"Mad Men" is a show that I started watching a year ago on AMC. It's set in 1960 Manhattan and is centered around the main character who is an executive at an ad agency. Every episode quips at the underlying theme that the only thing they sell is an image, or an illusion, to create desire. For example in the pilot the main character, Donald Draper, struggles to overcome the recent discovery that cigarettes are in fact bad for you and advertising otherwise is now against the law. In a brilliant advertising coup, Draper comes up with the slogan "It's Toasted" for Lucky Strike cigarettes which is still the slogan used today. The idea is that because all the other tobacco companies have the same problem, advertisers can say whatever they want to set their client's products above others.
Another recurring theme in the show is the way that most of the characters live double lives. Draper has a nice suburban home with two kids and a beautiful wife, but he also has a mistress in Manhattan. Draper himself is really not who he says he is, since that isn't even the name that he was born with.
Anyway, I thought that the show was pertinent to our Postmodernism discussions. If any of you have seen the show feel free to comment, but if you haven't you should really check it out. It's very rare for there to be actual thought provoking shows on regular cable TV.
3 comments:
i do think mad men has some postmodern qualities while not necessarily intending to be postmodern, particularly with the whole don draper/dick whitman plot point.
series protagonist don draper is born richard whitman and suffers a pretty unhappy childhood-- born illegitimately to a prostitute who dies during childbirth; goes to live with his father and his father's wife until his father eventually dies; then lives with his step-mother and her new boyfirend, who have another child together. dick's step-mother loves to remind dick what & where he comes from and what he'll essentially be all his life, often calling him a "whore child."
dick serves military time in korea with another officer named donald draper. draper gets killed, dick switches their tags and returns to the states. with dick whitman dead (at least on record), he makes an entirely new life for himself as donald draper.
when the show starts, we have no reason to believe the main character won't be who we initially think he is, and it's only as the show progresses that we even begin to see these tiny bits & pieces surface of don's previous life. for everyone in his life -- his wife & children, his friends, his co-workers, his lovers -- the image of donald draper is a complete reality because it's all they've ever known him to be and, like us as an audience, they have no reason to suspect otherwise.
apart from when don's past begins to come up more as a plot point in the story, i doubt he even thinks of himself as anything other than the persona he's made for the world to see. and who's to say he's even projecting any false image at all; don draper could be who dick whitman would have become anyway had his situation been different. the idea of starting over as don draper was infinitely more appealing than dick's life ever was, and he was able to have the freedom to do whatever he wanted in terms of who he wanted to be and what kind of life he wanted to live.
p.s-- the new season should totally start right now i think. :D
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