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  Mad Men

  The Cultural History of Television

  Series Editors: Bob Batchelor, M. Keith Booker, Kathleen M. Turner

  Mad Men: A Cultural History, by M. Keith Booker and Bob Batchelor

  Mad Men

  A Cultural History

  M. Keith Booker

  Bob Batchelor

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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  Copyright © 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Booker, M. Keith, author. | Batchelor, Bob, author.

  Title: Mad Men : a cultural history / M. Keith Booker and Bob Batchelor.

  Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. | Series: The cultural history of television | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015039815| ISBN 9781442261457 (hardback : alk. paper) |

  ISBN 9781442261464 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mad men (Television program)

  Classification: LCC PN1992.77.M226 B66 2016 | DDC 791.45/72—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039815

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For you-know-who. You know why.

  —Keith

  To my parents, Jon and Linda Bowen, for all your love and support.

  To Suzette, for everything and more.

  And to Kassandra Dylan, as always, the center of my life!

  —Bob

  Acknowledgments

  I feel fortunate to have a fantastic group of mentors and friends who I can turn to when writing a book becomes tough and needs discussion to fight through the difficulties. My deepest thanks go to Keith Booker, my coauthor on this Mad Men journey. Keith has long been an inspiration to me and countless other scholars. Our collaboration has helped me grow tremendously as a writer and thinker.

  Others have provided so much more than I could include here: Phillip Sipiora, Don Greiner, Gary Hoppenstand, and Lawrence Mazzeno. Thank you for being wonderful role models and guides. Many friends offered cheer along the way, including Chris Burtch, Larry Leslie, Kelli Burns, Thomas Heinrich, Gene Sasso, Bill Sledzik, Josef Benson, Ashley Donnelly, Jesse Kavadlo, Sarah McFarland Taylor, Heather and Rich Walter and family, and Tom and Kristine Brown. I have been lucky to have many fantastic mentors, whom I would like to thank: Lawrence S. Kaplan, James A. Kehl, Sydney Snyder, Richard Immerman, Peter Magnani, and Anne Beirne. I benefit from a secret team of like-minded scholars: Brendan Riley, Brian Cogan, Kathleen Turner, Norma and Brent Jones, and Leigh Edwards! I would also like to thank my new Miami University colleagues.

  This book launches the Rowman & Littlefield Cultural History of Television book series that I edit, along with Keith and Kathleen. We have a great lineup of books ahead that will explore and assess the role of television programming on American cultural history. Thanks to Stephen Ryan, our senior editor atRowman & Littlefield, for promoting and helping get the series launched. Stephen’s constant support and friendship have been crucial. Thanks to the creative team at Rowman & Littlefield for their work on this book, especially the design team that created the outstanding cover.

  My family is incredibly supportive considering what writing books means for one’s time and energy. Thanks to my parents, Jon and Linda Bowen, for everything they do to make our lives infinitely better. Finally, Kassie is my inspiration, hope, and joy no matter what. I am blessed to have such a wonderful daughter!

  —Bob Batchelor

  Introduction: A Mad Age

  Don Draper, c. 1962. AMC/Photofest ©AMC

  When Mad Men premiered on the AMC cable channel on July 19, 2007, it had already been seven years since series creator and showrunner Matthew Weiner wrote the initial script for the pilot. In the meantime, though, that script had garnered the attention of Sopranos creator and showrunner David Chase, leading Chase to hire Weiner as a writer for that show. The Sopranos not only gave Weiner an opportunity to develop his writing skills (previously he had been a writer for the Ted Danson sitcom Becker and some other minor television shows), but also helped to change the landscape of American television, ushering in the “quality television” revolution and helping cable television to gain an unprecedented prominence as a venue for that revolution.

  Mad Men would become a key element of that revolution, eclipsing even The Sopranos in terms of awards and recognition, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in each of its first four seasons. (The Sopranos won only two Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Drama, though it does have the distinction of having been nominated in the Outstanding Drama Series category every year that it was eligible and having been the first cable series to win the award.) Fame tends to be fleeting in the world of television, of course, and whether Mad Men will challenge The Sopranos in terms of its ongoing critical reputation remains to be seen. In any case, Mad Men, which ran for seven seasons spanning nearly eight years (AMC broadcast the finale on May 17, 2015), stands as one of the most talked-about and written-about series of its time and seems likely to be remembered as an important part of American cultural history long after most of its contemporaries have been mostly forgotten.

