"Mad Men" -- my new favorite show
Tuesday August 26, 2008
Categories: Culture
Given how little TV I watch, being Rod Dreher's Favorite Show is like being the best ballerina in Galveston, as the saying goes. But a colleague last week suggested that I watch "Mad Men," the acclaimed dramatic series set in...
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
Recent Posts
About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
Subscribe
Archives
Blogs Worth Reading
- Front Porch Republic
- The American Conservative
- Patrick Deneen
- Conventional Folly
- The American Scene
- First Things
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Plank
- Eunomia
- Get Religion
- Postmodern Conservative
- Alex Massie
- The Corner
- Contentions
- Sharon Astyk
- Barry Ritholtz
- The Oil Drum
- Mere Comments
- First Principles (ISI)
- Brian Kaller
No post yet to put this in, but did you hear/read about the "infamous" Joe Eszterhas?
toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080823/NEWS10/808230343
Not quite. The early sixties had much more in common with the fifties than with the later sixties. What a lot of America thinks of when they think of the sixties was really from 1965/66 until 1970.
Dude, if you don't want your kids working in that kind of environment, keep them out of advertising altogether. As a 23-year veteran of advertising, I can assure you that the sexism is still alive and well.
Just last week, I was told I'm being taken off an account that I have been VERY successful with, because one of my male counterparts decided he wants it. Six years of investing in the product knowledge, industry experience and client relationships, all gone in a poof because the men at ad agencies get what they want and the women aren't supposed to complain. If we do, we have "attitude problems" and lose our jobs. If we don't, we are deemed as "not trying hard enough" and dismissed for lack of effort.
In our creative department, new management is slowly replacing all the women with younger men. Two have gone...I'll be the third because sometime around December, without that plum account I just lost to a guy, they just won't have room for me on the staff and will politely suggest I look elsewhere.
It's been this way at every agency I have worked for. Even in the 1980s, I had to wear fishnet stocking and a short elf costume while I belted out "Santa Baby" for clients.
I was a fool to go into advertising. Don't let your kids go into it. Mine won't -- they know better.
An area of the country that continues to be socially conservative in many respects is the upper Midwest. Notably, it is an area of the country where women were treated far better than their counterparts elsewhere. My mother was a bank president in a small town in rural North Dakota in 1950. I have asked her if she was ever treated badly because she was a woman. She never was.
The Scandinavians who settled that town led difficult lives. They could not afford to be prejudiced against women, because they needed them to be leaders in their society.
In the movie "Fargo," the heroine (a pregnant sheriff!) was never treated badly because of her gender. Although many considered that film to be a mockery of the region, I don't. In how many parts of the country could that character exist?
In some ways, the '60s never reached this area. People there still go to church. Divorce rates are much lower than the rest of the country. But a strong sense of decency remains. Of the Red states, North Dakota's support of Obama is surprisingly strong. Despite being overwhelmingly white, racial prejudice is not a major concern. Although the upper Midwest is hardly considered cutting edge, maybe its values could model what a post '50s and '60s culture could look like.
In 1972, my mother was told she was not being hired for some actuarial position because the interviewer had talked with the other employees in the department (all men), and they thought introducing a woman into their work environment "would change things too much." She also had a professor in college who said all the women in his class were there to meet men (a story she still laughs about -- it was a 7 am class, and these were all math majors. Not the pick of the litter, IOW.)
I spent several months in Italy in the early 90s and thought it must be there still like people describe the US in the 50s -- it is assumed that every woman wants to be hit on, at any time, and if not, there is something wrong with her.)
You have a weird notion of "collapse". How in the world did the world collapse in the 1960s?
While the clearest cultural context is the sexism and underlying rage of women that would propel the feminist movement, the show also deals with other issues that would later challenge the culture. In the first season, the question of whether to take on a Jewish client despite not being a "Jewish" ad firm and the anti-Semitic comments made towards Jews. The way the closeted gay creative director acts around his co-workers. The complete absence of African Americans.
It's a fascinating show to watch and actually reminds me a lot of "Far From Heaven," which was a beautiful take on the repression of the 1950s.
It is interesting the little things that shock us utterly that were completely normal at the time, and I REMEMBER some of these things being normal.
Smoking everywhere, including elevators, in closed cars with your kids, while pregnant, in airplanes...
Drinking EVERYWHERE. Bars in your office. Drinks before AND after meetings (and during). Drinking and driving, with kids in the car. Lack of seat belting ANYONE, or car seats. Children crawling all over the car while driving 55+ on the highway.
