Screen Tastes

Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes

Charlotte Brunsdon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134808045
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Charlotte Brundson's key writings on film and television are bought together with new introductions which contextualise and update the arguments. The focus is on the tastes and pleasures of the female consumer as she is produced by popular film and television.

Part I

The defence of soap opera

Introduction

This section reprints three short early articles on soap opera and one later historical piece, Chapter 4, which reflects on the feminist engagement with soap opera in the context of feminist television criticism more generally. In this introduction I want to offer some brief contextualisation to the short essays and the feminist defence of soap opera of the late 1970s and early 1980s, bearing in mind that Chapter 4 in some ways functions as a retrospective introduction to the section as a whole.

The most substantial of the short essays, ‘Crossroads: notes on soap opera’, emerges from a period of research at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the late 1970s. In this period the Midlands-produced serial Crossroads was widely referred to within British culture in a metaphorical sense to refer to the worst of cheaply produced, under-rehearsed serial television drama. This reputation lives on, partly through a regular sketch, Acorn Antiques, by the British comedienne Victoria Wood with performers Celia Imrie and Julie Walters, in her television series As Seen On TV. In Acorn Antiques which was transparently based on Crossroads, actors repeatedly forgot their lines, doors stuck, walls shook and the narrative never seemed to progress, despite the fact that characters were always talking about what had just happened. It was partly this metaphorical significance of Crossroads—an extremely popular programme—that first interested me in it, although it was Dorothy Hobson (also at CCCS) who made the substantial populist defence of the programme in this period (1982). One of the positions argued in Chapter 1, that it is analytically necessary to distinguish between the address of a text—in the terminology of the time, the spectator (position) the text constructs—and the social readers of the text who may have various relations to this position, has on occasion been attributed to me alone. In fact it was very much a product of the collective work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s, and can be found, for example, with direct reference to media consumption in the contemporary work of Janice Winship (1981) and David Morley (1992) and more generally in other CCCS work of the period. The argument was fuelled in a particular way in Britain by the hegemony, within leftist intellectual work, of the positions associated with the film journal Screen in the mid-1970s. Screen, under the editorship of Sam Rohdie and then Ben Brewster, had been responsible for the translation into English of key structuralist and ‘metapsychology of cinema’ texts which theorised the operations on the cinematic spectator of the film text and the cinematic ‘machine’ (see, for example vol. 14, 1–2 (1973); 16, 2 (1975). Particularly significant in this argument came to be both Colin MacCabe’s notion of the ‘classic realist text’ (1974) and texts displaying those features loosely described as Brechtian, which were understood to ‘undo’ the imaginary unity of the spectator produced by classic illusionist cinema. That is, this Althusserian/ Lacanian theorisation of cinema in its turn valorised particular avant-garde practices which were argued to have particular effects on the spectator. The address of this genre of criticism was consistently political—the task of the critic was to reveal the ideological workings of the film text, while the radical filmmaker had to struggle to find cinematic forms which were not complicit with existing modes of representation. These arguments led to the dominance in the magazine Screen and associated British film culture of the assumption that it was not the explicit politics of a film text that were significant, but its formal operations. Thus the radical modernism of Jean-Luc Godard was validated above, for example, the naturalism associated with the work of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett. (The Days of Hope debate reprinted in Bennett et al. 1981 provides a good example of the ferocity of debate in this area in the 1970s.)

It was from this context that an essay on a popular, cheaply produced soap opera was developed. The Crossroads piece was conceived as a double provocation in that I wanted to address the issue of the gendering of the spectator —both textually and contextually—and I wanted to play with assumptions about the progressive effects of texts which displayed Brechtian formal features. In arguing that a despised programme like Crossroads displayed—looked at in a certain way—formal features such as discontinuity, interruption and tableau-like spacing which were heralded as the acme of progressive practice in radical cinema, I wanted to suggest both that making sense of these formal devices is significantly dependent on what the viewer brings to the viewing, and that the cultural competences of femininity are largely unrecognised as such. This was then, like early essays by Tania Modleski (1979) and Ellen Seiter (1982a), an attempt to find a theoretical space for a female viewer, but was, significantly, articulated in relation to the less culturally prestigious form, television, while haunted by the theorisation of the spectator within film studies, and particularly Laura Mulvey’s inaugural gendering of the spectator (1975).

Annette Kuhn (1984a), in what has become a canonical account, has subsequently pointed to the way in which this essay straddles the disciplinarily bounded address to audiovisual women’s genres. She shows the way in which feminist work on television soap opera is formed within sociological paradigms, dominated by notions of the real and the social, while feminist work on film melodrama is shaped by literary and psychoanalytic models which privilege the text and textuality. The validity of her argument, and the persistence of this distinction is demonstrated by the extraordinary paucity of empirical work on film audiences. The outstanding exceptions here, the work of Jackie Stacey (1994) and Jacqueline Bobo (1995), serve to accentuate this point, while Stacey herself has also challenged the taken-for-granted status of textual analysis as method in cinema studies (1993). I suspect that there are institutional, as well as disciplinary, factors in play here, and in fact, the feminist attention to audiences has had an enormous impact when considered in relation to the very small amount of funding it has received. Here it is worth observing, as Lyn Thomas (1995) has pointd out, that a high proportion of this work, the studies by Ien Ang (1985), Helen Taylor (1989) and Jackie Stacey (1994), has in fact used letters as principal data. The empirical study of audiences is both time-consuming and expensive, usually requiring research grants—which in turn require the support of grant-giving bodies. ‘Women as viewers’ has not been a favoured topic in comparison with research in the sex/violence/young men axis. However, my own disinclination to pursue empirical audience work and to investigate whether the hypotheses advanced in the Crossroads piece were valid was more influenced by anxiety about occupying the position of empirical researcher. I just couldn’t imagine how to do this. Instead I have chosen to focus on the discursive context in which meanings are made, the talk and writing about soap opera which provide the vocabulary and repertoire of attitudes through and from which individuals express their attitudes to these programmes. It is this with which Chapters 2 and 3 are concerned.

