Dallas

I visited Dallas a couple of weekends ago to attend a festival of horror films by women directors. It was good fun and I won a t-shirt, but the highlight of my journey was the trip to South Fork Ranch, site of the original location shooting for the epic soap opera, Dallas. Here I am with JR's portrait, and he appears to be making a rude gesture behind my head.

To my surprise, only the exteriors were shot at the ranch, and yet, one can tour the interior of the house. The interior has been lavishly decorated, but not to look like the sets of the show. Rather, they have just designed it with Dallas in mind. It's really more of a Dallas-based art installation than anything else. It was an excellent example of a simulacrum - a copy without an original - which was one of the "big ideas" in my science fiction class last semester. I suspect I was the only person on the tour thinking about it in this particular way.

I particularly enjoyed JR's bedroom, what with the chandelier over the bed.

Stranger still was JR's master bath, with the telephone installed beside the toilet. This seems a questionable design choice.

As the tour guide was telling us about the history of the house, he mentioned that the original owner's name was JR Duncan. I asked if that was the origin of the character's name, but it turns out it wasn't - the script had already been written before the location was chosen. I was pleased to hear this because I have a pet theory about the origin of JR Ewing's name. In the movie Giant, which is the master narrative of West Texas, James Dean plays a character named Jett Rink who gets rich when he strikes oil. There's a wonderful scene where he's sitting at a banquet table, and his initials, "JR" are plastered in huge letters on the wall behind him. When I saw this, I thought, "that must be where they got the name for Dallas." I haven't made the effort to actually find out, but I floated this theory to the tour guide, and he found it intriguing. Then a lady on the tour jumped in to explain that JR Ewing is called that because his father's name is John Ross and he's named after him. I restrained myself from telling her that they are fictional characters, so that's not actually an explanation. Instead, I went back to thinking about simulacra.