I have to admit that I’m not really a fan of Mad Men. When the show first began in 2007, I was a
graduate student in exile from New York.
I wasn’t one of those insufferable types who brags about not owning a
television, but I also saw little reason for possessing one. (Even now that we have one, we use it
exclusively for watching Steelers games or Netflix streaming on our Roku
box.) Over the first few years of its
existence, I was aware that Mad Men was becoming a huge critical favorite,
talked about in glowing tones by people I generally respected, but it was
generally off my radar. When I lived in Argentina, the American television shows people were interested in were House and something they knew as Ley y Orden: Unidad de Víctimas Especiales.
This summer, in
search of things to watch on Netflix streaming, Catharine and I watched every
episode of the first four seasons of Mad Men. The
show certainly meets a basic level of what I'll call "entertainingness," but I have to admit
that I’m puzzled by how seriously so many people seem to take it. To me, it seems like an impeccably artful
soap opera. And I have to think that a
big part of the reason people watch this show is its surface veneer of cool;
I’ll admit, I like the slicked-back hair, pressed white shirts, and slim ties
as well. None of the characters,
however, are compelling or sympathetic, least of all its main character, Don
Draper. Will someone please explain to
me why I am supposed to care about this man’s existential crisis and what,
exactly, is so devastating about drinking Canadian Club all afternoon, having
women throw themselves at you, and then coming home to your wife, played by the
stunning January Jones? (Admittedly, Draper gets divorced from Jones' character, Betty, at the end of the third season. He then has dalliances with several women before shacking up with Megan, played by Jessica Paré: a woman attractive enough that the show's writers have found several excuses to show her in her underwear or a bathing suit during the current season.) Anyway, the takeaway about Draper is this: just because an actor is wearing a perfectly-tailored suit does not mean the character he or she is portraying is interesting.
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| Don and Betty Draper, played by Jon Hamm and January Jones. |
I believe, along with Liz Lemon, that we are in a golden age of scripted television. But I wouldn’t count Mad Men as part of it. For me, the brilliance of a show like The Wire was that every one of its characters was complex, rich, and therefore sympathetic. I have a fairly strong moral disapproval of those on both sides of the drug war, but I could understand characters like Stringer Bell or McNulty as possessing recognizable human aspirations. The characters in Mad Men are all over the place, and the wild swings in plot strike me as ham-fisted and amateurish. I keep watching it, though, because I do find it entertaining; I also watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, but I wouldn’t make an argument for SVU as “great television,” either. I also keep watching Mad Men because, like it or not, it’s become an important part of the cultural landscape. It’s a text that people are talking about, and I’d like to be able to understand their conversations. For one thing, I notice that my Twitter timeline on Sunday evenings is full of discussions on that night's episode.
And Mad Men has brought up some issues that are pretty
central to my interests. For starters, I
am of course pretty interested in the mythology of the 1960s, in the way this
decade is endlessly re-used and re-cycled in the present. In the United States, "the 1960s" seems to be something like World War II or the Civil War: a well-known drama that everyone
knows a little about and which can be selectively mined, apparently, to reveal something
about our national character. I have written more about the late 1960s and the early 1970s; the action of
Mad Men begins in 1960, but with each passing season has moved chronologically
forward, closer to my era of interest. In the episode "Tea Leaves" of the current season, Draper and an associate
attempt go backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Forest Hills, Queens (a
concert which actually took place on July 2, 1966) in order to convince the
Stones to do a jingle for the Heinz company.
In a season 4 episode, Draper had arranged for his young daughter Sally to see The Beatles when they played their famous August 15, 1965 concert at
Shea Stadium. (Matthew Weiner, the
show’s creator, has a penchant for sticking the fictional characters of Mad Men
into well-known historical events of the 1960s.)
The Beatles made an appearance again in last week’s
episode. Or, at least, they had an
audible presence, and certainly a quite rare one, at that. Draper’s young, second wife Megan (who we’re
told is supposed to be 26 years old, to Draper’s 40) suggests that he listen to
“Tomorrow Never Knows,” the experimental final track on The Beatles’ 1966 album
Revolver. I was interested in this because of its
similarity to something that I wrote about in the conclusion to my
dissertation: the usage of the Beatles
song “Baby You’re a Rich Man” at the end of the 2010 film The Social Network. (Unfortunately, this video below cuts out just as the screen fades to black for the end credits and the chorus comes thundering in--which I thought was definitely one of the most effective moments in the movie. But you'll get an idea of how it works in the scene leading up to the end credits.)
As I wrote:
The Beatles—or, rather, the estate
of The Beatles, run in a tenuous partnership by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr,
and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison—are also notoriously
reluctant to allow their songs to be licensed for usage in advertisements,
television shows, or films. Director David Fincher must have somehow
convinced them to allow him to use the song, almost certainly by negotiating a
deal that added significantly to the budget of the film
Much of the coverage that has followed—as I’ve mentioned,
Mad Men episodes are heavily discussed online and in the print media—has focused
on the expense of licensing this song, with Ben Sisario and Dave Itzkoff of The
New York Times reporting that the cost was likely around $250,000, no small sum
of money for a show which has a per-episode budget of about $2 million.
In an interview with Sisario and Itzkoff, Weiner says that he wanted to include a Beatles song on the
show because The Beatles are, “the band of the 20th century.” I’m willing to grant this, but that isn’t
actually the point that is most important.
Weiner, for all of his genuflections toward historical accuracy and
authenticity isn’t actually making a show “about” the 1960s, or at least, he’s
not making a show that is only about the 1960s.
Mad Men’s appeal has to be that it also speaks to themes and issues that
are still relevant in these first years of the 21st century. The themes of patriarchy, sexism, privilege,
commerce, race, and class that Mad Men explores—rather ineptly, I would argue—are
still things that contemporary viewers find compelling. As far as I can tell, most people are not
antiquarians. We don’t like things just
because they’re old or they’re “faithful” or they’re “accurate.” We like things because, despite the
intervening decades or centuries, they speak to us somehow.
So Weiner’s usage of The Beatles song wasn’t, I don’t
believe, primarily about fidelity to an accurate representation of life in
1966. Instead, it was a kind of a
guess—or better yet, given the amount of money involved, a bet: a bet that the music would not only be "authentic" to what people in 1966 were listening to, but also attention-grabbing and, dare I say, important to viewers watching in 2012. And whatever you think of Mad Men (or The Beatles, for that
matter), it seems pretty likely that Weiner bet correctly.
Here's what I wrote about Fincher's choice to use The Beatles in his film.
What interests me most about the
appearance of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” at the end of The Social Network is that Fincher must have believed that this
song from 43 years before would still be relevant to the film’s wide audience
and that it would function as some sort of meaningful commentary on the lives
of the Millennial Generation characters the film chronicles.
I'll leave you with one last thing from my dissertation.
Perhaps it is more productive to
understand the music of The Beatles—and more broadly, rock music from the 1960s and
1970s—as belonging both to the past and to the present. “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” then, becomes not a
song from a foreign past, but a song that still has currency, meaning, and
intelligibility in the present.
