“Mad Men” has a curious status in our household. We came to it a couple of seasons late, as we do most things, after an even more belated binge on “The Wire” (five seasons squashed into five weeks, between last year’s political conventions and Obama’s big night). On the heels of that riveting panorama of corruption, cruelty, and struggle across classes and races in Baltimore, “Mad Men” seemed a little shallow by comparison: John O’Hara right after Dickens.
It’s gorgeous to look at—I don’t remember the early sixties being so stylish, but for me those years were mostly about applesauce and toilet training—with every cigarette, cocktail, pillbox hat, necktie, and telephone not just a triumph of attention to period detail but a fetishization of the objects themselves. This perfect surface is utterly seductive, and so it made me suspicious (my aesthetics tend toward the puritanical), as did the immobility of the Drapers’ faces and emotional lives, and the clumsy flashbacks, and the spurious premise of an altered identity, which tried to stand in for the main character’s lack of depth. After, and sometimes during, each episode, we would lob irritated questions back and forth: “So what?” “Is the character hollow, or the actor, or the material—and how would we know?” “Why doesn’t she go out and get laid for God’s sake?”
And yet—we watched every episode of the first two seasons on Netflix, and then recorded every episode of the third season while we were in Berlin, and scarfed down all of them in about a week after our return, and last night, when we thought for a moment that we’d missed the season finale, which would have been the first episode we actually watched along with the regular viewing audience, there was some real consternation before we realized our mistake. So the question is obvious: what’s so interesting about this annoying show?
“Mad Men” (and I’m about to channel thoughts that mainly originated with the other person in the living room) has a particular fascination for the generation that came after Don and Betty Draper and Pete and Trudy and Peggy and Joan and Ken and Paul, and the generation after that. Beneath the mesmerizing retro sheen lies the inversion of manners and morals: everything forbidden us is permitted to, even encouraged of, these men and women—smoking and drinking to excess, office sex up to and including blatant harassment, parental neglect, a kind of frank selfishness about ends and means. No one has to smoke outside the building like a furtive criminal, no one has to pretend to like his colleagues, adultery is a perk for men on the level of an expense-account Martini dinner. Relations between the sexes are openly exploitative, with only Peggy trying to make her way in a man’s world and paying a high price (among other things, she’s more single-minded and cut-throat about work than the men). Meanwhile, they go to self-destructive lengths to conceal what we accept and even advertise: childhood poverty, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. “Mad Men” is all about repression—every character has a tell-tale tic, and stiffness reigns over every scene—but it’s also about the license to indulge impulses that would soon be socially forbidden. Who wouldn’t like just once to leave their picnic garbage right where they finished eating it?
It’s not hard to understand why men might be drawn vicariously to the upside-down moral order of “Mad Men,” but what about the show’s legions of female viewers? The one I know best maintains that “Mad Men” presents a world that’s alien enough to be interesting as anthropology—not as remote as, say, a thirties screwball comedy, but headed in that direction—and yet not entirely so. It’s still close enough to us, or we to it, that there’s a certain familiar pain beneath the viewing pleasure. Peggy would no longer have to be such an oddball, but her dilemmas and agonies would hardly be unfamiliar to an ambitious professional woman today. The sexual politics of the office might be submerged beneath a host of written and unwritten codes, but the dangerous temptation to mix work and play for pleasure and advancement has hardly died. Many marriages are still structured so that one spouse—more likely the woman—has to live out her ambitions through the other (the unhappy premise of Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Road,” set a few years before “Mad Men” and recently made into an excellent movie).
“Mad Men” shows the last years of a social order in which middle-class American men were little kings—slimy, anxiety-ridden, petulant, lifeless, but kings nonetheless. It’s all about to come undone—Peggy is the harbinger of the change—and soon give way to an age of confusion and improvisation, which is the age we still live in. Watching “Mad Men” might be what it was like for Americans of an earlier age, around the time of Lincoln, to see an eighteenth-century European costume drama: this is what the world looked like just before the old order fell. The roles were rigid and constricting, but they had the advantage of being roles, ready-made for men and women to put on and live in. You didn’t have to spend your energy inventing a way through the bewildering maze of unfamiliar social relations. It is no longer our world, and a good thing, too—but beneath the makeup and hair, the costumes and masks, this period piece still means us.
(Photograph: Carin Baer)