If anyone wants to see a good filmed document of the period, they should take a look at the film of the 1962 Billy Graham crusade in Chicago.
It is a portrait of a culture that is about to explode. The day was hot, but if you look at the crowd, virtually all the men were in long-sleeved white shirts and neckties, the women in relatively long and heavy dresses, with hat that would have fried their brains if they had any to fry.
And none of those people there, nor my family which would not have been caught dead at such thing, had any idea of the bomb that was ticking under all that. 1962 and 1963 were the last of the fifties culture. In 1964 it all fell apart.
Hey, Rod. I don't get cable, so I haven't seen "Mad Men" yet. When you are done with the episodes you missed, try renting the first season of "Buffy." I think you'd really like it, as long as you don't mind horror themes.
Sometimes a little guilt by association is all but impossible to resist.
I see the author of that review in The Nation of Mad Men is a co-editor of Social Text.
Just as many cannot think of The New Republic without the throbbing footnote "Stephen Glass", or The New York Times without "Jayson Blair" (or "Walter Duranty", &c.), I find it impossible to read "Social Text" without thinking "Sokal Hoax."
"The Sokal Affair resulted in Social Text's' editors being awarded with the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for Literature."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair
"Mad Men" gets even better and more layered as it goes; it's like a televised novel. And its critiques of capitalism, while occasionally boorish, are often finely tuned and not inconsistent with the kinds of critiques conservatives should embrace. For one, the show critiques the endless creation of media images as symbols of promise that can never deliver. Also, the show's most trenchant critiques always land at the level of character. As "Mad Men"'s brilliant title sequence reminds us each week, it's not just interested in the collapse of a society, but in the fall of (a) man.
Keep watching. It's a fascinating document, and a powerful story.
sparki: "Even in the 1980s, I had to wear fishnet stocking and a short elf costume while I belted out 'Santa Baby' for clients."
We see in the whole elf aspect a variant of the dispute over blackface and minstrelsy, actors "going native" portraying members of protected groups not their own, &c.
If sparki were able to play the short elf standing at natural height, that would be one thing. But not while on her knees.
That would be wrong.
"I was a fool to go into advertising. Don't let your kids go into it. Mine won't -- they know better."
Yiddishe Mamas, don't let your Abies grow up to be Mad Men...
Paging Donna Summer, first among equals to cut the new single, "Ad Girls":
♫ See them up at the agency by day, copyin'
Picking up on accounts of strangers
If the pitch is right you can score
If your copy's nice
But you need a good line
You ask yourself, who will buy?
Like everybody else, they laugh till they cry...
Ad girls
Talking about the Mad Girls
Mad girls
Talking about the ad girls, yea
Friday night and the client's hot
Office closed, off to prime night spot
Expense account, and he's hot to trot
Do you wanna get hired?
Now don't you ask yourself, who will buy?
Like everybody else, in the afterlife they'll fry...
New New! Hey! Improved!
Bad girls, &c. ♫
I second Alicia's recommendation of *Buffy* to Rod and recommend *Mad Men* to Alicia.
What's great about *Mad Men* over and above the excellent acting, writing, and directing is the way that the show seems to recognize the continuity between capitalist consumerism and counter cultural values.
It's often hard watching the show to tell which characters are holdovers from a "Fifties" about to end and which are harbingers of a "Sixties" about to begin, in a way that suggests -- correctly I think -- that there were as many similarities as there were differences between the two.
In both paradigms what you're dealing with are the consequences of the libertarian turn that the whole culture took after World War Two, as the immediate need for austerity and self-restraint appeared to wane.
In some ways, *Mad Men* is about the "Fifties" generation who grew up in the Great Depression and World War Two as they invent the "Sixties" week to week before our very eyes.
That this story should take place in an ad agency, at the place where art and commerce meet and merge, is a really acute bit of cultural critique, one that identifies precisely where ground-zero was for the historical changes that the show seeks to treat.
That said, there's always the chance that the show will let us down and turn out to be *American Beauty* disguised as *Upstairs, Downstairs* after all. Let's hope not though, and knock on wood.
Uh, what are "feminism's obvious excesses"?
My husband and I squirm during the portrayals of family and neighborhood life. The tension between men and women and the alcohol and smoking match our memories to a tee. When we were children in the fifties, conversations among adults were often either stilted or crude, so much posing. People were medicating constantly - pills have yet to show up in the show but they as they were ubiquitous as drinks and smokes. Women were prescribed tranquilizers as the fix for their unhappiness and amphetamines for their figures.
The young men in the agency are boys playing grown-up and Don Draper is the consummate Organization Man. Women are infantilized, both the "girls" in the secretarial pool and the wives. Women learn to game whichever system they are in at the moment - working girl or mother/wife.
