![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
May. 6th, 2015 12:43 amMad Men's gone on so long that you forget that you once knew what it was doing.
Subtlety is dangerous on television - you need to interweave it with overt purpose or it starts to look like you have none. Unlike in books active engagement can't be counted on, and what's happened before can't be flipped back to in seconds for the sort of refreshing even a glance can take in - or anyway won't be. And unlike Breaking Bad it's always been juggling quite a lot of balls. So mosaic-work can start to feel like randomness.
I don't disagree the show's gone on too long, but what do we quite mean by that? It made all those daring shifts, after all; even of location. And of course two of its themes, gradual change and being trapped in slog, both fit a glacial pace. I think every season's start was the problem: everyone vaguely dissatisfied in the same way they'd been previously and dealing with this how they always had - Peggy's grumpiness, Pete's top-blowing, Roger's drinking and gleeful firings, above all Don's affairs. The same, the same, the same. Nothing more dangerous than making your artwork's very form represent being in a rut. Has anyone gotten away with this? Maybe Beckett in his plays, but even those are a lot shorter than you remember them being. I'm not saying Mad Men has wasted itself, but it's in a similar position to Crowley's Aegypt, where you couldn't admire the whole and all the parts more but where the effort to connect them - when you're prompted to make it - takes you out of the mindset of direct, absorbed reception that gives art much of its power and satisfaction.
But what it's doing is really interesting. The basic premise was really interesting, and hasn't been departed from, since the characters haven't. The characters pretty much are the premise:
Burt is Coolidge-era capitalism. Roger is the WW2 generation. Both are responsible for unleashing consumerism while being largely immune to it, since what to do and with whom and where had always been a settled matter. The rules were either followed or broken, and the consequences for the latter were obvious and deserved little consideration. The WW2 people simultaneously had seen enough horrible shit to make them accept the arbitrariness of those rules, and assumed that since they'd been part of a Good Thing that they were Good People, leading them to a curious balance of permissive hedonism and vestigial conformity. Roger captures all of this well, including his lack of any way to justify his own contradictions - he tries not to think about it, which of course prevents him form ever thinking of anything else. I'm not sure that I associate wit with the GGs, but it's an interesting choice for him, since one theory of humor's that it papers over areas of cognitive dissonance.
Don's represents the first generation buying into a manufactured view of life - the pursuit of what's been enticingly suggested rather than insisted on by authorities uninterested in your comfort. He knows he's doing it, of course, hence the Dick Whitman identity shift, but still runs into trouble buying the very stuff he sells, which is pretty much the show's heart - doing almost any job you discover such quantities of bullshit that you'd think you'd be led to suspect everything everyone else sells. But you're not, because you're addicted to the thought of being better, different, more that's offered on all sides. Joan's his female counterpart, I think, though with the complexity that the image she's fashioned herself into is a subordinate one, hence a highly problematic way to gain power: she lands a head of the firm but he's married, marries a handsome doctor but he too was a false front (bad at doctoring) and has full power over her (domestic abuse), and similar humiliations. Don's need to seem intrinsically great as a person rather than achieving something great or merely filling a great role gets him in hot eater all over: marrying a young model gets him a superficial marriage, marrying a young actress gets him someone playing the role of what he'd want - which proves unsustainable for either party. And the affairs are about both that lack and about the need to prove that the facade is still being believed in, counterparts to his acts of dominant display at work.
The younger generation, Pete and Peggy, are just a decade ahead of the Boomers. They buy it. Pete discovers Don is a sham but finds that his ability to never question his own bullshit lends him authenticity Pete can't match. Pete assumes this means Don gets what he wants, which is of course part of what Don is trying to project. The ambivalence of always trying to get the thing supposed to make life easy but knowing it will never make life easier is heightened because of this assumption, and is behind Pete's outrage: he doesn't know that there's anything outside the set of advertised enticements to want, just that he never quite gets what he might because of his own failings. Aggression gets alternately aimed at others and himself, but it's pretty impotent either way. The balding thing is a nice touch, considering. And of course the actor nails it again and again.
