Mad For It

As with Mark Lawson’s baffling conclusion that The Sopranos’ great legacy was linguistic (can’t find the link but it was basically: “more swearing on the box – yay!”), so this verdict on the appeal of Mad Men from a little while back also missed the mark entirely in its Last Man-ish smugness – the very idea that ‘we’, at the end of history, ‘know better’, that what Mad Men details is the work in progress that culminated in our totally liberated selves, divested of all illusions, free of all prejudice*… MM does demonstrates the foundations being laid for the age to come, but in quite a different way - not just the manner in which our desires were being shaped and exploited by capitalism, but the way in which mass media invaded our unconscious.

How much does Peggy look like a marionette here, as though Ann Margaret is performing through her?

Watching Mad Men with M. after The Wire, M didn’t like it at first – her complaint being “you don’t really know anyone.” Of course, you don’t know anyone in The Wire better than you do any of Mad Men’s characters, but the nature of The Wire’s wide-ranging, systemic analysis meant that a certain, rapid thumbnail sketching of character traits was necessary. The ‘self’ – or rather the lack of an authentic self – is Mad Men’s major subject. (Ok, The Wire’s too, in a sense, where individuals believe they’re masters of their own destiny but are prey to a larger force – Capital – working around them, through them). Don Draper’s rather Ripley-like assuming of a new identity, escaping his poor, ‘shameful’ background, has been painted as a metaphor for America, but is obviously also a dramatic representation of the ‘self’ as a construction, and one that we have far less control over than we believe.

Like Ripley, even though Don has accessed the class he aspired to belong to (not exactly through murder… although he does ‘accidentally’ send the ‘real’ Don Draper up in flames after experiencing a moment of humiliation), it hasn’t relieved him of the pressures of being, just given him new ones (like boredom). Nor has it given him as sense of wholeness (how could it?). How many Don Drapers are there? Not just the ‘real’ Don (who died) and the fake ‘Don’ who assumed his identity, but Don the husband, Don the father, Don the ad genius, Don the romantic etc which all co-exist but don’t form a coherent ‘reality’.

Mad Men is Laingian in a way (double-binds, the family nexus and so on)…

Laing on Wikipedia:

“In The Divided Self (1960), Laing contrasted the experience of the "ontologically secure" person with that of a person who "cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted" and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid "losing his self".

It’s arguable, though, that as much as Don strives to avoid losing himself, he equally puts himself into situations where he risks losing himself, where the conflict between different ‘Dons’ can no longer be smoothed over. He craves the void as much as he tries to avoid it.

Don, in a moment of ontological insecurity:


The recurring motif in Mad Men – the shot from behind an actor, usually seated – is one view of ourselves that, even with an elaborate mirror set-up, we can never have: the ‘thing’ in repose before the performance of language/self recommences. In that moment, we are Don/Betty… we know them as well as we can know ourselves. Sometimes what happens next surprises or shocks us, at others we feel as though we might know what they’re thinking…

* The point is, surely, not to just laugh or be aghast at the prejudices and conventions of the era. Mad Men functions in the way that some sci-fi does, by showing us ourselves, or people very much like us, but at a remove that allows us to see the bigger picture - it's just several years into the past rather than the future. One of the questions it poses is: what are the attitudes which seem normal to us now that, if we had just a little perspective on them, would appear naive or even horrifying?