This is the second post of Operation AMC, my ongoing project to watch every episode of the AMC series Breaking Bad and Mad Men, often called two of the best shows on television. This post covers the first season of Mad Men.
For an hour-long drama on a basic cable network that regularly broadcasts the Jaws sequels, it’s pretty impressive that Mad Men has become the cultural fixture it is. On top of that, it’s still not that highly rated, especially in the wake of AMC’s monster premiere for The Walking Dead (which I'm not that high on, but that's another story). Yet it’s become an iconic piece of art, endlessly parodied and referenced across the pop culture spectrum. Shamefully, Mad Men has eluded me throughout its first four seasons, despite the fact I would be hearing about its brilliance from all sides. Now I dive in myself.
Let me tell you, thematically this show is a behemoth. One can attack it from many different ways, but no one can argue it is a cultural document. It works its magic on you slowly but surely, and where Breaking Bad grabs you from the first shot, Mad Men gradually entrances.
The show bounces between the professional and personal lives of Don Draper (Jon Hamm), creative director of Sterling Cooper, and advertising agency in New York City. When he’s in his office, he’s an advertising übermensch, doing his job with surgical precision. Outside the office, his life is an unabashed mess. He is married to Betty Draper, a relationship that is growing increasingly strained, and meanwhile he carries on extramarital affairs with a couple other women.
No one in Mad Men is who they seem to be. In general, they project different images to different people, be it at work, at home or interacting with friends or family. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a young hotshot at Sterling Cooper, gets married to a woman named Trudy (Alison Brie), and immediately he feels the pressure of married life. She’s an avaricious little thing, demanding that they spring for the best because they’re, like, married now and that’s what’s supposed to happen in her little dream world. Period. Pete wants so badly to please her, but does not make enough money at Sterling Cooper to support a family. At work he’s “the man”, while within his family he’s much more submissive.
Everyone at Sterling Cooper constantly tries to one-up each other, the ultimate prize being the admiration of everyone else in the office. They passive-aggressively do their best to gain status while emasculating the rest of the office. This reaches a disgusting peak in the episode “Red in the Face”, in which Don and Roger Sterling (John Slattery) must climb hundreds of stairs together. Don beats Roger to the top, and when Roger finally catches up he vomits on the shoes of a prospective client. Don wins.
One of the major themes Mad Men explores is the treatment of women in the 1960’s. The men of Sterling Cooper are a conservative bunch, and they see women merely as eye-candy to be gazed upon and occasionally played with. The women, for the most part, are not insulted, for this is the world which they have grown up in. One of the women, Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) works as a sort of hussy-coach to the various office women. There is only one, Don’s newly hired secretary Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), who remains timid in this land of promiscuity.
Peggy asserts herself as a confident business woman who yearns to get ahead. She’d get further than even she imagined as the first season goes on, but it turns out she has some hidden desires of her own, and she starts having a relationship with the newlywed Pete Campbell. It’s obvious she wants to take that relationship somewhere, but obviously Pete is hesitant. He’s married and all.
The series’ ambiguous center remains Don Draper, who internalizes just about any emotion that won’t make him seem infallible. Here is a man who, from the outside, seems to epitomize the American dream. Not only that, but he sells it to the people. Some of the most fascinating stuff in Mad Men is the advertising process it depicts so well. How often in movies and TV shows do we see people who are apparently masters at their job but in reality their work is incredibly half-baked? The writers of Mad Men (and its creator, Matthew Weiner) understand the psychology of an ad man, and when a pitch goes well we buy it, and when it goes sour we buy it as well.
As I noted before, the men of Sterling Cooper are in charge of selling the American dream to America itself. They must convince the public that they MUST buy this product, they MUST shop here, or else their lives will be empty, and they are less American because of it. Mad Men, in its own way, is a critique of this idea. Each character tries to convince themselves they are living as a stereotypical American. Don Draper has a wife, two children, and he buys his kids a dog. Pete Campbell is just married and is looking to start his life. Yet each of them remains unfulfilled, seeing that perhaps the very ideal they are selling to America isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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