Mad Men on a New Frontier
By James Poniewozik
"Nostalgia. It's delicate. But potent." It's November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for their new slide projector. He's loaded the carousel with his family pictures, a poignant gesture because of what we know about him: not only does he cheat on his wife--prolifically--but he also hides his true identity from her and the rest of the world. Born Dick Whitman and orphaned as a boy, he went to Korea, swiped the dog tags of a fallen soldier (the real Draper), abandoned his dirt-poor relatives and rose to the heights of swellegant, three-martini Wasp success on Madison Avenue.
In some ways, Don's life is as phony as a stock photograph. Unloved as a child, he may never know how to love, though he's learned the gestures. Yet looking at his compromised memories, he wells up, and so do we, even as we know we're being sold. The Kodak suits want to focus on their machine's technology. Don argues that its true pull is emotional. "In Greek," Don says, "nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound.'"
Nostalgia is tricky for TV, which tends to render it as camp, sap or cliched commentary. Mad Men could have been another index item in the boomer-centric '60s-history textbook that includes We Didn't Start the Fire and The Wonder Years. The New Frontier. The social upheaval. The same old times a-changin' again.
In fact, it's something very different, and beautiful. It's true that Mad Men, which with FX's Damages is the first basic-cable drama to have been nominated for a Best Drama Emmy, is deliciously curated, from the omnipresent cigarettes to the rocket-cone brassieres (and casual sexism) to the cool modernist sets. But the subtle, deliberately paced drama has a wider sense of history. Don is not defined by his time. He's an American archetype of self-reinvention: a Gatsby or a Huck Finn, who lights out for the territory but cannot escape from himself.
Unlike the typical '60s reminiscence, Mad Men doesn't have a baby-boomer perspective. (Creator Matthew Weiner, 42, was born after the boomer cutoff.) Its sensibility is closer to artifacts of its time like The Apartment or John Cheever's Wasp-character-study stories. In Mad Men, the boomers are a market for Clearasil or the children of the Drapers and their friends, largely unseen and unheard. (In a new episode, Don instructs his grade-school-age daughter how to mix a Tom Collins for guests.)
And though change--beatniks, integration, feminism--percolates at the edges, Mad Men is mainly about people who stand outside that change. The early '60s was a time of creative ferment in the ad industry, but Don and his old-school ad shop, Sterling Cooper, resist the trendy smirkiness of the revolutionary Volkswagen "Think Small" ads of the period. "There has to be advertising for people who don't have a sense of humor," he scolds an underling. In Season 1, Sterling Cooper got involved in the 1960 election. It backed Nixon.
Older. But Wiser?
When season 2 begins (AMC, sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), it's Valentine's Day, 1962. Chubby Checker's Let's Twist Again plays over an opening montage of the main characters. Sounds like a party, but like The Sopranos (for which Weiner was a writer), Mad Men uses its sound track ironically. Don's wife Betty (January Jones) has taken up horseback riding as an escape, after learning that Don was cheating and--a more intimate betrayal--secretly getting reports from her psychiatrist on her therapy sessions. (She used a session on the couch to relay a message to Don that she knew about his skirt-chasing.) His former secretary, Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), is climbing the ladder as a rare female copywriter at Sterling Cooper, but at the cost of having given away her out-of-wedlock baby. The daddy, Pete (Vincent Kartheiser)--a weaselly rich boy who tried to blackmail Don into promoting him after learning the truth about his past--is suffering the apparent karmic payback of being unable to conceive with his wife.
And Don? When we first see him again, he's taking off his shirt, in a room with a woman--but she's a nurse, and it's an insurance physical. His doctor tells him he has high blood pressure: "You're 36 years old. You need to take this seriously." He's trying to behave; he even turns down a proposition from a gorgeous waitress. And he's feeling old. (Hamm wears Don's manly rigidity like a suit of armor; he's Clark Kent, hiding not a super but a lesser alter ego.)
At work, clients are pressuring him to hire new blood to reach the youth market. "We're a young country," a colleague says. "The President has a baby." The culture is being transformed by a charismatic young leader. (Everyone is watching Jackie Kennedy on TV giving tours of the White House.) It sounds timely, given the Obama candidacy, but in Don's world, Camelot is less about hope than about anxiety, not a magic kingdom but an invading force. Even the return of space hero John Glenn annoys Don's boss, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), a WW II vet. "I'd like ticker tape for pulling out of my driveway and going around the block three times," he grumbles. "It's not like people were shooting at him."
It's an inversion of the usual '60s-retrospective equation (J.F.K. + space = optimism). But what makes Mad Men great TV is how it subverts our expectations. Thus the philandering Don turns out to be Peggy's biggest backer in the sexist office. Thus Peggy in turn is not a persecuted saint but competent, focused--and sometimes cold. And thus a surprise twist in the second episode reveals Pete to be both opportunistic and sympathetic.
Mad Men can do all this because its characters do not stand in for Important Social Milestones. The changes in society serve to illustrate the characters, not the other way around. Don is right. In the end, no one is nostalgic for fashions or fads or furniture. We're nostalgic for people. And that, for all its sexy Eames-era perfection, is what Mad Men gives us. Not the fiery explosions of pop history, but the throbbing, persistent ache of time.