newcritics

I wasn’t expecting to join in the weekly blogfest over Mad Men, mostly because with my lack of cable, I’ll be at a certain disadvantage. As it turns out, though, AMC is
making episodes pretty quickly available on iTunes, and the chance to rejoin something I was getting a pretty big kick out of turned out to be irresistible.

Mad Men has become, unfortunately, one of those “high quality” TV items where the prestige appeal overwhelms its fairly simple ambitions, and people  are spending time making a lot more of it than it is. That includes the TV Academy, which showered Season 1 with more Emmy nominations than I think was seemly (though they did give long overdue recognition to my silver-haired mancrush John Slattery).

The lavish attention, I think, has a lot to do with the extensive period detail on display in Mad Men, I think. Like a number of popular efforts these days, there’s an obsessiveness to the period details in Mad Men that simply seems like overkill. Sets scream sixties modernism, the male cast wander around with their high and tight hairdos and narrow suits like mini-Ratpackers, while the women - especially the secretarial set - mince around in cocktail sheaths and pumps as if drinks hour is just around the corner. Which of course, it always is.

Such highly stylized production design can easily subsume the actual story, and for many, I think, seeing Mad Men is seeing the design for the trees. What I’ve found is that Mad Men is an interesting, fairly cerebral exercise on the social customs and mores of our recent past… and on that level, it also delivers handsomely. Where I think it falls down is in relating its period musings to our modern day, and thus its airlessness (literally, given the heavy smoking) can seem especially stifling. It’s not what’s on display, but the challenge of figuring what it has to do with our modern life that can make Mad Men… well, maddening.

Lance Mannion suggests that the whole attention to period detail is a trick, that in fact the period detail is meant to simply seem so alien to us that we can see the storylines as more archetypal than not. I tend to agree with Tom that such a notion is a little too far out there - the fascination with the “Camelot years” and the world of Madison Avenue at the time seems too deliberate to be incidental. Though, too, I think Tom is too hard on the show (”plot starved?”): there’s a lot in Mad Men, and a lot of it is too good to ignore.

Don Draper and his cohorts embody the last gasp of High WASP-y dominance of the American culture: one of Season One’s most interesting undercurrents was the exclusion of Jews from a certain segment of upperclass working and social life, a reminder just how little progress there was by the eraly sixties (the office’s lilywhite quality is much more immediately apparent).

As Season One progressed, and characters were sketched in more fully, the sense of hidden lives became more apparent: from the deep closet case (Bryan Batt, in a role he was born for), to the secret writer, to the ambitious guy with the massive inferiority complex… and most of all Draper himself, who turned out to be constructed almost completely out of the aftermath of the Korean War, having assumed the identity of a war buddy who was killed.

It’s the sense of constructed identity, the stories we tell ourselves and tell others, and how they differ from reality that make Mad Men, and at best, make Mad Men work amazingly well.  Draper’s understanding of what appeals in advertising, what will attract a customer to make a positive purchasing decision, has everything to do with his sense of America’s archetypes, and those, in turn, are all he wants to be. The apotheosis of this is his wife Betty, literally a model of WASP perfection, a blonde Grace Kelly lookalike who knows instinctively the perfect image of suburban housewife style… but also fleetingly realizes that none of what she has is real.

As with so many of these exercises, the dawning feminism of the period informs more than I think many people see: what really gives Mad Men zip is the narrowness of women’s lives and choices, and the way the women living with such strictures deal creatively with the challenges they face about societal expectations, and the pressures coming from other women. That’s true of Betty (a prime “Feminine Mystique” type), but also Joan, the head Secretary at Sterling Cooper (the ultimate early “Cosmo Girl“), and Peggy, Don’s former secretary who has moved into the role of copywriter (Feminism’s Second Waver).

Compared to them, the men tend to blend into one sexist bore, privileged and pampered and overfed. There are individual variations - Slattery’s smooth iciness as one of the named partners and Joan’s feckless paramour is especially acid - but the men’s dilemmas have an air of similarity that make it hard, eventually, to sympathize with another tale of the WASP businessman who  just never gets fully understood. “Get over it” only begins to cover it.

And therein lies the frustration of Mad Men - in the end, what’s really going on in the series is High WASP Angst, an ancient genre of drama in which painfully unemotional people remain tightly wound and unable to connect. I happen to love the genre, partly because I am one (an easy litmus test: did you love The English Patient?); but I’ll be the first to tell you, it’s usually an exercise in frustration, partly because the acting is mostly in the silences and rarely is the emotional temperature much above “simmer.”  Mad Men’s glossy surfaces and it’s images of glace perfection - especially in Betty - work best when we can realize how artfully constructed they are to deny any admission of feeling, and when we can realize how much pain lurks beneath the smooth surfaces.

Though Season Two leaps ahead by two years, it’s hard to see how much has changed (that, in fact, may be the point of the shift) - most interesting, from the first episode, is Peggy growing into her role as a professional adwoman, Betty’s ongoing struggles with her largely made-up suburban existence, and Draper’s continuing attempts to create himself from whole cloth.

It takes exceptional writing and acting to make this work, and to be fair, Mad Men has a lot of both: Jon Hamm as Don Draper, Slattery, and Bryan Batt are all excellent, and most of the others are very good among the men; and the three main actresses, Elisabeth Moss as Peggy, January Jones as Betty and Christine Hendricks as Joan are all quite wondrous… as was Rosemarie DeWitt as Don’s free-spirited mistress, Midge. As well, the scripts are well constructed and thought out… though they have the feel of Arthur Miller scripts - Death of An Ad Man, done in one hour installments.

The fact that Mad Men feels remote and at times more than a little inaccessible (like Miller, generally) is probably unavoidable. What’s more frustrating is that Mad Men’s lavish recreations of a particular time and place have the distancing effect of saying little about how we live now. Yes, that rampantly sexist, three martini lunch lifestyle gave us much of the modern “isms” which we still struggle to undo… but whether Mad Men glories in its excesses (don’t you miss the days when people dressed a little more stylishly and seemed more inclined to hang out in a cocktail lounge?) or looks askance at them is never entirely clear. Examining the lies we tell ourselves - as individuals and as a society, through our advertising - is interesting… but that’s just who we are. Now what?

Adapted, slightly, from a crosspost at nycweboy