Jul. 02, 2008 - Issue #663: The Bestest of Edmonton

DVDetective - Men behaving adly

One pleasant surprise of Mad Men is that it isn’t so much about men at all. The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, The Office have focused on males’ panic attacks, pissing contests, power plays, vigilante toughness or cringing un-selfconsciousness as they try to boss away.
 

AMC’s acclaimed show, its first season on disc even as CTV re-runs it, is set in a man’s world, as suggested by its ’50s nickname for Madison Avenue types and its Hitchcockian opening visuals—men in suit-and-tie silhouettes falling out of a glass skyscraper. Matthew Weiner, a Sopranos head writer, lands us in an advertising company in Manhattan. It’s 1960, with Vietnam and the sexual revolution and women’s lib and hippies and drugs on the way.
 

But among the copywriters and account executives at Sterling Cooper, a work day is puffed out, chased down and cheated on. The first episode, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” opens with Don Draper (Jon Hamm) lighting up and lubricating himself in a restaurant, musing on how to ward off health concerns for his cigarette account, Lucky Strike. Don has a mistress—we see her before his wife—and his co-workers all seem to want their own lady or two on the side.
 

It’s the women whom the show makes more interesting—not hard when these guys act, as Don tells breezy, up-and-coming Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), as if “the whole world looks like one big bra strap, waiting to be snapped.” Don’s new secretary is Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), and Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), a cooing, on-top-of-things gal, shows her around the place, where “steno” girls put up with coarse innuendo and winking glances for a free lunch from these ad men who are looking for “something between a mother and a waitress.” By the second episode, “Ladies Room,” Peggy sees the office as a parade of leering cads.
 

Don’s mistress Midge (Rosemarie Dewitt), independent and confident, makes his wife Betty (January Jones), who shudders her car and the children (in an age before seatbelts) into a front yard, seem all the more anxious and cooped-up a housewife, young and restless with little to do. Yet the cocky men can feel threatened by women who are, slowly but surely, making more room for themselves.  

 

Impeccably shot, Mad Men unfolds in slick, pseudo-glamourous interiors: boardrooms, restaurants, dining rooms, kitchens. The faint glow of the oven door, to which so many women were tied, recedes like an ominous headlight into the darkness at the end of one episode.
 

The series is a narrower, more historically grounded (and less hard-hitting) look at the American Dream, at a moment when, Don asks, “Who could not be happy with all this?” The pursuit of happiness seems unnecessary—and so it’s the pressure to be happy, feel worry-free, that rises and snakes through the air. That pressure to buy into satisfaction smoulders from Don’s own business.
 

Ingeniously, Mad Men shows how much ads and their products—cigarettes, deodorant, even a younger “Dick Nixon” about to run for office—preach and pretend to reflect North American values. Don only considers “What do women want?” to push an aerosol deodorant onto wives shopping for their husbands. He mines life not to reflect or emboss it through art, but to reduce and sell life as a lie. All that matters is a supply of slogans and images that will whet demand.
 

Psychiatry is even more suspected here than in The Sopranos. Don, though he feels out of place, deep down, a cipher to himself, rejects the death-drive and other Freudian findings for campaigns, and doesn’t want to think his wife’s strain is mental. The men are glib in their white dominance, snapping others back into their place beneath them with casual condescension. A black waiter’s eyed suspiciously by his white superior, a Jewish worker’s used as a token to make a Jewish client feel more comfortable and a father can’t “wait until that girl [his daughter] is another man’s problem.”

The advantage of Mad Men on DVD isn’t just the absence of ads. A glut of special features includes a preview of the second season, a piece on the music of the show and audio commentaries. The hour-long “Establishing Mad Men” shows how many soporific compliments actors can pitch, but the research behind the show’s unobtrusive period details, often gleaned from the writers’ own childhoods, is fascinating (an Etch-A-Sketch was kept out because it hadn’t come out for another few months). “Pictures of Elegance” is a fine sampler of the show’s hair, costume and set designs. “Advertising the American Dream” flips through a 1960 of solidifying, post-war middle-class wealth, when political candidates started to be sold and the first family stereo, colour TV or car was momentous. One interviewee notes the self-sustaining madness of advertising—first, sponsors need to believe they should advertise, then North Americans can be sold a bill of goods. Call it dwindle-down dreamonomics. V 

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