Mad Men, page 28
The Mad Age is an era of contradictions and chaos. One senses that despite the countless books, films, documentaries, TV programs, shows, and other mass media pieces written about the sixties, the era will never be fully captured or understood. Even for those who lived through the decade, their experiences only seem to capture a part of the larger portrait, as if each carries a jigsaw puzzle that might have a couple matching pieces but no real continuity. This is a burden of history that is rarely examined—people live through and experience the past on very individualized and small-group levels. It takes historians to create a record from the bits and pieces they can unearth from all those disparate lives.
History of the Mad Age and Our Own
If one digests the contemporary reviews (professional and academic), then the early returns overwhelmingly rate Mad Men as one of the most important television series ever created. As such, the show has had a role in determining how viewers interpreted the decade, which will almost certainly continue into the foreseeable future. The program, though, is only one of countless tools that a person might employ to get a better comprehension of the 1960s and its legacy.
To reveal the Mad Age, set in the recent past, the audience must rethink either what it actually experienced or what it learned about the time frame. As discussed in previous chapters, Mad Men and other forms of public scholarship raise questions about television’s role in depicting history. According to Keith Jenkins (2003), history at its essence is what remains, from documents and photographs to film and tapes, which lacks real meaning until the historian supplies a framework for interpretation. There may be a commitment to objectivity and diligent primary resource research employed, but historians certainly still bring pieces of themselves into the work either consciously or subconsciously.
Historian Alun Munslow explains that the past is “what actually happened but which is now gone” and quite different than history, “only ever its narrative representation.” Thus, Weiner and his team of writers, directors, and producers wield a deft scalpel in fashioning a grand narrative that becomes Mad Men, essentially determining “truth” or some version of it. According to Munslow, the historian plays an active role filtering through numerous personal and cultural lenses that then are reflected in the representation of the past (2002, 18–19). For Mad Men, although on the surface slavish to historical authenticity, the sexism, anti-Semitism, and cruelty within the confines of the narrative are presented in a manner that allows the audience to rebuke its characters in contrast to today’s (supposedly) higher standards. Elisabeth Moss addressed this point, saying, “We know it’s a good script when we do our table read and the heads lower, like, five times. I definitely cringe at the sexist things the guys say. The guys cringe too” (qtd. in Schwartz 2008).
As Moss’s comment indicates, we should also consider the important role the actors play in (re)creating the era. They perform a role similar to the audience by crafting an interpretation based on their own internal experiences (built through varying degrees of formal education, popular culture, and other stimuli, including the direction and input of the creative team). Whether he knew it when he earned the role as Don Draper, Jon Hamm is now a cultural artifact, a twenty-first century representation of the turbulent mid-twentieth century.
Peggy plays a significant part in Mad Men’s aesthetic vision of the decade. As Weiner has suggested, the series is not really about Draper; it is about the female leads and their transformations. From our ultra-knowing, post-postmodern perspective, we are supposed to look down at the endless misogyny Peggy faces on an episode-by-episode basis. The concurrent feeling, then, is rooting for the character and the desire for her to succeed—despite all the obstacles. The viewer’s distance from the 1960s (even the supposedly more enlightened days of the late 1960s) promotes assessment, or in the case of those who experienced similar discrimination, reassessment.
Interpreting Peggy’s travails gives critics and viewers multiple readings, including a means to deconstruct the show’s signs and symbols and compare and contrast these ideas with today’s world. For example, the viewer who prides herself on condemning the harsh sexism and other shortcomings of the mid-1960s can use the portrayal as a benchmark for looking at what women face in the twenty-first-century corporate world. The commitment to authenticity and its resulting influence on viewers is critical in creating an atmosphere in which the audience can root for often-vile characters. Comparable to motion picture cinematography, every aspect of what would normally be considered background comes alive in Mad Men. As such, careful viewers recognize nostalgia and history having a role in both creating and propelling the story.
Given the darkness inherent in so many Mad Men plots, one must surmise that the portrayal of life’s challenges is appealing. Weiner created characters that enabled pretty depressing plots to be turned into quality television. Peggy is particularly important here too. She has problems and internal demons, but as a guide to the series in general, Peggy stood out as a ray of hope amid the carnage.
At various times in the series, Peggy seemed on the edge of breaking, but in her resilience, she revealed that these weak spots are part of life. She was not a broken soul, like her mentor Don. Peggy could make poor choices and be forced to live with the results (like her secret pregnancy and child with Pete), but she also served as the link to what viewers know is on the horizon, such as improved workplace rights for women and the end of the Vietnam War. Peggy is the optimism that people carry when they look to a positive future, whereas Don and his generation flailed at the changes sweeping them into history’s dustbin.