Peggy is a less clean character, I think, probably because they want to have a fairly straightforward endorsement of gender equality added to the main one of entrapment by imaginary futures. She's very amusing though, or becomes it after she starts to snap at people as a way to cope with the many difficulties of being the first woman - that her skills make her necessary is her machete, but she's the first woman through so everything's jungle. She's competent and will win. One of the more obvious endings for the series, the way things have tended, is her either becoming Don's boss or starting her own firm, though they've made near enough approaches to both that they don't need to bother, and maybe won't. Is she a she-Don? Her baby secret is suggested as parallel to Don's hidden past, but it's presented as more of a horrible admission fee than a personality-defining lie. She's caught in the image of a successful woman, I guess you could say, but the show's hardly going to directly undermine that. Looking back I think I've mostly forgotten what else they've been doing with her. Is she more like a she-Pete, someone trying to be Don but finding people mostly don't allow her to? Though increasingly they do.
Sally's the Boomers, and with the telescope stuff and her various not-buying-it scenes with her parents I think we're supposed to see her as maybe a ray of hope for discovering, or rediscovering, the authentic. Which, um, historically ... well, they're still slightly to the left of X on most issues, so why trample on them.
Though of course she's also the Millennials, since the show's pretty self-conscious about being about Now as much as Then. The show's generations are the peak or origin point of types of person still with us, though I think there's some genuine investment in the idea of the Draper-era advertisers as being the great innovators. Those magazine ads. The Renaissance of the worst of the genuine arts. Gore Vidal: "The one great 20th century art form is the television commercial." One sees his point, though I imagine the late '90s and early 2000s will be seen as the creative peak of that dubious genre, but I think the show's arguing that later advertising codifies the achievements of a rawer, more need and inspiration-driven period. Which I don't really care if it's true or not, they make it plausible. And it does help with the irony they're establishing now, that the phenomenon of corporations' templating of every aspect of every day life that their efforts helped bring into being has inevitably swallowed their own business as well.
Anyway, all the little details they throw out are supposed to stick to the relevant portions of that web. And when you can remember that it exists you notice how well they're still doing it.
But where will they go? Will authenticity be found? By Don, Peggy, Sally, anyone? Was there ever any to find? The fast food scene last year was amazing for a lot of reasons, but one was its implication that life is still life, lived thus. A lot of what's new, what's promised is really helpful, freeing, promising. And we find ways to stay human within, to make human or make the human fit many of the new realities. By no means all, or maybe even often. I'm still surprised we carved a toe out of television. A surprise I should probably get over and move on, since it's only a toe. But it makes things look so easy.
Subtlety is dangerous on television - you need to interweave it with overt purpose or it starts to look like you have none. Unlike in books active engagement can't be counted on, and what's happened before can't be flipped back to in seconds for the sort of refreshing even a glance can take in - or anyway won't be. And unlike Breaking Bad it's always been juggling quite a lot of balls. So mosaic-work can start to feel like randomness.
I don't disagree the show's gone on too long, but what do we quite mean by that? It made all those daring shifts, after all; even of location. And of course two of its themes, gradual change and being trapped in slog, both fit a glacial pace. I think every season's start was the problem: everyone vaguely dissatisfied in the same way they'd been previously and dealing with this how they always had - Peggy's grumpiness, Pete's top-blowing, Roger's drinking and gleeful firings, above all Don's affairs. The same, the same, the same. Nothing more dangerous than making your artwork's very form represent being in a rut. Has anyone gotten away with this? Maybe Beckett in his plays, but even those are a lot shorter than you remember them being. I'm not saying Mad Men has wasted itself, but it's in a similar position to Crowley's Aegypt, where you couldn't admire the whole and all the parts more but where the effort to connect them - when you're prompted to make it - takes you out of the mindset of direct, absorbed reception that gives art much of its power and satisfaction.
But what it's doing is really interesting. The basic premise was really interesting, and hasn't been departed from, since the characters haven't. The characters pretty much are the premise:
Burt is Coolidge-era capitalism. Roger is the WW2 generation. Both are responsible for unleashing consumerism while being largely immune to it, since what to do and with whom and where had always been a settled matter. The rules were either followed or broken, and the consequences for the latter were obvious and deserved little consideration. The WW2 people simultaneously had seen enough horrible shit to make them accept the arbitrariness of those rules, and assumed that since they'd been part of a Good Thing that they were Good People, leading them to a curious balance of permissive hedonism and vestigial conformity. Roger captures all of this well, including his lack of any way to justify his own contradictions - he tries not to think about it, which of course prevents him form ever thinking of anything else. I'm not sure that I associate wit with the GGs, but it's an interesting choice for him, since one theory of humor's that it papers over areas of cognitive dissonance.
