Mad Men's Retro Trip
Arts: The Emmy-nominated drama reminds us what things were like in 1960 and what they could be like again.
July 18, 2008
|
|
It's early 1960, and the boys of Madison Avenue are in their glory years. They're celebrated, well paid and, technically at least, happy—but far from content.
They gasp for air through cigarettes they inform the world are filled with tobacco that’s "toasted." They baste their corporate wounds with 18-year-old scotch, and lots of it. For relief from their ritualized suburban marriages they turn to affairs with "office gals" who resent them and female clients who despise them.
They're talented white, privileged Christian men who are suffocating. They rule an airless world that's killing them. But they keep at it because their jobs, like the impending account for the Nixon presidential campaign, pay off like rigged slots.
Who were these guys? Matthew Weiner, creator of the TV series, described them as the men at the center of the U.S. economy, essential to commerce in war and peace. "When you can be that cynical about the machine and still be a part of it," Weiner told Variety, "you have part of the definition of American character."
The second season of Mad Men, the best dramatic series now on television, opens on July 27 on the American Movie Channel. (A DVD collection of the first season episodes was released in June).
When a dramatic series of this quality reaches U.S. television, it’s such a rarity that it has to have a backstory of its own. In 2004, Weiner approached the producers of HBO’s The Sopranos, and showed them an early version of Mad Men. It was good enough for Sopranos producers to hire him on the spot. They put him to work as a writer of the mob epic and as a supervising producer on thirty (out of a total of 86) episodes. Suddenly Weiner was working at the cutting edge of television, one of the rare dramatic narratives in the industry that was working free from network and advertising pressure and in which social criticism was actually valued. When Sopranos wrapped, HBO decided against producing Mad Men and Weiner took it to AMC, which was then trying to revive its ratings with original programming.
The theme that runs through every scene of Weiner's series is the role of deception in the daily life of the U.S., from the grinding insincerities of the workplace to the systematic mendacity that keeps "the machine" operating on a grand scale. Weiner's America in 1960 is a place where bullshit is a principle of social organization. Meanwhile, the society teeters on the brink of a catastrophically stupid war that will be sold as an advertising project now remembered as the Gulf of Tonkin provocation.
Weiner paints this world, the immediate predecessor to our own, with such tiny strokes of characterization and minimalist dialogue that each hour of narrative is self-contained and can easily be viewed on its own. But it's necessary to see all of Mad Men to appreciate that this is a national portrait that penetrates to the backbone.
In the early episodes, the viewer is startled by unexpected details of memory of what it was like in the U.S. "before"—before women began to assert themselves, before casual anti-Semitism became unacceptable among Ivy Leaguers, before the rise of civil rights and gay pride—before everything. Office spaces are dotted with puce and turquoise ash trays shaped like internal organs; overhead lighting blinks out of stamped plastic baffles; female office workers move stiffly in crayon-colored wool dresses and men's haircuts and suits are razored to a military stiffness. And always, everywhere (you can almost smell it). mass-market cologne cutting through the reek of booze and smoke.
When the cracks in this world start to appear, they come as shafts of light from another world—from the future that is our recent past. The light is most often cast by a woman struggling to make changes.
Office secretary Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) refuses to play the victim after a quick fling. She shows a gift for writing advertising copy that derives almost miraculously from her sincerity and refusal to treat other human beings like objects. Peggy is young, naïve and talented—and doomed. She watches wide-eyed as her work is stolen, gratefully runs to fetch ice for the scotch and worries about how to provide alibis to inquiring wives when the admen husbands return to the office after a long lunch, "greasy and calm." Like the suburban wives, we can see her gathering energy for a rebellion even before she is aware of it herself.
Another shaft comes in the rebellion of the wives, led by the luminous actress January Jones, in a story line promised to pay off in the new season.
Another comes from a bohemian woman (a hipster but not yet a hippie) who rolls a joint and offers it to Don Draper, the principal Mad Man (Jon Hamm), who is emotionally a banked bed of hot coals. She tenderly hands it to him after refusing to let him sweep her off her feet with an expensive and lascivious weekend in Paris to be bought with a large bonus check. Her refusal—she just wants him for his body, she implies sweetly—demoralizes him. He signs over the check, stuffs it in the neck of her blouse and drives home to the dark house in the suburbs where his family is sleeping. He wakes his four-year-old son. "Ask me anything," the ad man pleads. "I won't lie to you." When the boy complains that he's tired, Draper presses him: "Ask me!" The boy, weakly: "Why do lady bugs light up?" Draper’s coals collapse into ash.
How can a narrative intentionally so elusive be so riveting? Maybe it’s the effort required to keep track of everything through the physical pleasure of observing it. It demands that the viewer toggle back and forth continuously between the past and the present, to become a witness to small acts of courage planted like seeds by people who are now remote from us in time and sensibility but so recent that in some sense they still are us. Or we are still them, the latest revised edition. We are reminded again and again: This is what things were like in 1960 and what they could be like again—or worse.
As a genre, this feels like something new. It's not historical fiction, exactly; it's more like historical science fiction, a world in which time bends out in all directions and flows back to the viewer as an explanation of how things have gone so terribly wrong. How propaganda as thick as tobacco smoke still hangs on in an airless world that’s killing the rest of us.
Dave Wagner is the co-author of Radical Hollywood (The New Press, 2002) and Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television (Palgrave, 2003).
Still this new motto is a trickster whose answer varies from moment to moment but where the general impulse in the population as a whole seems to be, “I don’t give a shi#”—meaning the general motto of America has become a lie. We’ve moved beyond “Shi# Happens”—a form of shoulder shrugging indifference but a form from which one could still laugh with the fullness of their heart. This “who cares” impulse is a lie because Americans are screaming, “we want change”, but it is in no way a funny state of being but closer to a defeated caged animal whose will to be free is dying. Perhaps after almost sixty years of the witch-hunting McCarthy dogma of suppression and the permitted umbrella of secrecy at the top of American power, Americans have become systematically programmed to act as though they don’t care. They are so used to playing dumb that they have actually become dumb, like Chief Bromden in Ken Kessey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Chief when he actually utters a word after playing deaf and dumb for so many years that he experiences fear at the thought of actually using his vocal cords—(because then the “combine” will know he was faking it) but once he remembers the good feeling of having a voice again he feels himself swell and he grows strong again—a whole being with a sense of purpose. He remembers who he is and all fear vanishes. No threat of any kind could then stop him because his heart is his again and so is his will. That is how freedom starts in the soul—like Prometheus to Zeus “Here I sit—I make men in my own image, a race like me, to suffer, to weep, to enjoy life and rejoice, and to defy you, as I do.” (Goethe’s Faust)
So when Americans discover they actually do care.. …Something that surfaces in the most painful form of guilt, fear and trembling the first inclination is to cover it up immediately and to pretend as though nothing happened—hence this collective Alzheimer’s phenomenon that Studs Turkel talks about. Nonetheless, those hardy souls who actually do try to act on the inner authenticity of their being by showing some real backbone find they meet the stone wall of authority that says it is forbidden to care—caring that’s something that pussies do, or even worse liberals. Persistence rewards the strong willed by labeling them as a potential threat to society—a fanatic nut case—someone who needs 24 hours a day surveillance. Still it is madmen who create new things—like religions or ideologies. But I am not suggesting anything radical or even new—but something that is as American as say apple pie, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. To stand against the status quo of today demands nothing more than that one stand for the principles upon which this nation was founded—hardly something mad or insane—the insanity however is those who lead us, and their obscene statements and actions that distort reality beyond all comprehension. Yep today the biggest threat to political leadership are Americans who are awakening—this why the new FISA is being ordered Bush (the new FISA is necessary to create corporatist America—companies want the right to spy on you too—makes it easier to steal your money and blackmail you).
The true fear in the US is in the attitude of the American elite—their fear resides in the fact that that they actually know that what they are doing is morally wrong (it’s a game to see who can be the most disgustingly autocratic and get away with it, but like the stooge in Jack London’s To Build a Fire, they are individuals without any form of imagination, thus they are creating their own demise as well)—but they are “bored”. It’s a consequence of being rich spoiled brats of the American elite, who get the world served up to them on a silver platter and they need someway to entertain themselves and a way to maintain their oppressive grip on global power—this is most obvious in an elite group whose power globally is on the wane because we’ve used most of this resource up. It is called the Oil industry, an elite industry whose power ought to have been cut off 30 years ago when we became slaves of foreign oil—but since their power persists to this very day the threat to the US has never been greater because this group of “cowboys” don’t control oil in the way they once did and thus they are doing everything they can to maintain their grip—like manufacturing false grounds for war in the Middle East. War with your blood for their wealth while they impose fascist principles of government on the American people—they reward Americans by stealing theirs home, stealing their civil rights and making dungeons to put Americans in once they’re done fighting the wars they started.
Nonetheless we are being programmed from the top (especially via the TV-tube and Hollywood) to create the mentality of indifference (indifference is not fear mongering but rather it is a kind of sleeping pill that makes the senses dull—obey me and don’t care, do as I command and don’t care. Yet it is difficult to do as “they” command because it is suicidal and undermines self esteem as well as the very towns we hold dear (in fact things are so out of control that there is no longer any “sense” to be made of it at all. It is so obviously perverted, but the power of obedience (I don’t care, just following orders) is still strong enough to enforce this insanity but there is no mind behind it hence the total irrationality of it all—it’s like the rule of Caligula—most humorously portrayed in I Claudius (It is a sort of morbid cynical humor that elicits fits of giggling and uncontrollable bursts of insane laughter until one’s mind focuses on our White House leadership and you get hit with, “Oh my God this is too close for comfort. “)
To keep the public at bay demands that it substitute “carefree” for freedom. Carefree means without a care whatsoever—or absolutely indifferent. Torture, unprovoked warfare or plain old mass murder, government sanctioned kidnapping, a global chain of secret prisons and dungeons, the status quo formula for increasing the number of home owners = nationwide bank fraud = depression, no due process, no habeas corpus, wide spread spying on the public—the end of all privacy, skyrocketing inflation, can’t pay the bills (underpaid by 20%), can’t drive the car because its too expensive, rising unemployment, etc. Bush answers these conditions of decay as Pompey Magnus did after his humiliating defeat in Greece to Julius Caesar—“All is well”, he claims before sailing to Egypt to get his throat cut… so much for being visionary.
The US has received what might amount to a lethal injection of nihilism unless the American people rise now and put these idiots called “leaders” where they belong—on permanent vacation in like say the Hotel Guantanamo with of its “humane goodies”, like water boarding therapy, no sleep therapy and other creative forms of talk therapy that might help us better know what has occurred the last eight years—and where we can honor this great leadership in a place that symbolizes their concept of justice, “World they are not in a prison but rather they’re in a therapeutic happy place, healing beneath a watery fountain of spiritual health and all is well—soon they’ll be cured.”
My thoughts on the creeping enui? You're right -- television as we know it is the drug of choice for the masses. It's replaced religion in that niche, and serves the same purpose. That is, it supplies the self-deceiving human mind with a touchstone of symbolic meaning. A picture of meaning, that endures simply because it has sucked the life out of its ideological competitors. And like all good cultural symbols, it justifies itself with circular logic, until its very existence becomes its purpose.
People will tell you that television is a "good source of information." I say the information you get from dedicated TV watching (and what other kind is there?) is an illusion -- and perversion -- of real information.
For one thing, by the time you see it, it's been through the maw, belly, and excretory organs of a vast profit-oriented machine. Whatever value WAS in the info before the machine had its way with it, it now serves the machine's purposes; not ours. Even shows that are "worth watching" (and Mad Men may be one) don't gift the viewer with any empowering perspectives, but instead seem to use thier relative merit to work the viewers' butts more firmly into the couch cushions, and their minds further into a trance that most won't even know they are in, until they wake up old one day, with the world's problems no closer to being resolved.