For Mad Men, the artful aesthetics and strong narrative work together, not only connecting the intimate moments with the broader cultural and historical era, but also creating a story that seamlessly jumps between characters and lives as they unfold. Writer Todd VanDerWerff discusses the link between the 1960s and today, explaining:
In placing a remove between us and the screen, in setting this in the comfortable past, the series is able to deconstruct our own lives, to show us how the relationship between the haves and have nots, between races, and especially between the genders haven’t really changed all that much beneath our veneers of political correctness. (2013)
Weiner’s window into this specific past has purpose but is enacted subtly, enabling today’s viewer to reassess contemporary society.
The intimate flashes, sometimes seemingly unimportant, exist to provide cultural and historical context for the enormous transformations rocking the nation across the 1960s. As a result, large events, like the astronauts landing on the moon, are encapsulated in the facial expressions of characters as they witness the events in what for them would be real time. The wonder and awe of an age is reduced to a tense nod, shocked expression, or general amazement.
Mad Critics
Popular culture that endures often faces stiff criticism, particularly as time passes and specialists wrest critical control from journalists and others who often rely on quick judgments and assessments. Mad Men is no exception and, frankly, generated quite a bit of controversy and criticism across its entire run. One can imagine that writers and scholars will continue to pore over the show, searching for an elusive key to interpreting it and what it all means in analyzing its representation of the sixties and how we use it to reflect on our own era. Mad Men’s long-term critical reputation seems in many ways tied to the way commentators consider the ad business.
In the 1960s, critics debated the inherent evil that advertising represented, questioning its use of scientific methods and technology to dig deeper into the consumer’s psyche. In 1969, H. B. Shaffer reported:
Advertising grew more clever. It catered to the individual’s desire to be young, beautiful, rich, admired. Consumers learned from advertising of such previously unrecognized menaces to their health, beauty and success as halitosis, pink tooth brush, tattletale gray, and they simultaneously learned of the one product that would banish the threat to their happiness.
Shaffer’s summary of the challenges at the heart of the ad game continued to plague the industry into the contemporary era. Strains of this argument are revealed as today’s advertising insiders and critics challenge the ubiquity of Google- or Facebook-sponsored ads that employ advanced algorithms to essentially spy on the user and feed her commercial content based on information that most people would consider private.
This notion of privacy that bedevils modern users is related to American values and what is considered within the bounds of good taste. The advertising industry blew some of those ideas out of the water and continued to do so well past the Mad Age. For example, the rampant hyper-sexuality in ads from the 1970s and 1980s and commercials for erectile dysfunction pills in the 2000s and beyond demonstrated how far the business world could push cultural norms. According to writer J. M. Tyree, Mad Men reveals “an American paradox”: “The much-vaunted Emersonian characteristic of self-reliance dovetails rather nicely with the goals of big business to create a nation of isolated, vulnerable, and greedy selves who can be persuaded that buying products is a form of self-expression” (2010, 35).
The criticism against advertising, which seems to have developed alongside the industry from its earliest times, sets the tone for the approach some critics adopted to critique Mad Men. In other words, some commentators viewed the program as an overt celebration of corporate power and the advertising industry’s ubiquity. The latter brought rampant consumerism to the fore, essentially locking the nation into hyper-capitalism and its intrinsic evils. Weiner discussed this idea with NPR’s Terry Gross, explaining:
The show is about, on some level, the contemplations that we have about what we want versus, you know, what we can get. And happiness is always that gap in between there. Happiness becomes this weird invention, you know, just something that’s sought out of that other people have, and you’re like, how do they get that? (2015)
Critics bemoan the ad game’s role in creating an aura in which people should measure themselves against others based on consumer products, goods, and services. Advertisers killed whatever innocence once resided in the American Dream by making life worth based on who had the most toys.
Another common reproach Weiner faced centered on Mad Men’s depictions of vice, race, gender, gay rights, and other societal ills. For many critics, the program did not address these topics often enough or push them enough to satisfy modern sensibilities. Ironically, an offshoot of this reasoning also blossomed. For example, writer Peter Suderman censured Mad Men for serving up its characters for judgment by modern audiences. He labeled the show “passionless,” explaining, “Mad Men, though, is too timid to let its viewers in on the fun, choosing to judge its characters safely and subtly, through the lens of modernity” (2007, 54). For some critics, it seems, Mad Men either had too much or too little history or historical accuracy, as if that could be measured by anything other than an individual’s opinion.
One of the most interesting controversies surrounding Mad Men focused on whether the show’s overt wickedness in some ways gave viewers an avenue to condone the repulsive behaviors on display. For example, journalist Susannah Breslin labeled the show “man porn,” explaining that male viewers secretly watched the show to revel in Don’s decadence (qtd. in Weinman 2008). Writer Jaime J. Weinman supported the notion, saying, “Don Draper may live a lie, but if we didn’t enjoy that lie, we wouldn’t be watching” (2008, 78).
