Thursday, October 4, 2007

Rebirth of cool

"Mad Men" (an AMC series!) is all AO and I have recently been watching on television. It's about the venal, corrupt world of 1960 New York, where men boose up all day in their offices and sleep with their secretaries. It captures a world when advertising became the real king of the market. There is even a growing subplot of creating Nixon's advertising in his failed race against Kennedy; it's clear that they are being beaten by Kennedy's people.

The series is great on the gender politics of this world, the assumptions that drive them, and the ambivalent divide between the wives and the working women. But, I think, the series is really about class. The main character, Don, is the creative director at the agency. He passes in a world dominated by the East Coast establishment, but his lower class origins haunt him and keep him subtly separate from the entitled, fraternity types around him. He has married into the establishment as well, using war-time heroism to transform himself into an upper middle-class man. But we keep seeing flashbacks to a depression-era childhood dominated by poverty, shame, dislocation, and abuse (like Nixon?). He is clearly terrified that this past will be exposed. He pays off a younger step brother (who is working as a janitor) to disappear from his life. He seeks his revenge by sleeping with women who share his own vexed relationship to the world, first a Village beat and then a second-generation Jewish-American department store owner. He sleeps with the latter only after learning about her father's modest origins. His class mobility mirrors not only their own journeys through the class system, but also their goal of being different kind of women, something other than child-like homemakers or subordinate helpmates in the workplace.

The creator of the series was an important executive in the Sopranos franchise, and he's created a world, when one thinks about it, that is much more evil than Tony Soprano and his mates could ever be. These 1960s types weren't at all marginalized; they were the future, the "rebirth of cool."

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