DALLAS REDUX

They've been redecorating Southfork, in case you weren't watching

JAMES WOLCOTT

Mixed Media

Everyone's down on Dallas. It excites no response. It's a supertanker moping in the mists like a ghost ship, adrift in apathy. Now in its twelfth season on CBS, Dallas faces audience slippage so severe that even the show's executive producer, Leonard Katzman, has been counting empty sofas. "People won't stay home to watch it Hmn anymore,'' he told the New York Daily News. The attrition isn't confined to America. In England, the show no longer plays to crowded pews. Some find this tuneout a welcome trend. Good riddance to all the glory hogging! Bring on the warm fuzzies!

For at its peak Dallas was a symbol of unleashed libido and capitalism unchained—an oil well spuming cowboy sperm. Should the rich overflow of Dallas carry the day, worried the stately minds of Europe, what would happen to socialism, the spirit of sacrifice, the art of conversation? Would we all be wearing string ties and shafting our neighbors? Profile groups were set up by sociologists and psychologists from Ireland to Algeria to corral this cash-consciousness craze, studies summarized in the British Film Institute survey East of Dallas. Today the hubbub is subdued. Even in its decline, however, Dallas has currency. George Steiner recently credited the series with the collapse of Communism. "With Dallas being viewed east of the Wall,'' he wrote in the London Observer, "the dismemberment of the regime may have become inevitable." But Steiner was being characteristically quirky. The rest of the planet regards Dallas as passe.

Why? Reasons aplenty. Problems in the oil patch have depleted Dallas itself as a fertile source of drama—the city has the funk of foreclosure. Once "America's Team," the Dallas Cowboys have become patsies in shoulder pads. The spill of the Exxon Valdez blackened oil barons as environmental baddies. Nationally the mood has also shifted. The greed-is-good ethos of the eighties grinds the wrong gears today. We no longer swing from ropes of pearls; we're now out at garage sales with Roseanne. Another plausible explanation for Dallas's hobbled status is that after riding the range for so long the show has simply run out of pep. Plausible—but wrong. Watching the series after a long absence, I was surprised and pleased at how much motion it still musters. However much it may be bucking megatrends, Dallas hasn't lost its internals. Its resoled boots retain some kick.

Like many soaps, Dallas charts the destinies of two rival clans. The chief clan is the Ewings, who owe much of their mystique to their dynastic resemblance to the Kennedys. Jim Davis's Jock was the Joe Kennedy patriarch, a wildcatter with a short fuse and a nicotine rasp. Barbara Bel Geddes's Miss Ellie is the Rose Kennedy stalwart, a warm appliance in a curtained shrine. Representing Jack, Bobby, and Teddy are the three Ewing brothers, J.R. (Larry Hagman), Bobby (Patrick Duffy), and Gary (Ted Shackelford, shipped to the spin-off series, Knots Landing). The very name of the show has a spooky resonance, Dallas being where the Kennedy saga went tragically askew. When J.R. got plunked, the ensuing "Who Shot J.R.?" media mania was like a deranged pop replay of the J.F.K. assassination.

The Ewings are more than a bloodline. As the Jungian analyst James Hillman reminds us in A Blue Fire, "family" to the Romans meant a house and all those who belonged to it—relations, servants, pets. "Neither parentage nor descent, not even bloodkinship within the clan determined the use of the word family; place did." On Dallas, that place is Southfork, the Ewing ranch. Southfork is the Ewing Hyannis Port; it's the Ponderosa of Bonanza plus backyard barbecue and swimming pool and a curved driveway that acts like a magnet. It's not an accident that sequences on Dallas often begin with Southfork sitting in sunlight or darkness. It's more than an establishing shot. It's a power chord.

The other Dallas clan is descended from the drier loins of Jock Ewing's embittered former partner, Digger Barnes. Rooked out of their rightful fortune by Jock Ewing (or so they claim), the Barnes brood have no power base. They're disinherited. Television's most durable and enjoyable underdog, Ken Kercheval's Cliff Barnes is a flopsweat loser who always seems to have the last olive of his three-martini lunch lodged in his throat. (It was a cruel knock on Walter Mondale when he was dubbed the Cliff Barnes of politics.) His cause is to take the Ewings to the cleaners for the dirt they did his daddy. Even after his half-sister Pam (the contoured Victoria Principal) married Bobby, no truce was achieved between these tribes. Instead the conflict was accentuated. Had to be. Because proximity to the Ewings could only point up the Bameses' spavined entitlement.

