A clip from my latest obsession.
SPOILAGE.
Tired of the movies, where women barely exist onscreen at all, and when they do, they’re treated like imbeciles or cardboard cutouts? The assumption in the movie industry is that men make the vast majority of the movie-seeing decisions, and that women are therefore a niche market that only needs a couple of intelligence-insulting bones thrown for a twice-annual girl’s night out.* But TV is another story. For whatever reason, it’s beginning to be understood that shows with fully realized female characters that have more going on than being fuckable and having babies do quite well on the small screen, thank you very much. And TV meets a variety of entertainment gaps that weren’t being filled. You have your fantasies of female empowerment that still aren’t realized in the everyday world—like on “Battlestar Galactica” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and you have shows that address women’s lives in an honest way, patriarchal warts and all, like on the comedy “Ugly Betty” and the drama “Mad Men”, which is a show that we power-chugged last week, watching most of the first season flying to and from New York.
The first season of “Mad Men” is set in 1960, which means it’s an exceedingly relevant program for modern times, because it’s this turning point in time that all culture war madness turns off of. When conservatives talk bitterly about the 60s, it’s because they romanticize the 50s as the ultimate moment of the American patriarchy, and to varying degrees, also the last gasp of blatant white supremacy, a utopia of white male dominance that was cruelly snatched away and needs to be restored through government intervention.
It’s clear from the get-go that “Mad Men” is going to be a show about how the 50s weren’t really as the romantic images show us, and that’s a message that’s a little well-worn at this point. We know that single women were treated like prey (the show mercifully namechecks its obvious predecessor, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which came out in 1960 and made many of the same points through dark comedy), housewives were so stifled they were losing their minds, the country was so racist that merely having an Italian-American work a position in a major advertising firm was treated like a huge step forward, and that men treated their female coworkers like dumb bunnies, too stupid for real work and mainly existing for typing, coffee-fetching, and sexual release. Sure, your average conservative who gets teary-eyed at the thought of “Leave It To Beaver” apparently needs a harsh reminder, but for those of us who know better, “the 50s weren’t as great as they were said to be” is a well-trod fact.
But because this is a TV show and there’s plenty of time available to the writers, they lift the show out of cliche-land, by dint of their ability to really make each character a fully realized human being just trying to get by under the weight of social expectations. And that also means that the women get to be fully realized characters, too, even though the show has the word “men” right in the title. There’s a myriad of characters on the show, but the ones that get the most screentime are the main character Don Draper, his wife Betty, his secretary Peggy Olson and his colleague/wannabe competitor Pete Campbell. Don’s story is too complex to get into here, but it’s definitely a symbolic retelling of the idea that the 50s weren’t what they were cracked up to be, and yet it escapes cliche and tedium. Betty initially seems like the kind of woman “The Feminine Mystique” was written for, but as the show grinds on, you find that she’s even worse off than that, because she was trained from the get-go to be the dumb bunny housewife, she has been robbed of her ability to articulate her frustrations, and probably wouldn’t know what to do with that book if she got a copy. Pete is a young executive who grew up in a privileged family and is trying to prove that he’s worth everything he’s got and more on talent alone and not name. And Peggy is probably the most sympathetic character on the show, even if she’s rude and unsociable at times. She’s definitely the Ugly Betty character, but in a dramatic sense—the dowdy girl from Brooklyn who first is besot by her ambitions to be a big-time Manhattan secretary and then gets even more ambitious when her bosses discover she’s got a skill for copywriting and start assigning her that kind of work on the side. Her struggles to get recognition for her talents will warm the feminist heart.
The patriarchy crushes everyone on the show, which is one place where the writing soars above the usual cliches. Even the obvious predecessor The Apartment doesn’t dive into the way that even the alpha males get ground down by their own stifling social roles, but since the main character on this show is Don Draper, we slowly get to see how even those who supposedly have it all in this world are adrift. Don got his ideal housewife and children and he’s moving up in a job that is both lucrative and creatively fulfilling, but he’s a mess of longing for something else. He finds himself starting affairs with women that are everything his wife is not—intelligent, independent, with a short patience for crap. I’m particularly infatuated with Rachel Menken, the manager and heiress of a 5th Avenue department store that Don’s agency takes on as a client. From the moment Don suggests she’d be happier getting married and being sequestered in the suburbs instead of running her department store, and she looks at him like he just spit on the table, it was true love for me for her. Don also keeps a beatnik mistress, which gives the writers some fun opportunities to portray both the bright side of the counterculture (particularly its artistic side) but also its seeds of destruction in the preening self-importance of it all.
