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Tuesday
Oct062009

Mad Men

Yes, I'm a fan of Mad Men, and I thought I'd explain a bit why as the third season winds to a close. 

First, it's no fluke that this show has picked up a slew of awards over the past few years. It is one of the premier examples of the new golden age of television which was inaugurated by shows like the Sopranos, Six Feet Under and more recently Damages and Lost. What the writers and producers understand about these shows is that although the plot and subject matter are important, it is the characters that drive the story. Lost had a quasi sci-fi gimmick, but, as J.J. Abrams made clear in a recent TED presentation, it is the characters that make the story. Mad Men studies people during the 1960s, a time that is now historically distant enough to be as interesting as it is controversial. How did people live in those days is no longer a matter of the memory and politics of our parents, so much as a series of forgotten truths about the history of the western world. The brilliance of the show is to investigate this history at a very human level.

Second, the title, Mad Men, encapsulates one of the key features of the era it studies. This is, in brief, a study of the last hurrah for modern masculinity. The opening credits depict a man falling through skyscrapers which reflect the facade of female forms.  This is a bygone age when men ruled New York like a troupe of idiotic boys, and Mad Men offers a careful analysis of how and why feminism won the day. Of course, there are still powerful men in New York, but the statistics now conclusively paint a different picture of the gender configuration of today's postmodern Gotham. To cite just one from a recent article in the New York Times: "women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages."

Although most people today consider it a matter of pride that women have become so successful in western society today, there remains a kind of nostalgia, I think, for a world full of well dressed men in suits and fedora hats who welcomed you to their offices with an elegant glass of scotch. This nostalgia somewhat explains the recent Mad Men inspired fashions and resurgence of 1960s era cocktail parties. We celebrate feminine freedoms, and yet we miss some of the pretence of that old fashioned polity.

It is in this light that I have a theory as to why Don Draper is the hero of the show. For those who haven't seen it, Don is a genius creative director at an advertising agency. What's interesting is that Don is just as much of a misogynist man's man as any of the other men in the show. And yet, he is somehow the one who tells us the truth about the era he lives within. He is something akin to a magician who is able to immediately recognize how a product should be depicted to a public audience. One of the most poignent examples of which was when Kodak came to Don's agency to have them market a slide projector. In one of the most beautiful sales pitches of the show, Don described it as a carousel.

Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copyrighter, a Greek named Teddy… Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel. Let’s us travel the way a child travels. Round and round back home again to a place where we know we are loved. (Available on Youtube)

Don's description of technology as a glittering lure is straight off the pages of Marshall McLuhan, one of the saintly prophets of the digital age. But the reason why this scene is so powerful for its audience is becuase it describes the precise appeal of the show for us today. We watch because it offers us that chance to look at the past with more than a desire to recover memories. Rather, we watch to find solace for an ache in our social consciousness that wonders where it all went wrong. Mad men engages its audience on this emotive human level, and we watch like children hoping to be returned to a time when the pretence of politeness was more precious, when our lives weren't bubble-wrapped with health and safety laws to protect us from the boogey-man lurking around every corner.

The reason Don Draper is the hero of Mad Men is not because he is any less hypocritical or more truthful than the other characters in the show. For instance, the reason why Don thinks Roger (one of the other mad men) is a fool is not because he divorced his wife and re-married his mistress, but because he thinks that this will somehow be a more authentic life than his previous one. What Don's character tells us time and again in the show is that, just like the advertisements he creates, life's truth is mediated through facades. Don, whose very identity is a facade, knows just how important it is to respect them. And here the subtitle of the show, "Where the truth lies," should be mentioned. The puns in the names matter here. Don Draper is the literal cover/drapery for his real name Dick Whitman, the phallic white man.

Whereas everyone else in the show lives with an identity crisis which drives them to try to make their lives really real, Don clings all the more robustly to the facade of his particular life. He fights for the beautiful house, wife and two kids not because this is who he really is, but because this facade is as true as it gets. It's not that perception is reality as we might expect from an ad man. Rather, that precisely because Don has a deep seated respect for the elusiveness of reality, the facade is all the more precious to him. Somehow, fifty years on, with the pain in our nostalgic hearts, we seem to agree.

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