It would be fair to describe popular culture as something akin to the shared dream of a people and their times. Popular culture, when its really popular, reveals something that resonates in the psyches of such people at the same time. The German word for this would be that it captures the zeitgeist: the spirit of the time. Though we're never aware of it, this is at the heart of all successful popular culture, And that is even more so when it crosses the threshold into the category of fad.
Be that as it may, something is missing from that description. What precisely is it that allows a TV show set a full half century ago to capture the modern zeitgeist? What is the success of a program like the Mad Men TV show?
Well, I'm no social psychologist or anthropologist of the modern, or whatever job description would presumably qualify one to provide a definitive explanation. But I do have a few ideas.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
That doesn't seem though to provide a sufficient explanation. If that's all you want, you can watch PBS (if you can stomach it). There's something else cooking in the secret recipe of the Mad Men TV show's success. Yes, of course, there are all the great production values: the spectacular writing, full of insightful character development and the presentation of adult conflicts; spot on precision acting; and of course it looks incredible, with finely detailed attention to the art work, settings and costumes, and the gorgeous cinematography. Still, true as all that is, there's still something else to be explained.
There's still that something called, on this blog, the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm, the glamour, the charisma of lives lived with intention and absent cloying introspection. It's so subtle at first that it easily slips by your cultural radar. But it's there; the most compelling accuracy in Mad Men's great arsenal of period authenticity is the depiction of a time before the inundating of our society with a therapeutic ethos.
Challenges a plenty they may well have, but the characters of Mad Men won't be found whining over unfairness of life; they don't complain that daddy didn't show them any affection or mommy was heartless and cruel (though in some cases, that may well be true). They face life's roadblocks and obstacles free of our contemporary fixation on communication, introspection, finding ourselves and "working on" our emotional IQ. Mad Men reveals the last great era of Americana, before the guidance tyrants, emotion police and relationship regulators corrupted the culture.
Yes, it's true, this colonization of the culture by the "experts" was already beginning at this time, as hinted at with the story line around Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the prying school counselors, the know-it-all therapists, talk show emotional snake oil salesmen and big brother policy makers, even at this time, were rearing their ugly heads. But Mad Men shows a time before these sanctimonious do-gooders had succeeded in hijacking our society and reducing it to the current state of therapeutic culture and rampant, suffocating paternalistic political correctness.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. No one would say their life was perfect, that's not the point. The problems they did have, though, they dealt with on their own terms, free from the peeping toms and patronizing nannies poking noses into their lives. They didn't make their choices constantly inundated with judgments and accusations about the legitimacy of their feelings, ridiculing their choices and regulating their hopes and desires.
The Don Drapers and Peggy Olsons were the last of a generation who didn't have or need their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Despite all their problems, they were free in a way strangely foreign to us. And we can't help being a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.
Be that as it may, something is missing from that description. What precisely is it that allows a TV show set a full half century ago to capture the modern zeitgeist? What is the success of a program like the Mad Men TV show?
Well, I'm no social psychologist or anthropologist of the modern, or whatever job description would presumably qualify one to provide a definitive explanation. But I do have a few ideas.
Strangely, some people suggest that Mad Men captures a simpler time. Fooled me. That's not what I see each episode on my TV. We're not talking about Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, here. What we see on Mad Men is a 1950s and even early 1960s often unacknowledged by our contemporary mass media: it's rife with adultery, narcotics and loneliness. Also, it doesn't gloss over the uglier parts of the era: tragic political assassinations, the difficulties in race relations, sexual discrimination nor the mounting fiasco of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. If anything, perhaps one of the show's charms is precisely its far more realistic presentation of the period.
That doesn't seem though to provide a sufficient explanation. If that's all you want, you can watch PBS (if you can stomach it). There's something else cooking in the secret recipe of the Mad Men TV show's success. Yes, of course, there are all the great production values: the spectacular writing, full of insightful character development and the presentation of adult conflicts; spot on precision acting; and of course it looks incredible, with finely detailed attention to the art work, settings and costumes, and the gorgeous cinematography. Still, true as all that is, there's still something else to be explained.
There's still that something called, on this blog, the old school cool of Mad Men. The charm, the glamour, the charisma of lives lived with intention and absent cloying introspection. It's so subtle at first that it easily slips by your cultural radar. But it's there; the most compelling accuracy in Mad Men's great arsenal of period authenticity is the depiction of a time before the inundating of our society with a therapeutic ethos.
Challenges a plenty they may well have, but the characters of Mad Men won't be found whining over unfairness of life; they don't complain that daddy didn't show them any affection or mommy was heartless and cruel (though in some cases, that may well be true). They face life's roadblocks and obstacles free of our contemporary fixation on communication, introspection, finding ourselves and "working on" our emotional IQ. Mad Men reveals the last great era of Americana, before the guidance tyrants, emotion police and relationship regulators corrupted the culture.
Yes, it's true, this colonization of the culture by the "experts" was already beginning at this time, as hinted at with the story line around Betty's breakdown. The child psychologists, the prying school counselors, the know-it-all therapists, talk show emotional snake oil salesmen and big brother policy makers, even at this time, were rearing their ugly heads. But Mad Men shows a time before these sanctimonious do-gooders had succeeded in hijacking our society and reducing it to the current state of therapeutic culture and rampant, suffocating paternalistic political correctness.
It was a time before men were feminized, women were androgynized and children were pathologized. No one would say their life was perfect, that's not the point. The problems they did have, though, they dealt with on their own terms, free from the peeping toms and patronizing nannies poking noses into their lives. They didn't make their choices constantly inundated with judgments and accusations about the legitimacy of their feelings, ridiculing their choices and regulating their hopes and desires.
The Don Drapers and Peggy Olsons were the last of a generation who didn't have or need their emotions monitored, validated or otherwise administered by the therapeutic class. Despite all their problems, they were free in a way strangely foreign to us. And we can't help being a little fascinated with them because of it. That above all is the greatest secret to the old school cool of Mad Men.
This article collected, selected and written by: Author Van Hoc
Niche blogs are sometimes referred to as splogs, but this is a misnomer. Even though the desired end result for the niche blogger is to make money...
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