What Breslin and Weinman tap into is a notion that many people simply are not willing to contemplate—are people in contemporary society less racist, sexist, or homophobic than in the past? Perhaps at the heart of this deep-rooted angst is the idea that modern society has not only not really advanced but in many areas receded. Whether or not we secretly applaud Draper taps into the often conflicted and hidden feelings about socioeconomic and cultural challenges. It might be impossible to ever prove, yet is intriguing—like the answers one would get conducting a survey on racism or sexism in which respondents give the answer they think the interviewer desires, rather than the truth that asks them to contemplate their most complicated attributes. There is an air of snickering, “Weren’t we naughty boys?” in the comments of advertising greats interviewed about the veracity of the show, as if they get a free pass because people “back then” did not know any better.
From the beginning, Weiner realized the slippery slope Mad Men traveled, particularly in using vice as a marketing tool. Asked whether he wants viewers to like Draper, the showrunner responded: “No one wants to look in the mirror and see the warts. I’d say just wait and stick with the story and see what happens, but I hope that the source of the entertainment is not judging these people. Everyone has a reason for what they’re doing. It all comes from a human place. . . . I’m trying to talk about what it is to be a person” (qtd. in Whitney 2009).
There seems to be an interesting duality at work when one assesses Mad Men. On one hand, the show excels in representing American history as something life-altering for its characters. In essence, these are significant turning points on an intimate and societal level. As viewers, though, we already know (or assume we know) the outcomes or how events unfolded. All the handwringing over Armstrong’s moonwalk, for example, is to heighten suspense for a situation that viewers know (in reality) went successfully.
At the same time, though, Mad Men urges people to do more than watch, enjoy, laugh, cry, criticize, or the many other reactions people have to most television programming. The opportunity exists for the audience to engage with the series almost as if wearing a historian or sociologist hat. Interrogating the issues Weiner raises allows viewers to consider what the show says about the cultural, economic, or political values we value today, as well as how those topics transformed over time.
End of an Era
There is a strangely endearing moment on the audio commentary for Episode 5.6 (“Far Away Places”), which features Weiner and Hamm giving insight into the show and its characters. At several points during the commentary—each time Elisabeth Moss’s Peggy Olson walks into Draper’s office when the character is not there—Hamm jokingly barks: “Get the f#@k out of my office!”
Known far and wide for his understated humor, Hamm plays the occasion for a laugh, but on closer inspection, one senses a deep intimacy and attachment between Moss and Hamm that makes the moment possible. There would not be any angry words exchanged after Moss heard the audio, and nothing about it would end up in a tabloid. Instead, it offered an instant of real affection, even if in a mock-angry tone. This might have been the happiest f-bomb ever dropped!
In addition, Hamm’s exclamation demonstrated how intertwined Mad Men’s actors were with their parts and the show. A viewer could imagine Draper shouting an expletive at Olson, particularly if he were in a bad mood or experiencing something that forced his Draper and Whitman identities to collide. To Hamm, Moss walked into “my office,” showing his deep commitment to being Don Draper. That space—completely fabricated to look like a 1960s executive’s office—came alive to Hamm as his and not another character’s. Just like Don and Dick sometimes smash together, Hamm and Draper came together in an instant, thus merging identities, if just for a second. Life and reality blurred.
Weiner chuckled at Hamm’s outbursts, but one might wonder if he recognized the undercurrents. Past, present, fact, and fiction swirled in a flash: while the audience watches and listens, an actor who plays a person from the past both discusses the show and moves into character to comment to another actor on the show, also playing a history-based role. Like so much of Mad Men, the looping in and around itself is delightful. Yet, others question how any piece of popular history can present the past. Historian Jerome de Groot wonders about these mass media channels, particularly something like a TV series, explaining:
History is the misrecognized reflection of now seen in a glass darkly; something connected but misunderstood, a moment of trauma to be constantly returned to; the cycle that cannot be escaped or avoided; a problematic representation of an imagined past that never existed. All historical work, then, is an attempt at surmounting this or avoiding it. (2011, 275)
As historical content re-created by Weiner and the creative team, Mad Men unfolds across the lives of characters from three generations. The intimate perspective gives the audience a sense that life carries on, just as it does in reality. As viewers, we know this is not reality, but it feels authentic. Is the audience simply passive here, allowing Weiner to fill us up with a version of history of an era that people know well, or does the audience work and think to actively partake in the process?
The audience joins in the notion that what happens on screen among a group of actors imitates life. As such, Sally, the offspring of Betty and Don, reveals traits that a child might inherit from her parents. Sally mimics her mother in the way she looks and the poses she strikes, including the movement of her arms and hands when she smokes cigarettes. At the same time, Sally is quick-witted and insightful like her father, with more than a little angst around the edges. We root on the evolutionary aspects of the show as we live out our own times. The audience gets the notion that children eventually supplant their parents, grow older, have families, and continue the human cycle. History then, unfolding in forty-four-minute snapshots on television, helps us contextualize the past, present, and future by demonstrating that life’s themes and arcs contain universality across the contemporary world. Or it doesn’t.
