Feature: You say one thing when you mean another: Consumerism in “Mad Men”
I. I hate Don’s life but I want his suit.
In The Reality of the Virtual, Slavoj Zizek makes what at first seems an absurd claim: that the Sound of Music is a racist film. But, when put under analysis, his argument is hard to deny. Basically, Zizek makes a distinction between the narrative reality of the film (i.e. Mary Poppins and the seven dwarfs must escape the fascist Nazis) which only seems to appeal to an anti-fascist sensibility, and the overriding virtual texture of the film which is overtly fascist. That is, if you look at the visual coding of the film, you can see that what is really at stake in The Sound of Music is not just a Nazi invasion but the sullying of Austria’s blonde-haired blue-eyed population and their “down-to-earth” provincial lifestyle. Or in other words, the purity of the Austrian nation is under threat. Let’s be clear: I love The Sound of Music. But I wouldn’t be surprised if “Edelweiss” became an anthem for the “Fuck Off We’re Full” Facebook group. “Small and WHITE! CLEAN and BRIGHT! Bless my HOMELAND forever!” Indeed.
This dichotomy between “narrative reality” and “virtual texture” is, I think, a useful way to explore some of the misgivings I felt towards Season One of Mad Men, the television series created by Matthew Weiner exploring the employees of an American advertising agency in 1960. On one level it’s easy to argue that Mad Men is an indictment of the consumerism and social conservatism of that time inherited from the 1950s. The series’ main dramatic strategy is, as Benjamin Schwartz points out, is to shock its audience “by presenting as reasonable and commonplace behavior we now find appalling”. Hence we find scenes of casual sexism, homophobia and racism and the expected response is for the audience to mutter about the social mores of the past and pat ourselves on the back for living in the enlightened present. The advertising agency is an especially effective setting for allowing the writers to dramatise the way the American Dream is a media construct operating as an ideological mask for the social conflict and oppression in society. The most memorable images from Mad Men centre around the protagonist Don Draper wearing a suit. Don Draper is the American ideal: a square-jawed alpha male, a corporate success who pulled himself out from a life of poverty, the ultimate self-made man. The suit that Don Draper wears encapsulates these ideals but what it importantly represents is how restricted Don Draper’s life is. For Don Draper is not happy. He resents his perfect wife and home. He has worked his whole life to achieve the American Dream and all he has to show for his troubles is a load of ennui. How ironic that he is a victim of the ideology that he sells to his advertising clients day in and day out.
But if the narrative reality of Mad Men describes the oppressiveness of American consumerism, the series’ virtual texture is telling a completely different story. Each episode of Mad Men revels fetishistically on details such as period-accurate fitted suits, pleated skirts, expensive cocktails and cigars. In Mad Men, the frame often seems drenched in cigarette smoke. Far from operating as a critique of American corporate/consumer culture, the real legacy of Mad Men lies in the way it functions in the exact same way as any clothing advertisement, creating a desire for expensive suits and floral print dresses. Hence, the enthusiasm that the series has sparked amongst television viewers for Mad Men-themed parties; the ubiquity of Mad Men avatars; the Mad Men/Banana Republic tie-in; and the Special Edition Mad Men suit from Brooks Brothers. We are less interested in thinking about what makes Don Draper unhappy than in marvelling at how someone can be so unhappy but look so good.
I wish it was the sixties. I wish I could be happy.
I thought I wouldn't be able to "Mad Men myself" but thank goodness they included the "squinty Asian nerd" option.
II. Actually, no, I really want to be Don Draper.
Yet another aspect of Mad Men’s glamour derives from its affinity with Great American Literature. That Don Draper’s power depends upon a war-hero backstory he invented for himself is a device borrowed from The Great Gatsby. When Don Draper’s brother appears from nowhere, a spectre of his actual abandoned childhood in a rural backwater, we are reminded of Holly Golightly from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. By borrowing elements from The Greats, Mad Men hopes to adopt the mythic resonance that such classics have and in so doing, be included among them. There is, however, a significant difference between Mad Men and The Great Gatsby as texts. When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, the Jazz Age was not some mystical, alluring point in history. The glamour of the Jazz Age was Fitzgerald’s present and The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s critique of his present. When The Great Gatsby was released in 1925, it wasn’t just a bunch of beautiful sentences; those sentences had political bite. They hit home.