  Mad Men and the 1960s in American

  Cultural History

  First and foremost, Mad Men drew both popular and critical attention for its vivid evocation of the 1960s, one of the most important decades in American cultural history. From the Kennedy-Nixon electoral campaign of 1960, to the Kennedy assassination of 1963, to the Chicago police riots of 1968, to the Apollo 11 moon landing of July 1969, well-remembered events of the 1960s provide vivid background to the experiences of Don Draper, Peggy Olson, Joan Holloway Harris, Roger Sterling, and the other characters of Mad Men, who collectively represent one of the most interesting groups to have appeared on American television since the crew of the starship Enterprise in the 1966–1969 airing of the original Star Trek (which, of course, also features in Mad Men). Mad Men engages in an extensive dialogue with the history of the 1960s, and the events of the series are keyed to contemporary events in their larger world to an extent that has seldom been rivaled in American television. Indeed, the events of Mad Men are so carefully synched with events in their contemporary context that the date on which the events of the series occur can almost always be located with considerable precision. However, even more important than its evocation of specific events is the general way in which Mad Men, which begins in 1960 and ends in 1970, clearly wants to argue that this period was a crucial turning point not only in the history of American advertising (the ostensible topic of the series) but in American history in general.

  The essays in part III of this volume deal specifically with Mad Men’s engagement with history—and, in particular, with the ways the series addresses our ways of remembering and talking about history. Chapter 8 deals
with the topic of nostalgia—and, of course, with the use of nostalgia as a weapon in the arsenal of advertisers. Chapter 9 contains a discussion of the role of the oppositional political and cultural movements of the 1960s in the series, including a discussion of the difficulties of Draper (who moves into his forties in the course of the series) in coming to terms with these movements, while chapter 10 looks at the imaginative role played by California in the series, a role that is closely related to Mad Men’s exploration of the American dream.

  The most vivid historical memories of the 1960s, of course, have to do with the eruption of political activism that marked the decade: the women’s movement, civil rights movement, and antiwar movement all sprang up in parallel during the decade, often making common cause in an outburst of idealism and utopian hope for the future. Of course, the “counterculture” of the decade included much more than these specific “issue-oriented” movements, also extending to what might be called more “lifestyle-oriented” movements, as a variety of groups (most of which came to be labeled under the general rubric of “hippies”) sought alternatives ways of living that were intended to bring more satisfaction and emotional fulfillment than the dog-eat-dog, money-driven world of capitalism could offer. Such lifestyles—often described as supported by a “tune in, turn off, drop out” mentality—were closely associated with an emergent drug culture, the sexual “revolution,” and a variety of cultural innovations, including rock music. There was, of course, considerable overlap between the issue-oriented movements and lifestyle-oriented movements, as when sexual emancipation (fueled partly by the introduction of the birth-control pill in, appropriately enough, 1960) was a key ingredient of the women’s movement.

  Mad Men contains an extensive engagement with all of these political issues and movements of the 1960s—though it is certainly possible to argue that this engagement isn’t extensive enough, given the crucial importance of these issues and movements of the decade. Still, the women’s movement is engaged in a particularly thorough, if indirect way, in Mad Men through the inclusion of numerous important women characters who struggle to find their way in the world amid the changing gender roles that the movement made possible. The final section of this volume is devoted to a discussion of the role played in the series by the three most important of these women characters—Joan Holloway Harris, Peggy Olson, and Betty Draper—including a discussion of what the representation of these characters has to say about the changing status of women in American society in the 1960s.

  Of course, the counterculture in all of its manifestations is not the subject of Mad Men, which focuses on the mainstream capitalist culture itself, particularly on the evolution of American consumer capitalism through the 1960s, and even more particularly on the business (and discourse) of advertising as one of the key motive forces behind that evolution. The action of Mad Men thus takes place primarily in the meeting rooms and offices of Madison Avenue advertising firms, as well as in the suburban homes and urban apartments where the people who work in those firms pursue their private lives. And, while the countercultural movements that were so crucial to the 1960s (especially the women’s movement) certainly impinge on these mainstream cultural spaces in the course of Mad Men, they generally remain marginal to the spaces that define the world that is the central setting of the series.

  It is in its presentation of these latter business and private spaces (as well as in the costuming of the characters who occupy them) that Mad Men primarily manifests the visual style for which it has been so widely lauded. Indeed, it may be more in this visual style than for any direct engagement with the specific events or broad movements of the decade that Mad Men can truly be said to evoke the historical context in which it is set. One can, for example, track the progress of the action through the decade by monitoring the lengthening hair and sideburns of most of the men, along with the shortening skirts of most of the women. It is, however, in the set design that brings the spaces of the series to life that the visual style of the 1960s is most vividly re-created in Mad Men.

