Lauren M. E. Goodlad - Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s

MICHAEL BRUB

YOU'RE NOT THERE

The single most annoying criticism of Mad Men is the complaint that the series is, in the words of Mark Greif, an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. Annoying, because it expresses the kind of partial truth that doesn't know how partial it is; I think of it as the kind of thing uttered by people to whom my sister-in-law refers as Know-Some-of-It-Alls. There's no point trying to deny it: when you watch the Draper children scamper around in dry-cleaning bags and tumble in seatbeltless cars; when you gasp at the casual-but-intense sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia in the office; when you snicker at Francine worrying that the arrival of a divorced woman will drive down the local property values in Ossining; or when you shudder at Betty Draper shaking the picnic blanket and leaving the Drapers' trash on the groundthere's no way not to reflect on the differences in social mores between then and now. Much of the Mad Men commentary across the length and breadth of the infinite Internets consists of such reflection. When a self-described product of early 80s schooling where littering will land you in, or around, the lowest depths of the netherworld showed up at Ask Metafilter and questioned whether people really acted that way, dozens of respondents repliedby reminding everyone what the archaic word litterbug meant and why a national campaign was Because, you know, only trash did that.

Schwarz, like Greif, claims that Mad Men directs its audience to indulge in a most unlovelybecause wholly unearnedsmugness; interestingly, this line of argument can be and has been pressed into the service of an even more elaborate smugness, as evidenced by Melissa Witkowski's Guardian essay in which Mad Men is castigated not only for its unpleasant, unearned smugness (the expected, self-congratulatory response is: Look how far we've come!) but also for making the early 1960s look worse than they really were. Witkowski thus concludes that the times, they have been a-stayin pretty much the same: By ignoring the successes and struggles of women and people of colour in advertising in the 1960s, Mad Men obscures the fact that we are not much further along than we were then. The advertising world is still largely controlled by white men (with white women making greater strides in increased presence than black men and women), and the exceptions are still ultimately outliers, if somewhat greater in number. The show's overemphasis on institutional racism and sexism thus underemphasizes institutional racism and sexismand, having read Witkowski's essay, Now We Know Better. Similarly, Greif knows perfectly well what the series wants us to think, what it directs its audience to feel:

It does at least expose what's most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged. As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan societyLook, they used to burn their witches!while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake.

Beginning with the editors' introduction, several of the contributors to this volume have refreshingly bracing responses to this school of thought. Caroline Levine points out that the shock of the banal would not work in a representation that merely distanced us from the world represented: it must offer us the play of familiarity in strangeness; thus, she writes, from episode to episode, Mad Men actually gives us very little reason to leap to the conclusion that we are now postrace and postgender, but it does give us a strong incentive to entertain the serious and radical political questions: Is change possible? And if so, how does it happen? Similarly, Jeremy Varon suggests that the very tension between official censure and illicit desire propels many of the show's richer meanings, which little concern a supposed hierarchy of eras and go way beyond vicarious thrills, and concludes,