It is the face of a woman with heavy lidded, blue, expressionless eyes.

That is why intellectual snobbery meets its match here. In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any 'intelligent' critique that can be made of it. is the emblem, which gives rise to the desperate efforts on the part of the women to escape from this archaic trap.

It is a closed world in which everything leads inevitably to fatality, perfidy, sentimental incest or magical cannibalism. That is why there is never any laughter in it: no wit, no humour, no comic episodes, no happy coincidences. Dallas 's secret lies in its closeness to tribal and initiatory stereotypes. It is the same as in a ceremony: outside the ritual, you count for nothing, but the ritual is flexible enough to make use of all the chance happenings of life. If they are sacrificed in the script, their stardom inevitably comes to an end in real life too, since they are identified with the characters they play. If they should die in reality, a way is devised for writing them out of the script. The scriptwriters have each of the actresses in the soap opera play the death scene in the swimming pool: they do not know which of them is to die, and hence disappear from the series.

The best soap opera ever