Another Bitchin' Analysis of Mad Men

This was an article written by Lilly Slaydon and I for last December's issue of thesommonvoice.net. They misspelled Lilly's name and credited my half to Devin Goodwin, Lilly's boyfriend and another former writer for the commonvoice.net. Lilly and I recently left the country and don't really how the publication is holding up. Neither does Devin.

The sixties generation were once the young radicals who fought for change. Now they’re the powerful yuppies who control the media, and most likely your parents. They and their decade were marked by a kind of earnestness that our generation completely skipped over. We grew up on satire, political commentary & humor, and saw a lot of truth (see: truthiness) that our parents were never exposed to at our age, because the people who owned the media back then were from a very different time.

With all our freedom of information though, there came a kind of disillusionment. No generation before us ever had to deal with the existential stress and pressure of growing up with iPods, the Internet, and George W. Bush. We yearn for days long before we were ever born, because the post-millenium age appears unexciting, bland, and low-carb.

We were bored and overexposed, stuck flipping channels, wanting something more, something else, something with sharp clean lines, to sweep us off our feet and out of our twittering, texting, super-HD, pausable, re-playable, Appleä iPresent. We needed some re-illusionment. That is, until a man in a suit came to our televisions screens and gave us back our future. Don Draper.

There has never been anything like Mad Men. The show, which documents the personal and professional lives of 1960’s ad men of the Madison Avenue agency Sterling Cooper, was the first original production by AMC. Now, this basic cable channel, which used to show nothing but old movies, is an Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning TV institution. It all started with Don Draper. We get to appreciate the essential American ideal of inspired enterprise in the success of a show all about the elusive “American Dream.” How perfect is that?

There are many reasons for the show’s explosive artistic and cultural success. First of all, it perfectly captures the feeling of the Space-Age, future-is-now early 1960’s, which for those of us who never lived through them was only ever really communicated by things like Disneyworld and episodes of the Jetsons. With Mad Men, though, it’s different. It’s not a relic of the time- it’s a modern projection, a little shot of 1962, straight to the veins of 2009.

The visual aspects of the show—costume, set design, hair and makeup, etc-- are unparalleled on TV. Mad Men as a whole is far more cinematic than anything else you’ll catch on prime time. Its photography and actual direction sometimes rival the best work of Kubrick and Hitchcock.

TV shows usually move so fast that audiences can only catch what characters are saying, without having time to really enjoy the subtleties of a scene. But Mad Men isn’t a usual TV show. It gives itself room to breathe, and settle, and come alive. As an audience, we can really dig our teeth into each scene, break down the visual cues as we watch. No one ever stared deeply into Matthew Perry’s eyes when he cut someone down to size on Friends, but when Don Draper does it, you can’t help but soak up all you can.

This leads us to the most significant and human element of Mad Men-- the utterly perfect intertwining of form and function, style and substance on the show. Don Draper doesn’t just say the ultimate Man phrases (or, more often, meaningful silences)- he always looks the part. No male figure has influenced fashion as much as Don Draper since Eddie Vedder, and kids were already wearing those clothes anyway.

The interwoven form and function that Mad Men employs so well is a reflection of how people behave. Its combination of truly honest human content and beautiful people, sets, costumes, etc. reflects the combination of one’s true personality and that face we put on for the rest of the world. The marriage of Don and Betty might not last for the entire run of the show, but that marriage of style and substance sure will.

The effect of this balance on the show reflects an even more delicate balance of the two within ourselves. In sociology, there is the concept of ‘I’ vs. ‘me’- there’s the ‘I’, the pure ideological self, which has goals, ambitions, and powerful driving emotions. Then there’s the ‘me’, which is the face we put on for society. In Mad Men, the struggle between the two and the ambiguity of the line that separates them are reflected to some degree in all the characters on the show, but most distinctly in Pete Campbell.

Pete is an interesting character to watch, because his ‘I’ and his ‘me’ have bled together to make him, ultimately, the biggest victim on the show: never genuine, always striving, and perpetually unsatisfied. Yes, the show comments on the struggles of women and “coloreds,” but their struggles are visceral and concrete while Pete’s are internal and ambiguous. Failure to find happiness is the real Bad Wolf for most of the characters on the show: Joan, Roger, Betty, Don…everybody. But especially Pete.
Pete’s ambition and sliminess have come together to characterize the essential post-modern man, a man with free-floating drive, anger, and persistence. He has a transient grasp on what he thinks he deserves because he wants to be successful, but society also expects it from him, so he is never sure who he is trying to please. Pete comes from very old money (eg: his tennis shorts) and he is childish and immature, although surprisingly perceptive and good at his job. Pete is constantly trying to please the clients and his bosses and assert his importance to himself and his close ones, often far more than is necessary. There is no character on TV quite as complex as Pete Campbell.

If Pete represents the child that we are, smart-assed and determined, then Don represents the adult we strive to be. I know when I watch Don handle a delicate situation with seeming ease and calculation, I am extremely jealous. There are so many situations in my life where I wished I had said more, said less, or said differently. Don knows the exact right amount of words to use, and the exact right moment to use them in order to exercise optimum control. Don thinking on his feet is smarter and more fleshed-out than most people’s grounded thinking.

Of course, the things Don does aren’t always right. In fact they are often incredibly, incredibly wrong. He is never any more successful in finding happiness than anyone else. Merely idealizing Don and his time don’t give us that re-illusionment our generation so greatly desires. If anything, you’d think the show’s uber-revisionism would only make us feel worse. That would be true, if Mad Men wasn’t just as inspiring as it is disillusioning.

For every ethical “what” question the show raises, with the philandering and back-handedness, it seems to answer an ethical “how” with the character’s response to what they are doing. For example, in the Season 1 episode “Ladies Room”, there’s a scene of Don and Roger discussing the emerging popularity of psychiatry, and their comments reflect the old-school idea of psychoanalysis as a taboo. Roger calls psychiatry “this year’s candy-pink stove.” Don talks about an Army shrink who was a “real gossip.” Then Roger says something striking. “I am very comfortable with my mind. Thoughts clean and unclean, loving and… the opposite of that.”
I don’t appreciate why Roger said that, but I appreciate that he did, and how he did. He says it with supreme confidence- like a man, your grandfather’s idea of a man. I have repeated myself Roger’s phrase on many an occasions when I am faced with the issue of my own wandering mind, and I am filled with a similar confidence. I have placed aside what is unsettling about the whole scene, harvesting the parts I think will help me out, and I act. When I deal with a situation in Don Draper’s style, but with my own substance, I can’t even begin to explain how satisfying it is.

The women on Mad Men, however, are far more trapped by their failure to find happiness. Like your grandfather’s idea of a woman, they’re stuck looking for it in their perpetually unsatisfied men. Don’s wife Betty Draper, for example, is trapped by her pretty delicacy, her empty marriage, and the things she has been taught to want. When she finally discovers the many secrets her husband has been keeping from her and confronts him about it, we long to see her finally taking action to satisfy her anger and improve her life. But all she does is leave Don for another suited stranger; She’s stuck.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When the women of Mad Men use their situation to their own advantage, it creates a different kind of power- take Joan. In everything she does, Joan is efficient and discreet, knowing when to use, or be used by, the men she works for. In the 3rd season episode “My Old Kentucky Home,” Joan’s husband Greg is having a dinner party for his colleagues at the hospital. The conversation starts to turn, and from the comments of the other doctors and their wives, Joan begins to realize Greg is a clumsy and accident-prone surgeon, and that he most likely won’t get past his residency. Drowning, Greg desperately asks her to play accordion for the guests.
It’s such an overt distraction that it seems impossible it could work- but it does. She plays and sings a cute little song in French, presenting a façade of allure and charm that completely distracts the guests- but when we get in closer, and look at her eyes, we see that she is silently communicating to Greg: Don’t think I don’t know what this is. I’m saving you.
Through her feminine talents, Joan is able to keep the people around her in the places she needs them to be- the doctors are charmed, the wives adore her, and Greg knows exactly who saved him from disgrace.

We learn from Betty’s hopelessness, and Joan’s forced submission to her failure of a husband, and we’re thankful for the things 2009 has given us. But we also learn from their cleverness, their efficiency, the scheming and subtlety they put into steering the men around them in order to get the things they want. In short, we learn from their classic femininity. They remind us that women aren’t supposed to be men- we’re different, and it’s the ways in which we are different that make us to indispensable to one another.

Mad Men is a show about the sixties, sure, but in a lot of ways it isn’t really about the sixties at all. It’s about us- looking at ourselves through the ways we want to view the sixties. There is a kind of thrill to watching our protagonists pause during a serious conversation to smoke in an elevator while hitting on a nearby secretary. And that isn’t about them- it’s about us, and what we’re naturally far too modern to want.

That’s why the 50’s/60’s style is so popular lately. Not just because of how incredibly good John Hamm, Christina Hendricks, and January Jones look wearing it, but also because we want to recreate the ambition, confidence, and classic beauty of that time, without all the corruption and social inequalities. That may not be possible, but we’ll keep trying.

And if the world doesn’t move both stylistically backward and substantially forward, as our generation seems to want it to, then there is still one huge thing Mad Men has re-illusioned us about: television. Since it started three summers ago, Mad Men has changed the broadcast market in a lot of ways. Shows are not as overtly cynical and now play on a more episodic template than the harsh reality of serialized shows from earlier this decade. Shows like Community, 30 Rock, Venture Bros., etc. use a format more recognizable from things like the Dick Van Dyke Show and The Honeymooners than anything to come out of the early ‘00’s, using an old style to put a new spin on a changing medium.

I’ve heard people say that life feels like a movie, but it actually is more like a TV show. The stories we face in ‘real life’ are merely circumstantial, and people rarely ever change, just like TV characters. People stay the same, more or less. TV characters grow along with the audience and are a part of our lives. Life moves around in chaos, essentially out of our control, but ‘essentially’ doesn’t mean all the time. Humans do brief wonderful things, but often by accident, and with prolonged distressing problems in between. Mad Men’s characters are the most honest characters on television because of their disingenuous nature. They’re insecure and they lack confidence—so they fake it, because that’s simply What People Do, and sometimes that cover of false confidence is all they need to create real strength.
This can be rare, however, and it’s mostly up to chance. Like life. Or like the last episode of the season, when Pete finally has Don at his mercy in his living room and squeezes an earnest extended compliment from him.

