Core Response #2--Looking at Mad Men Through Lipsitz--Michael Feinstein

    When I read the chapter in George Lipsitz’s book Time Passages entitled “The Meaning Of Memory” detailing how 50s sitcoms that centered on urban, ethnic, middle-class families did the work of legitimizing (and assuaging anxieties surrounding) consumer capitalism and the new values and social relations that had taken root as a result of it, my mind kept wandering to Mad Men. Obviously Mad Men, which ran on AMC from 2007 to 2015, was neither a sitcom nor centered on an ethnic family, however, how it went about utilizing the past and our nostalgia for it seems strikingly similar to the cultural work that these sitcoms were doing a half century before. Mad Men, whose story begins during the late 50s, is about the very advertising men who implanted the ideology of consumer capitalism into America’s televisions. On the show we watch Don, Peggy, Roger, and the other employees of a Madison Avenue advertising firm devise strategies and create copy with the goal of keeping the wheels of consumerism turning and convincing members of the public that they are fundamentally lacking—missing something integral to their existence— and that the only thing that has the potential to fill that hole is the product they are selling. While this interrogation of marketing practices in Mad Men often looks upon the industry as a whole and its’ objectives in a negative, cynical light— exposing the contradictions and hypocrisies of 50s and 60s consumerist values—it also, at the same time— validates advertisements as an art unto themselves. At the beginning of the 21st century, as corporate sponsorship of narrative forms moved further beyond the bounds of our television sets and into our computers and phones in the form of branded content (and more and more creatives within the entertainment industry began to make their living by producing these digital commercial/ short film hybrids) Don Draper, with his otherworldly charm and existential longing, showed us the artistry (and appropriate suffering) behind a great advertisement— legitimizing the tool of consumerism in a way that it never has been before.

Additionally, as our society and culture’s idea of masculinity has once again been renegotiated and redefined Mad Men offered us a view of American men from the past—many of whom are veterans of World War II and the Korean War, belonging to what we’ve gushingly coined “greatest generation”— as racist, misogynistic drunks and philanderers. This less-than flattering depiction of a generation of men who the culture, for the last 50 years, has put on a towering pedestal creates the potential for an oppositional understanding of the past’s ideal of masculinity and his values all the while implicitly validating today’s man— who by comparison seems to function better in society (even if they don’t have the hope of ever being as good looking as Jon Hamm and John Slattery). 

Finally, Mad Men is a show that is ultimately about a man trying to exist in the world with two identities and the anxieties that arise from that condition. Don Draper is both the son of a prostitute from Kentucky and the sophisticated ad man that he presents to his family and co-workers in New York. Much of the show deals with the idea of pretending and when— if ever— Don is actually being his true self. By the end of the show it seems to reach a place of saying that Don was never really pretending—that the facade of his other self was inextricably linked to his authentic self in such a way that the two are indistinguishable. This idea— that the masks we present to the world are just as truthful as what is behind them— does the work of legitimizing a social media-obsessed public that is constantly contending with ideas of our digital other. The post-war world of Mad Men, in its’ own way, assured 21st century audiences that the shiny online veneer we create for ourselves is a valid form of identity.