Mad Men and Politics

Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America

Lilly J. Goren, Linda Beail, Lilly J. Goren, Linda Beail

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781501306358
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501306365
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Television
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Mad Men, using the historical backdrop of the many events that came to demarcate the 1960s, has presented a beautifully-styled rendering of this tumultuous decade, while teasing out a number of themes that resonate throughout the show and connect to the contemporary discourses that dominate today's political landscape. The chapters of this book analyze the most important dimensions explored on the show, including issues around gender, race, prejudice, the family, generational change, the social movements of the 1960s, our understanding of America's place in the world, and the idea of work in the post-war period.

Mad Men and Politics provides the reader with an understanding not only of the topics and issues that can be easily grasped while watching, but also contemplates our historical perspective of the 1960s as we consider it through the telescope of our current condition.

Part One

The American Century

1

Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of America

Linda Beail and Lilly J. Goren

Nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place we ache to go again.

Don Draper, pitching an ad for the carousel slide projector to Kodak, in The Wheel (1.13)

Since its premiere in 2007, Mad Men has been designated as one of the great television dramas of all time, winning four best drama Emmy awards, among many other accolades. It has been hailed as ushering in a new “golden age” of television and credited with creating one of the great new breed of “anti-heroes” of contemporary broadcasting in Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm.1 Its aesthetic of mid-century modern cool has inspired fashion lines, interior design, and other stage and television shows mining the 1960s for drama and comedy. The show has been recapped, tweeted, and written about by fans and cultural critics alike, who weekly dissect its visual allusions and dialog like forensic detectives, looking for clues to its hidden meanings with as much care as any literary scholar, while swooning over the fashion.

Yet Mad Men is an important political text for reasons that include, but reach beyond, its significant impact on popular culture. The show has much to tell us about American identity, not only in the 1960s—a period of major change and importance in American social and political life—but in our own twenty-first-century milieu. In depicting a post-war America defining itself as a political and economic superpower, while struggling with its inequalities of race, gender, and class, Mad Men offers viewers a way to explore contemporary facets of American identity through the lens of the recent past. Our nostalgia for the 1960s fuels the show’s appeal. This is a time just far enough away to have acquired a romanticized gloss of history. Yearning for a past that never was, we can watch Mad Men to immerse ourselves in that “uncomplicated” and glamorous era. Gender roles were separate and clear, African Americans were nearly invisible in the corporate world, and ice clinked seductively in a crystal glass as the secretary poured whiskey for her boss. Yet simultaneously, the show undoes the fiction of the 1960s as cool perfection before the tumult of the decade hits; its characters are lost and unhappy, adulterous, and alcoholic with no idea how to relate to their children or find contentment; they lose jobs, companies, and even take their own lives. Creator Matt Weiner describes the show as “science fiction”—but in the past.

Just as science fiction often uses a future world to say things about the present you can’t say directly (it’s both figuratively and literally ahead of its time), his show uses the overtly sexist and racist atmosphere of a 1960 New York advertising office to talk about issues that persist today but that we are too “polite” to talk about openly.2

Never a documentary, Mad Men instead tells stories set in the 1960s that appeal to those who never actually lived through or remember that era, stories that illuminate our continuing political dilemmas of freedom, identity, inclusion, consumption, and authenticity.

Weiner noted that the script, when he wrote it, reflected some of his own ennui at the time. He explained that he had a lovely family, a good job, but he felt “really unhappy, dissatisfied, and wondered what was wrong with me … I had a complete lack of gratitude for what I had.”3 He has also explained that the idealized Madison Avenue advertising executives of the 1960s were his heroes, given their excessive lifestyle and general disregard for authority.4 Weiner went on to write for a number of other shows—most particularly The Sopranos—before finally getting the go-ahead from AMC to produce Mad Men. Weiner’s particular creation in Mad Men, Don Draper/Dick Whitman, has become a touchstone within the canon of television “anti-heroes.” This canon, demarcated by the late James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, through Don Draper, includes Bryan Cranston’s Walter White on Breaking Bad (also on AMC), Michael Chiklis on The Shield, Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer on 24, and characters on Deadwood, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. It can be traced all the way back to the earlier 1990s and the dueling police procedurals Homicide: Life on the Streets (1993–7) and NYPD Blue (1993–2005).

One of the central themes of Mad Men is the contradiction between appearance and reality. Don Draper, we quickly discover, is not who he seems; in the pilot episode, he is seen in his Manhattan office and with a lover in Greenwich Village, but in a surprising twist in the last moments of the episode we discover he has a wife and children in suburban Ossining. Later we learn he isn’t even Don Draper; his real name is Dick Whitman. Draper is the identity he stole from an officer killed in the Korean War. While everyone around him wants to be suave, successful Don Draper, this is merely a role Don himself plays. As viewers gradually learn his actual life history, we see what a self-created man he is, seizing opportunities to leave his unhappy, rural upbringing behind and cheerfully, desperately conning Roger Sterling into hiring him at the advertising agency. Yet the counterfeit becomes the reality. When Pete Campbell, a jealous account executive, discovers Don’s true identity, he threatens to reveal it and destroy Don. Importantly, Don maintains his cool bravado, and boss Bert Cooper dismisses Pete’s melodramatic allegations in an instant: “Who cares who he really is?” As long as Don is creative and charismatic, wooing clients with perceptive pitches, Cooper is happy enough to count the profits. Don’s excellence in creating the illusion of Don Draper has created the reality of Don Draper—he is who he says he is, because the money and motives of those around him accept and desire that reality.

