Waiting for the Barbarians (11 page)

The show’s directorial style is static, airless. Scenes tend to be boxed: actors will be arranged within a frame—sitting in a car, at a desk, on a bed—and then they recite their lines, and that’s that. Characters seldom enter (or leave) the frame while already engaged in some activity, already talking about something—a useful technique (much used in shows like the old
Law & Order
), which strongly
gives the textured sense of the characters’ reality, that they exist outside of the script. As for the acting, it is unexceptional in general and occasionally downright amateurish. (The baby-doll performance of the porcelain-beautiful January Jones, as Mrs. Don Draper, is an embarrassment.) I am not one of those critics who admires the performance of Jon Hamm as Don, which seems to me to emblematize the glossy inauthenticity of the show in general. There is a long tradition of American actors who excel at suggesting the unconventional and sometimes unpleasant currents coursing beneath their appealing all-American looks: James Stewart was one; Matt Damon is, now, another. By contrast, you sometimes have the impression that Hamm was hired because he reminds you of advertisements, and after all the show is about advertising—he’s a foursquare, square-jawed fellow whose tormented interior we are constantly told about but never really feel. (He looks uncannily like the guy in the old Arrow Shirt ads.) With rare exceptions (notably Robert Morse in an amusing cameo as the eccentric Japanophile partner Bert Cooper), the other actors in this show are “acting the atmosphere,” as directors like to say: they’re playing “Sixties people” rather than inhabiting this or that character, making him or her specific. Coupled with the fact that most of them are so awful, your sense of the characters as mere types—the loner with a secret, the prep, the philanderer, the bored housewife—short-circuits any possible connection to them. I cared more about what happened to the people in
Friday Night Lights
after one episode than I did for anyone in
Mad Men
after four seasons.

The way that the scene about Lane and his black girlfriend somehow morphs into a scene about an unnatural emotional current between him and his father is typical of another of
Mad Men
’s vices: you often feel that the writers are so pleased with this or that notion that
they’ve forgotten the point they’re trying to make. During its first few seasons the show featured a closeted gay character—Sal Romano, the firm’s art director. (He, too, wears vests.) At the beginning of the show I thought there was going to be some story line that shed some interesting light on the repressive sexual mores of the time, but apart from a few semicomic suggestions that Sal’s wife is frustrated and that he’s attracted to one of his younger colleagues—and a moment when Don catches him making out with a bellhop when they’re both on a business trip, a revelation that, weirdly, had no repercussions—the little story line that Sal is finally given isn’t really about the closet at all. In the end, he is fired after rebuffing the advances of the firm’s most important client, a tobacco heir who consequently insists to the partners that Sal be fired. (This character seems to be suffering from what can only be called sudden-onset homosexuality: there’s no hint of his being gay until the writers suddenly need this particular subplot.) Naturally the tobacco heir gives a phony reason for his sudden discontent, and the partners, caving in to their big client, do as he says. So in the end it’s not a story about gayness in the 1960s, about the closet; it’s a story about caving in to power, about business ethics. A lot of the writing has this ad hoc quality.

To my mind, there are only two instances in which the writers of
Mad Men
have dramatized, rather than simply advertised, their chosen themes. One is about the curvy office manager Joan. At one point, she’s asked to help vet television scripts for potential conflicts of interest with clients’ ads, and finds she’s both good at it and intellectually stimulated by it—only to be told, in passing, that the firm has hired a man to do the job. The look on her face when she gets the news—first crushed, then resigned, because after all this is how it goes—is one of the moments of real poignancy in the show. It tells us far more about prefeminist America than all the dirty jokes and gropings the writers have inflicted on us thus far.

And there’s a marvelous sequence that comes at the climax of season four, in which Don’s secret past creates a real dramatic crisis in the Aristotelian sense: what Don has done, and what he does, and what he is and wants as opposed to what his society is and wants, all come together in a way that feels both inevitable and wrenching. At the beginning of the episode, we learn that Sterling Cooper’s biggest client—that tobacco company whose billings essentially keep it running—is about to drop the account; as a result, the agency is in serious danger. Then—luckily, as it would seem—a young executive seems on the verge of bringing in a huge account from North American Aviation, a defense contractor based in California. But the routine Defense Department background check that is mandated for companies doing business with NAA poses a threat to Don, who, as we know, was a deserter from the army.

This situation creates a conflict with an elegantly Sophoclean geometry: the survival of Don’s business depends on doing business with NAA, but doing business with NAA threatens Don himself—his personal survival. In the end, Don’s sometime rival—a younger colleague who discovered his secret long ago, but has kept it, sometimes grudgingly, and whom Don has bailed out at a crucial moment, too—covers for him, dumping NAA on some pretext. As I watched this gripping episode I realized it was the only time that I had felt drawn into the drama as
drama
—the only time that the writers had created a situation whose structure, rather than its accoutrements or “message,” was irresistible.

In its glossy, semaphoric style, its tendency to invoke rather than unravel this or that issue, the way it uses a certain visual allure to blind rather than to enlighten,
Mad Men
reminds you of nothing so
much as a successful advertisement. Indeed, the great irony of
Mad Men
may be that it functions the way that ads function, rather than the way that serious drama functions: it’s suggestive rather than discursive, juxtaposing some potent pictures and words and hoping you’ll make the connection. And yet as we know, the best ads tap into deep currents of emotion. As much as I disliked the show, I did find myself persisting. Why?

