The Mad Men Account
28th November 2015
This review is somewhat dated but captures perfectly, I think, what I disliked about the series.
To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. In Mad Men, everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It’s not that you don’t know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement; it’s just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s wearying rather than illuminating.
I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction, so it doesn’t bother me to see a tendentious fantasy on screen — I can roll with it. I remember that time, and it brought back a lot of memories — my first job, right out of college, was with a Wall Street law firm, and almost all of the secretaries had ash trays on their desks — but I found it disappointing because of its heavy-handed assumption that everyone watching it would share its sniggering “Wow, life pre-Woodstock really sucked, didn’t it?” attitude, to the extent that it was almost a self-parody.
Nevertheless, it captures a lot of the truth of that time, primarily because the writers and producers included things that they might not have have if they been more perceptive.
This impulse might be worth indulging (briefly), but the problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.