It's more than interesting, that the only "acceptable" avenue for political/cultural change is through the gauntlet of our (non-) representative government. The conservative/TV machine paints any attempted popular end-run (protests; popular referendums; simply speaking one's mind) as intollerable abuses of the representative principle.
Yes, I said the conservative/TV machine. TV is profit-driven -- it is allergic to anything that questions the wisdom of either profit-based worldviews, or indeed the wisdom of watching life go by from the couch. And not even your own life, but the ersatz focus-grouped lives of imaginary people with wholly imaginary problems, that are commonly resolved in an hour of touchy feely interaction of a sort we can hardly imagine, much less use as actual templates for our own interactions with people we have to work and live with.
I'm not a cable baby, and I won't be, until truly ala-cart cable is available, and I can choose the channels that come in through my walls -- there would be only about four of them, out of hundreds. So I don't know the virtues of shows like this, and don't care to. If it's a cut above the usual, I suppose that's progress; but it still would require the use of precious hours of my life, and I won't willingly sign over even a minute of that resource to a medium composed of layers of propaganda, so onion-wrapped that a viewing mind must exercise constant awareness to avoid being programmed.
I don't need TV to tell me we're in deep [deleted] as a culture,
------
This is your brain, on TV...
The mADMEN could just as easily be many of the politicians and their cronies who populate DC's Pennsylvania Ave. clone of Madison Ave. As a public interest advocate over a long career, I've been privy to (but never complicit in) this very same kind of smirky locker room banter by blowhards who have learned how to game the political system with incredible acumen. Yet, like the mADMEN, they seem never to even consider what the end goal is, or even should be, from all their manipulative genius focused on winning at all costs. That's what really struck me, and I hope living rooms throughout our metro DC area are similarly having ah-ha moments of revelation by watching this series.
Maybe mADMEN can be like MASH was...a not so thinly veiled allegory about Vietnam, with different settings nevertheless unable to mask the underlying banality of evil that lurks in those who wield power without having a soul.
When it comes to what's on TV, you've expressed my sentiments precisely.
It's my life and I'll do what I want (which won't be watching TV)
It's my mind and I'll think what I want (as long as I can avoid TV contamination)
Show me I'm wrong
Hurt me sometime
Someday I'll treat you real fine
Yep.
The 60's.
The Animals
Eric Burdon
Loved 'em.
I don't know whether your Wisdom overshadows your beautiful Talent as a writer, or if it is the other way around, but I commend you. Obviously you have a true grasp of the 'big picture', but never has it been more precisley and accurately stated. Thank you for your wonderful comment.
The rot reached new levels on college campuses when my generation –the Boomer Generation, possibly the most self-absorbed, narcissistic navel gazers in history, came into their own with an almost genetic sense of entitlement. At the same time corporations finally caught on that they could get in on the action too if they just lobbied and expanded the federal government to provide them with their share of the stolen goods too!
Stunningly, now the Left sees salvation in an expansion of the same brain-dead mindset that is killing us-namely the done-nothing junior senator from Illinois and his promise to explosively expand the rotting carcass of the federal government to new heights of confiscatory powers! He will be no improvement over the war-mongering false-conservative idiot we now have. It’s time to stop wallowing in all the self- loathing anti-capitalism (which by-the-by, provides all of the jobs and wealth in this country and the world) and recognize what ails us; an out-of-control federal behemoth that will not be improved just because we have a hip, semi-black president.
But Susan has a point....we are still fighting the same battle. Also, Peggy's character would not even have been given the pseudo chance to develop the ad, the idea would have been stolen by some young lackey and presented as his own right off the bat. As a secretary back in the day, I had to train young men who were hired as management trainees. We could train them, but not be them. However, the office hanky-panky was much less than portrayed, but then it is NYC. There was only one office romance that we ever knew about. And a lot of the secretaries were smarter than their bosses. They haven't developed that plot-line yet, although they have indicated that the senior secretaries knew the lay of the land and how to stay out of the way.