Mad Men and False Dichotomies 5 comments

By Santiago Ramos

Many Image readers are fond of G. K. Chesterton’s line that “there is no story without a fall.” I am not yet fully convinced that that sentence is saying anything true, but Mad Men, the television series about an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, set in the early 1960s and produced by American Movie Classics, makes me think that there is no story without a rise. Or, at least, a desire to rise.

In one sense of the word, there is plenty of rising going on in the show—how many paramours did Don Draper (chief Mad Man, played by Jon Hamm) have in the first season alone? I couldn’t tell you without taking a minute.

Apart from the particular attention that the screenwriters give to Don, the rest of the cast forms a two-tiered ensemble of loveable decadents, the top composed by lusty, nicotine-addicted, upper middle class (and moving up) men who do the business in the Sterling Cooper Agency; below (and, to the men on the show, beneath) them, lies the second tier of sundry secretaries who type the Mad Men’s letters and filter their phone calls.

Everyone’s trysting with everyone. Few characters have predominately admirable qualities. Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss), a secretary whose intelligence and hard work earns her a job as a copywriter, breaks with the two-tiered hierarchy, and is more honest, for the most part, than her co-workers.

Don is admirable in short spurts. He sports an old-school habit of loyalty towards clients and coworkers that is slowly being swallowed up by the shadows of rising billboards. The only truly admirable character was the businesswoman Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), who shows tenderness for Don, and who, apart from having to take flak in the business world for being a Jew, has her heart broken by Don.

But I am not very interested as to who is bad and who is not-so-bad. Everyone is bad, sometimes.

But what are the madmen and madwomen chasing after? So far (that is, up through the penultimate episode of the second season), the show is exactly what the (beautifully done) opening credits show: one man falling into a pit of lies, surrounded by advertisements. But the man doesn’t have any desire to not fall. He doesn’t see any sign that offers some sort of resistance against the lies. It’s just falling. Everyone is falling, in different ways, choking on their own forbidden apples. Peggy appears to be rising, but really she is only rising in the company. Her life seems lonely. She is becoming estranged from her family, and she can’t find someone to love.

The logical follow-up is: what do I mean by rising? I am not sure. But I don’t like the dichotomy the show’s writers have drawn up for their characters. In a mostly unappreciative review, Michael Brendan Dougherty says one interesting thing: “The problem with Mad Men is that it doesn’t allow its guilty pleasures to be all that pleasurable.” The characters are after something good, ultimately, because they are after happiness. But where to find it? He goes on:

“The writers give Draper the desperate, needy conscience of an addict, without ever showing him enjoying the high. Sleeping with interesting and beautiful women in Manhattan while your wife keeps up appearances in Ossining, is sinful, yes. A terrible betrayal of sacred vows, of course. But there is a reason adultery is tempting: it’s fun!”

The problem is, the fun doesn’t last, and despite the fact that the characters inhabit a world that maximizes choice for the sake of the highest consumer satisfaction, they are only given two choices on one of the most important questions: How do I live?

For Don, it’s either domestic life in the suburbs (which, for him, is unfulfilling), or a series of fiery affairs with exciting Manhattanite women (also unfulfilling). The red-headed head secretary Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) gets to choose between an abusive fiancée med student, and middle-aged, philandering, greedy Roger Sterling (John Slattery). Roger himself, upon being rebuffed by Joan, chooses another, fresh-out-of-college secretary, for keeps this time, and asks his wife of twenty years for a divorce. No wonder his daughter can’t stand him. Peggy, it seems so far, has to sacrifice family and love for success at work.

The choice is simple as it is cruel. Monotony or anarchy. The suburbs or the city. Long and dull, or short and fast. If we want to get even more vulgar, we can even tease out a liberal and a conservative way to rot. A plague on both!

Yet within the dynamic of the stories themselves, there is a hungering for a third way. There must be a way towards fulfillment that is based on authentic relationships, and that does not destroy the qualities that we already know are good—-loyalty, and fidelity to one's spouse. The problem is that this third way has not been unearthed in the forty years since this show takes place. Matthew Weiner, the showrunner of Mad Men, told Charlie Rose that one of the things he sees as most compelling about the show is the dramatic irony running through it: we’ve seen how the series ends, and it’s us. And in many ways, we are just as, if not more, confused than they were back then.

The latest episode of the second season ends with Don Draper, on extended leave from work, walking into the Pacific Ocean, waves beating against his chest. The scene reminded me of the last shot in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, where the hero of the film, freshly freed, has to face the infinite possibilities of what to do with his freedom. Draper is in a similar position now, and his hunger for more has not been satiated. My only hope is that he doesn’t drown himself.

(Stay tuned, next Sunday, for the season finale.)