can care about yourself and be selfish but you can have a child also. (American Group #3)
21 For an analysis of Sadat's televised visit to Jerusalem see Elihu Katz, Daniel Day an, and Pierre Motyl, “Television Diplomacy: Sadat in Jerusalem,” in G. Gerbner and M. Seifert (eds) World Communications (New York: Longmans, 1980), pp. 127–36; also Tamar Liebes, “Shades of Meaning in President Sadat's Knesset Speech,” Semiotica 48, no. 3/4 (1984): 229–65. For an analysis of an American detective as the lone hero of a western, see BBC, Violence on Television: Programme Content and Viewer Perception (London: BBC Audience Research, 1972).
22 Biblical themes in the Dallas stories are discussed in Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, “Dallas and Genesis: Primordiality and Seriality in Television Fiction,” in James Carey (ed.) Communications and Culture (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988), pp. 113–25.
23 David Thorburn, “Television Melodrama,” in Horace Newcomb (ed.) Television – The Critical View, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 3rd edn.), pp. 529–46.
24 Robin Dynasty, which I watch a lot of now, moves a little bit slower. You know, with this one, if you really miss an episode you've got to try and figure out what happened in between – unless you're able to talk to someone else, ‘cause there always is something going on, and Dynasty in comparison the show moves a lot slower. (American Group #4).
25 Mary Mander, “Dallas: The Mythology of Crime and the Moral Occult,” Journal of Popular Culture 171 (fall 1980): 44–8.
26 Michael J. Arlen, “Smooth Pebbles at Southfork,” in his Camera Age: Essays on Television (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 38–50.
27 As Dallas is not broadcast in Japan, our Japanese participants were shown the first episode of the series in which Bobby brings Pamela to Southfork after having married her in secret. The new wife happens to be the daughter of the Barnes family, the enemies of the Ewings.
28 Lynn They seem to have certain shows that are preliminary to other shows. I guess they save the better shows until rating time (American Group #16).
29 The Russians are “literate.” They read the tide of the episode, for example, and ask whether it is a good name for the story.
30 Herta Herzog, “What Do We Really Know About Daytime Serial Listeners?” in Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (eds) Radio Research 1942–1943 (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1944), pp. 3–33; Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
31 As Kyoko puts it, “it might be the difference between meat-eating people and grass-eating people. Europeans and Americans are war-like.”
32 Except for “messages,” which we decided to include, belatedly, among the critical categories. But, as we have noted, the coding permits us to distinguish between messages supplied in answer to our explicit query and those volunteered prior to our putting of this question.
33 We note again that we are discussing statements, not people. Almost everybody who makes oppositional statements in the critical frame also makes referential ones.
34 In The “Nationwide” Audience, Morley makes the point, which we make in this chapter, that his focus-group discussions of a television newsmagazine accepted the ideology of the program even while they were critical of its aesthetics. Others opposed the ideology while remaining uncritical of the construction. Morley was thus surprised to learn that critical readings do not necessarily constitute a defense against ideology.