In the final episode of season one, there’s a terrific scene in which Don Draper is pitching a campaign for Kodak’s circular slide projector, which he has dubbed the “carousel”—a word, as he rightly intuits, that powerfully evokes childhood pleasures and, if you’re lucky, idyllic memories of family togetherness. To make his point, he’s stocked the projector he uses in the pitch with photos of his own family—which, as we know, is actually in the process of falling apart, due to his serial adulteries. But even as we know this, we can’t help submitting to the allure of the projected image of the strong, handsome man and his smiling, beautiful wife—the ideal, perhaps, that we all secretly carry of our own parents, whatever their lives and marriages may have been.

The tension between the luminous ideal and the unhappy reality is, of course, what the show thinks it’s “about”—reminding us, as it so often and so unsubtly does, that,
like advertising itself
, the decade it depicts was often hypocritical, indulging certain images and styles of behavior while knowing them to be false, even unjust. But this shallow aperçu can’t explain the profound emotionalism of the scene. In a lengthy
New York Times
article about
Mad Men
that appeared as the show—by then already a phenomenon—was going into its second season, its creator, Matthew Weiner, recalled that he had shown the carousel episode to his own parents, and the story he tells about that occasion suggests where the emotion may originate.

Weiner, it turns out—like his character, Don Draper—used his
own family photographs to “stock” the scene: the most poignant image we see as Don clicks through the carousel of photos, a picture of Don and Betty smilingly sharing a hot dog (a casual intimacy that, we know, can now only be a memory), was based on an actual photograph of Weiner’s parents sharing a hot dog on their first date. Interestingly, Weiner made a point of telling the reporter who was interviewing him that when he showed the episode to his parents, they didn’t even remark on the borrowing—didn’t seem to make the connection.

The attentive and attention-hungry child, the heedless grown-up: this pairing, I would argue, is a crucial one in
Mad Men
. The child’s-eye perspective is, in fact, one of the strongest and most original elements of the series as a whole. Children in
Mad Men
—not least, Don and Betty’s daughter, Sally—often have interesting and unexpected things to say. Perhaps the most intriguing of the children is Glen, the odd little boy who lives down the street from the Drapers, whose mother is a divorcée shunned, at first, by the other couples on the block. Glen has a kind of fetishistic attachment to Betty—at one point, when she’s babysitting him, he asks for and receives a lock of her hair—and he occasionally pops up and has weirdly adult conversations with her. (“I’m so sad,” the housewife finds herself telling the nine-year-old as she sits in her station wagon in a supermarket parking lot. “I wish I were older,” he pointedly replies.) The loaded way in which Glen often simply stares at Betty and the other grown-ups suggested to me that he’s a kind of stand-in for Weiner, who had been a writer on
The Sopranos
and, more to the point, was born in 1965—and is, therefore, of an age with the children depicted on the show. That Glen is played by Weiner’s son strikingly hints at a very strong series of identifications going on here.

It’s only when you realize that the most important “eye”—and “I”—in
Mad Men
belong to the watchful if often uncomprehending
children, rather than to the badly behaved and often caricatured adults, that the show’s special appeal comes into focus. In the same
Times
article, Weiner tried to describe the impulses that lay at the core of his creation, acknowledging that

This, more than anything, explains why the greatest part of the audience for
Mad Men
is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts—people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties—but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up.

Hence both the show’s serious failings and its strong appeal. If so much of
Mad Men
is curiously opaque, all inexplicable exteriors and posturing, it occurs to you that this is, after all, how the adult world often looks to children; whatever its blankness, that world, as re-created in the show, feels somehow real to those of us who were kids back then. As for the appeal: Who, after all, can resist the fantasy of seeing what your parents were like before you were born, or when you were still little—too little to understand what the deal was with them, something we can only do now, in hindsight? And who, after having that privileged view, would want to dismiss the lives
they led and world they inhabited as trivial—as passing fads, moments of madness? Who would still want to bash them, instead of telling them that we know they were bad but now we forgive them?

—The New York Review of Books
, February 24, 2011

IN THE EARLY
1970s, my Uncle Walter, who wasn’t a “real” uncle but had a better intuition about my hobbies and interests than some of my blood relatives did, gave me a thrilling gift: membership in the Titanic Enthusiasts of America. I was only twelve, but already hooked. The magnificence, the pathos, the enthralling chivalry—Benjamin Guggenheim putting on white tie and tails so he could drown “like a gentleman”—and the shaming cowardice, the awful mistakes, the tantalizing “what if”s: for me, there was no better story. I had read whatever books the local public library offered, and had spent some of my allowance on a copy of Walter Lord’s indispensable
A Night to Remember
. To this incipient collection Uncle Walter added the precious gift of a biography of Thomas Andrews, the man who designed the ship. (It has always been among the first books I pack when I move.) A little later, when I was in my mid-teens, I toiled for a while on a novel about two fourteen-year-old boys, one a Long Islander like myself, the other a British aristocrat, who meet
during the doomed maiden voyage. Needless to say, their budding friendship was sundered by the disaster.