What really makes the show remarkable is that with the combination of The Apartment as an inspiration and the hindsight of being able to write this in the 21st century, they’re able to tack out on a subtle point missing in a lot of examinations of how the 50s turned into the 60s, which is that the middle class American patriarchy collapsed from its own weight. The feminist movement did a lot for women, but they were effective because they had good timing, sweeping in with solutions as the cracks began to really show in the old system. This show is about how the cracks are forming, and how they were inevitable in the post-war America where the values states of ambition and self-fulfillment made it increasingly hard for people to just accept their roles as assigned. And every character on the show chafes because they are striving, and they are striving because it’s an exciting new world where striving is the ur-value. It’s not a mistake that all the action centers around the advertising industry. Instrumental to the striving new American world was the place of the consumer capitalist mentality, for better or for worse. It’s easy to condemn that mentality for the damage it does women, but it’s also true that it created a foothold for women to gain power, because their talents in the workplace were needed and their opinions as consumers suddenly became valuable.
It’s an uncomfortable space, but it’s all the more intriguing for it. What puts the show a notch above is the willing to sink you into those gray areas there. Most shows would have you rooting for Kennedy over Nixon during the election that hangs over the entire first season of the show, but on this show, the characters are so firmly in the Nixon camp that you find yourself empathizing with their disappointment when the notorious American villain loses. A show that can do that can walk you down some thought-provoking roads.
The new season starts in July.
*Whether or not this is true—i.e., that men still rule over women’s lives and choices on an individual basis to this degree—is up for debate, but considering that the U.S. now has more single adult women than married adult women, I’m dubious. And even married women probably see a lot more movies without men than they used to. And while I don’t doubt that women lose most battles still when it comes down to Him vs. Her on what movie to see, I’m sure more and more couples are interested in seeing something that interests everyone involved.
35 Responses to “The seeds of the culture war sprout here”
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Thank you for this post.
I had a moment of panic that I had missed the season opener. Normally I view TV as a never-ending stream of distractions, so it is not worth it to me to play catch-up on a series. (I got way too far behind on BSG and The Wire & had to drop them.) This is the only show I’ve gone back and watched every single episode. I found it when they were on the 4th or 5th show. The writing is so good.
You can catch up on iTunes. I can say that we’re downloading more and more stuff to watch now, and Apple TV is looking like a smarter idea than I initially thought. Not that I hate watching TV on a laptop in bed, but it would be nice to see it on the bigger screen.
I thought there was a study not to long ago (I can’t find it now) that showed women in het. couples are more likely to choose what movie to see. It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember any details, though.
“Tired of the movies, where women barely exist onscreen at all, and when they do, they’re treated like imbeciles or cardboard cutouts?”
What, you went to see Iron Man over the weekend too??
“For whatever reason, it’s beginning to be understood that shows with fully realized female characters that have more going on than being fuckable and having babies do quite well on the small screen, thank you very much.”
I have been so happy with this turn of events on tv. I would say 50% of the shows watched in my household star women. What’s really stupid on the movie studios’ part, is that they see movies with strong female roles as something only women will want to see. My husband asks me to wait to watch recorded episodes with him because he wants to watch these shows with me.
I thought there was a study not to long ago (I can’t find it now) that showed women in het. couples are more likely to choose what movie to see.
Back in film class I had a teacher who explained that most Hollywood films were marketed to 18-25 year old men because they figure those are the people going out on dates. Which made me wonder who they think all those 18-25 year old guys are going on dates with. If they thought it was with one another, the obligatory female love interest wouldn’t make any sense at all.
