[I try to keep
this blog pretty positive, as befitting a critical
optimist perspective, but once
a year it’s time to air some grievances. Leading up to one of my favorite crowd-sourced
posts of the year, so share your own non-favorites, please!]
On the
historical and American flaws in the acclaimed TV drama.
First, a
disclosure: I haven’t yet watched the last two seasons (the 6th and
the two-part 7th) of AMC’s
drama Mad Men. It’s quite possible
that some of the issues I’ll identify in this post were rectified in the course
of those final seasons, and as always I’d welcome your thoughts on that
question and on anything and everything else related to the show and this post
in comments! I’ll also make clear that I watched the show’s first 5 seasons
(not as they were aired, but on Netflix after the fact) because there’s a lot
that I found both enjoyable and impressive about it: the performances
(particularly Jon Hamm,
Elisabeth Moss, and the always great John Slattery); the
nuanced themes of identity and community, work and family, love and loss; the recreations of a very
specific milieu within the broader historical world of American society
across the 1960s. This was indeed a unique and significant show, and thus one
that both rewards viewing and yet at the same time demands the kinds of
critical analysis that I hope this post will provide.
For one thing, I
wrote “recreations of a very specific milieu within the broader historical
world” for a reason—although Mad Men
has often been described (as in the Time piece
hyperlinked in that spot above) as portraying the 60s in America overall, I
would argue that it did so in an incredibly limited and narrow way. The show
was set in New York City during the period of Civil Rights and Black Power, the
Immigration Act of 1965, the Chicano Rights Movement, and so many more similar
historical trends, and yet issues of race, ethnicity, and culture were nearly
invisible from its fictional world (that article does indicate that African
American characters became slightly more present in those final seasons, but
still reads them largely critically). Even worse, Season
5 opened with a NYC racial protest and the firm’s subsequent advertising
for an African American secretary, seemingly suggesting that the show was
beginning to recognize and engage with these inescapable historical issues—only
to fail to do anything else with that character or those histories and issues
for the remainder of the season. I’m not suggesting that Mad Men would have had to make race or culture a central theme
(shows can be about any number of subjects), but for a work set in NYC during
the 60s to portray such a consistently white-washed setting and world
represents at best an extremely limited historical perspective. (For the
opposite argument about race and the show, see
this article.)
So Mad Men wasn’t about those historical
themes and issues, for better or worse—but even if we focus on one of the
show’s most central subjects, the complex, layered identity
of its protagonist Don Draper, I’d say there’s a substantive critique to be
made. Don was in many ways inspired by F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby—like Fitzgerald’s character, Don grew up
impoverished with a different name (Dick Whitman) and then, in one crucial moment,
reinvented himself as a new man in order to chase the American Dreams of
privilege, wealth, and beauty. (One key difference is that Don
took the name and identity of an actual person, a Korean War officer who
was killed because of him.) But there’s a world of difference between a short
novel and a 7-season TV show, and it seems to me that Don Draper’s identity and
arc quite simply did not have enough substance to merit all those hours of
storytelling. It’s true that Jay Gatsby famously makes
the case that we can repeat the past, but we didn’t have to read hundreds
and hundreds of pages about him trying to do so again and again—while a good
bit of the latter seasons of Mad Men
featured Don making the same mistakes in pursuit of his elusive dreams. Perhaps
that was part of the show’s thematic intent, but to this viewer it made the
protagonist increasingly unlikable, and the show significantly less innovative
and compelling.
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other non-favorites you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment