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.