There should be a place on every boomer’s wall for a big sign, in bold red and blue. This sign should use Amanda’s words (which I love, because I’ve been using them in arguments with boomers for years):
I sometimes wonder if that preening self-importance is one of the key reasons that so many pundits and Hilary Clinton supporters hate Obama’s supporters so much: those snotty kids just don’t get that all that is Noble And Good And Idealistic is already embodied in the boomers, so nobody fifty (and especially nobody under thirty, the arrogant little fucking gradeschoolers) should be permitted to open their yaps in the presence of their betters.It’s assumed, for a reasonably good reason, that if a woman and a man have different ideas on what to see, the man’s going to win the battle most of the time. I’m sure that there’s a thin percentage of couples where the woman gets to pick the entertainment 50% of the time, but most of the time it’s a lot like the housework battles. Men win by privilege and attrition, because they have the advantage of dismissing what their female companions want to see by calling it chick flicks.
“The assumption in the movie industry is that men make the vast majority of the movie-seeing decisions, “
Is it actually an assumption, or is it a fact revealed by market research?
What the fuck?
RKMK, haven’t you ever made a point in the guise of a tearass, over-the-top, hyperbolic rant? Fun!
I personally don’t care where one stands on the Obama v Clinton divide. One really can’t avoid, however, the reality that a lot of the commentary on the idealism of Obama’s supporters — and often their youth — is condescending as hell. That’s why Hilary’s comment about Obama was galling for reasons other than its implied/perceived racism (ie: blacks just aren’t ready!): it basically pissed on the youth of Obama. Likewise with her campaign’s commentary on the idealism driving a lot of his supporters, wherein she and her supporters called them, in effect, naive nincompoops.
There is a tendency among former counterculture types to sort of assume that Cool Ideas began and ended with them. It can be and often is spectacularly annoying.
“I sometimes wonder if that preening self-importance is one of the key reasons that so many pundits and Hilary Clinton supporters hate Obama’s supporters so much: those snotty kids just don’t get that all that is Noble And Good And Idealistic is already embodied in the boomers, so nobody fifty (and especially nobody under thirty, the arrogant little fucking gradeschoolers) should be permitted to open their yaps in the presence of their betters.”
Oddly enough, as a 26-year-old Clinton supporter, I see a lot of hate from Obama supporters who can’t believe I can have ideals and not be utterly wowed by the one true sainted Barack.
Interesting point, Catnick; that must be vexing as hell.
Looking at it from the outside, (I’m sitting in Canada) the differences that I see are this:
(1) The condescension coming at Obama’s supporters seems also to come from the top. Some of the jabs of Clinton and her top surrogates / allies / etc. say the same insulting or impliedly insulting things. I don’t see Obama doing that to anywhere near the same extent. (Put colloquially: you often can’t stop your supporters from being jerks to your opponent’s supporters; you can stop yourself being a jerk about it, and I really haven’t seen that from Ms. Clinton. Which is a shame, because it is basically her pouring paint over her own head, hiding her own qualities.) Many of the comments aimed Obama’s way have not just been jabs at the idealism of his supporters but at idealism itself. You don’t hear Obama sneering about feminism; you do hear Clinton mocking Obama for his call for a post-1960s mindset, to take one example.
(2) The condescension is often reinforced by the mainstream punditry. The corporate media crowd hate the proles having ideas, of course, but they especially denigrate the young having ideas.
There are other attacks that Hilary has to deal with, of course, that Obama doesn’t have to deal with. But they aren’t linked to a topic on this thread, and have been canvassed effectively elsewhere. The point I’m trying to make is this: the 1950s vs. 1960s battles have been branded into the American political psyche and are poisoning attempts to move away from sterile head-bashing. Clinton has obtained some skilful and recently very effective mileage by buying into those tired frames to woo older, more cautious voters. Fine. But she has to accept being called on the limitations and drawbacks of such a strategy.
Speaking of stifling 1960 patriarchy, Mildred Loving passed away today.
That’s so sad, Ms. Kate. She and her husband were important pioneers in the inter-racial marriage battle. Speaking of good roles for women, check out the TV movie Loving Vs. Virginia sometime.*
*Yeah, I know that sounds like a made up title, but it’s not.
I am so thrilled at this opportunity to blogwhore Basket of Kisses, the only non-offical (non-AMC) blog devoted entirely to Mad Men.
It’s run by my sister and me; we’re both feminists. It’s not a feminist blog per se but we spend a lot of time talking about the issues raised by the show in a deeply analytic way.
A show that dedicates an entire episode to women characters discovering masturbation is a really amazing thing.
