A little light culture: Nostalgia

The golden forty year rule of nostalgia was proposed by Adam Gopnik in a New Yorker article about Mad Men, written this past April. It's one of those things that is so obviously wrong and trite and yet there is a little something about it that is right and I want to try and tease that out. Here is the rule he proposes:

 The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)

And he goes on to cite examples of how the 1940s had nostalgia for the aughts, the 1950s had nostalgia or the First World War, the 1960s had nostalgia for the 1920s, the 1970s had nostalgia for the 1930s and the 1980s had nostalgia for the 1940s.

Well, there is a huge problem here and it's the 1950s and early 1960s. The 1980s was my decade and we had a huge nostalgia going for the 1950s and early 1960s only thirty years earlier. The massive sales of The Official Preppy Handbook were driven by nostalgia for the values of that era. And it wasn't just us:

• One of the huge successes at Woodstock was a lame 1950s revival band called Sha Na Na.
• American Graffiti, released in 1973, was set in the 1950s. 
• The hugely popular Happy Days, which ran from 1974 to 1984, was set only twenty years earlier in the 1950s.
• Grease, released in 1978, was set in the 1950s.
• Animal House, also released in 1978, was set in 1962.
• Diner, released in 1982 was set only 23 years earlier in 1959.
• In Back to the Future, released in 1985, had its hero travel back to 1955.

And I could go on and on.

Gopnik notes in his piece that the even the Beatles were a nostalgia act and he correctly notes they did a lot of 1920s nostalgia but they started with 1950s nostalgia because that was the kind of rock and roll they played on their first records. 1950s nostalgia sprang up in the 1960s and, like bird crap that the sun has baked onto a shiny chrome bumper, it's very hard to get rid of.

We've had lots of nostalgia for other eras too. Music and fashion in recent decades seems to be nostalgically drawn to the 1970s the way a lonely man stuck in his apartment with nothing else to do is drawn to on-line porn. And there have been bits of nostalgia for the 19th century and the earlier decades of the twentieth century. But it is that 1950s and early 1960s nostalgia that rules the roost.

Why? I think to get at that we have to see that the really big mistake that Gopnik makes is actually the reason he gives for nostalgia:

And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.

This is the same lame reason that the credentialed elite have always given for nostalgia. They think that nostalgia appeals to people who want to turn back the clock. That is exactly backwards: nostalgia's appeal is precisely because you cannot turn back the clock. Nostalgia is driven by loss.

Loss is inevitable so there will always be some people who are nostalgic for any era. But there are also some eras for which lots of people are nostalgic. These are eras of great loss. We had something in the 1950s and early 1960s that we don't have anymore. As Vincent Kartheiser, the actor who plays Pete Campbell put it:

“There is a large portion of America that doesn’t feel about America the way we did in 1960, and I think we want to know why we don’t,” said Mr. Kartheiser, 29. “We want to know what went wrong.”

Note the "we" in that sentence. Kartheiser, like most of the people who watch Mad Men, has no memories of the 1960s because he wasn't born yet. The loss he and people like him have is for something they feel was taken from them before they were born. That is true even of Matt Weiner who was born in 1965. In fact, anyone born from the late 1950s on would have no real memories of this era beyond the usual childhood ones but would have lived their entire lives with the sense that something happened in the late 1960s that changed everything forever.

Note also the resentment in what Kartheiser says: "We want to now what went wrong". And here we can see a different forty year rule that makes more sense than Gopnik's. Forty years after the fact the people who have set and controlled the narrative about an era begin to lose their grip on it. (If they were real people, Megan, Peggy and Don would respectively be in their seventies, eighties and nineties now.) If you studied the late 1950s and early 1960s in university any time in the past few decades, you would have been told that this was an era when mindless conformity and complacency were set aside in the name of real progress. This is still the narrative that a lot of people want to tell. They are the people who want the show to "deal with race" because that is their trump card against the late 1950s and early 1960s; that whatever good you might say about that era it was racist.

But a lot of us don't buy that reductionist view. And we shouldn't have to. A more accurate history would tell the story of how getting the civil rights acts passed and enforced was the work of men of the same generations and not unlike Roger Sterling and Don Draper. For it certainly wasn't the baby boomers who passed civil rights, most of them couldn't even vote at the time. And if you sweep that bit of self-serving twaddle aside, a very different picture emerges. Take that away and we can see an era that was full of confidence and an era that had real style that is about to be swept aside by a new era that has neither. We want to know what went wrong and we aren't going to listen to the bullshit anymore.

We're waiting for the man

The virtues of mad men
Blowing Smoke
Judging this episode is difficult because nothing will really make sense until after the season finale, called "Tomorrowland" for whatever that is worth.

In the meantime, this episode ties a lot of themes together. The title "Blowing Smoke" recalls that of the very first episode, "Smoke Get in Your Eyes." Notice that the opening scene has Don sitting in a leather banquette having a conversation with a man whose mind he cannot change just as the opening of the very first episode did. And the decor is deliberately old-fashioned feeling for the era it is supposed to be set in. There is a classic feeling of Americana about this shot and we don't have the feeling of being in any particular era.

When asked to explain the challenges he wants help with the man from Heinz begins, "During the war ...."

