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The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
February 24, 2011
Issue
The Mad Men Account
Daniel Mendelsohn
Mad Men
a television series created by Matthew Weiner
Lionsgate, 4 DVDs per season: Seasons 1 and 2, $39.98 each; Season 3, $49.98;
Season 4 (to be released March 29, 2011), $49.98
Michael Yarish/AMC
Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway Harris, Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson, and Cara Buono as Faye Miller in
Mad Men
1.
Since the summer of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable station AMC, the world
it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly
suited, chain­smoking, hard­drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously
intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding
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beautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business
trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness. I’m not even referring
to the critical reception both in the US and abroad, which has been delirious: a recent and
not atypical reference in the Times of London called it “one of the…best television series
of all time,” and the show has repeatedly won the Emmy, the Golden Globe, the Screen
Actors Guild Award, the Writers Guild of America Award, and the Producers Guild of
America Award for Best Drama Series. (A number of its cast members have been
nominated in the various acting categories as well.) Rather, the way in which Mad Men
has seemingly percolated into every corner of the popular culture—the children’s show
Sesame Street has introduced a Mad Men parody, toned down, naturally, for its tender
viewers—suggests that its appeal goes far beyond what dramatic satisfactions it might
afford.
At first glance, this appeal seems to have a lot to do with the show’s much­discussed
visual style—the crisp midcentury coolness of dress and decor. The clothing retailer
Banana Republic, in partnership with the show’s creators, devised a nationwide window
display campaign evoking the show’s distinctive 1960s look, and now offers a style
guide to help consumers look more like the show’s characters. A nail polish company
now offers a Mad Men–inspired line of colors; the toy maker Mattel has released dolls
based on some of the show’s characters. Most intriguingly, to my mind, Brooks Brothers
has partnered with the series’s costume designer to produce a limited edition Mad Men
suit—which is, in turn, based on a Brooks Brothers design of the 1960s.
Many popular entertainments, of course, capitalize on their appeal by means of marketing
tie­ins, but the yearning for Mad Men style seems different from the way in which, say,
children who are hooked on the Star Wars series yearn to own Darth Vader action dolls.
The people who watch Mad Men are, after all, adults—most of them between the ages of
nineteen and forty­nine. This is to say that most of the people who are so addicted to the
show are either younger adults, to whom its world represents, perhaps, an alluring
historical fantasy of a time before the present era’s seemingly endless prohibitions
against pleasures once taken for granted (casual sex, careless eating, excessive drinking,
and incessant smoking); or younger baby boomers—people in their forties and early
fifties who remember, barely, the show’s 1960s setting, attitudes, and look. For either
audience, then, the show’s style is, essentially, symbolic: it represents fantasies, or
memories, of significant potency.
I am dwelling on the deeper, almost irrational reasons for the series’s appeal—to which I
shall return later, and to which I am not at all immune, having been a child in the 1960s—
because after watching all fifty­two episodes of Mad Men, I find little else to justify it.
We are currently living in a new golden age of television, a medium that has been
liberated by cable broadcasting to explore both fantasy and reality with greater frankness
and originality than ever before: as witness shows as different as the now­iconic crime
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dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral
textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci­fi hit Battlestar
Galactica, a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid; and the perennially
underappreciated small­town drama Friday Night Lights, which offers, among other
things, the finest representation of middle­class marriage in popular culture of which I’m
aware.
With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant
qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and
often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude
toward the past is glib and its self­positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the
acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.
Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the
show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most
part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving,
successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial
affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of
believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and
cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy,
racism, the counterculture, and so forth.
That a soap opera decked out in high­end clothes (and concepts) should have received so
much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the
willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them;
as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the
Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday. But just what
in the world of the show do we want to possess? The clothes and furniture? The wicked
behavior? The unpunished crassness? To my mind, it’s something else entirely,
something unexpected and, in a way, almost touching.
2.