Don's represents the first generation buying into a manufactured view of life - the pursuit of what's been enticingly suggested rather than insisted on by authorities uninterested in your comfort. He knows he's doing it, of course, hence the Dick Whitman identity shift, but still runs into trouble buying the very stuff he sells, which is pretty much the show's heart - doing almost any job you discover such quantities of bullshit that you'd think you'd be led to suspect everything everyone else sells. But you're not, because you're addicted to the thought of being better, different, more that's offered on all sides. Joan's his female counterpart, I think, though with the complexity that the image she's fashioned herself into is a subordinate one, hence a highly problematic way to gain power: she lands a head of the firm but he's married, marries a handsome doctor but he too was a false front (bad at doctoring) and has full power over her (domestic abuse), and similar humiliations. Don's need to seem intrinsically great as a person rather than achieving something great or merely filling a great role gets him in hot eater all over: marrying a young model gets him a superficial marriage, marrying a young actress gets him someone playing the role of what he'd want - which proves unsustainable for either party. And the affairs are about both that lack and about the need to prove that the facade is still being believed in, counterparts to his acts of dominant display at work.
The younger generation, Pete and Peggy, are just a decade ahead of the Boomers. They buy it. Pete discovers Don is a sham but finds that his ability to never question his own bullshit lends him authenticity Pete can't match. Pete assumes this means Don gets what he wants, which is of course part of what Don is trying to project. The ambivalence of always trying to get the thing supposed to make life easy but knowing it will never make life easier is heightened because of this assumption, and is behind Pete's outrage: he doesn't know that there's anything outside the set of advertised enticements to want, just that he never quite gets what he might because of his own failings. Aggression gets alternately aimed at others and himself, but it's pretty impotent either way. The balding thing is a nice touch, considering. And of course the actor nails it again and again.
Peggy is a less clean character, I think, probably because they want to have a fairly straightforward endorsement of gender equality added to the main one of entrapment by imaginary futures. She's very amusing though, or becomes it after she starts to snap at people as a way to cope with the many difficulties of being the first woman - that her skills make her necessary is her machete, but she's the first woman through so everything's jungle. She's competent and will win. One of the more obvious endings for the series, the way things have tended, is her either becoming Don's boss or starting her own firm, though they've made near enough approaches to both that they don't need to bother, and maybe won't. Is she a she-Don? Her baby secret is suggested as parallel to Don's hidden past, but it's presented as more of a horrible admission fee than a personality-defining lie. She's caught in the image of a successful woman, I guess you could say, but the show's hardly going to directly undermine that. Looking back I think I've mostly forgotten what else they've been doing with her. Is she more like a she-Pete, someone trying to be Don but finding people mostly don't allow her to? Though increasingly they do.
Sally's the Boomers, and with the telescope stuff and her various not-buying-it scenes with her parents I think we're supposed to see her as maybe a ray of hope for discovering, or rediscovering, the authentic. Which, um, historically ... well, they're still slightly to the left of X on most issues, so why trample on them.
Though of course she's also the Millennials, since the show's pretty self-conscious about being about Now as much as Then. The show's generations are the peak or origin point of types of person still with us, though I think there's some genuine investment in the idea of the Draper-era advertisers as being the great innovators. Those magazine ads. The Renaissance of the worst of the genuine arts. Gore Vidal: "The one great 20th century art form is the television commercial." One sees his point, though I imagine the late '90s and early 2000s will be seen as the creative peak of that dubious genre, but I think the show's arguing that later advertising codifies the achievements of a rawer, more need and inspiration-driven period. Which I don't really care if it's true or not, they make it plausible. And it does help with the irony they're establishing now, that the phenomenon of corporations' templating of every aspect of every day life that their efforts helped bring into being has inevitably swallowed their own business as well.
Anyway, all the little details they throw out are supposed to stick to the relevant portions of that web. And when you can remember that it exists you notice how well they're still doing it.
But where will they go? Will authenticity be found? By Don, Peggy, Sally, anyone? Was there ever any to find? The fast food scene last year was amazing for a lot of reasons, but one was its implication that life is still life, lived thus. A lot of what's new, what's promised is really helpful, freeing, promising. And we find ways to stay human within, to make human or make the human fit many of the new realities. By no means all, or maybe even often. I'm still surprised we carved a toe out of television. A surprise I should probably get over and move on, since it's only a toe. But it makes things look so easy.