F. Scott Fitzgerald with his wife Zelda
Unlike Fitzgerald, the creators of Mad Men seemingly have no interest in the now; no desire to come to grips with the shallowness of contemporary culture. What they are really interested in is aestheticising the sadness of Gatsby. This speaks to the inevitable change in the way audiences receive texts. It may be that The Great Gatsby is no longer able to say anything significant about society. Perhaps all The Great Gatsby can possibly do for the contemporary reader is engender feelings of nostalgia and yearning for a past we wish we had experienced. What this leads me to conclude is that there is no conflict in Mad Men between the repulsive narrative reality and the attractive virtual texture of the TV series. There is not one element of the series which is social critique (i.e. the dramatisation of Don’s ennui, the social oppression of women, black people and gays) and another element which is just eye candy (i.e the fetishism of suits, skirts and cocktails). In Mad Men, the entirety of the 1960s, everything including the alienation and oppression, is reduced to a pleasurable commodity. You can even wear alienation and oppression. It’s available for only $998 from Brooks Brothers.
III. What is happening here?
Here is Arlo Weiner, son of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. He was featured in GQ, a lifestyle magazine.
You will never look this good.
Zora
16/02/10 - 3:39 PM
Ah, but does any of this make it bad TV? That’s the important thing.
Brad Nguyen
16/02/10 - 3:57 PM
No not at all. Mad Men is well made and all. I guess this requires one to unpack what is meant by “good” and “bad” television, but I’ll admit that the writing is sharp, the acting excellent and the set and costume design is dazzling.
I would call Mad Men disingenuous though. And it’s far from being the significant work of art it wants to be recognised as.
Eloise Ross
16/02/10 - 9:32 PM
I’m not sure that it is disingenuous. It does create a desire for material things in the way that advertising does, but featuring within this context I think achieves the very thing that it wants to. The audience should be able to see that the American Dream is not what it was made out to be, and if they can’t, well they should know that already anyway. Mad Men just makes it clear how hard nice things are to resist.
Zora
16/02/10 - 10:50 PM
I think it’s only disingenuous if you buy the line that it’s trying to challenge anything in the first place. The pleasure of the show is so blatantly in it’s opulent, materialistic, nostalgic aesthetic, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing per se. I don’t think in reality there’s much of an effort to critique the period, I don’t think that’s what it’s about. And those occasions when the show does try to critique something (the subplot about how African Americans buy a particular model of television set) is when the show works the least.
It’s a period drama, which is a different thing from something that just happens to be set in the past. It’s as much about creating a world as recreating one.
I also think Mad Men gets more complicated in season three, the writing certainly gets better. But I don’t think a failure to sufficiently critique the period it’s set in means anything, that’s not what the show is about.
Zora
16/02/10 - 10:50 PM
APOSTROPHE FAIL.
Brad Nguyen
16/02/10 - 11:09 PM
Zora – I actually do enjoy the show. I REALLY DO! But I disagree that the show is not attempting some kind of social critique. Isn’t every scene supposed to arouse a reaction like, “I can’t believe people were so sexist then!” or “It’s amazing how accepted racism was!” Sometimes the writing is a bit too on the nose, such as any scene involving a NEGRO, but it’s usually still emblamatic of what is Mad Men’s bread and butter.
Ken
27/02/10 - 5:42 PM
Interesting article, Brads, and the distinction between “narrative reality” and “virtual texture” is a useful one. That said, I’m not sure I completely buy the pillar of your argument that “the narrative reality of Mad Men describes the oppressiveness of American consumerism”, or the argument that follows about Mad Men’s narrative reality being at odds with the virtual texture of the series (which, as you point out correctly, rather delights in consumerism).
