Mad Man

Most people I talk to about Mad Men think the show is setting us up for the big transition into the 1960s. That decade, oddly enough doesn't begin until 1964 (as is clearly evident in the show). 

Does it end in December 1973? Well, it felt like it at the time but I was only 14 so what do I know.

The crucial fact is this. If you think of the sixties as the period from 1964 to 1967 you can think of it in relatively positive terms. It isn't self-evident that it was actually positive but no one could call you crazy for thinking so based upon events from those four years. But if we include the six years from 1968 to 1973 then the 1960s are a failure by any reasonable objective measure.

But we also have, competing with the actual 1960s, a mythological 1960s based on a selective handling of evidence and the importation of all sorts of pseudo-religious mysticism.

Lots of people are heavily invested in the mythological view. James Cameron, for example, has made a lot of money repackaging 1960s mythology in Titanic and Avatar. For a long time, until 1995 at least, a lot of people believed that mythology was representative of the actual 1960s. To suggest otherwise would have been to surrender membership in the club of right-thinking people.

In fact, if Mad Men had been made anytime between 1980 and 1995 it would have been branded hate literature because of Don Draper. That may seem odd because you get the distinct impression that makers only created Don Draper to have him fall. This is telegraphed by the opening credits. In the recent past, however, a guy like Don Draper would have only been accepted if he had been presented as a heavy parody.

But Draper is an admirable guy and—much like Patton in the 1970s and Alex P Keaton in the 1980s and Bart Simpson in the 1990s—a much more admired guy than the people who made the show intended him to be.

Don Draper is from that odd, deeply cynical generation who were still babies in the depression and were too young for WW2. Those who went to the Korean war, as Draper does, tended to have an experience that falls far short of glorious. These guys—in the popular imagination and not without some justice—lived lives of cynical escapism knocking back Martinis. They were hated by the 1960s generation, probably for not getting out of the way fast enough. My father is from that generation.

Sometime in the1980s, however, opinions started to shift. Not overnight the way things were supposed to have happened "between the end of the Lady Chatterly ban and the Beatles' first LP". Ever so slowly, however, we have started to think differently about the Eisenhower era. (I remember seeing a movie at the end of the 1970s wherein a simple mention of that era was shorthand for everything that was an affront to good taste. Watching Mad Men we see the opposite as there is a clear decline in taste as the 1960s progress and we know where this is headed in the early 1970s.)

Watching Don Draper now a lot of us see him as someone worth emulating. And yes, I include myself in that. Call it a backlash or whatever you want. I watch the show because I really like Draper and because there is something in me ready to despise both Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson. (Both name choices are brilliant, BTW, especially Peggy Olson and the way it echoes "Jimmy Olsen".)

And therein lies the rub. The entertainment industry seems to be the only place where there are still people stupid enough to believe in the 1960s anymore. And James Cameron has to create an imaginary world on a planet far away to make it credible to a paying public. A movie or television program that tried to set the 1960s mythology against the actual events of of 1964-1973 would be unintentional comedy now.

So how are they going to get out of it. Matthew Weiner has already used the highly ambiguous ending shtick in The Sopranos. Would he do that twice?