David Buckingham has recently argued that the study of soap opera is now ‘normal science’, no longer requiring the challenges to existing paradigms that characterised the opening-up of this area in the 1970s and early 1980s (1997). Buckingham wrote this in a review of Robert Allen’s international collection on soap opera, To Be Continued…(1995) and Jostein Gripsrud’s major case study of the reception of Dynasty in Norway (1995), and certainly, ‘soap opera studies’ seems an established topic for both publishers and students. In English there have recently been books by Martha Nochimson (1992), Mary Ellen Brown (1994) and Laura Stempel Mumford (1995) on US soap opera, and the study of the genre is now an established part of many syllabuses. In the context of this continuing flow of genre and programme studies, the short essays here reprinted document an earlier phase of soap opera studies, when there was considerable resistance to the notion that the genre might be worthy of attention (despite the long history of social science research into the effects of daytime serials on their viewers or listeners). It is for this reason that I have called the section ‘The defence of soap opera’, for I wanted to retain some sense of soap opera as a contested object of study. These essays offer traces of a different context, when the arguments for the study of soap opera, although they were arguments about the significance of the genre, were also carrying many other arguments. These involved the gendering of television and media studies and polemics about the validity of the study of popular forms. So ‘soap opera’ carried ideas of a female spectator, respect for women as audience and an assertion of the significance of the private sphere. Similarly, in its place near the bottom of the aesthetic hierarchy, the genre posed most vividly the issue of the value of the study of popular culture. I think partly because the validation of soap opera as an object of study did carry so many other issues, there has perhaps recently been a certain wallowing in the evident value of the genre as a central area of study. I’m not sure that much is gained by the repetition of what have now become the clichés of the field, such as that soap opera is a woman’s genre, and I’m also not sure that these arguments are in fact any longer true of popular programmes such as Neighbours and Brookside. Indeed Buckingham (1997) goes on to urge academics who teach in this area to (re)consider, ‘what do we expect our students to learn about soap opera that they do not already know—and what difference do we think this will make?’ These seem to me appropriate questions in the 1990s, for while I do want to insist on the historical significance of the defence of soap opera in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the significance of this defence lies mainly in the challenge to aesthetic hierarchy and the canon, the gendering of the study of popular culture and the associated gendering of its consumer, rather than, beyond a certain point, the study of soap opera as such. Soap opera, as I argue at more length in Chapter 11, was just one of many women’s genres addressed by feminist scholars in this period. Soap opera was a site on which particular struggles within a rather marginal part of the academy were carried out. These were significant arguments, and have generated new areas of study and a substantial body of knowledge about the genre. Now I think it might be time to do something else.

Chapter 1
Crossroads: notes on soap opera^†

Husband to wife weeping as she watches TV: ‘For heaven’s sake, Emily! It’s only a commercial for acid indigestion.’

(Joke on Bryant & May matchbox)

INTRODUCTION: A GENDERED AUDIENCE?

The audience for soap opera is usually assumed to be female.¹ In these notes I would like to examine this assumption, and the extent to which the notion of a gendered audience can be useful to us in the understanding of a British soap opera Crossroads.

Initially, I should like to make a distinction between the subject positions that a text constructs, and the social subject who may or may not take these positions up. We can usefully analyse the ‘you’ or ‘yous’ that the text as discourse constructs, but we cannot assume that any individual audience member will necessarily occupy these positions.² The relation of the audience to the text will be determined not solely by that text but also by positionalities in relation to a whole range of other discourses—discourses of motherhood, romance and sexuality for example. Thus it may well be that visual pleasure in narrative cinema is dependent on identification with male characters in their gaze at female characters, but it does not necessarily follow that any individual audience member will unproblematically occupy this masculine position. Indeed, feminist film criticism usefully deconstructs the gendering of this ‘you’. As Janice Winship has recently argued: ‘A feminist politics of representation…has then to engage with the social reader, as well as the social text’ (Winship 1981:25).

The interplay of social reader and social text can be considered by examining the extent to which a gendered audience is implied in programme publicity, scheduling and advertisements. The Independent Broadcasting Authority, in its 1979 annual handbook, groups Crossroads with other Drama serials:

TV drama serials have for many years been an essential ingredient in the programme diet of a large and devoted audience. Established favourites such as Coronation Street and Crossroads continue to develop themes and situations which often deal with the everyday problems and difficulties to which many viewers can relate. Occasionally the more adventurous type of serial is produced.

(Independent Broadcasting Authority 1979:92)

The femininity of the audience is specified, apart from the structuring dietary metaphor, in the opposition of ‘devoted’ and ‘everyday’ to ‘adventurous’. There are a wide range of ‘spin-off materials associated with Crossroads—novels, special souvenir supplemen...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• GENERAL INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE DEFENCE OF SOAP OPERA
• PART II: CAREER GIRLS
• PART III: QUESTIONS OF QUALITY
• PART IV: FEMINIST IDENTITIES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED