The news came out two months ago, but I’m still not sure it has fully sunk in yet that Mad Men won’t be around for this year. So let me just think about this for a second.
There won’t be a Mad Men. For an entire year. Okay. Excuse me as I smash my head through a glass door.
Alright, I’m back.
For Mad Men fans all over the world, this is a huge collective kick in the groin; a full second half of the year without vintage suits, vintage bigotry, secretary free-for-alls, clever end-credits song choices, shocking non-sequitur plot twists, and Joan Holloway is as close to the apocalypse as it gets. In a micro, personal level, this is sad. In a more macro American sense, this must be devastating.
Nothing unites America – a country so idiotically divided between disparate ideologies that may both very well be imaginary – quite like Mad Men. Bin Laden and 9/11 are still dangerously divisive to this day. You could probably say “the Miami Heat” because they are unilaterally hated by Democrats and Republicans alike, but the hatred is not politics-based, not even close. Mad Men, on the other hand, centers around a character that both Republicans and Democrats love for reasons that are (a) different, but (b) have everything to do with their politics.
As a milieu, Mad Men’s pre-Summer of Love 60s is a powerful metaphor for America’s success, of both its spoils and its pitfalls. As a character, Don Draper is a powerful metaphor for America’s identity crisis; an identity crisis that manifests itself in an ideological war that has increased in intensity over the last two decades. Mad Men, consequently, is layered with rich subtexts unlike any other TV series in history.
When the series premiered, it was set in 1960 New York, the precipice of Pax Americana – a prosperity-filled victory lap of a decade behind them and a disruptive cultural revolution still ahead of them. Rock ‘n’ Roll was still in its infancy, yet as a country America was already in full rockstar mode. They came out of the biggest war in human history relatively unscathed, as heroes and saviors, and had all the power and affluent GI’s to show for it. The two greatest American inventions – consumerism and pop culture – were on the rise. The “Golden Age of Advertising” had begun.
We meet Don Draper: genius Creative Director of the Sterling Cooper ad agency. He is handsome, effortlessly spectacular at his job and with the ladies, he smokes every five minutes, drinks brandy in his office, and wasn’t “going to let a woman talk to me like this” during client meetings. On the surface, he is unflappable, confident, and indestructible; the era’s epitome of manly cool. But deep down he is not Don Draper; he is Dick Whitman – a wide-eyed country boy, a shamed bastard child of a prostitute, a bumbling private during the less noble Korean War, an identity thief. Whenever Dick Whitman is confronted by his less-than-grandiose Depression-era past, Don Draper is reduced into a breathless, paralyzed mess.
In essence, Don Draper is a romanticized Republican: he is an unapologetic capitalist with traditional family “values” (some men in the far right might even revel in the fact that politically-incorrect Don is almost always never wrong in early 60s American society). Dick Whitman, on the other hand, represents the white-man conscience of the liberal left; the reminder of America’s country-boy, bastard, identity-thieving past; of cotton farms, lynch mobs, and Indian Reservations.
This is one of the great triumphs of Mad Men – that this duality could co-exist in such a way that the era it depicts never gets crushed under the weight of social commentary. For one thing, the social commentary can seldom be seen in the show itself, where the anachronism of accurately-depicted 60s social mores already lends itself to obvious sneers from the contemporary TV audience. But the more crucial reason why Mad Men works for traditionalists and progressives alike is that, while the show serves as a reminder of how far we have come as a society, it also simultaneously serves as an ode to the way things were. In fact, the homage aspects of Mad Men are often so far-sweeping that it seems as if it truly misses everything about the early 60s. It’s remarkable it hasn’t been called out yet for celebrating political-incorrectness.
Creator Matt Weiner has even admitted in an interview that there is an overall “ache” of nostalgia in the tone of the entire series. While no one has proof that Weiner specifically yearns for the days when you can spend your office time drunk, playing grab-ass with your secretary, or making “Negro” jokes, I think it’s more of a general wistfulness at a nation’s innocence in the same way an adult could feel wistful about his or her ridiculously immature childhood days, years before the realities of heartbreak, parenthood, and capitalism revealed themselves. There is always something simultaneously wrong and blissful about ignorance.
Hence, Mad Men – America’s ideological junction, where Democrats scoff at a forgotten unenlightened era, and where Republicans look back wistfully at a forgotten golden era. It is also, albeit secretly, Liberal America’s guilty pleasure: where you can smirk at Betty Draper for smoking in front of her newborn baby, yet wistfully shake your head at Don for hitting on his secretary. But on this year – 2011 – America has to endure the next few months without its greatest unifying figure and will instead be continually torn at the seams by the Glenn Becks and the Keith Olbermanns of the nation, screaming from their TV screens.