In East of Dallas, the editors diagram this fracture. "Unlike the Ewings, the Bameses are defined by what they do not have (Digger does not have Elbe and Southfork, Cliff does not have power, success and money, Pamela does not have a child of her own). The Bameses' family structure is a reversal of the natural hierarchical order: the son controls the father and the sister advises her brother. Quite the contrary is true of the Ewings, where, until his death, Ellie is subordinate to Jock and even JR has to obey his father!" Many was the time Jock would croak at his sons, "Bobby, J.R.—you two boys quit fightin'!" His word was a rugged cross. Long after Jim Davis died, Jock Ewing's portrait hung at Southfork as a reminder.

The first years of the Ewing-Bames feud on Dallas had an aerospace dynamic. The women seemed clipped from cosmetic ads and pasted against a cloudracing sky. They wore their features like designer labels. Linda Gray's Sue Ellen—J.R.'s wife, prone to alcohol, sometimes just plain prone—had billboard lips which left a red insignia on the screen. Described by the critic Clive James as "a neckless blonde sex grenade," Charlene Tilton's Lolita-ish Lucy climbed into the hayloft with the hired hands and seldom did her homework. Yet sex was always a sidebar on Dallas. The real screwing took place in the executive suites, at the point of a fountain pen. A good ol' boy having a grand old time (all guile and no guilt), J.R. was the pork belly of capitalism polished to a pink shine. When he rolled into the Oil Barons' Ball, women wanted to rub his Buddha belly. By comparison Cliff Barnes was a small pot of ashes. The silky array of women who passed between the two mattered less than the oil pumps in the background bent toward mecca like praying mantises made of metal. When Dallas was at its feuding height, the characters towered over these industrial assets as if they were toys. They met in combat without wind resistance. Glued fast, J.R.'s toupee never went flip-top.

Couldn't last, this momentum. The show began to tread mud. It's clear now, however, that although there may have been a slow leak in Dallas's appeal, the dreaded blowout came with the "Pam's dream'' fiasco. When Patrick Duffy ankled the series to pursue a movie career, the writers totaled Bobby in a car crash. Poor Pam, a widow! Then again, black is so slimming; she'd. . .cope. In the meantime Duffy discovered that Hollywood is a cold town. A town paved with broken promises. His movie hopes dried faster than Pam's tears. Shelving his pride, he rejoined the cast. But how could his killed-off character be rewritten into the show? Ah, solution: Pam, hearing water running, rushed to the shower and there was Bobby, wearing a birthday suit and a smile. He hadn't died—he was just under the nozzle! And I awoke, and it was all a dream. The brain trust behind Dallas is said to believe that "you must never lie to the audience, never start off a story in one way and then suddenly take off in another direction." But with "Pam's dream," they made a violent U-turn, breaking that trust. Reaction was swift and irate. The backlash seemed to make the cast and crew sheepish. J.R. began bringing his lunch to the office in a bucket. Waistlines thickened, hairlines thinned.

I\ ather than close up shop and check 1C the mailbox each month for residuII als, the Dallas team has returned to fighting trim. The emphasis is on righthere right-now. In the opening credits an explosion hurls a faceful of dirt into the camera lens. The writers have sharpened the tempo by tackling current events, including the wayward voyage of the Exxon Valdez. But the loudest wake-up call has been in the casting. A trio of tiny blondies have been installed as a perky set of spark plugs. Sue Ellen's successor at Southfork is Cally (Cathy Podewell), whose tongue twangs like a guitar string: "Amcha gonna intraduce me to yer dayat?" she asks at a posh affair. As her name suggests, Cally is a simple country squeeze spun from calico. Disco dazzle is supplied by the sequined sisters, April and Michelle. Beneath a feathery cap of hair, Kimberly Foster's Michelle rumbas into the room in bare-navel outfits taken off the Madonna rack. The whole point of having her rumba into the room is to have her rumba out again. To paraphrase Bob Hope, she really takes it with her. After Victoria Principal left the series, Sheree J. Wilson made her move on Bobby. At five feet five inches, Wilson's April often finds her face reflected in his belt buckle. But they do have romance and rapport. When she told a straying Bobby, "I'm the right woman for you," she was every lover who's ever tried to reason with a rockhead. And for once Patrick Duffy appeared reachable. He actually folded his brow and fed her some emotion.