On the contrary, I think that the series has absolutely no truck (in either its narrative reality or virtual texture) with, and indeed quite intentionally takes a sensual pleasure in, that particular period of consumerism. There is almost no sense in which the show is intended as an indictment of consumerism. For example, it is one of the series’ open intentions to allow the viewer to enjoy the sight of Don selling (vide the “It’s toasted” scene, or the “Carousel” scene, or the “Jesus in your heart” scene, all of which are pivotal). Selling is the one thing (apart from sleeping around) that Don seems to enjoy. Moreover, the screenwriters DID feature one character who made the schematic argument about “the oppressiveness of American consumerism” (he was Don’s other woman’s other man, if you will) but, if you remember correctly, he was a complete jackass. I remember fondly the sight of the bohemian hipster down in the Village going on about “Madison Avenue … what a gas … selling the lie” and finally self-righteously asking Don, “How do you sleep at night?”, mostly because Don’s response was hilarious: “On a bed made of money.” Boom, as Ari Gold would say.
One of the things that Mad Men achieves is avoiding the dull, cliched anti-consumerist tropes that you might see in, say, Avatar. To quote from David Denby’s review of that film, Avatar stood for the proposition that:
“Science is good, but technology is bad. Community is great, but corporations are evil. “Avatar” gives off more than a whiff of nineteen-sixties counterculture, by way of environmentalism and current antiwar sentiment. “What have we got to offer them—lite beer and bluejeans?” Jake asks. Well, actually, life among the Na’vi, for all its physical glories, looks a little dull. True, there’s no reality TV or fast food, but there’s no tennis or Raymond Chandler or Ella Fitzgerald, either.”
To Denby’s observations, one might add, “Yeah, but you DO get the aura of Chandler and Fitzgerald in Mad Men. Plus you get awesome suits.” Consumerism ain’t all bad, and I’d far prefer the world of the US in the early 1960s to the world of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, which, as Clive James notes in Cultural Amnesia, found it pathetically impossible to produce scissors that could cut, toilet paper that would not cut and toothpaste that would not rot the teeth.
To the extent that Mad Men IS a social critique of its period, that critique is mostly limited to the question of feminism. Don Draper has the wife who meets the period’s apparent feminine ideal, but it gives him no happiness; moreover, Betty’s achievement of the ideal clearly gives her no happiness. And, actually, I think the show does make a good fist at showing that feminism, from the 60s onwards, has added to the sum of happiness in the world.
PS. I bought that Brooks Brothers suit. How do I sleep at night? On a bed made of money.
PPS. How’s Japan? Want to come visit in the second half of this year.
Brad Nguyen
27/02/10 - 7:19 PM
Well I wouldn’t say that Mad Men is at all saying simplistically “capitalism is bad” and the scene with the bohemian hipster is certainly evidence of the writers’ rejection of that kind of reasoning. So I agree with you on that part.
But it’s also a fallacy that a critique of a system necessarily involves the rejection of that system. Mad Men is by no means rejecting capitalism. But it does offer a critique. Why else the ironic contrast between the image of Betty as feminine goddess in the Coke advertisement and the reality of her depression? Why have Don, the picture of corporate success, suffer from his enveloping (and beautiful) ennui. Why dramatise the life of the long-suffering Pete Campbell as he tries to pull himself up the corporate ladder? It’s also interesting to note that even as Peggy gains more responsibilities at the firm, she doesn’t necessarily become happier or more self-empowered.
The object of critique then is not that things are being sold. It is how desire/subjectivity is produced by advertising at a micro level and capitalist society at a macro level. How the structure of capitalist society results in various traumas for the lead characters (even the fervently closeted Sal). We don’t need to reject capitalism, but we do need to understand why these characters have the neuroses they do. What is really keeping them from happiness?
P.S. Japan is awesome. Look forward to showing you around.