72
Television and Everyday Life
of it, especially in the UK, it seems much more preoccupied with environments
that are anything but suburban: the declining or revitalised working-class inner-
city area on the one hand
(Coronation Street, EastEnders),
or
the rural idylls
of
Emmerdale
on the other. Only
Brookside,
the more real than real, Liverpool-
based, soap opera has a location firmly fixed within the suburban heartland,
though
Crossroads
could also be seen to have been located in suburbia and
also embodying both profoundly suburban values and a kind of suburban
ontology (in its name and even in the standard of its acting).
7
American soaps
are, or were, much more consistently secure in a suburban (or small town)
environment, a version of which provides the parodic stimulus for the recent
Twin Peaks
. The Australian appropriation of the genre could be described in
broadly similar terms. Finally, more widely, and more internationally,
the likes
of
Dallas, Dynasty
and the rest, though not strictly speaking soap opera (which
is an essentially parochial genre), offer a vision of what can be described as a
kind of suburban hyper-reality, in which the various characters play out the
new frontier, struggling with the tension of the transfer of the old Western,
traditional, values into the new West: a potent mixture of place, tradition, family
values and the frantic struggle for ‘stability, happiness and success’ (Newcomb,
1982, 171).
However, the argument that the soap opera is a
suburban genre is not based
necessarily, or only, on an examination of the content of single examples. What
I want to suggest is that, taken as a whole, that is taken as a system in the Lévi-
Straussian sense of the term, the soap opera provides, mythically, a cultural
form in which the problems of the suburb and of the suburban are worked
through. It is impossible, of course to demonstrate this conclusively. But I will
try and explain what I mean.
Lévi-Strauss’ (1969) analysis of the systematic
nature of pre-Columbian
mythology depends crucially on understanding each myth and each set of myths
as part of a wider system which contains them all. Within this system the
myths (individual stories or variants of stories) are related to each other through
transformative relations. These transformative relations, the principles by which,
Lévi-Strauss argues, the system is held together, provide a means whereby
each mythic story can also be understood as growing out of a particular society
and culture. The story-teller will draw on what is to hand in his or her own
environment to fashion his or
her own particular narrative, but according to
rules that are familiar to the listeners and which also mark the story as a myth,
that is as something which is both of, and beyond, everyday experience. The
myths also function to provide a kind of commentary on the basic problems of
existence in every society and all societies, dealing with matters of life and
death, gender relations, nature and culture,
the origins of things, in such a way
as to reassure by the closure that each narrative offers.
The soap opera is not a mythic narrative in the simple sense in which Lévi-
Strauss defines it, and I am not going to suggest that it is structured in the same
The suburbanisation of the public sphere
73
way as the myths that he analyses: that is, with the same degree of narrative
closure (see Geraghty, 1990). What I do want to suggest, however, is that both
within each soap opera as an example of the genre,
8
and
within the genre as a
mythic system, the same kind of narrative and functional dimensions are visible.
The system of soap opera includes within it narratives that are set in urban,
rural and suburban settings. Between and amongst them the problems which
suburbanness attempts to deal with, and of which it is itself a mythic (utopian
or dystopian) resolution—the problems of nature and culture, of the rural and
the urban, of the stranger and the friend, of gender and family relations and so
on—are displayed and worked through, constantly and continuously. They
become a kind of Greek chorus for the drama of everyday life.
In much of the literature on soap opera the key term which students of the
genre have chosen to define is that of community (e.g. Geraghty, 1990 for a
recent example). There is no doubt that this
is an accurate assessment of
much of what soap operas are about: yet community is a peculiarly
disembodied notion, and the focus of soap opera is better posed as a problem
of the modern community, that is in terms of the ‘suburban community’
which provides the framework both for the lives of its audiences (though by
no means exclusively so: see Liebes and Katz, 1991) as well as of its
characters. This community is constructed however not just in the content of
the soap opera but in its form; in the secure, endless and structured
recursiveness of the ordinariness and crises
of the daily lives of its
characters. The fictional populations of
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