Man Men
Bret L
>> " Mad Men, the upscale drama about an early 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency, is a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups. For Baby Boomers, it’s hard to watch Mad Men without enviously exclaiming: Our parents had it better!
Like the eleven-hour 1981 British adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel
about the elegance and indolence of post-Great War Oxford undergrads,
Mad Men’s languorous 13-hours per year pace affords viewers the time
to wallow in the visual details and manners of a more adult age than
our own.
Matthew Weiner, the 44-year-old creator of Mad Men, describes the root
of his fascination with the post-WWII/pre-Beatles New York City that
he never experienced firsthand:
Catcher in the Rye has got to be at the bottom of the entire show.
It’s the first book I ever completed reading. I read it many times. I
fantasized about living in New York. I loved the WASP-iness of it even
though it’s got these Jewish undertones to it.
When first reading J.D. Salinger’s novel in the 1970s, I was surprised
by 16-year-old Holden Caulfield’s assumption, shared by his culture in
general, that it was more fun to be old than young. In contrast, as
far back as I could remember—the historic hinge years of the later
1960s—the media had marketed the opposite message.
Mad Men’s cinematography is suitably mature, using a dolly-mounted
camera instead of the jitter-cam of today. The serial resembles a
Ralph Lauren catalog with plot twists … more plot twists than I,
personally, care to follow, but there can certainly be worse things in
a storyteller than a fecundity of invention.
The main plotline about a handsome fellow (played by Jon Hamm) who
went off to war as Dick Whitman and returns as Don Draper is
particularly old-fashioned. I suspect Weiner was inspired, ironically,
by Random Harvest, the movie Holden Caulfield grumbles through at
Radio City Music Hall, the one in which Ronald Colman gets amnesia
from being knocked on the head on the Western Front and then starts a
new life with Greer Garson under a new name.
Mad Men’s music isn’t as good as it could be if the show had a bigger
budget (rights to the Sinatra catalog and Broadway standards don’t
come cheap), but it’s easy to remember while watching that this was
the last era when more than a few of the hit songs on the radio were
composed for the over-25 demographic.
While Waugh wore his reactionary heart on his sleeve in Brideshead,
Weiner maintains plausible deniability in Mad Men by methodically
depicting how unenlightened the upper-middle class WASPs of a half
century ago were. We in the audience are scandalized to note, for
example, that even the most respectable parents in 1960 devoted more
time to socializing with other adults than to obsessively overseeing
their offspring’s next leap up the steep slope of the meritocratic
pyramid.
Moreover, many families in 1960 can afford a home on just one income.
As Betty Friedan noted, housewives are imprisoned in their suburban
homes, escaping in Mad Men only, well … any time they feel like it.
Worse, firms pay married workers more than equally productive single
ones, in violation of all the tenets of Friedan and Friedman.
Employers back then felt they had a “duty to society,” a concept with
which our advanced cultures are no longer familiar.
Even more shockingly, the employees at the Sterling Cooper ad agency
knock off work right at 5:15 PM each day. They appear to have some
weird Depression-era relic of a notion of solidarity among American
workers: that if the bosses want more work done, they should hire more
workers.
Didn’t they understand back then that cheap wages and expensive land
are what made America great?
And, in contrast to today, everybody in New York wants to move to (pre-
diverse) Los Angeles. Weiner, who grew up in LA (attending Harvard-
Westlake, the rich kid’s high school that was my school’s archrival in
debate), depicts Los Angeles in 1962 as the Paradise for the Common
Man. During the second season, rich Don goes AWOL from Madison Avenue
to see what it would be like to be poor Dick in LA. He discovers a low-
rent utopia next to the beach where blue-collar artistes exquisitely
customize cars straight out of Tom Wolfe’s famous first article.
Weiner told blogger Alan Sepinwall:
… part of the point of the 60s is the focus is going to change
from New York, and by 1972, New York is going to be a disaster. At
this point, it’s on its way down and California is on its way up. That
hot rod, read Tom Wolfe. It’s “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby.
While watching Mad Men, Weiner affords us ample opportunity to
congratulate ourselves on how much progress we’ve made. For example,
most of the black characters in Mad Men have servile jobs. Today, of
course, things are infinitely better. Black men are seldom seen in
servile jobs (unless they are African immigrants or gay). In fact,
black men aren’t seen in any jobs as much anymore: ten percent of
black men were out of the work force in Don Draper’s 1960 versus 24
percent in booming 2000. Indeed, black men aren’t even seen at all as
much anymore because a million are now locked away in prison. (The
incarceration rate of black male high school dropouts was one percent
in the Bad Old Days of Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office versus
25 percent in Bill Clinton’s glorious finale.)
The kicker to the joke is that Mad Men, despite being set in New York,
is filmed in LA, where Latinos have been imported in vast numbers to
fill the servant jobs that today’s upper-middle class whites no longer
trust blacks with. Yet Hispanics are even more invisible to the
Hollywood elite today than blacks were.
Is Mad Men a satire on the old WASP-run America? Or is it, more
daringly, a satire on the new America watching the old America?
Neither, really.
In setting and characters, Mad Men is a de-satirized, minor key riff
on the musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really
Trying. (Indeed, Robert Morse, who won a Tony in 1962 for his role as
the social-climbing young VP of Advertising in How to Succeed, plays
senior partner Bertram Cooper in Mad Men).
Weiner has the fetishistic, obsessive-compulsive observational skills
to be a great satirist, but his heart’s just not in it. He’s a
nostalgist.
Satire, from Swift onward, has been a Tory art form. In contrast,
Weiner, at least consciously, identifies with the triumph of
progressive liberalism. He is the loyal son of the kind of hard-
working, left-leaning Jewish family (his father is a prominent
neurologist, his mother a housewife and attorney) whose conventional
wisdom has come to dominate our culture so thoroughly that, at least
in his copious interviews, neither Weiner nor his interviewers appear
to notice many of the ironies of Mad Men.
As a social commentator, Weiner is on the winning side in the culture
war. Yet, as an artist, he senses a void in the brave new America.
While he may lack the vocabulary to articulate it, this longing helps
give Mad Men its romantic aura that lifts it above its own soap
operaish and soft porn tendencies.
Weiner, who has a wife and four sons, is at least aware, however, that
he finds feminism a hoax. (This same heresy added interest to the
1980s television serial about the advertising business,
thirtysomething, which was created by two otherwise liberal Jewish
family men, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz.)
Consider the interview in Variety in which Weiner is asked a standard
question: “How much of the show’s take on gender roles is rooted in
your own upbringing as someone born in 1965?” In response, he wanders
around for 867 words trying to explain, without being so lucid that
gets himself Larry Summersized, that he’s learned—the hard way—that
feminism is flapdoodle. In his strained verbiage, though, there’s one
cogent sentence that explains much of Mad Men’s appeal to contemporary
women:
“What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.” <<