So take a lesson from Mad Men. Say what you mean with conviction and style. But do it the 2009 way- don’t let yourself get trapped in an unhappy pretense. And don’t try to smoke in the elevator.

My Old Kentucky Home

The Minnesota Timberwolves fucked up a deal to draft some 18-year-old basketball prodigy from Spain because the little piece-of-crap already had a contract with some team in Barcelona. I don’t really give a crap what happens to this kid, but the last sentence of the article read that his potential NBA career, as he’ll once again be a free agent when let go by this Spanish league team, “remains in the future.” This phrasing seems a bit ominous as this young talented hoopster is likely going to have money thrown at him constantly, but that phrase stuck with me. Just the phrase. Remains in the future. What if “remains” was the plural noun instead of a potential verb? Remains in the future. I imagine something seeming like Incan or Mayan ruins but is actually our remains, skyscrapers and such, like the ending to Planet of the Apes. It raises the question of what will destroy us.
And then I think about the most recent episode of Mad Men. These characters are entering a brave new world, and, as the old one crumbles around them, who knows if they’ll be able to handle it. If this last episode, entitled “My Old Kentucky Home,” answers this question in any way, it seems the characters are going to be singing to get through it. This episode put a lot of interesting things on the table, and I think it is the best episode of the show so far. I will explain both.
Matt Weiner had been taking cues from Hitchcock for a lot of the show so far, not just visually (Betty is clearly channeling Kim Novak and Tippi Hedron at times), but emotionally. Alfred was the master of directed tension and the cinematic red herring. The storyline involving Sally stealing money from her Alzhiemer’s-ridden grandfather, Gene, was all directed tension. You wondered whether Gene would ever figure out if Sally stole his $5 and, more importantly, you were scared he would do something dangerous to her if he did find out. Mad Men has edged into some freaky psychological ground with introducing a character that is medically proven to grow more delirious over time. Is this what they were going for with the title?
And, focusing on Sally’s act alone, this is by far the most ethically questionable thing a child has done on the show so far. Will the growing tide of angry youth in this changing world be reflected in the Draper children? I hope so and think so. This episode has broken a lot of walls, and I think these kids are going to do a lot more important things in episodes to come. By the end it’s entire run, we might have a bra-burning, teenage Sally Draper. Whoa.
Then there’s the musical numbers. Spectacular. I really hope it was John Slattery signing. He just spun a new twine into that wonderful web of a man, Roger Sterling. And the Pete and Trudy dance sequence, well, that speaks for itself. I honestly expected Paul Kinsey to sing nine times by now, but I like that it’s here, when he gets high.
Joan, who has already taken womanhood and sexiness to more dimensions than any other character ever, enters two more, as a housewife and singer/musician. And her scene facing off with Jane in the office was too perfect. It had the perfect amount of words. It was paced exactly right. The camera angles made too much sense. Joan’s facial expression said 100% who she was and what she was doing. It’s like Matt Weiner had that scene in this head for years and made this entire show just for that one scene. Christina Hendricks is going to shine this season.
Of course, there’s the fantastic pot plot, signaling and official beginning to 60’s grooviness. Don tried pot with Midge and her beatnik friends in Season 1, but he didn’t like it. Like society, it wasn’t really ready. But that was three years ago. Things are changing, and when you gather Paul Kinsey, who was alluded to have smoked grass at his party in Season 2, and new, young copyrighters, Smitty and Peggy Olson, into an office alone of the weekends, they’ll be getting stoned.
Peggy is young and she enjoys it. Don is old and does not. The parallel comparisons of Don and Peggy are numerously strong, but their reactions to smoking grass are very different. Don has an awful Korea flashback while Peggy is on cloud 9. She leaves the room, after a light bulb turns on above her head for the rum ads, and says, “I’m in a really good place right now.” She gives that epic monologue to her new secretary about being fearless. It reveals a lot about Peggy’s ambition and her state of mind. That’s one of the best-written monologues that’s ever appeared on this whole goddamned show.
I thought the best scene in the episode was the scene between Don and that old bartender, where they exchanged stories of growing up poor. It was very revealing of Don’s past and his humanity. Don has a respect for the working class that some of his more bourgeois don’t really share and you see it here. You also you what is probably the first instance on the show where Don realizes he’s the personification of the American Dream. It can be seen when he breaks eye contact briefly with the bartender.
Additionally, the scene begins with the Man Move of Don hopping over the bar and making himself and the old man a couple cocktails, which the barkeep compliments highly at the end of the scene.
Finally, there’s the old school movie ending with a kiss. Perfect. To remedy the first mention of their separation last year, he grabs Betty and plants a smacker on her. I love it. Ultimate Man Move. EPIC.