...The scourge of racism bubbles under the show's pleasant surface. And the period's sexism may make moderns wince. But this is a show for grown-ups fascinated by a mannerly America not yet turned to chaos by the social upheavals to come.Read the rest here.
Children in "Mad Men" are neatly dressed and taught etiquette. Girls don't wear nail polish, bare their navels or display cleavage in high school. The division between child and adult is still a valued concept. Eighth-graders don't have sex lives, and parents think that being mature is a good thing. The family dinner hour survives even marital breakup.
The series shows older people as complex individuals with interesting lives. This was a joy of watching "The Sopranos" — a very different scene to be sure, but one in which we are made to care about characters who are elderly and not gorgeous. Compare this to today's juvenile TV fare where older people, if they appear at all, come off as comic curmudgeons or shrill mothers-in-law.
In "Mad Men," suited gentlemen and ladies in cocktail dresses add an air of festivity to the formal dining establishments in which they enjoy a decidedly adult evening. Grown-ups don't arrive in overalls, even expensive ones. There are no strollers.
This sense of occasion has almost vanished in today's culture. Lost is a notion of difference between country and city, night and day, workweek and weekend.
Some younger viewers may scoff at the suits, ties and polished shoes required of the male go-getters. But these ambitious workers of the '60s generally left their offices after eight hours and didn't work at all on weekends. So which is the liberated generation?
H/T The Young Fogey
4 comments:
Notice that the first comment cried "racist" and talked about the awfulness that the boomers felt towards their parents? While I am against any type of romanticizing and idealizing a period of time (for as sinners, human nature has remained the same), the author brings up a few good points. Instead of throwing out an entire generation when the Pax Americana was ushering in unparalleled prosperity merely because of that generations flaws we could certainly hope to learn from it.
The problem with the first comment is that nothing has changed - except for the fact that we wallow in perpetual adolescence, immaturity and de-cultured decline. If anything, the following generation have are substantially *more* shallow. It's not that the era of "Mad Men" was great, it was just unfathomably more civilized than today's America.
I haven't watched the show. Isn't it about upper-middle class people in the 60's?
Does it include working class people and their lives?
Does it have any "minorities"?
Nostalgia is not what it used to be.
Steve Sailer's impolitic take:
...Weiner maintains plausible deniability in Mad Men by methodically depicting how unenlightened the upper-middle class WASPs of a half century ago were. We in the audience are scandalized to note, for example, that even the most respectable parents in 1960 devoted more time to socializing with other adults than to obsessively overseeing their offspring’s next leap up the steep slope of the meritocratic pyramid.
Moreover, many families in 1960 can afford a home on just one income. As Betty Friedan noted, housewives are imprisoned in their suburban homes, escaping in Mad Men only, well … any time they feel like it.
Worse, firms pay married workers more than equally productive single ones, in violation of all the tenets of Friedan and Friedman. Employers back then felt they had a “duty to society,” a concept with which our advanced cultures are no longer familiar.
Even more shockingly, the employees at the Sterling Cooper ad agency knock off work right at 5:15 PM each day. They appear to have some weird Depression-era relic of a notion of solidarity among American workers: that if the bosses want more work done, they should hire more workers...
While watching Mad Men, Weiner affords us ample opportunity to congratulate ourselves on how much progress we’ve made. For example, most of the black characters in Mad Men have servile jobs. Today, of course, things are infinitely better. Black men are seldom seen in servile jobs (unless they are African immigrants or gay). In fact, black men aren’t seen in any jobs as much anymore: ten percent of black men were out of the work force in Don Draper’s 1960 versus 24 percent in booming 2000. Indeed, black men aren’t even seen at all as much anymore because a million are now locked away in prison. (The incarceration rate of black male high school dropouts was one percent in the Bad Old Days of Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office versus 25 percent in Bill Clinton’s glorious finale.)
The kicker to the joke is that Mad Men, despite being set in New York, is filmed in LA, where Latinos have been imported in vast numbers to fill the servant jobs that today’s upper-middle class whites no longer trust blacks with. Yet Hispanics are even more invisible to the Hollywood elite today than blacks were...
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