And then we have a wonderful bit of dramatic irony: that is when a character says something that we know to be significant but they cannot know this. Think of a movie opening up with someone sitting in a deck chair and saying, "Nothing to worry about until we get to New York," and then the camera pans back to reveal that he is sitting on the deck of the Titanic. Well, the Heinz man's world has changed forever and he doesn't know it yet. He says that tastes are cyclical and that although Heinz Ketchup is currently dominating sales, beans will come back. We all know they won't come back.

Also recalling episode one, Don is helpless, desperate for a solution he cannot find and he runs into Midge in an odd scene where his marital status feels ambiguous.

Midge is an odd juxtaposition to Don because, right from the beginning, she has always had no trouble facing reality. She lies just as much as he does but she lies the way a person who accepts the truth lies. She just wants to fool you. Don, as we have discussed before, is not reality based. He wants to change the reality.

The historical theme
A while ago I speculated about which 1960s political event the season would be built around. There may be one coming yet but last night everything seemed to be about addiction and how hard it is to change our habits and that theme tied everything together. It goes to Don's personal struggles as he attempts to get his drinking and personal life under control. It goes to SCDP's reliance on Lucky Strike to cover their cash flow needs. It goes to Roger's inability to let go of his romantic dreams.

It goes to all the women characters inability to let go of certain expectations of them.

In this episode, addiction is most obvious in the heroin addiction of Midge. We forget that aspect of the 1960s so easily. The brutal facts of what drug use did in the 1960s is still hidden behind a wall of denial. I thought the slow breakdown we saw of Midge's lies was one of the most brilliant things the show has done. As always on Mad Men, we learned about who Midge is a long time ago and then she slipped out of the frame. When she returned what was stunning was how absolutely right it all felt. "Of course!" I thought, "this is exactly what would have happened to her."

It's exactly what happened to so many people between 1965 and 1971.

New York, New York
It's also what happened to New York and I have to wonder how that will play out. Nowadays New York looks pretty good but in 1965 it was a city spiraling out of control.  For two and half decades it was a symbol of decay and failure. (A position it could easily lapse back into if current trends continue by the way.)

Related to this, of course, is another recurring theme of Mad Men and that is the collapse of progressive Republicanism. The Republican party was very much the party of university-educated progressives in those days, a situation that is exactly reversed these days. What happened is a delicate issue because what happened to the Republicans in the mid 1960s seems to be repeating itself today with the Democrats and I always hesitate to bring these things up because emotions are so strong about them.

But, here goes, what happened is that the university-educated progressives who were a major force in the Republican party in those days got into power and it turned out that they weren't much good at managing anything. Nothing better represented this than the disastrous mayoralty of John Lindsay, who is, of course, the guy that Henry Francis works for.

Tomorrowland
Progressives aren't driven by a lot of party loyalty and they switch back and forth. In 1965, hard as this may be to imagine for anyone born after 1980, Time magazine was as heavily biased in favour of the Republican party as it is today biased in favour of the Democratic party. What never changes is progressives' belief that careful planning and government management by university-educated professionals like themselves will produce a better life for everyone.

This dream goes way back in American politics but it has never worked. That doesn't mean it can't work. Most successful ideas get tried several times before it all comes together. Of course, most unsuccessful ideas also get tried several times before people finally give up on them.

In terms of Mad Men we'll never know as this era ended with a  failure when Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek re-election—an event that is three years in the future as we wind up this season.

In a sense, what LBJ did was an incredible success. No other president since has done as much to change the country and his party. LBJ is the man who made the Democrats into the progressive party that attracts, as it does today, upper-middle class university graduates. But when he left office, he left a country and a party in tatters with Vietnam, race riots, the end of what had been decades of economic prosperity and hope and incredible political divisions.

Nowadays, people talk about political division and red-blue politics and hatred in politics but nothing we see today even comes close to what happened in the last half of the 1960s. The divisions, hatred and upheavals of that era were horrible.

Revolution in arts and advertising
As things were going a little crazy, artists were at loss about what to do. Pop artists wrote songs about "the revolution" but felt excluded. It was hard to tell who was real and who was a fraud. That is beyond the scope of this particular blog thread but I wanted to end up with what I thought was the most interesting line in the show last Sunday.

We have been watching the falling man opening credits for four years now without any clear idea of what they might refer to. In a sense, the reference is obvious as everyone knows the iconic 9/11 photograph but what has that image—once called "the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century"—to do with the show we are watching.

The biggest hint so far was given by Vincent Kartheiser in an interview really early in the series:

“There is a large portion of America that doesn’t feel about America the way we did in 1960, and I think we want to know why we don’t,” said Mr. Kartheiser, 29. “We want to know what went wrong.”  

And that's it really. Progressives have been promising hope and change for decades now, first as Republicans and then as Democrats, but what we seem to be stuck with is increasing malaise.

But this episode we got—for what I am pretty sure is the first time—something inside the show itself that clearly referenced the falling man opening.

Peggy comes to Don's office to ask what they should do. She suggests what Don ultimately tries—"if you don't like what they are saying about you, change the conversation." But in the meanwhile the conversation goes like this:

Peggy: "You always say if you don't like what they are saying about you, change the conversation."
Don: To what? What they are saying about us is true."
Peggy: "And there is nothing we can do?"
Don "Sure there is. We're going to sit at our desks and keep typing while the walls fall down around us because we're creative, the least important most important thing there is."

And, really, for all the talk about change and revolution, that is all art can ever do.

We'll see how this works out next week. It should be interesting.

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