Most of the time Bobby has the AWOL look of a man in a haze. His problem: he hasn't gotten over Pam. To explore Bobby's Pam preoccupation, the writers presented him with a Pam impersonator (Margaret Michaels). Usurping Pam's clothes and hairstyle, she hardened his haze into a daze. "You can have Pam ...whenever you want." Stunned before sex, stunned after sex, Bobby walked confusedly through walls, like the comic-book klutz Stuporman. As Marla Maples's pal put it in a different context, "It was a case of boy meets girl meets zombie." But the story line wasn't all put-on. It had a touch of tender regret, and it was a clever way of putting the Pam business to rest.

Pam disposed of, the power brunette on the scene is Lesley-Anne Down, playing a sexy publicist trying to trim the monkey tail off of Cliff Barnes and groom him for political stardom. Unlike the blondies, Down is no chickie-poo. An alumna of Upstairs, Downstairs from the early seventies, she demurely tilted her parasol in such big-screen costume dramas as The Great Train Robbery and A Little Night Music. Despite Down's protracted personal troubles (an ugly divorce from the director Billy Friedkin), her beauty evidences no disrepair. The shapely cheekbones, the full lips hiked at the comers, the eyes suited for operetta—close up, she's still a cameo brooch. And she's more accessible now. Free of her corsets, she has a connecting comic swing. What a wonderful eyepop she made after she sent Cliff Barnes to a spa to spruce up for media appearances. Flapping open his jacket upon his return, he twirled before her desk. You haven't lost a pound! she exclaimed. "A worm couldn't live on what they feed you down there," grumbled Cliff, who wanted some caviar. But her Cliff rehab did show progress. Cut to: grainy photo of a smiling Cliff Barnes and a voice-over of J.R. fuming, "Why is this moron's picture in the papers?"

J.R. has other adversaries besides the pesky Barnes. As tycoon Carter McKay, George Kennedy weighs in as a serious contender. And I do mean weighs in. A screen veteran, Kennedy used to appear in Westerns, until the horses complained. Now he sits behind a desk holding a giant knife and fork. In one scene Michelle rumba'd into his office to collect an I.O.U. "I thought you loved my sharp and hungry little face," she said, pausing for the rest of her body to come to a complete stop. It's actually her drumsticks he admires. Let me smother you with onions, my pet. Kennedy rose from his chair and walked around his desk. In real time this took about a halfhour, but through the miracle of editing, it occupied only a few seconds. Rather more agile is Alexis Smith, returning to the series as Lady Jessica. I quote from the priceless CBS press release: "Lady Jessica was last seen during the 1983-84 season, when she was packed off to a sanitarium for the criminally insane after her failed attempt to kidnap Miss Ellie." Behind bars she ate flies and flexed her painted talons.

Dallas was a symbol of capitalism unchained-an oil well spuming cowboy sperm.

Of course the mainspring of the show is still that coiled snake J.R. Some of his nefarious antics have gotten tired. Just as Joan Collins took too many bubble baths on Dynasty, Hagman spends too much time behind the shower curtain on Dallas. It's embarrassing handing him a bar of soap and sending him in to scrub the flavor of the week's back—you shouldn't ask a man his age to suck in that much stomach. His hedonism is more at home in a hot tub. But Hagman does more than loofah dorsal surfaces. He makes sure J.R. gets his jollies beyond the bedroom and boardroom. This season there was a story line in which Denver Pyle was sprung from storage by J.R. to sniff out an elusive vein of oil. Being outdoors brought out a happy bounce in J.R., who was able to do Jock's legacy proud by popping a gusher. And the indoor sparring between J.R. and Down's P.R. whiz has limbered up his reflexes. Listed as co-executive producer, Hagman also directs episodes of the show between showers. He's the true guardian of Southfork and the real hero of Dallas's resurgence.

So why hasn't Dallas's pulling itself up by its own bootstraps received more attentive praise? Television critics tend to run in a pack, in pursuit of the latest trend. Once something is "out," it's hard to get back "in." But "in" and "out" are outmoded concepts (there's too much flux today), or at least should be treated as such by people who track pop culture. The show warrants fresh appraisal. For the May ratings sweeps, Dallas rounds off its twelfth season with a cliff-hanger that strips J.R. down to his stark necessities. Will fate turn him into a warm fuzzy? Perish the perverse thought. His daddy didn't raise no daffodils.