The final season is underway for the popular AMC series “Mad Men,” set in the New York advertising world of the 1960s. The drama, which has won 15 Emmys, portrays the lives of its flawed characters, as well as the racism and sexism of the time. It is known for its depiction of fashion and pop culture, with obsessive attention to the detail of the period sets. Robert Rushing, a University of Illinois professor of comparative and world literature, talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel about why the show resonates with viewers and its theme of taking on a new identity. Rushing co-edited a 2013 book on the series, titled “Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s.” The co-editors were Lilya Kaganovsky, director of the Program in Comparative and World Literature and a professor of Slavic languages and literature, and Lauren Goodlad, a U. of I. professor of English.
“Mad Men” shows us a different version of the 1960s than the hippie/counter-culture era many people think of in relation to the ‘60s. How does Don Draper’s world of the 1960s help us to understand that time?
Especially in the first seasons of “Mad Men,” the show really challenged American viewers’ expectations about the 1960s. Our collective image was not only very stereotyped (fringe jackets, long hair, peace signs and beads), but was also just wrong for most of the decade. That was really the first brilliant move the show took: It showed a very different aesthetic, one that was familiar to those of us who study films of the period, especially European films, which often show not only the narrow silhouettes and ties of the era, but also a pervasive sense of angst and alienation – precisely the dominant mood of “Mad Men,” where many of the characters aren’t really sure who they are (sometimes literally) and how they fit in.
The real question is why that new image and mood resonated so much for viewers in 2007 and since: I think a big part of the answer is that “Mad Men” is chronicling the decline and fall not just of Don Draper (whose world disintegrates around him, leaving him in free fall, in the credit sequence before each episode), but also of America after the heady optimism of the 1950s. The appearance of “Mad Men” almost exactly coincided with the financial crisis of 2007, and well after the debacles of Hurricane Katrina and the quagmire of Iraq – an ideal time to remember a prior era of turbulence.
The aesthetics and style of the show – the period clothing, furniture and architecture – are a big part of its appeal. The design details are accurate down to the kitchen wallpaper and the magazines on the coffee table. What is their importance to the show’s plot?
The recent exhibit on “Mad Men” at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York showed just how far the design detailing went – the period copies of “TV Guide” that we see in the ad agency’s lobby actually have typed (no doubt on a period typewriter) mailing labels on them, with the correct address for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. These are details that are far too small to make out even with a freeze frame in high definition. A lot of the scholarly attention to the show has focused on its incredible, mimetic realism from clothing to period decor.
The show is, after all, about an ad agency, a world of consumer products, and we need to see the material world that materialist culture has created. The show returns again and again to the idea that this material world of commodities has also become our emotional life, or perhaps a critique of how stunted our lives are when Belle Jolie lipstick is the mark of love, and the Kodak Carousel is the only way Don can express – or perhaps even have – feelings about his family.
Just as often, however, the design detail in the show isn’t about realism at all, even when it’s realistic – it’s about conveying a mood, an atmosphere, a look. In other words, the show is as devoted to pure aestheticism as it is to realism. Finally, that aestheticism was a huge part of the show’s popular success – even with our book about the show, a collection of scholarly essays, many readers turn first to the essays on the fashion in “Mad Men.”
A theme of the show is reinventing oneself. The main character took on (or stole) the identity of Don Draper. What does it say about him that he is always ready to reinvent himself? And how does his career in advertising – offering promises of becoming better by using a product – play into that theme?
I often joke that absolutely everything about “Mad Men” can be understood exclusively from the opening credit sequence. That sequence shows Don Draper not as an individual, but as a generic silhouette, just as much the poor Dick Whitman as the more grandiosely named Don Draper. The risk of this generic self is that, yes, it lends itself to reinvention, but also to disintegration: Perhaps this is so much an Everybody as a Nobody. And indeed, in the sequence, his world literally disintegrates around him and he falls through a world of alluring advertisements before he reinvents himself once more: cool and confident, on the couch with a cigarette in one hand (and, no doubt, a drink in the other).
This is the kind of subject that advertising imagines (or perhaps hopes for): a generic blank who’s ready to take on a new identity through a new product. We’re not individuals, but types who declare our “individuality” through a pretty limited repertoire of consumer goods.
Implicitly, the show is both participating in that culture (it, too, is funded by advertisements, like the Johnnie Walker ads that seem to suggest that drinking Black Label might reinvent us, bring us a little closer to the world of Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan) and critiquing it: Don’s endless reinventions always, as the credit sequence suggests, just bring him back to the same place. And of course, we know that as consumers already: The reinvention promised by consumption (“retail therapy”) provides a very fleeting happiness, at best.
What do you expect to see in the show’s remaining episodes?
My fellow editors and I made a few predictions when we wrote the introduction to “Mad Men, Mad World” back in 2011, and actually many were right: We saw Betty becoming more and more distanced from the principal action of the show, while Don and Peggy would remain the primary dyad that the show revolved around. Not all were spot on: I predicted that Harry would become a “Star Trek” fan – I was close, but it turned out to be Paul. And of course, we’re going to check back in with all of the old characters we’ve been missing: We’ve already seen old lovers like Rachel Menken and Sylvia Rosen. Perhaps we’ll even get to check back in with a character many viewers were sad to lose, Sal Romano.
At this point, however, I think that the genius of “Mad Men” is that the usual kinds of questions we want to ask about the ending of a show don’t really work. Will X live or die? Will Y hook up with Z? Almost all of the main characters live in an alienated and atomized universe, and Matt Weiner’s point always seems to have been more about making us understand the world they live in than to love and identify with the characters.
From that perspective, it doesn’t matter how it ends – you might just as easily cut to black in the middle of a banal, everyday sequence, as “The Sopranos” famously did, because the world he lives in will go on, with or without Don Draper. “Mad Men” has had its share of soap opera-like revelations, as when Pete Campbell reveals that Don isn’t who he says he is at all – but then everyone shrugs and goes on as if nothing happened. The show is often deliberately undramatic and anticlimactic, which is so unusual for television that it’s one of my greatest pleasures in watching it. However, it’s very hard to imagine the show ending “happily” (whatever that would mean on “Mad Men”), especially for Don.