Deborah, your blog sounds interesting. I had forgotten about the masturbation episode! Sounds like I need to rewatch the first season before the second one starts.
As far as Amanda’s comment about men choosing the cinematic entertainment is concerned - I wonder if it’s different here in Britain? I’m fairly certain that my girlfirend chooses a higher percentage of the films we watch than me. She also turned me on to about 25% of the music I really love. That’s one of the reasons I love her - She’s got great taste!
I had a moment of panic that I had missed the season opener.
Ron O - the one really good thing you missed out on by not seeing the episodes in order is the there’s a big emotional impact at the end of the pilot episode that one doesn’t get if they’re already aware of Don’s home life from subsequent episodes.
Oh, man - I love this show, not just for it’s devastating takedown of the sixties (and look for Revolutionary Road to plumb this further), but for the joy of watching something on television where (a) I don’t know where it’s taking me and (b) after I’ve been taken, I don’t feel that I’m there via a gimmick.
I actually had a professor in college who lay on her couch for the better part of two years in the late 1960’s, suffering from depression and wondering whether this was all her life was supposed to be. It wasn’t - she went back to school, got her PhD in Political Science, and was at the forefront of the 1970’s-era women’s studies boom.
I am looking forward to this year, as Peggy is the transformational character who will in time, I think, be the forbearer of the modern career woman.
And there’s this genius scene, where closeted Sal can’t get over his fear and go back to the out-of-town client’s hotel room. And everything takes place between the lines.
July can’t come fast enough.
Hoping this isn’t a repeat, but I’d note that Revolutionary Road will plumb the same territory later this year.
I love Mad Men, not just for all the cultural reasons that you nail above, but for having the ability to surprise me without it feeling like a cheat.
And I have to recommend this scene, where Sal can’t get all the way out of the closet and go back to an out-of-town client’s hotel room.
Eric: I don’t know. I’ve heard it always described as an assumption, but I’d love to see market research.
They make fun of Ayn Rand. It’s worth watching just for that.
And the casting of Robert Morse is pretty much genius:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_29IeEeZqo
Couple of things - I don’t have cable, so I will have to rent on Netflix. I caught one episode at a friends, and it looked GREAT. Second, I just made the point on a Jezebel post http://jezebel.com/387205/coming-soon-2008-the-summer-of-the-dick-flick that women are never going to get more movies aimed at them if they don’t take the men in their lives to “chick flicks.” If the guys always get us to go to the “dick flicks”, but we don’t get them to come to the chick flicks, the dick flicks will always outperform the chick flick by a two to one ratio. If they’re not going to come with us, we should forgo going with them. I know it sounds harsh, but the way things are currently set up, it will be dick flicks from here to eternity.
to seeker6079 and Marcotte:
I’d be the first to say that the boomer generation has delivered incredibly bad government. Our best and brightest basically went into technology businesses.
That said, we also are the first generation in human history to pass down the set of tools that make bottom-up political change possible… the PC and the Internet. Without those, nobody would ever have heard of Obama and Hillary would be the Democratic nominee, centrism, corporatism, and neoconservatism at all. (why yes, I DID work in one of the early dot.coms… and in high-tech startups back when the home computer of the day was a Commodore 64 or Apple II and one got to cyberspace via 300 baud modem)
And political progressivism wasn’t invented by the generation who is now in its twenties. (unfortunately, part of my generations’ failure in government showed up in the educational system, otherwise stating this on a public forum would be superfluous. )
to Catnik
You may not have noticed, but there are people in my generation dumping on you hillbots, too. Why do we call you hillbots? Your thinking comes from whatever the Hillary talking points of the day are despite your community’s bleating “We came up with these ideas all by ourselves”. You are impervious to facts, like Hillary’s support of Santorum’s bill (now law) that immunizes pharmacists from the consequences of refusing to fill birth control prescriptions for patients. Finding out about this persuaded me that if Hillary gets the nomination, I’m leaving the top of the ticket blank.
If you want to equate DLC/GOP neoliberal (trickle-down) economic policy and neoconservative foreign policy (Hillary “OBLITERATE IRAN”= “Insane”McCain “BOMB,BOMB IRAN”) with progressivism, go for it.
But don’t expect any response other than derisive laughter when you do. You don’t get laughed at and dismissed in public because of people’s ages, you get laughed at and dismissed because you people say stupid shit in public and expect to get away with it due to some passed-along sense of Hillary entitlement.
If YOU and Hillary want to defend Saudi Arabia because it has one of the worst records on human rights on the face of the earth, pack up your bags and go there. Personally, I don’t think defending the House of Saud dictatorship is worth a paper cut, let alone the use of US nuclear weapons.
“Our best and brightest basically went into technology businesses.”
…which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. But many of those “best and brightest” were amoral/immoral money-grubbing scum who saw their role in the world as making the most money and dying with the most toys. Combined with the belief that it’s perfectly okay to screw as many people as possible on your way up, you have the makings of Bushism as we see it today.
It must be cool to think you live entirely apart from the rest of humanity, and achieved your success without any benefits received from the rest of society…
…or maybe it just makes you an asshole…
Great post Amanda. I’d have to say my favorite episode was when Betty discovered the joys of the washing machine. We’d seen Don have his affairs and while she didn’t it did show that she had a desire outside of him and, quite frankly, she *probably* wasn’t that sexually fulfilled. The treatment of the female neighbor who was divorced and Betty’s interaction with the neighbor’s son was interesting as well. There was a great scene between the two where this woman who is supposed to have everything has to reach out to a child and all he can say is, “I don’t know how long 15 minutes is but my mom will come back soon” (I’m paraphrasing).
And it was surprising for me to realize just how racially divided society was back then. I was expecting them to treat the black characters badly but I will admit I was surprised at the treatment of Jewish and Italian characters.
I haven’t seen “Mad Men,” but I thought I had read at least one early critique that it went so far in showing women being dismissed and objectified that it began to cross a line into _reveling_ in that casual sadism rather than calling it into question. (I have zero recall about where I might have seen that.) Did the show shift in a different direction after a few episodes, or could it still be received that way?
(I’ll hold my tongue about “preening self-importance,” because I’m more curious about “Mad Men” than about another round of the primary battledrome.)
Lizard.
Hiya.
You know two things about me. My age, and that I voted for Clinton. You really should kindly refrain from making assumptions about my zealotry, or what I believe. It’s a touch hypocritical to harangue my supposed “imperviousness to facts,” without bothering to gather any to base your statements on. That straw man is looking kind of the worse for wear.
I know how you feel, Catnik. My point was that the boomers act like they invented idealism and popular movements, a belief of self-satisfied narcissism. A.Lizard’s riposte (if one can call it that) is to misstate that I feel that “political progressivism wasn’t invented by the generation who is now in its twenties” and then go on to say, in effect, “and boomers invented the internet!” (Rolls eyes.)
I should be thankful, though, because he/she/it does rather make two of my points better than I did: (1) that many boomers really don’t listen to anybody else if it conflicts with their own views and self-regard; and (2) that many boomers can’t wait to rush to self-congratulation and dismissal of the views of others. “Yay Me!” should be tattooed on many such an ass.
Chick flicks don’t pull the numbers as much. It’s all about the money. If Art was what the paying public wanted, we’d see more of it. Instead, we get McFilms.
I love my appleTV. If it weren’t for Turner Classic Movies, I’d dump my cable bill for it. I think I would spend much less to simply buy the shows I want - and the few I have time to watch - rather than pay month after month.
There was a time, in the 1930s, when movie executives realized that mostly women went to movie houses, particularly matinees. This realization led to a slew of “Women’s Pictures”, starring forgotten greats like Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis. Though never as feminist as one might wish, they are often far more pro-woman than any movie between world war two and the seventies.
The other day I saw one called “Stranded” and the man had to admit he was wrong about being a sexist ass to Kay Francis at the end. It’s a rare thing to see in any old movie.
Damn you! I wasn’t going to watch the clip, but I had to follow the “Casual Cruelty” post you had on 5/9 (JFK nearly drowning women in the bathtub during sex? How could I not?) and it linked to this post, and I CLICKED ON THE CLIP to see how the two posts were connected. Now, dammitall, you’ve got me hooked! Now I have to watch the show. DAMN YOU! I’m too busy to spend another hour watching TV! What am I going to tell “Lost”? That I’m seeing another TV show?
This is all your fault….