George Packer of The New Yorker, editor of the great collection of Orwell non-fiction called Facing Unpleasant Facts, explains why Mad Men is so frustrating…and so fascinating.
He writes on his blog Interesting Times:
So the question is obvious: what’s so interesting about this annoying show?
Beneath the mesmerizing retro sheen lies the inversion of manners
and morals: everything forbidden us is permitted to, even encouraged
of, these men and women—smoking and drinking to excess, office sex up
to and including blatant harassment, parental neglect, a kind of frank
selfishness about ends and means. No one has to smoke outside the
building like a furtive criminal, no one has to pretend to like his
colleagues, adultery is a perk for men on the level of an
expense-account Martini dinner. Relations between the sexes are openly
exploitative, with only Peggy trying to make her way in a man’s world
and paying a high price (among other things, she’s more single-minded
and cut-throat about work than the men). Meanwhile, they go to
self-destructive lengths to conceal what we accept and even advertise:
childhood poverty, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. “Mad Men”
is all about repression—every character has a tell-tale tic, and
stiffness reigns over every scene—but it’s also about the license to
indulge impulses that would soon be socially forbidden. Who wouldn’t
like just once to leave their picnic garbage right where they finished
eating it?
[cut]
“Mad Men” shows the last years of a social order in which middle-class
American men were little kings—slimy, anxiety-ridden, petulant,
lifeless, but kings nonetheless. It’s all about to come undone—Peggy is
the harbinger of the change—and soon give way to an age of confusion
and improvisation, which is the age we still live in. Watching “Mad
Men” might be what it was like for Americans of an earlier age, around
the time of Lincoln, to see an eighteenth-century European costume
drama: this is what the world looked like just before the old order
fell. The roles were rigid and constricting, but they had the advantage
of being roles, ready-made for men and women to put on and live in.
Now that the "little kings" are dead, who will we become? I'm interested to find out…
Kit Stolz 