Selling America To Americans~ or How America Became Disney Land & Its Inhabitants Cartoon Characters, Even to Themselves

“Where the truth lies” ~America’s Troubled Relationship with Advertising & Spin ~

Your Demon has recently become captivated the new AMC TV series Mad Men, & although I’ve only managed to catch two episodes, the most recent quite by accident (not being one to internalize TV schedules, since I rarely watch), this series hooked me first with its period detail & keeps me coming back because it tantalizes me with the possibility that it could speak volumes about how we, as a country ended up this way, & the fact that we rarely notice the culture that has so decidedly shaped us.

What we live everyday is often invisible to us.

A period piece which is more or less faithful to its time, Mad Men is set in the “golden age” of American advertising, & re-creates the world of high-flying advertising execs in a fictional Madison Avenue agency circa 1960 (&, incidentally, was written by the same guy who brought us Sopranos).

We know now that, in the particular details, the era was a time capsule, not destined to last, but that’s precisely what’s fascinating about it, & why the writer chose it.

Viewers’ reactions (judging by blogs devoted to it) range from love to hate ~ the latter, as far as I can tell, because there are no explosions, gunfire, or grisly murders. (”Nothing happens!”)

Rather, it’s more of a character study, albeit confined as it is to a limited time slot, with the predictable result that many of the characters, & the series’ apparent dedication to treating them as fully-dimensional human beings, neither wholly bad nor wholly good, takes time to unfold (as in real life), but is occasionally rushed with the result that when we first meet them, they seem to be predictable archetypes & not much more.

But they have their surprises built in, as do we all. We rapidly get glimmers that all is not as it appears on the surface.

The focal point of much of the action so far is the character of Don Draper, the creative head of the agency, & his beautiful young blonde wife Betty. They personify the ideal American couple for whom everything falls into place just so ~ big beautiful home, two children, the right (meaning white & middle class) background. Betty is one of those fortunate women of whom it was said contemporaneously that she got a college education ~ her M.R.S. degree ~ & has the luxury of being a full-time homemaker & mother.

What’s not to love about that? She feels superior to her divorced female neighbor (divorce was still scandalous in her neighborhood ~ a divorced woman was a harpy & probably of questionable sexual morals out to steal other womens’ husbands, by definition) & seems predisposed to see other women’s reactions to her as nothing more than jealousy.

But she’s unhappy & having unexplained physical symptoms that are dismissed by her doctors. Rather, it must be all in her head. So she undertakes therapy.

Betty is extremely dependent emotionally on her husband, Don, but the more she expresses how much she needs him, the further he drifts away. He won’t even share information about his childhood with her (hints that Don isn’t really who he represents himself to be, & that somewhere along the line he has reinvented himself) besides the fact that he’s having at least one affair on the side ~ one purely hormonal, with a “loose” bohemian artist/illustrator named Midge, & the other of the heart (we suspect), a Jewish female ad-agency client, Rachel, who inherited & now runs a very successful Fifth Avenue department store & who resists ad men’s suggestions that she settle for clipped coupons as a means to draw in more customers. She’s going for upscale chic.

In sexual infidelity, Don is the rule rather than the exception ~ office affairs (& politics) abound ~ so there’s more than enough Peyton-place-style drama in the series so far, but it stops short of being a mindless daytime soap opera by inviting viewers as well as the characters themselves to think about it.

In all good dramas, as in life, the characters carry the seeds of their own undoing, & here it often appears in hints of the strengths in women that men of the time were all too willing to overlook & dismiss. Look closely, & all the women who are really, truly attractive are the “outside” strong ones.

Case in point, Joan, the office manager, a red-hot single woman who unabashedly wields her sexiness as her primary weapon in a world filled with dogs & wolves. She advises neophyte office girl Peggy, on her first day, to conduct an honest assessment of herself in the world by cutting two eyeholes in a paper bag, putting the bag over her head, & review honestly what she has to offer.

But while the uniformly white middle & above-class men are running things in the office & incidentally shaping the way Americans not only buy things but become persuaded to define themselves wholly in terms of what they can buy-successful capitalism is not merely consumerism, but will become far more than that, a world view & religion of sorts–the sexism, more than occasional misogyny, homophobia, racism (toward Jews) & bias toward all things white & middle class as defined by the ostensibly squeaky-clean mores of the period (which included copious amounts of non-PC behavior such as smoking, drinking, & not restraining children in seatbelts ~ how DID the human race survive, GenX &Y’ers wonder in amazement in the blogs) is only illuminated by the fact that we already know what happens next.

The American middle class dream is about to rupture & be forced to reinvent itself, as a result of pressures both within (a fragile center that cannot hold, a dream within a dream that was never real except in American ad-land), as well as without ~ previously ignored & unseen racial strife, women’s lib, student unrest & the war in Vietnam. None of which was inevitable, as I once thought, given the hollowness of what we see here, & which preceded those later tumultuous events.

Rather, today, America is still struggling to find its soul beyond the blitz of the glitz & the equally ferocious conservative backlash that tries to convince us we should go back there, to a happier, more stable, & by definition, more simplistic time.

Problem is, that time exists only in our imaginations. And the attempts to sell us what we should buy ~ & indeed, be & think ~ has only become more pervasive & difficult to resist.

I’m intrigued by the idea that the view from a retrospect can matter & teach us something about how we came to be who & where we are. That so much in our lives may have been due to conscious manipulation of mass media with the initial aim of separating us from our money (fairly transparent & therefore easy to resist & ridicule) has since morphed into something beyond that is, to me, a hopefully productive & necessary conversation in an age where politix, especially, is dominated by misinformation (formerly trusted media sources who can’t even seem to get their facts straight about the simplest details, never mind conduct a thoughtful investigation, deliberate disinformation (the histrionics of conservative TV & talk radio), & public leadership that plainly believes that there is no problem that the right (manipulative) “spin” can’t cure.

Seems that a relatively unknown politician by the name of Nixon is going to be the Mad Men’s’ next client. A really novel & bizarre idea at the time.

Introductory article from the LA Times Weekly: http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/screen/mad-mens-gray-flannel-nightmare/16789/

If you haven’t been watching, check it out on the show’s website (view clips of previous episodes, review upcoming plots, & set the producers straight on the blog if you spy a detail that isn’t “period,” other than use of IBM Selectrics, non-period telephone dial tones, & references to books that weren’t published yet): http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/

Fun blog where you can vote on what you think is going to happen to a character next. “Betty ends up in looney bin?” I voted “yes.”

http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/07/27/mad-men-ladies-room/