  It should, however, be noted that Mad Men’s evocation of the look of the 1960s is heavily mediated: it is a representation not of the way the 1960s actually looked so much as of our cultural memory, half a century later, of the way the 1960s looked. Whether this memory is accurate is one of the issues that constantly lurks in the margins of the series, and Weiner himself has suggested that one of his principal goals in the series is to remind viewers “that they have a misconception about the past, any past” (Weiner, Spring 2014). Exactly how successful the series is in achieving this goal can be debated, but it is certainly the case that Mad Men is often highly successful in creating a vision of the 1960s that reminds us how different that time is than our own, while at the same time reminding us that this different time is still closely connected to our own and is in many ways more like our own time than we might care to admit. Much of Mad Men’s treatment of the issue of historical memory resides in the plot and characters, of course, but the visual style is a big part of this memory as well, and it is fairly clear that the visual style of Mad Men owes as much to well-known cultural representations of the 1960s (the early James Bond films are an obvious source for much of the look of the series) as to the physical reality of the period.

  In many ways, in fact, Mad Men is really more engaged with the popular culture of the 1960s than with the 1960s themselves. Weiner has said that he extensively studied films and television series of the decade in developing his vision of what the period was like, and the series itself includes even more representations of the cultural products of the 1960s than of the historical events of the decade. These products include, among other things, books, which have a surprising prominence in the series, with protagonist Draper being a particularly avid reader. This prominence suggests a number of things about Draper himself, but it also suggests that books (especially fiction) played a larger role in American culture during the 1960s than they do now—one of the numerous (and not always obvious) ways in which the series reminds us of the differences between that time and ours. Television itself plays a key role in Mad Men as well, and (though specific individual programs factor into the series relatively little) one of the main historical arcs narrated in the series has to do with the rising prominence of television in the decade—a story, of course, that is not unrelated to that of the subsequent decline of the importance of books, especially as entertainment. Meanwhile, if Draper is a lover of books, he is even more a movie lover. His taste in cinema is eclectic and surprisingly sophisticated (many of his favorites seem to be European “art” films), and he is often shown attending films in theaters in scenes that generally include a snippet of the film being viewed as well.

  Part II of this volume explores Mad Men’s engagement with specific forms of American popular culture, beginning with chapter 4, which discusses the role played in the series by books and reading. Chapter 5 looks at the use of music in the series, and especially at the way in which the engagement of Mad Men with the music of the 1960s is used to enhance its engagement with the context of the 1960s in general. Chapter 6 then details the role played in the series by movies, including Draper’s use of popular films as a means of gauging the popular American mindset. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the numerous points of contact between Mad Men and the popular genre of science fiction, including a consideration of the ways in which the series itself might be read as science fiction.

  In any case, the world of Mad Men is not a representation of the world that actually existed in that decade but a representation of an imaginary world that never existed in any sort of historical reality. It is, in Baudrillard’s terminology, a simulacrum of the 1960s (or, in Jameson’s terminology, a pastiche of the 1960s) rather than any sort of genuine representation of the 1960s. Meanwhile, in its evocation of the 1960s through cultural representations of the decade, Mad Men is a quintessentially postmodernist work, and one of the stories told by the series has to do with the status as a sort of bridge
decade that took us from the still largely modern culture of the 1950s to the full-blown postmodernism of the 1970s. In this sense, the focus of the series on the world of advertising is particularly apt, because advertising itself was a key contributor to this cultural transformation and to the growth of a postmodern cultural climate marked by the thoroughgoing commodification of everything, including culture itself.

  Draper himself seems to understand the close connection between advertising and other forms of American culture in the 1960s. Thus, he consumes culture not merely for entertainment or to stimulate his mind, but also as research for his work as a creator of advertising. Draper seems to be convinced that reading the books or viewing the films that are currently popular will give him a leg up on understanding the popular mind of America and that he can then use this understanding to craft advertising campaigns to which that mind will respond positively. One of the key ironies of the series, however, is that, despite his emphasis on being plugged into contemporary trends, Draper himself is very much a man of the 1950s who is always a step or two behind in trying to catch up to the dramatic cultural changes that marked the 1960s—or at least he is until the very last scene of the series, when (in one possible interpretation) he finally latches onto a workable (and brilliant) idea for how to commodify and sell the counterculture of the 1960s, just as we move into the 1970s.