Aug 19, 2009
Mad Men: It’s Pretty Clear Why We’re Here. You Want To Know How Our Generation Feels.
This essay is part of “Point-Hyperpoint: Mad Men,” a rollicking series of posts devoted to discussing AMC’s drama series. Spoilers abound. To read the entire series, please visit this page. To see all of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” discussions, please click here.
I have a friend who watches Mad Men even more religiously than we do, and I can remember talking with him in the middle of the second season. We were admiring everything – the depth of storytelling, the steadily more celestial visual style that seemed like a highly-evolved film aesthetic from a world where the ’70s never happened and Hitchcock never died. We came around to discussing the serene coolness of the workplace at Sterling-Cooper – how, putting aside the morning cocktails and the institutional sexism and the complete lack of any ethnicity more exotic than second-generation Italian-American, there was something almost pornographically pleasing about a world where social etiquette and old notions of hard work hadn’t been completely deconstructed.
This conversation took place right as my friend was working at a start-up and I was working at a small independent company, so this may have just been corporate-envy, but I would argue it’s a central part of Mad Men’s appeal that our protagonists — who make jokes about how their tomboy daughters are “little lesbians” and can’t stand to ride in the same elevator as a black janitor — have an eerily admirable amount of respect for things we didn’t know we were missing. Like the scene in the Season 2 premiere where Don is in an elevator with a lady and two crude young men, and Don, disgusted by the sexual nature of the men’s discussion, tells one man to take his hat off. Then Don takes the man’s hat off for him.
Of course, this scene is morally ridiculous if you consider that Don is a regular adulterer – if you consider that the crimes perpetrated against his wife far outweigh any amount of mental damage a woman could suffer from overhearing a few dirty jokes. But the morality of Mad Men is more complex than our own morality. One of the running meta-jokes about the show is that Mad Men is set in the 1960s, but it doesn’t feel anything like the 60s of our collective cultural imagination. Social, political, and cultural revolutions and counter-revolutions are taking place in Mad Men America, but they’re far offscreen. Rock and Roll, drugs, free love, hippiedom and its discontents are all still a few years in the future, but what’s interesting is that Matthew Weiner seems to indicate that, functionally, everything that made the late 60s so iconic was already present in people’s lives long before. Only hidden, behind walls of identity, lurking within hotel rooms. (PS, Let’s hear it for service personnel in 1963! Two traveling well-to-do businessmen are just a ripe airline stewardess and a comely bellhop away from a night to remember!)
The list is too long, but let’s just focus on the most cliche cliche: the notion of “The System” as some huge, inhuman, capitalist-fascist-bourgeois conspiracy ruining the world. I don’t think that Don Draper would dispute the fact that the world is incredibly unfair, that rich people screw over poor people, that the government was in Vietnam for terrible reasons, and that working in the corporate world and putting on a suit every day makes you a cog in the great wheel of the capitalist system. In fact, I think he realizes all of this, and more besides — that, having literally turned himself into a new human being, he lives every day with the pure insanity of a mock existence, having passed a name that doesn’t belong to him onto first his wife and then his own children, the grand-spawn of a dead prostitute and two generations of adulterous fathers.
In essence, what I think Weiner is arguing, or at least partially explaining, is a vision of the world before the 60s that portrays the whole rise of the counterculture as a kind of genetic aberration, as if a whole generation of human beings was born without a some essential limb that took millions of years to evolve. I don’t really think that any part of the show has been weak, but the parts that seemed to fit in least were the bits last season with Kurt and Smitty, two new copywriters who represented the Youth movement. (It would have been an easy metaphor if they weren’t hired within the show for that exact purpose – to serve at Sterling Cooper as the Token Young Guys, like some early form of affirmative action.)
Smitty continues: “Your generation wants to talk about that newly designed can or the premium beans. But we don’t want to be told what we should do or how we should act. We just want to be.”
This scene, and the pitch to Martinson’s Coffee that follows, is one of those eerily perfect Mad Men scenes where realism seem to blend with mythic metaphor. You’re aware, the second time around, that what you’re seeing the simultaneous creation and selling-out of an entire generation. The Port Huron statement was either the beginning of the 60s or the beginning of the white-person version of the 60s, and Mad Men is saying that the spirit of the 60s was already being marketed before it had even begun. Not with iPhone advertisements that brag about diversity and individuality, not with rock music that was utterly divorced from any social meaning – the corruption of the 60s began at the beginning.
But, at the same time, Kurt’s openness is antithetical to the show’s atmosphere. What my very perceptive friend noticed about season 2 was that things were beginning, in tiny ways, to become dangerously familiar to our iconic vision of the 1960s. The way that Smitty says “Dig it,” the way he adds “Man” onto the end of sentences like a fuck-you affectation, the frequency with which he uses the word “generation” — this is all right out of everything from Easy Rider to Forrest Gump, and it weirdly feels more primitive and less modern than everything else in the show.
I know that you don’t think much of the running Dick Whitman subplots, but I think that, as the show progresses along with history further into the 1960s, it’s going to become even more important. Because Mad Men is, at a certain level, a show about secret identities, and although some identities are more secret than others (as you point out, it’s much worse to be a homosexual than to be a boy from a farm, whoreson or not), those secrets are valued in the Mad Men universe.
Or at least they’re valued by Don, who seems to only tell the truth to people who don’t know him at all. Notice how he developed another secret identity last night, and how easily he took another man’s name when it was offered. Notice, also, how he could only tell his true birthday to an airline stewardess, literally a human being whose entire job is going in and out of people’s lives and whole regions of existence four or five shifts a week. (Do the Drapers even celebrate Don’s birthday? Did he just pick a day to celebrate it, like how we all agree that Jesus was born on December 25?)
There’s a real danger in Mad Men, then, one that makes every passing episode now feel even more important. At what point do we reach the tipping point, when all secrets are revealed? Does it fundamentally change Sal’s character now that he’s no longer an understatedly repressed homosexual – now that we’ve seen him act, however inconsequentially, on desires he can’t even describe? When will the Mad Men 60s become the American 60s, and what will the show look like, then? What would Mad Men look like in another forty years?
