September 12, 2008

Brave Old World

By: AF Editors

So I just started watching Mad Men tonight (I know, I’m behind the curve on this one; tomorrow, we’ll talk about this new grunge music I’ve been listening to). It’s fun and well-made and basically supports my theory that we’re living in a golden age of television (pretty much everything else is going quite the other way, I’m afraid).

However, like a lot of historical dramas — particularly those that focus on the not-too-distant past — its writers seem to be drawing from a deep well of condescension, which seriously distances the viewer from the show’s characters. Some of these are in the form of Austin Powers-ish moments, along the lines of “Look at this incredible typewriter technology,” and “Who wouldn’t trust this Dick Nixon guy?” and so on.

These are blatantly being played for laughs, so they’re not fatal to the show’s realism. More problematic is its not-so-subtext about relations between the sexes. Much of the behavior shown is pretty ugly, and it’s no doubt realistic (even though the camera, of course, catches every single entendre and dismissive comment and all around piggishness in a way that is not itself true to life).

But one can’t help feel that this theme is outweighed by the meta-theme of our own easy superiority over such behavior. So the show risks becoming not about how men and women thought and acted in Madison Avenue advertising agencies in the late 50’s/early 60’s, but about how we in the early 21st century think about them.

It may be impossible at this point to portray men from the pre-sexual revolution era without invisibly smirking over their shoulders, but for its own sake, the show needs to try harder. It’s no doubt an unfair comparison, but for an indictment of corporate inhumanity and caddishness, I’ll take this any day.