It would be fair to describe popular culture as something akin to the shared dream of a people and their times. Popular culture, when its really popular, reveals something that resonates in the psyches of such people at the same time. The German word for this would be that it captures the zeitgeist: the spirit of the time. Though we're never aware of it, this is at the heart of all successful popular culture, And that is even more so when it crosses the threshold into the category of fad.
Be that as it may, something is missing from that description. What precisely is it that allows a TV show set a full half century ago to capture the modern zeitgeist? What is the success of a program like the Mad Men TV show?
Well, I don't claim to have the credentials of social psychologist or modern anthropologist -- that one might claim necessary to provide a definitive explanation. I will share a few thughts with you, though.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
That, though, you can get from PBS. There's something else at work in the formula for success of the Mad Men TV show. Sure, the writing is great, full of deep character development and real life adult struggle; the acting is impeccable; and it is aesthetically delightful, with meticulously detailed attention to the art work in settings and costumes and the gorgeous cinematography. Yes, yes, all that is there, too. But there's still something more.
That something I've called I've called elsewhere the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm of lives lived with intention and absent cloying navel gazing. It subtle. Initially it can slip in under the radar. But it's there; the most compelling tidbit of authenticity in Mad Men's notorious inventory of 60s accuracy is the depiction of an era before the swamping of our society in the grim therapeutic ethos.
Challenges a plenty they may well have, but the characters of Mad Men won't be found whining over unfairness of life; they don't complain that daddy didn't show them any affection or mommy was heartless and cruel (though in some cases, that may well be true). They face life's roadblocks and obstacles free of our contemporary fixation on communication, introspection, finding ourselves and "working on" our emotional IQ. Mad Men reveals the last great era of Americana, before the guidance tyrants, emotion police and relationship regulators corrupted the culture.
Certainly, the social colonization of these so-called "experts" was already beginning at the time that Mad Med is set. This is gestured toward in the sub-plot of Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the local school snoops, the know-it-all therapists, talk show mental health snake oil salesmen and social engineering public policy savants, even then, were rearing their ugly heads. Mad Men though preserves for us a glimpse of an era before these self-righteous do-gooders had managed to hijack modern culture, reducing it to the current state of incipient therapeutics and runaway, claustrophobic paternalism.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. Sure, they weren't living anything like perfect lives. They had as many problems as we do. Whatever problems they did have, though, they dealt with free of today's peeping toms and patronizing nannies, poking noses into their lives.
Don Draper and Peggy Olson were the last generation who could live their lives free from having their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Their very real life problems notwithstanding, they were free in a manner peculiarly foreign to us. And we, I suspect, where conscious of it or not, can't help feeling just a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.
Be that as it may, something is missing from that description. What precisely is it that allows a TV show set a full half century ago to capture the modern zeitgeist? What is the success of a program like the Mad Men TV show?
Well, I don't claim to have the credentials of social psychologist or modern anthropologist -- that one might claim necessary to provide a definitive explanation. I will share a few thughts with you, though.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
That, though, you can get from PBS. There's something else at work in the formula for success of the Mad Men TV show. Sure, the writing is great, full of deep character development and real life adult struggle; the acting is impeccable; and it is aesthetically delightful, with meticulously detailed attention to the art work in settings and costumes and the gorgeous cinematography. Yes, yes, all that is there, too. But there's still something more.
That something I've called I've called elsewhere the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm of lives lived with intention and absent cloying navel gazing. It subtle. Initially it can slip in under the radar. But it's there; the most compelling tidbit of authenticity in Mad Men's notorious inventory of 60s accuracy is the depiction of an era before the swamping of our society in the grim therapeutic ethos.
Challenges a plenty they may well have, but the characters of Mad Men won't be found whining over unfairness of life; they don't complain that daddy didn't show them any affection or mommy was heartless and cruel (though in some cases, that may well be true). They face life's roadblocks and obstacles free of our contemporary fixation on communication, introspection, finding ourselves and "working on" our emotional IQ. Mad Men reveals the last great era of Americana, before the guidance tyrants, emotion police and relationship regulators corrupted the culture.
Certainly, the social colonization of these so-called "experts" was already beginning at the time that Mad Med is set. This is gestured toward in the sub-plot of Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the local school snoops, the know-it-all therapists, talk show mental health snake oil salesmen and social engineering public policy savants, even then, were rearing their ugly heads. Mad Men though preserves for us a glimpse of an era before these self-righteous do-gooders had managed to hijack modern culture, reducing it to the current state of incipient therapeutics and runaway, claustrophobic paternalism.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. Sure, they weren't living anything like perfect lives. They had as many problems as we do. Whatever problems they did have, though, they dealt with free of today's peeping toms and patronizing nannies, poking noses into their lives.
Don Draper and Peggy Olson were the last generation who could live their lives free from having their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Their very real life problems notwithstanding, they were free in a manner peculiarly foreign to us. And we, I suspect, where conscious of it or not, can't help feeling just a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.
About the Author:
Mickey Jhonny is lead writer at the Mad Men celebration cite, the Don Draper Haircut.
No comments:
Post a Comment