As a rule, popular culture can be described as a kind common dream that says something about times in which we live. It resonate in the minds of many of us simultaneously. To borrow a lofty German term, it captures the zeitgeist - the spirit of the time. This is always true of popular culture, especially when it reaches the status of genuine fad. In the parlance of the time, when it goes viral.
For all that, the particulars are missing in this explanation. How in fact do we explain the specific popularity of a TV set a half century earlier than the zeitgeist that it captures, as in the case of the Mad Men TV show? This is another matter.
Well, I don't claim to have the credentials of social psychologist or modern anthropologist -- that one might claim necessary to provide a definitive explanation. I will share a few thughts with you, though.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
That, though, you can get from PBS. There's something else at work in the formula for success of the Mad Men TV show. Sure, the writing is great, full of deep character development and real life adult struggle; the acting is impeccable; and it is aesthetically delightful, with meticulously detailed attention to the art work in settings and costumes and the gorgeous cinematography. Yes, yes, all that is there, too. But there's still something more.
There's still that something called, on this blog, the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm, the glamour, the charisma of lives lived with intention and absent cloying introspection. It's so subtle at first that it easily slips by your cultural radar. But it's there; the most compelling accuracy in Mad Men's great arsenal of period authenticity is the depiction of a time before the inundating of our society with a therapeutic ethos.
However great may be their daily challenges, the characters of Mad Men are not found whining over the unfairness of life; they don't wallow in self pity that father show them affection or that mother was bitter and cruel (though that may have been precisely so in some cases). They confront the obstacles of life unfettered by the present-day obsessions with communicating, expressiveness, finding ourselves and hand-wringing over one's emotional IQ. Mad Men offers us a window upon that last time in American life when our sense of self had not been corrupted by professional navel gazers: before the feelings tyrants, thought police and relationship regulators captured the culture.
Yes, it's true, this colonization of the culture by the "experts" was already beginning at this time, as hinted at with the story line around Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the prying school counselors, the know-it-all therapists, talk show emotional snake oil salesmen and big brother policy makers, even at this time, were rearing their ugly heads. But Mad Men shows a time before these sanctimonious do-gooders had succeeded in hijacking our society and reducing it to the current state of therapeutic culture and rampant, suffocating paternalistic political correctness.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. No one would say their life was perfect, that's not the point. The problems they did have, though, they dealt with on their own terms, free from the peeping toms and patronizing nannies poking noses into their lives. They didn't make their choices constantly inundated with judgments and accusations about the legitimacy of their feelings, ridiculing their choices and regulating their hopes and desires.
Don Draper and Peggy Olson were the last generation who could live their lives free from having their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Their very real life problems notwithstanding, they were free in a manner peculiarly foreign to us. And we, I suspect, where conscious of it or not, can't help feeling just a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.
For all that, the particulars are missing in this explanation. How in fact do we explain the specific popularity of a TV set a half century earlier than the zeitgeist that it captures, as in the case of the Mad Men TV show? This is another matter.
Well, I don't claim to have the credentials of social psychologist or modern anthropologist -- that one might claim necessary to provide a definitive explanation. I will share a few thughts with you, though.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
That, though, you can get from PBS. There's something else at work in the formula for success of the Mad Men TV show. Sure, the writing is great, full of deep character development and real life adult struggle; the acting is impeccable; and it is aesthetically delightful, with meticulously detailed attention to the art work in settings and costumes and the gorgeous cinematography. Yes, yes, all that is there, too. But there's still something more.
There's still that something called, on this blog, the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm, the glamour, the charisma of lives lived with intention and absent cloying introspection. It's so subtle at first that it easily slips by your cultural radar. But it's there; the most compelling accuracy in Mad Men's great arsenal of period authenticity is the depiction of a time before the inundating of our society with a therapeutic ethos.
However great may be their daily challenges, the characters of Mad Men are not found whining over the unfairness of life; they don't wallow in self pity that father show them affection or that mother was bitter and cruel (though that may have been precisely so in some cases). They confront the obstacles of life unfettered by the present-day obsessions with communicating, expressiveness, finding ourselves and hand-wringing over one's emotional IQ. Mad Men offers us a window upon that last time in American life when our sense of self had not been corrupted by professional navel gazers: before the feelings tyrants, thought police and relationship regulators captured the culture.
Yes, it's true, this colonization of the culture by the "experts" was already beginning at this time, as hinted at with the story line around Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the prying school counselors, the know-it-all therapists, talk show emotional snake oil salesmen and big brother policy makers, even at this time, were rearing their ugly heads. But Mad Men shows a time before these sanctimonious do-gooders had succeeded in hijacking our society and reducing it to the current state of therapeutic culture and rampant, suffocating paternalistic political correctness.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. No one would say their life was perfect, that's not the point. The problems they did have, though, they dealt with on their own terms, free from the peeping toms and patronizing nannies poking noses into their lives. They didn't make their choices constantly inundated with judgments and accusations about the legitimacy of their feelings, ridiculing their choices and regulating their hopes and desires.
Don Draper and Peggy Olson were the last generation who could live their lives free from having their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Their very real life problems notwithstanding, they were free in a manner peculiarly foreign to us. And we, I suspect, where conscious of it or not, can't help feeling just a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.
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