There won’t be a Mad Men. For an entire year. Okay. Excuse me as I smash my head through a glass door.
Alright, I’m back.
For Mad Men fans all over the world, this is a huge collective kick in the groin; a full second half of the year without vintage suits, vintage bigotry, secretary free-for-alls, clever end-credits song choices, shocking non-sequitur plot twists, and Joan Holloway is as close to the apocalypse as it gets. In a micro, personal level, this is sad. In a more macro American sense, this must be devastating.
Nothing unites America – a country so idiotically divided between disparate ideologies that may both very well be imaginary – quite like Mad Men. Bin Laden and 9/11 are still dangerously divisive to this day. You could probably say “the Miami Heat” because they are unilaterally hated by Democrats and Republicans alike, but the hatred is not politics-based, not even close. Mad Men, on the other hand, centers around a character that both Republicans and Democrats love for reasons that are (a) different, but (b) have everything to do with their politics.
As a milieu, Mad Men’s pre-Summer of Love 60s is a powerful metaphor for America’s success, of both its spoils and its pitfalls. As a character, Don Draper is a powerful metaphor for America’s identity crisis; an identity crisis that manifests itself in an ideological war that has increased in intensity over the last two decades. Mad Men, consequently, is layered with rich subtexts unlike any other TV series in history.
When the series premiered, it was set in 1960 New York, the precipice of Pax Americana – a prosperity-filled victory lap of a decade behind them and a disruptive cultural revolution still ahead of them. Rock ‘n’ Roll was still in its infancy, yet as a country America was already in full rockstar mode. They came out of the biggest war in human history relatively unscathed, as heroes and saviors, and had all the power and affluent GI’s to show for it. The two greatest American inventions – consumerism and pop culture – were on the rise. The “Golden Age of Advertising” had begun.
We meet Don Draper: genius Creative Director of the Sterling Cooper ad agency. He is handsome, effortlessly spectacular at his job and with the ladies, he smokes every five minutes, drinks brandy in his office, and wasn’t “going to let a woman talk to me like this” during client meetings. On the surface, he is unflappable, confident, and indestructible; the era’s epitome of manly cool. But deep down he is not Don Draper; he is Dick Whitman – a wide-eyed country boy, a shamed bastard child of a prostitute, a bumbling private during the less noble Korean War, an identity thief. Whenever Dick Whitman is confronted by his less-than-grandiose Depression-era past, Don Draper is reduced into a breathless, paralyzed mess.
In essence, Don Draper is a romanticized Republican: he is an unapologetic capitalist with traditional family “values” (some men in the far right might even revel in the fact that politically-incorrect Don is almost always never wrong in early 60s American society). Dick Whitman, on the other hand, represents the white-man conscience of the liberal left; the reminder of America’s country-boy, bastard, identity-thieving past; of cotton farms, lynch mobs, and Indian Reservations.
This is one of the great triumphs of Mad Men – that this duality could co-exist in such a way that the era it depicts never gets crushed under the weight of social commentary. For one thing, the social commentary can seldom be seen in the show itself, where the anachronism of accurately-depicted 60s social mores already lends itself to obvious sneers from the contemporary TV audience. But the more crucial reason why Mad Men works for traditionalists and progressives alike is that, while the show serves as a reminder of how far we have come as a society, it also simultaneously serves as an ode to the way things were. In fact, the homage aspects of Mad Men are often so far-sweeping that it seems as if it truly misses everything about the early 60s. It’s remarkable it hasn’t been called out yet for celebrating political-incorrectness.
Creator Matt Weiner has even admitted in an interview that there is an overall “ache” of nostalgia in the tone of the entire series. While no one has proof that Weiner specifically yearns for the days when you can spend your office time drunk, playing grab-ass with your secretary, or making “Negro” jokes, I think it’s more of a general wistfulness at a nation’s innocence in the same way an adult could feel wistful about his or her ridiculously immature childhood days, years before the realities of heartbreak, parenthood, and capitalism revealed themselves. There is always something simultaneously wrong and blissful about ignorance.
Hence, Mad Men – America’s ideological junction, where Democrats scoff at a forgotten unenlightened era, and where Republicans look back wistfully at a forgotten golden era. It is also, albeit secretly, Liberal America’s guilty pleasure: where you can smirk at Betty Draper for smoking in front of her newborn baby, yet wistfully shake your head at Don for hitting on his secretary. But on this year – 2011 – America has to endure the next few months without its greatest unifying figure and will instead be continually torn at the seams by the Glenn Becks and the Keith Olbermanns of the nation, screaming from their TV screens.
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