Mad Men—the term, according to the show, was coined by ad men in the 1950s—centers
on the men and women who work at Sterling Cooper, a medium­sized ad agency with
dreams of getting bigger; when the action begins, in the early 1960s, the men are all
either partners or rising young executives, and the women are secretaries and office
managers. At the center of this constellation stands the drama’s antihero, Don Draper, the
firm’s brilliantly talented creative director: a man, we learn, who not only sells lies, but is
one. A flashback that comes at the end of the first season reveals that Don is, in fact, a
midwestern hick called Dick Whitman who profited from a moment of wartime confusion
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in Korea in order to start a new life. After he is wounded and a comrade—the real Don
Draper—is killed, Dick switches their dog tags: the real Don’s body goes home to Dick’s
grieving and not very nice family, while Dick reinvents himself as Don Draper. (In the
kind of cultural winking in which the show’s creators like to indulge, the small town in
which Dick Whitman’s family await his body is called “Bunbury”—the term that the male
leads in Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest use for their double lives.)
This back story, as rusty and unsubtle a device as it may be, helps establish the pervasive
theme of falseness and hypocrisy that the writers find not only in the advertising business
itself, but in the culture of the Sixties as a whole just before the advent of feminism, the
civil rights movement, and the sexual liberation of the 1970s. (In a typical bit of overkill,
the writers have made the ingenious adman the son of a prostitute.) The four seasons that
have been aired thus far trace the evolution of the larger society even as the secret that
lurks behind Don’s private life becomes a burden that’s increasingly hard to bear. Female
employees become more assertive: one secretary, Peggy Olson, who’s not as pretty as the
others, becomes a copywriter—to the dismay of the office manager, a red­headed
bombshell called Joan Holloway, who’s a decade older and can’t understand why anyone
would want to do anything but marry the boss. One of the fabulously hard­drinking
executives finally goes into AA. The firm considers the buying power of the “Negro”
market for the first time.
Meanwhile, Don wanders from career triumph to career triumph and from bed to bed, his
preternatural understanding of what motivates consumers grotesquely disproportionate to
any understanding of his own motives; and back home, his gorgeous blond wife, Betty, a
former model from the Main Line, is starting to chafe at the domestic bit. All this plays
out against some of the key historical events of the time: the Nixon–Kennedy race
(Sterling Cooper is doing PR for Nixon), the crash of American Airlines Flight 1 in March
1962 (a character’s father is aboard, triggering a crisis of conscience as to whether he
should capitalize on his family’s tragedy to help land the American Airlines account),
and, inevitably, the Kennedy assassination, which ruins the wedding of a partner’s
spoiled daughter.
As I have already mentioned, the actual stuff of Mad Men‘s action is, essentially, the stuff
of soap opera: abortions, secret pregnancies, extramarital affairs, office romances, and of
course dire family secrets; what is supposed to give it its higher cultural resonance is the
historical element. When people talk about the show, they talk (if they’re not talking
about the clothes and furniture) about the special perspective its historical setting creates
—the graphic picture that it is able to paint of the attitudes of an earlier time, attitudes
likely to make us uncomfortable or outraged today. An unwanted pregnancy, after all,
had different implications in 1960 than it does in 2011.
To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. In Mad Men,
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everyone chain­smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a
chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues,
every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It’s not that you
don’t know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist
movement; it’s just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and
crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s
wearying rather than illuminating.
Here, as with Don’s false identity and (literally) meretricious mother, Mad Men keeps
telling you what to think instead of letting you think for yourself. As I watched the first
season, the characters and their milieu were so unrelentingly repellent that I kept
wondering whether the writers had been trying, unsuccessfully, for a kind of camp—for a
tartly tongue­in­cheek send­up of Sixties attitudes. (I found myself wishing that the
creators of Glee had gotten a stab at this material.) But the creators of Mad Men are in
deadly earnest. It’s as if these forty­ and thirty­somethings can’t quite believe how bad
people were back then, and can’t resist the impulse to keep showing you.
T
his impulse might be worth indulging (briefly), but the problem with Mad Men is that
it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust
and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the
ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly
enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of
dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what
it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty
lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama
(or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even
as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me
as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s
simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us
anything of real substance about the world it depicts.
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