This preoccupation in American politics with style versus substance, appearance versus reality—the concern that political ads “sell” us a candidate with a false smile or lies, for example—is a theme that is explored throughout the entire series of Mad Men, and in the essays in this volume. What is real in politics? Who and what can we trust? Is it all shiny surfaces and lies? Beyond simply the interplay of reality and appearance, surface and what lies beneath, the show examines the very American notion of self-creation. As a nation, we have created the myths of our young history. Our iconic heroes—from Huck Finn to Jay Gatsby—light out for the territory and reinvent who they are. It’s a supremely American mythos, one that Don Draper fits into in interesting ways.

Don Draper is a self-invented creation, one who “refounds” himself. We see him live a life of quiet desperation, terrified of vulnerability in his personal and professional relationships. This fear of vulnerability may also be a feature of American political identity—to quote Ronald Reagan, the belief that we can only achieve peace through (overwhelming and intimidating) strength. There is no room for weakness or vulnerability. We see the personal costs of this belief for Don, and through his experience can examine the political costs to our national identity of this mythos. Other characters in Mad Men, such as Peggy Olson, represent a challenge to the old ideas. Peggy, as “the new girl” in episode one and the first female copywriter who climbs far up the ranks at Sterling Cooper, embodies other possible elements of this social and political evolution: the immigrant experience, blue-collar social mobility, feminist change, progress.

As Machiavelli reminds us, republics require founding myths. The 1950s and 1960s are a key period in modern American history. Post-World War II economic prosperity, the rise of the middle class (thanks to the GI Bill, Veterans Administration loans for home mortgages, and federal funding of interstate highways that made suburbanization possible), and the emergence of the Cold War create the modern American identity. The nation is “refounded” in this period as a super power, both militarily and economically—this new America is one that strides across the globe, not one that stays home, inside her borders. Our notions of social mobility and “the American dream” are shaped by this era in ways that resonate into the present: culturally we still refer back to 1950s television sitcoms as a sort of baseline for “traditional” family life (though 1950s family patterns were actually more “blip” than baseline, as the Baby Boom and low divorce rates represented were not the norm for most in the preceding half of the twentieth century). Even as the 1950s created a more prosperous, anti-Communist and imperial America, this refounding was challenged by the social and political events of the 1960s. The sixties are characterized as the end of American innocence: the sexual revolution, race riots, Vietnam, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy are evidence of the turmoil bubbling up from underneath the placid and powerful post-war American landscape. This decade—in which the entire arc of Mad Men unfolds—is important because of the way these changes contribute to the refounding myths of the United States, myths that are more inclusive and democratic, yet more violent and disruptive as well. This political refounding is still being contested in contemporary politics. The issues raised still confound us: free love, the Pill and sexual equality, or traditional morality and femininity? A post-racial society that is color-blind, or blind to continued racism? A country of increased social mobility, or increasing income inequality? White male privilege was undermined by the civil rights and women’s movements, but these were not traditional or complete revolutions with clear-cut victors. The social mores and political power threatened by these changes remain contested. We are still fighting over contraception, equal pay, the causes of poverty, and the systemic racism of re-segregated schools and the prison–industrial complex.

The nostalgia evoked by the show raises questions about the politics of popular and fictional uses of the past. We need to pay attention to the strategies used in representing this era, and to the responses that the narrative makes possible. With its matter-of-fact portrayal of 1960s sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism, the show shocks contemporary viewers with the chasm between what was normalized then and what we expect now. However, there is a political critique to be made that it allows us to feel superior to “the bad old days” (when bosses not only routinely expected to sleep with their secretaries and refused to hire Jews, but mothers also let children play with plastic dry-cleaning bags over their heads, women smoked and drank through pregnancies, and families casually left all their trash on the roadside after a family picnic). The temptation is to pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve progressed—without recognizing the potential indictment of our own continued, convoluted experiences with sexism, racism, domination, and privilege. Additionally, there is a political irony to the way that Mad Men works on one level to indict the white male class privilege of the 1960s, revealing its ugly flaws, while letting its viewers vicariously revel in the pre-revolution aesthetic style, glamour, and even clarity of roles. Is there something politically appealing, not only in the Herman Miller chairs or Sally’s go-go boots, but in the ways that women and people of color knew where they belonged—and stayed in their place? Can we have equality but keep Joan’s swaying hips, or the three-Martini lunch? Are we more attracted to the allure of this “dangerous” past than disgusted by its injustices? As Katie Roiphe opined wistfully in the New York Times:

The phenomenal success of the show relies at least in part on the thrill of casual vice … Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the 7-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon? … Can these messy lives tell us something? Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Part 1 The American Century
• 1 Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of America Linda Beail and Lilly J. Goren
• 2 If You Don’t Like What They Are Saying, Change the Conversation: The Grifter, Don Draper, and the Iconic American Hero Lilly J. Goren
• 3 The Power Elite and Semi-Sovereign Selfhood in Post-War America Loren Goldman
• 4 Cash or Credit? Sex and the Pursuit of Happiness Laurie Naranch
• Part 2 Business and Identity
• 5 Appearances, Social Norms, and Life in Modern America: Nationalism and Patriotism in Mad Men Lawrence Heyman
• 6 Going Groovy or Nostalgic: Mad Men and Advertising, Business, and Social Movements Kate Edenborg
• Part 3 Those Seen and Not Seen, Heard and Not Heard
• 7 Masculinity and its Discontents: Myth, Memory, and the Future on Mad Men Denise Witzig
• 8 “You Can’t Be a Man. So Don’t Even Try”: Femininity and Feminism in Mad Men Natalie Fuehrer Taylor
• 9 Invisible Men: The Politics and Presence of Racial and Ethnic “Others” in Mad Men Linda Beail
• Part 4 Conclusion
• 10 Tomorrowland: Contemporary Visions, Past Indiscretions Rebecca Colton Josephson
• Appendix I: Products of Mad Men
• Appendix II: Mad Men Episode Listings
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright