[PLEASUREMAN]

Mad Men is in the middle of it's third season on AMC. This is the show about the advertising business in the 60s, and of course by extension it's about America and its big transformative decade. It's also a distorted mirror to contemporary society, by way of its dazzling period recreation that has the nerve to show how not so bad the bad things were and how distressingly absent the good things are now.

To provide a precis of the series, the show follows the existential crisis of advertising exec Don Draper, a man who "has it all, and so much of it" yet feels adrift and isolated. He has assumed the name of a soldier in Korea to wall off his past (as the illegitimate son of a prostitute), and has worked his way up in the advertising business to become the head of creative at Sterling Cooper, a medium-sized ad agency based in Manhattan. Don's life is as strictly compartmentalized as he has made his past--he has his home and family in the suburbs, a static marriage, limited interaction with his neighbors, his work in the city, his extramarital affairs, all linked together by an unyielding drive to move forward. The problem is that "forward" is no longer a clear destination as social and political changes throw a fog over the future.


The magic of the series is that it is not about feminism, or civil rights, or the 60s counterculture, or even about the glories of smoking and drinking at work, but about the way large scale change creeps forward and creates a mood of threatening unpredictability that undermines our sense of comfort and identity. I believe it is no accident that the series came to fruition in the past few years; I think we are living through a period of equally chaotic change today, following a similarly chimeric prosperity, and that this sense of fluidity has produced a madness comparable to that which is still awaiting the characters in the series (the current season being set in 1963, the year of the JFK assassination).

The show leads with its writing, carefully overseen by Matthew Weiner, and it is some of the best writing of character and dialogue I have ever seen. I doubt the series can be fully appreciated by anyone younger than 30, as issues of personal identity and social change rarely become compelling before that point, but there is so much in the writing to appreciate that it hardly matters. Particularly notable is the level of character interplay--in a medium which commonly resorts to shortcuts and cliches and stock characterizations (and all manner of actorly gimmicks), it is one of the most refreshing things about the series. Conflicts are real and unpredictable, and while the series sometimes veers erratically in order to find a defining moment, there is never a sense of disposable melodrama or archness. Even the episode titles have a resonance--"The Marriage of Figaro", "New Amsterdam", "The Wheel", "For Those Who Think Young", "Meditations in an Emergency"--often culled from period culture and advertising.

The drop-off point for this post is the latest episode, "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency". Sterling Cooper's British parent arrives on July 3 for a visit to the troops and an unveiling of the new org chart (the managerial revolution is one of the more ominous changes going on), and all goes as expected until an impromptu John Deere lawnmower ride through the office results in the tragic foot mutilation of the new Brit account wunderkind (named Guy McKendrick, in case you were wondering). Needless to say, Guy does not walk out of an advertising agency.

I love this show.

[PLEASUREMAN]

The most interesting tension in the show is that between past and present, the moreso given that its creator, Matthew Weiner, is a liberal Jew whose feelings about the era do not often seem very ambivalent in interviews. From the Huffington Post:

Quote

Weiner is surprised by the idea that he, or his show, is sexist. "The treatment of women on Mad Men is the point," he says emphatically. "The women characters are informed not only by my mother, an attorney, and two older sisters, an attorney and a doctor, but by the philosophical underpinnings of what I learned at Wesleyan. It's right out of The Feminine Mystique. My show is saying 'This is not right.'"

"The most exciting ideas on campus involved feminism," Weiner says. His eyes light up when he talks about the impact of his freshman poetry course taught by Professor of English Gertrude Hughes. He was one of two men in the class. "Like Emily Dickinson, I was drawn to the hormonal teenage experience of loneliness, of the reality of death, and of sexual awakening." In the poems of women -- from Dickinson to Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Denise Levertov -- he discovered a form for his exploration of the outsider who tries to don a mask of acceptability, but often fails.

All very on the nose points to make if you are writing a modern television drama that "explores issues"--show business being much the case of an ingroup rewriting history to tell a pleasing story about itself. In Hollywood you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen or so people who marched with King, were transformed by reading The Feminist Mystique, or who at least have a dog-eared copy of Black Like Me in a prominent place on the bookshelf.

It would be ironic for a show to demonize the ingroup of WASP-filled 60s advertising agencies while being a product of an industry completely defined by liberal Jewish outlook and sympathies, but for all Weiner's talk of Sylvia Plath et al, Mad Men does not portray its WASPs as awful people or the social milieu as one of bestial injustice where black people get the back of someone's hand for being slow at the elevator controls. When Weiner mentions his college enthusiasms, one suspects it is partly for the interviewer's benefit--I do not doubt Weiner's formative experiences, but it is the only thing one really can say given what Mad Men is.



Weiner's tell is what is missing in Mad Men's episodes. The Sterling Cooper offices are completely free--one might say liberated--of dunning and joyless political correctness. Bras get snapped and secretaries ogled, but no one seems to have a huge problem with it, and more importantly the women know how to handle this sort of attention. Although much is sometimes made by the show's fans about Betty Draper's stifled suburban lifestyle or Peggy Olsen's low status at Sterling Cooper, both women are portrayed as largely responsible for their situations--Betty due to her immaturity and lack of imagination, Peggy due to her snippiness and lack of respect for others. When a Pepsi campaign fails due to a terrible attempt to mimic "Bye Bye Birdie", the unspoken reason is that the spot's homosexual director miscast the female singer and screwed up the whole tone of the ad. Draper's faith in him is indeed a testament to paternalistic WASP cluelessness. (Salvatore Romano, the agency's closeted homosexual, still behaves normally thanks to pressure to conform.)

More than that, Weiner mercilessly sends up the very liberal PC sensibilities currently the reigning ideology--the most scorned character is bearded, pipe-smoking, pseudo-bohemian Paul Kinsey, who flaunts a black girlfriend (until she dumps him), namedrops his downscale beatnik neighborhood, and generally carries on like a childish ass. He expounds the mind-expanding virtues of marijuana but it's clear that for him it's a form of infantile escapism--he is prosperity's offspring, the counterpoint to the generation shaped by depression and war.

In short, either Weiner's interviews should be taken with a grain of salt, or there is far more going on in Mad Men than even he is aware of. I opt for the former explanation--Weiner is simply too absorbed in all the show's details and too actuely aware of subtext for all this to be flying by him (some of it is not very subtle). I sometimes worry what will happen when critics lose patience with Weiner's tactics and demand a WASP sacrifice to Baal to reassure them that he is not an apostate. All the more reason to seed every interview with faux outrage over pay differences between men and women and so on--and continue creating a show in which the differences between men and women are very stark. If nothing else, Weiner is too fascinated with the setting to allow it to become something it wasn't, which allows us to see truths that cannot normally be broadcast on television these days.

[PLEASUREMAN]

As a counterpoint to the above, Mark Greif's review of Mad Men is sharply critical but still worth reading. An excerpt:

Quote

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show’s advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ – ‘Not on my watch.’ ‘Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology; it looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.’ It’s only a short further wait until a pregnant mother inhales a tumbler of whisky and lights up a Chesterfield; or a heart attack victim complains that he can’t understand what happened: ‘All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream, ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.’ We’re meant to save a little snort, too, for the ad agency’s closeted gay art director as he dismisses psychological research: ‘We’re supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite? . . . Ridiculous!’ – a line delivered with a limp-wristed wave. Mad Men is currently said to be the best and ‘smartest’ show on American TV. We’re doomed.

Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show’s ‘1950s’ is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film.

http://www.lrb.co.uk...20/grei01_.html

[Lookwell!]

Your review is pretty accurate I say; I was wondering why the head writer kept whining about how horrible the 50s and 60s "were" while without resorting to sacrificing some character on the show in the name of PC or whatever

The characters on mad men are the realest talking people on tv aside from hank hill

[PLEASUREMAN]

That's the appeal...the show allows its characters to act like real people...not like stock characters with pre-defined good or bad roles. Funny note--I saw the season premiere at the Angelika here in Dallas, and two black women from Chicago sat next to me and my wife. The four of us were the only people dressed up for the showing. I guess they were big fans...which reminds me of the line when Pete Campbell is trying to get Admiral to advertise in black magazines because their TV is selling well in black areas...and the Admiral guy counters, maybe blacks buy Admirals because they think whites like them. The show lets people say those lines without reprimanding the character by showing he is a child molester or beats his wife.

Much ado has been made this season because the writing staff of seven has five women writers...hard to say what effect that really has under a strong visionary like Weiner, and men are happy to overcompensate as Weiner does in interviews, talking about how feminism "fascinates" him and his two sisters and blah blah blah. Liberal Jewish men always do seem obsessed with women in one way or another (speaking of which, look at the pencilneck that Weiner had his Jewess run off and marry between the first and second seasons...a typical Draper cast-off taking a weak male as a pacifier).

[Probably Not]

It's interesting to read the conflicted responses women have to the show. Case in point is the little article in Newsweek on why women love Don Draper.
Newsweek

Only click if you have the strongest of stomachs - it's Newsweek. But here's a telling excerpt:

Quote

He's an enigma, a locked box of a man who resists, maddeningly, easy explanation. And yet he excites an attraction among women—particularly ones my age, women in their late '20s and '30s who were born after the era that Mad Men portrays—that seems unmatched by any leading man on television today... We describe our obsession in words that, like the show itself, are somewhat retro. "He is a straight-up man. He makes me feel like a woman via the TV." "He's a throwback to a time when men were men. "It's the thickness of his body." "Shoulders to cry on and a jaw that causes women to swoon."

A man's man. A virile man. A masculine man. Strong terms. And ones that would make our postmodern gender-studies professors blush.

I find it interesting how the show awakens desires in men and women, and how different yet compatible those desires are. Women have erotic longing for the men depicted, and are surprised to find that eros is unreasonable. Men, I think, have a longing to be the men depicted on the show, or at least more like them than our current gender-neutral culture would prefer.

Rather than look down on the show from an ironic and superior distance (as the negative reviewer cited above assumes), we can also look to it with a profound regret.

What I find refreshing about the show is not just the production but the response to it - the desires it evokes so easily (and which probably confound Weiner to some degree as well, if he isn't simply paying lip-service to PC sentiment) have clearly not been mastered by two generations of feminism and equality. I take this to be a Good Thing.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Yes, the show tells us what we lost and what the PC mindset of THAT'S THE ERA OF BIGOTRY AND INTOLERANCE forbids us from re-experiencing. And it isn't just the man-woman dynamic that Weiner focuses on--he's clearly showing, via Sterling Cooper, the managerial revolution. Paperclips and pens! Managerial oversight taken to a totalitarian level and managers who are themselves experts at nothing but saying "yes" to their bosses. I quit my last job because I could no longer take working for a company that marginalized its best (older) employees, openly plotted replacing departments with Indian contractors, and replaced productive work with mind-numbing meetings and process (if we avert risk we guarantee success--the modern corporate motto).

Whatever Weiner's conflicts, he loves the era and its freedoms. The managerial revolution quickly crept into the social sphere--if we can just hound people into "taking care of themselves" we'll shave a few points off the rate of accident/disease/death! Which today has reached the ridiculous level of helmet laws and zero tolerance and second hand smoking panics and so on.

The Newsweek article is terrible of course. A stupid, fannish essay banged out in maybe thirty minutes, most of it filled with repetitive superlatives and summaries and to be sure's. The second half of the article is a limp justification for worshipping effeminate ciphers like Barack Obama, the third president in a row with daddy issues and a crippled psyche. Women who consider themselves "professionals" (i.e. have a libarts or business-lite degree and do practically nothing of value) will always prefer an office filled with beta males they can dun into taking them seriously.

Of course when you look at the modern office, even the alphas are betas--weak men who gained power through a mysterious consensus after years of expertly sucking management dick and creating new synergies in risk aversion, men who are in fact the creatures of a workplace that is 50% female (and suffers for it). I don't know that today's manchildren will ever snap out of it and change this, but all it will take is men grabbing what they want and never apologizing for offending some useless libarts shrew and the she-male faggot who cries after sex.

[Lookwell!]

Another great thing about the show is the utter lack of fat or ugly people... the fattest person I've seen so far was the delivery room nurse and even then she'd be considered "normal" by today's standards

There is a stark difference in how people present themselves in the show vs. today. Even if a woman was only going to be about the house all day she at least made an effort to look good, the men care about how they look and get a haircut every two weeks. The marxist hippy has a beard and is the most slovenly of all of them. It seems that in modern times its the ugliest, fattest shrillest harpies that demand "political correctness" and insane beaurocracies and feel that everyone else SIMPLY MUST be trying to rape them at all times (lol reality disconnect) and have led us to this miserable situation

Of course a woman actually dressing nice for a man and doing her hair is proof to these types that "omg how PERSECUTED they were", rather than the actual reasons of the time (to maintain some sense of decorum and personal pride/respect)

[PLEASUREMAN]

I wrote a long blog thing about standards of appearance once...here...what's interesting is the places where the suit is still the required costume--talk show hosts, for example. Why does someone like David Letterman still wear a tie? He won't even wear contacts anymore. I guess they clashed with his constantly mutating mid-life crisis look. I suppose they'll all adopt the open collar Ahmadinejad look eventually. I really think it's all a matter of subtle workplace control, too subtle to be conscious. The de-professionalizing of many professions. If you look like a childish dickhead, it is easier to get away with treating you like one.

[PLEASUREMAN]

The second most impressive scene in this week's Mad Men was Draper's dressing down of Peggy. It's a testament to Don's old world sense of decorum that when Peggy comes sniffing around for a crack at the Hilton account, Draper sees in it a brazen attempt to undermine his authority through manipulation. Today Peggy would be commended for initiative--self-seeking aggression is now practically a cornerstone of business ethics. The modern workplace is defined by hustler morality. If someone leaves money on the table, you take it. If they object, you punch them in the neck--or in the back of the head, as some hitchhiking crooks do to Don after feeding him benzos.

Peggy is convinced that because she's the only woman in the office that her work has special merit. She must be outstanding (a woman has to work twice as hard to get the same credit as a man--something failures tell themselves while reaching for the Kleenex). Her liaison with Duck is typical of that character's aimlessness. Does she want a position with Duck's firm? Did she think sleeping him would advance any particular goal? If Duck is simply out to screw Don, how good an idea is this? What Duck demonstrated is that when Peggy is one of two people in a room, she is the more likely to get fucked.

The schoolteacher seems to be a revival of Helen, first season's divorcee, particularly when she accuses Don in almost the same manner as Helen accused Don's neighbor Carlton. It's a little implausible that Ossining, NY is filled with embittered single women plagued by unwanted male advances--who are therefore accustomed to acidly dressing those men down just so. Helen seemed an anachronism, and this dubiously pretty schoolteacher (who previously called Draper at home while nursing a cocktail) seems like a plot device. Surely we can get through at least one season of Mad Men without a melodramatic affair taking center stage.

The episode overall was filled with new developments, the most important of which was Sterling Cooper's taming of Don (via contract). Bert Cooper's showdown at the end was dazzling and absolutely right, especially in its brevity. Exertions of will like that don't play out in big speeches but rather a word or two to the wise--after which one can either acquiesce or resign. But Roger Sterling's contribution to Don's subjugation should not be underrated, mistaken as a clumsy maneuver--while Betty gave Roger a terse goodbye, his phone call did its work in applying domestic pressure. Don seems to realize this when he demands that Sterling be kept out of his sight. Sterling has involved himself in his home life one time too many.

The lingering question is of course, what does this contracted servitude mean for Don Draper? How will a man who always needs an out behave without one? It was of course inevitable--Draper's importance to Sterling Cooper couldn't have allowed him to remain a free agent much longer. The most overpowering line of perhaps the entire series is Bert Cooper's: "After all, when it comes down to it, who's really signing this contract anyway?" A play many chess moves in the making.

[PLEASUREMAN]

The past few weeks have been setting up the central crisis for Don. Conrad Hilton has become a pivotal figure in Draper's life. His avuncular manipulations have hit at a crucial weak point in Draper's character, his need for approval and acceptance, followed by a rejection of the creative effort that is the basis for Draper's status in society. The rejection has compelled him into another extramarital affair, where again he is manipulated into exposing his vulnerabilities. And again Draper chooses an outsider, an unconventional woman who, flattered by Draper's attention, will not turn to conventional morality.

Meanwhile Draper's business life faces turmoil. PPL's cost cutting efforts have been mere primping intended to put Sterling Cooper up for sale again (and effectively Draper as well, since Hilton's coercion led to him putting himself under contract). Roger Sterling, who abetted the sale to PPL to fund his pathetic late-life divorce and re-marriage, has become more openly antagonistic towards Don as it has become clearer that his status both with Don and Sterling Cooper has been diminished.

And finally, Don's wife Betty has discovered the core lie of Don's existence: that he is not, in fact, Don Draper. A carelessly mislaid desk key allows Betty to open the Pandora's Box that frustrated her in the previous season. Betty has been cultivating her own lies, abandoning bourgeois morality for a titillating pseudo-affair with an aide to the governor. One imagines that there are not many social or moral barriers standing between her and regular attendance at key parties. Both Draper's lives are and have been bereft of moral guidance, as is a fact of their milieu--the new middle class of the American suburbs enjoys a freedom from constraint taken to its banal limit. The privacy afforded by their tract homes is accompanied by a license to do whatever they want, unburdened by the morality of anyone or anything watching their inner lives.

Here we have a depiction of an amoral struggle with life, created in part by Draper's damaged upbringing but sustained through his adult life by his refusal to look inward (his reflections are not of himself and his behavior, but of other people). One of the ironies of the series is the attention given to its period customs, regarding such things as drinking and smoking, which are a part of today's purely cosmetic morality. It is amusing that we, living in a far more crime-ridden and corrupt world, can look at Mad Men and not see a mirror of our present corruption. (But for glib comment on the series' superficials, click here. Such people only look in the mirror when they wish to admire themselves.) The tension and dread derive from Draper's lack of grounding in anything real, as represented in the show's title sequence. We like him live in a society based on illusion, which as it turns out is not an environment congenial to morality and sense.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Also the conclusion to this week's episode was one of Mad Men's great moments: Don Draper just about to give a speech to an adoring crowd, then cut to black.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Steve Sailer linked to his Taki's article on Mad Men, which says mostly stuff about things other than Mad Men, remarking on the surge of television dramas that tell very extended stories and their connection with other serial fiction. It's probably just his temperament, but Sailer always seems to be hedging his artistic judgement when he reviews something. Does he like Mad Men? You'll reach the end of his article about Mad Men without a clue. There's something admirably canny about that.

He does unfairly criticize it for "underexploiting" the advertising industry, but that's quite a stretch considering how much the show is infused with real advertising culture, from the Volkswagon Bug print ads to the use of television in political campaigns. (The Kennedy ads it digs up are little more than naive jingles--and Sailer thinks 60s ad men would have turned up their noses at "It's Toasted".)

He does note the problem of soap operaization, but doesn't delve further into it in this short piece. It's an interesting subject because writers have a natural tendency to fall in love with their characters and obsess over them and play with them like dolls. It's something I always fear in each new episode of Mad Men--the moment a character stops behaving like a real human being and reverts to template. Fortunately, the show has escaped that problem to date (routine firing of writers may be the secret to Matthew Weiner's success).

But there are two false takes on Mad Men. One, that it is exposing the horrible behavior of white males in the 60s, but making us love it with all that chicness and impeccably researched retro. And two, that it is exposing the horrible behavior of white males in the 60s, because Matthew Weiner Is A Jew and They're All Liberal Feminists.

One anonymous commenter on Sailer's site sums up the latter in a whine that could vibrate glass:

Anonymous:

Its obvious the show is intended to portray the early sixties as that horrible time when white men ruled. All the white men on the show are depicted as racist, sexist, liter-bug, alcolihics who cheat on their wives at every chance they get. All the white women are mentally ill defectives who raise dishonest and bratty children.

The writers do their best to depict all the white people of that era as extremely insensitive. In one episode the guys at the office were standing around joking about the people who died in a horrible plane crash. Apparently people didn't use trashcans either, as it must have taken non-white people to clean up America's parks? The black characters are all philosophical geniuses who are well adjusted and deep thinkers. The most over the top moment was when one of the firms owners painted his face black at a party and sang negro mammy songs.

(A lot of white people must reclaim their country redneck gibberish follows.) You really can't watch the show and come to that conclusion, unless you're a weepy pseudo-conservative.

Further discussion is really unnecessary; the commenter Half Sigma can only be bothered to "ditto" the above in the inimitable conservative way of not thinking when it can be avoided:

Half Sigma:

The anonymous poster above who begins with "It's obvious the show is intended to portray the early sixties as that horrible time..." is correct.

End of dispatch from the "Let's not try very hard" brigade. (Must I add that he has a blog that is smug in inverse proportion to its incisiveness? But he's very big on the subject of IQ; some people seem to feel that taking an interest is evidence of abundance.)

Here's my riled up reply to all that bitching, which I thought I'd just paste here:

Udolpho.com:

The anonymous poster above who begins with "It's obvious the show is intended to portray the early sixties as that horrible time..." is correct.

Go back to obsessing about Sarah Palin on your website you nutjob.

Pseudo-conservatives desperately cling to their myths, just as pseudo-liberals do, and the most persistent myth of all is that they're always being misrepresented (life is so unfair).

First of all the central character, Don Draper, is an outsider from lower class surroundings and is not an everyman stand-in for Privileged White Males the way a certain whiny conservative likes to see the show (and everything else, really). Draper commits serial adultery because his own identity is fractured and he's spent most of his life running away from the consequences of his actions.

Second, the show looks at a variety of big developments of that era, including the managerial revolution, the transformation of bourgeois life by excessive materialism, and the sometimes sinister aspects of advertising in promoting happiness based on consumption. If conservatives can't get behind these critiques, then they are truly fucking stupid and deserve to live in a world swirling around the drain.

Third, no one on the show is depicted as unremittingly bad; it's a testament to Weiner's faith in the audience (here obviously misplaced) that he allows the characters to be good and bad at the same time, as most people are. The bearded beatnik ad guy often gets the worst of it, depicted as a vain and pompous liberal who dates a black woman for the political cachet, brags about his downscale neighborhood, and thinks of himself as a fount of creativity when really he's a self-important windbag. Even he is allowed to have some humanity.

The women on the show are a mixed bag themselves--Betty, of course, as a shallow, stunted child, but also Peggy (a brilliant performance by the way), Joan, Don's lovers (who really run the gamut), the generally daft pool of secretaries, etc. They aren't dreary cardboard stand-ins, airbrushed Donna Reeds that pseudo-conservatives would prefer to watch while vigorously masturbating over their lost golden age.

The show also depicts pre-60s generational shifts and alludes to some of the reasons people like Roger Sterling behaved the way they did (the glib Sterling is unusually taciturn on the subject of his war service; one can imagine why). His blackface performance was an inspired moment in the show because it was portrayed without judgement--Sterling isn't shown to be a racist asshole, but merely from an age that didn't get offended about broad racial caricature and stereotype. Pseudo-conservatives, being huge pussies, are certain that this scene is meant to tar them in some way. It's not afraid to handle "liberal" issues the "wrong" way, such as showing how the gay art department [guy] screws up a commercial by miscasting the lead actress, or when Peggy glibly retorts that "sex sells" and a stern Draper slaps her wrist, replying, "Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this." Have you seen an ad lately?

All in all there is tremendous depth and sympathy, pretty rare in any medium these days where inane partisan fantasy usually stands in for perspective. The show is tremendously restrained in its approach, far from the caricature it is supposed to be by people who either can't have watched it or are incapable of appreciating anything more sophisticated than Japanese cartoons. It's really painful to have to face the philistinism of the conservative mind, but there it is.

And of course there are many things that were pretty bad about that period; the show often doesn't focus on them directly, but they're always in the background because they are a part of that era. Conservatives who can't admit this just look like dimwitted caricatures, and they're doomed to political irrelevance. Which seems to suit them fine--there's nothing a certain type of conservative loves to do more than whine about how unfair the world is to him.

I thought I'd highlight that line about the philistinism of the conservative mind; it deserves longer treatment and I'd love to hear serious thoughts on that subject.

[O.D.B.]

When Sailer posted his Mad Men review, I was excited at first excited to hear his take. Unfortunately, his assessment served mainly to expose his limits as a critic.
While he’s great at recognizing societal trends, he has the classic nerd’s puzzling inability to seriously access character-based fiction. Perhaps Sailer’s readable prose style, at least in comparison to the likes of Half Sigma or whiskey, obscures the fact that they all share this common blind-spot.

Sailer's failings, however, were nothing compared to what lied in wait in the comments. Reading the comment thread prompted in me a perhaps overdue epiphany regarding the merits of the conservative blog world, or at least what's left of it. In the commentators’ comical race to find and denounce PC, anti-white bias in Mad Men -- a subtle character drama that is actually not interested in broad ideological statements about societal change (imagine that!) but rather the effect such change has on its characters -– the "conservative" commentators revealed themselves as the functional equivalent of the PC, liberal nutjobs they mock. Such liberals, of course, fail at accessing art as anything more than statements about social justice, colonialism, blah, blah, blah – a point of view which perhaps makes Crash the perfect film, embracing multiple storylines as an effecient tool to pair as much overwrought symbolism with as little character development as possible.

Interestingly, whiskey, Half Sigma, and the rest suffer exactly the same mental lapse as the liberals they hate: both are so consumed by their ideology that they utterly fail to analyze art as anything more than a series of ideological points. The whole affair is reduced to a yet further levels of unthinkable irony when you consider that Mad Men, as you pointed out, is actually certainly the best, maybe even the only TV show in recent memory to lend vivid support to anti-PC sentiment, the very position its baying critics ostensibly agree with. The madness...

This post has been edited by O.D.B.: 30 October 2009 - 01:04 AM

[rho]

Quote

It's really painful to have to face the philistinism of the conservative mind, but there it is.

To me it boils down to "thinking is hard, why do it when others will do it for me?" That one can select one's decision-making proxy in the free-market of cable TV and talk radio just makes it even more delicious for the lazy conservative. Art--good art especially, but any art will do--promotes discussion, and thereby requires explaining one's personal inflections. Easier by far to write it off as meaningless and go back to banging rocks together with the rest of the tribe.

Conservatism wasn't always thus, or at least so I've been told. Saint Buckley was supposed to have opinions on art, anyway, other than quips about how it relates to the cultural malaise. Steyn has plenty of opinions on music and musical theater, most of which seems reasonably well-informed to my uneducated eye, but can probably be filed in the too-little-too-late category. Not to mention about half of his musical opinions only surface when some tunesmith croaks, and therefore is likely an unspoken curmudgeonly critique of current trends.

There's also some degree of self-selection going on here as well. Big, loud opinions do not come from nuanced people, and big, loud opinions are what gain traction. Add to that the natural paranoia of any ideologue, either on the left or right, and you've got the makings of a good old fashioned lynching. Those more disposed towards critical thinking are easily swept up in the frenzy and follow along because, well, shit, everybody else is going, and I was walking that way anyway...

The Internet just exacerbates this tendency, especially for the untrained poster. Blogger posts about Mad Men; commenter goes apeshit over some trivial detail that rubs his outrage clit; another commenter points out how it's not that simple for this reason, and this reason, and this reason; first commenter calls second commenter a commie; second commenter notes that's not really an answer; first commenter adds that the second commenter is also a faggot; horde of knuckle-draggers pile on second commenter because, well, who wants a commie faggot around, fagging up their awesome goldfish bowl with his commie propaganda.

[PLEASUREMAN]

I don't think Buckley had much in the way of taste. His two main aesthetic passions appear to have been peanut butter and the harpsichord--even by conservative standards this is progeric infantilism. His Blackford Oakes "novels"--or Republican Party pornos if you prefer--barely make it into the lowest ranks of literature.

Politics encourages tastelessness because the will to power takes precedence over other values. The conservative mind should not be philistine--think of Jane Austen, who wrote persuasively about tradition and humility vs. the hubris and prejudice of clever people. And the great architecture and painting and music that is the product of tradition--vs. the anti-traditional statement art of the liberal. But post-war conservatism fused with the sterile materialism of business, and then with degenerate populism in a reaction to anti-business liberal elites, combining the tastelessness of both into one horrible Nascar/country music/motivational poster/movie explosion/crying bald eagle aesthetic.

I wrote elsewhere in that Sailer thread, "I have to ask, what has the life of the suburbs and the corporate business world given back to the conservatives who so valiantly defend it? To me both are complicit in the assault on conservatism and have produced a denatured and pointless Republican Party..." It's a question that should be debated vigorously in the house organs of conservatism, but it isn't, for obvious reasons. Pseudo-conservatives all live in the suburbs and work in the corporate business world and see themselves as blameless Real Americans. What tradition do they know? Beyond getting fat and shopping at palaces of consumption.

These pseudo-conservatives can't and won't accept Mad Men's criticism of their fallen bourgeois culture, and fixate instead on any hint that the show is nothing but a leftist critique of sexism, racism, and so on--all lies, of course, as sexism and racism never existed, NOT IN MY NIGGER-FREE AMERICA. Conservatism cannot win, much less maintain respectability, with that approach.

[Probably Not]

I wonder how much philistinism is the illness endemic to conservatism (like shallow bohemianism is for the left) - and how much is due to general American tendencies towards excessive pragmatism and equalitarianism. Any real taste for art requires a measure of elitism because it requires judgment about good and bad. We Americans don't seem to like making those calls outside of the moral or political arena. And since the production and enjoyment of art have only the faintest connection to anything "practical," pragmatism rarely has anything to say about it.

Steve Sailer's movie reviews are a good case in point here, because his willingness to make judgments often saves his essentially pragmatic analyses from terminal dullness. In the case of Mad Men, though, his suspension of judgment led to an uninspiring review with a few interesting observations in it. I like his approach generally, but in this case I was underwhelmed.

[rho]

I sort of get why one would suggest that Americans are pragmatic and egalitarian, but me, I don't see it. If I had to pick a common trait I'd suggest that Americans are highly insular. I'd further speculate that this insularity informs a good deal of conservative philistinism, for the simple reason that one's preferences are heavily influence by the company you keep.

This isn't exactly a startling revelation. Most cultures are insular--indeed, the non-insular culture soon ceases to be one. But America has the elbow room to spread out. If you don't like your neighbors, there's always another swamp to drain, back-fill and bulldoze for more cookie-cutter suburbs. The county commissioners will even authorize a nice new road so you don't have to actually down-shift your SUV into 4WD. Particularly pucker-assed folks can establish a home owners' association and write reams of covenants to keep out lunatics who want to put up a tool shed.

I'd also disagree that conservatism should be immune from philistinism. On some level, conservatism is distrustful of the new, especially when the new is largely heralded for its meaningless novelty. In regards to architecture, modernism is a good example of the mearly novel rather than a paradigm shift. Yet incrementalism gets you gothic architecture--if a few filigrees are good, more is clearly better. (It may not be entirely fair to associate incrementalism with conservatism, but they do seem related to me.)

Quote

But post-war conservatism fused with the sterile materialism of business, and then with degenerate populism in a reaction to anti-business liberal elites

This is a succinct and accurate portrayal of how modern popular conservatism came about. Modern popular liberalism has a similar pedigree, only made up of smaller and more vicious one-note grudge clubs. Some days it really brings me down to think that most political power is derived by the accretion of assholes.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Yeah that is what I was referring to when I say that conservatism has fused with populism...in the populist mind you can't say Johnny Boy has bad taste in music or insult his habit of wearing bib overalls with no shirt, JOHNNY BOY WORKS HARD YOU PENCIL NECKED FAGGORT

All the 9/11 aftermath stuff was shallow populist emotionalism, and pretty disgusting, which the Republican Party as instrument of populist sentiment quickly exploited for its nitro-injection quality (perhaps "ingested" is more accurate). Fox News is populist, not conservative in the slightest.

Conservatism's excess is more a surplus of caution and sense of obedience to custom and status quo, the worst result of which can be an overcorrection the other way as discredited conservatism gives way to heedless change.

I question the pragmatism of Americans, though, the culture seems to always have been fairly ideological with some pragmatist correction from time to time. Pragmatists don't amend the constitution to prohibit the sale and production of alcohol, for example. That was a movement with deep religious roots on a mission to save their fellow man. Pragmatism is often a weak form of conservatism struggling to stay relevant.

Steve Sailer's reviews are never interesting as reviews, he has never had the eye for the artistic detail that someone like John Simon had, he just looks at them through a sociological prism and with Mad Men, which puts all that front and center, it was harder than it looked to find something fresh to say about it.

[Lookwell!]

hey nancyboy what is your response to the women (and sackless men) who see Betty as some sort of modern feminist? Like whenever she does something stupid or childish (like accuse Don of whatever without proof or throw a fit for no real reason) these girls I know are all like "you go grrrl!" and in the latest episode when she essentially throws him out of the house and is having an affair with whosits, the governor or whatever they're like "woo she's showing him what!" and stupid shit like that