Mad Men revising

Libertas looks at the hit television series Mad Men and examines its revisionism of the 1960s.  It's an interesting perspective and the links are well worth following, though some of the revision of early 1960s America is less, I suspect, deliberate than the result of soap opera plots revolving around a profession that was already pretty dysfunctional to begin with.

My wife and I have recently been watching the entire series so far on DVD and I've found it both impressive and perplexing. It's impressive because the producers are obviously putting a great deal of effort into recreating New York in the 1960s, but perplexing that they're getting so much attention for doing what the BBC does half a dozen times before lunch.  There are entire antique markets that cater specifically to BBC production companies–and that's just the ones doing remakes of Pride and Prejudice.   As I've said elsewhere, the production values of the show are meticulous, the acting is often, though not always, first rate, and the direction tolerably restrained.  Where it falls down, as in most cases today, is in the writing.  It's not bad, but it isn't good.  As character studies, the episodes work very well.  It's pity that they are nearly devoid of plot.  Events happen, they go away, and I wonder why they even bothered to put them in. I often end up watching the credits and wondering what the point of any of the last hour was.  It is, in many ways, a pretty lifeless series and some of the acting often has a rout feel about it. Still, every now and again they roll out something like Don Draper's carousel speech and I'm willing to hang around a bit longer.

As to the revisionism:  Yes, the producer does have a very large axe to grind and he's admitted that he's a great admirer of the counterculture '60s.  The original idea, as we can see from the very crudely written pilot, was to set up these horribly repressed Eisenhower era types, show how ghastly they were, make us all suitably outraged, and then roll in the Summer of Love to make it all better. It worked for Chocolat and Pleasantville, so why not Mad Men?  So far I'm with David Ross and his assessment, but I differ in that I argue that by choosing the bizarre world of Madison Avenue Mad Men undermines its own argument and by, as Ross says, focusing on the adults the show makes the era attractive by showing the sophistication and maturity that modern society has lost–even if it is the pseudo-sophistication of Manhattan.  This latter is the ultimate irony because even though the producers still hang their straw men in the air, they've made their world so interesting that they've no choice but to treat it with some measure of respect.

One thing I've noticed about the show is that so many of the "outrageous" social attitudes of the time that we're supposed to shake our heads at ring so false. Not that they didn't happen, but that the consequences were in real life very different. Yes, men could be very vulgar to women, for example, but where in  Mad Men it's just part of the milieu, in the real 1960s it would have resulted in the vulgarian being quietly cornered in a broom cupboard by his fellow male coworkers and pounded in the wedding vegetables.  Much more effective than sensitivity sessions.

In the end, I suspect that the producers are in for a bit of a shock.  They may be aiming at, in Ross's words, the way in which "Baby Boomers have always justified their berserk torching of the culture", but I suspect that they will backfire and not invoke smug satisfaction at the conflagration, but a growing anger at what was lost, for all its faults, in exchange for what replaced it.