This is a much more realistic portrait of the fifties than "Ozzie and Harriet," "Leave It to Beaver" or "Father Knows Best."
n some ways, *Mad Men* is about the "Fifties" generation who grew up in the Great Depression and World War Two as they invent the "Sixties" week to week before our very eyes.
That this story should take place in an ad agency, at the place where art and commerce meet and merge, is a really acute bit of cultural critique, one that identifies precisely where ground-zero was for the historical changes that the show seeks to treat.
This nails it. These are the guys who marketed the Beatles and Elvis Presley. These are the guys who marketed Haight Asbury to the rest of America. These are the guys who turned America into a consumer culture. While I'm not sure that's what Rod was referring to in his "collapse" comment, that culture is certainly different in many ways from what came before.
On NRO the other day, I read the most insightful review of "Mad Men" I've seen yet, written by Rebecca Cusey. (SPOILER ALERT: Don't read the full review if you haven't seen the whole first season. A non-spoiler excerpt is below.) Key passage:
"The characters share, however, a deep-seated sadness and dissatisfaction with life. . . . They are too sophisticated to be happy. The characters are vaguely aware that somewhere, on a farm or something, there are people who at least have a basis for their lives. But the values of self-sacrifice, faith, devotion to family, even satisfaction in hard work, are horribly corny. This they have in common with other fictional Manhattanites, such as the girls of Sex and the City. They’ve sophisticated the meaning right out of life.
"There is only the slightest glimmer of hope for the characters of Mad Men, which is the quality that makes the show so frustrating and so brilliant: With all the riches, sex, and pleasure that infuse their lives, they are trapped in a quandary as old as Solomon’s. All is vanity."
Very crunchy con, no? Great show.
Would you rather have your daughter work in that office or be unwed with two children by two different fathers? Maybe in your case, you expect your daughter to do well and don't fear the latter, feminism is great. But women who spent less than 10 years in the workforce before marrying, is the current situation really better? Not that I'm defending that workplace, only that an improvement for one part of society caused massive and perhaps greater problems elsewhere. It's easy to look back and point out where people with 50 years less experience and knowledge and laugh, but in 50 years we will be in the same place.
I like the show though, it's my favorite until the Shield starts.
Rod Dreher, Ed. Man.
Don Draper, Ad Man.
If only they hadn't taken the title "Mad Men": I'd much prefer to see a drama centred round the works and ways of, inter alia, Sergio Aragonés, Dave Berg, Dick DeBartolo, Mort Drucker, Al Feldstein, Al Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman, Don Martin, Antonio Prohías, &c.
Now those were MY kind of MAD Men!
I liked "Mad Men" at first. I don't disagree that it's well acted. It just became too ugly, disturbing and depressing for me to watch. As intriguing as the story became I didn't like the titillation factor of the show. I guess I'm in the mood for lighter entertainment than most.
Here's a quick and negative comment: I haven't seen the show since I don't watch television, but I wouldn't watch this and relive that mindset if I were paid to do so. The attitudes mentioned, and many that haven't been, lived on for years. Not something I want to revisit.
I was born in 1965 and my memories of the greater culture start around 1972 with the Nixon/McGovern election. So shows about the 50's or 60's really describe another culture which I've read about and have no direct experience. That world seems pretty alien to the 80's which was my coming of age decade.
In any event I'll suggest the show to my spouse who likes to rent DVD's. We don't have cable and generally need to rent videos to find something worth watching.
The graphics in the opening credits are so reminiscent of those photos of the people in free fall from the top of the Twin Towers. I suppose the point here that is the Madmen and their wives are also trapped with no escape except various forms of self destruction. But allegories were never my forte so maybe I'm wrong. I'm hooked on the series even though it's achingly boring.
armchair pessimist,
The opening credits to *Mad Men* don't reference 9/11, they reference the opening credits to Alfred Hitchcock's *Vertigo* (the falling man) and *North by Northwest* (the skyscraper grid pattern), which they combine in a deft and interesting way that evokes both the era and the themes that the show has in common with Hitchcock's classic run of films from the mid 1950's through the mid 1960's.
Rufus, you are a man after my own heart. A movie buff, just like me. "North by Northwest" is definitely on my personal "Top 10" list, and Alfred Hitchcock is (currently) my favorite director.
If you think the Falling Man refers to Hitchcock, you've been asleep for decades. Look at the buildings he glides by. I believe they even have vertical stripes. Hitchcock didn't invent falling, but denial is even more classic.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.