Mad Men Watch: A Very Anxious Young Woman
If you didn't already know that Mad Men was created by a producer of The Sopranos, you might be able to guess it by now. Like The Sopranos, it has a gift for making its world seem utterly hellish and utterly seductive at the same time. The casual sexism and racism and the highly cultivated cynicism. The smartly dressed men and women enjoying cocktails and cigarettes. The despair! The scotch!
This show pays loving, almost fetishistic attention to small gestures of style and courtesy--a server cracking an egg into a Caesar salad bowl--and to details down to the bananas (the crew sought out smaller, and thus period-appropriate, pieces of fruit as props). An enlightened 21st-century man will feel a twinge of guilt for so enjoying the show's lavish pictures of the trappings of midcentury white-male hegemony, but damn! what good-looking hegemons they were!
Another element the show shares with The Sopranos now: therapy. But in Mad Men, understandably, it's a woman having the panic attacks. Episode 2, "Ladies' Room," was self-consciously structured around the plight of its main female characters--chased by wolves as single girls (Peggy), captive and insecure as wives (Betty), or pursuing a tenuous brand of freedom (Midge). The structure could have been a little less overt; my main complaint about the show so far is that it's too in-your-face with its themes, not just with the this-is-what-it-was-like jokes (here, the admittedly funny bit about letting the daughter play with the drycleaning bag). The plight-of-women theme was unavoidable already; on top of that, the woman weeping in the bathroom and the divorcee lugging a heavy box alone were two blows of the hammer too many.
What saves Mad Men for me is that its dialogue, mainly, isn't too obvious, and it's well-played. As quiet and acquiescing as Betty is, January Jones gives us the sense that five things are going on in her head at once; she knows that she's trapped, even if she can't quite articulate how or find the way out; she's conscious that she needs help but can't insist on seeing a shrink without further distancing Don, the source of her anxiety to begin with. (And she's more trapped than she knows, as Don ends up getting a report--"She's a very anxious young woman"--from her doctor; modern science in the service of old-fashioned paternalism.)
And what is Don hiding, anyway? Ironically, the one place where Mad Men's self-consciousness doesn't bother me is in the office scenes. Yes, Don and his writers talk overtly about the zeitgeist--but that's what ad creatives do, or at least the ones I've talked to. It's natural, for instance, that Paul would describe the aerosol can as "nothing less than space age. It's steel, it has exhaust, it's even shaped like a rocket." And Don's objection suggests some dark things going on in that head that he doesn't like to let anyone into. "Some people think of the future and it upsets them. They see a rocket and they start building bomb shelters... I don't think it's ridiculous to assume that we're looking for other planets because this one will end."
There's the big hidden period detail of Mad Men: Don is an existentialist, or at least a nihilist. Life is absurd, people give you no loyalty nor deserve any, someday the world will end and there will be nothing but an aerosol cloud in space.
In the meantime, have another old-fashioned.
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The dialogue may be subtle, but the closed captioning is a disaster. Or did people in 1960 live in fear of the bum? (Betty talking to the psychiatrist, among other examples.)
If they can't give the captioner a copy of the script, couldn't they find someone who can, you know, hear and interpret? Public shaming is in order.
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"my main complaint about the show so far is that it's too in-your-face with its themes...The plight-of-women theme was unavoidable already; on top of that, the woman weeping in the bathroom and the divorcee lugging a heavy box alone were two blows of the hammer too many."
Maybe it's "too in-your-face" for you because you haven't seen many other shows that are honest about women in this way. I thought it was effective and realistic. I have cried in a public bathroom before. I have also lugged many boxes in my apartment alone because I am single and I don't have a man to do stuff for me. I really liked this episode, and the show in general. It's easy for you as a (presumably) white male to dismiss the theme as "unavoidable." How many male bonding scenes were in this episode, this series, and in television at large? One 44-minute show examining the continued despair of women won't kill you. In fact, it will make you a better writer, Mr. Poniewozik.
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It was first a close look at the human side of the mafia and then another look at the human side of people most people do not think of as human, mad men.Willing to sell their soul to sell the product.This series if it grows like the Sopranos will be a huge winner.
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I think the ambiance of Mad Men is its real star - the cigarette smoke, the chauvinism, the exuberance are like nothing else I've ever seen on television... http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/2007/07/mad-men-2-smoke-and-television.html
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Thread hijack!
Anybody watching Shark Week on Discovery?
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@Intrepyd: I live every week like it was Shark Week.
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If people can post about Shark Week, why can't my comments be posted here?
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@Bianca: I went back, and it looks like not just one but three of your comments were not published. They should go up automatically once you hit "post," but it looks like they were picked up by the spam filter. I'll let our tech people know -- they've upped the filter's sensitivity because of the volume of spam our blogs get, but obviously they shouldn't be picking up genuine posts.
As for your original post, I think you mistake my criticism of a device (the use of some heavy-handed shots, lest we miss a point the dialogue had already made) for criticism of the theme (the situation of the women characters). As I said in my first post about Mad Men, this is something the show does in its treatment of the period's mores generally--as when it kept hinting, really heavily and over and over and over, that Sal was closeted and overcompensating. (Which it kept doing last week.)
Maybe the problem was my use of the term "unavoidable"? I didn't mean the theme would be better avoided. I meant that it was abundantly clear, without these scenes, which all but drew arrows saying, "Look! See! This is what it was like for women!"
To continue the comparison to The Sopranos (a show that paid plenty of attention to the situation of women in the mob), The Sopranos assumed that its viewers would be able to infer things from the dialogue rather than relying on these little televisual exclamation points. It's just a principle of good drama, to me--when viewers draw a conclusion for themselves, the effect is more powerful than if you hammer home the conclusion for them. It's like explaining a punchline--it ruins the joke.
Mind you, I also really like Mad Men, and I think--in general--it also trusts the viewers' intelligence. But it keeps having these moments, unlike The Sopranos, where it seems to lose faith that viewers will get it.
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Incidentally, if anyone else has been having trouble posting, let me know--I realize that's a Catch-22, but still--as I'm finding other mistakenly-spam-filtered posts stuck in Comments limbo, now that I've gone back and looked.
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Hee hee! Okay, so you made me laugh with the arrows analogy. Thank you for explaining what happened. I thought someone at TIME had read my blog and deemed me unacceptable. I guess I'll continue reading the rest of your posts now, since they seem entertaining.
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@Bianca: Seriously, though, if you're still checking this thread, let me know if you did anything different when you did the posts that got through... it might help the tech people adjust the filter. As far as I can tell, they include the same links, etc., so no idea what marked it for spam.
And believe me, if we had enough staff here that they could spend their time reading commenters' blogs for acceptibility, we'd be living in fat times here indeed.
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I posted on a different day from a different computer. That is all. I've had similar situtations occur when I, along with other blog enthusiasts, have posted comments on other blogs from different computers on different days. Sometimes they go through, sometimes they don't.
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I guess we know what Don is hiding now.
- poniewozik Loved the season. Mrs Tuned In wd have put u on the main list RT @boredtodeath Thank u for incl us in Time's Top 10. We'll take hon mention. - 4 hours ago
- poniewozik @carr2n Virgin is the best, LAX-JFK - 5 hours ago
- poniewozik Did NPR interview abt multiscreen multitasking. After, automatically reached for iPhone in pocket. Like don draper wd have for cigarettes. - 6 hours ago
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