Mad (that the season is over) Men or Mad Men and the Middle East

HOW IMPORTANT IS MAD MEN?

Important enough for George Packer--the New Yorker journalist whose main projects have been dissecting the complex inner workings of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the American military--to take time out from analyzing the Middle East to address the lure of this beguiling show. Exactly how leapable is the chasm separating Karzai from Don Draper? "Mad Men is all about repression," asserts Packer, "every

character has a tell-tale tic, and stiffness reigns over every scene—but it’s also about the license to indulge
impulses that would soon be socially forbidden."


Packer would never claim that Mad Men is a tenable lens through which the problems in Afghanistan might come into clearer focus, but it's not a stretch to claim a cultural and semiotic overlap. The ability to see through layers of cultural coding, the interpretative ability to understand how social norms shape human behavior play similar roles whether you're trying to figure out the representations of Kabul today or Manhattan in 1963.


The boardroom is war, we know this. But, the workplace--the contact zones between desks, the closed-door battlefields of mid-level managers--is its own form of combat. We have been throwing ourselves into the capitalist line of fire for so long now, we've internalized this struggle not in military terms but economic ones. But, as Packer will confirm, the distance between the two might be narrower than those separating Don and Hamid.

If the previous century was about the regimes of aggression, this new one is showing itself to be a century of the regimes of repression. No surprise, then, if a show like Mad Men feels like it is about more than smoke and mirrors.

Poems Katie Couric Would Like: Frank O'Hara's Meditation in an Emergency

WHEN THE SEASON TWO premiere of Mad Men made Frank O'Hara's 1957 collection of poems, Meditations in an Emergency, a major point in one of its subplots, the unlikliest of poets was, overnight, thrust into American popular culture. Immediately following the show--and even during the program--viewers all over America were typing "Meditations in an Emergency" into Google. When the search engine kicked out "Frank O'Hara" and the accompanying smattering of poems, Mad Men aficionados were no doubt puzzling over what the possible connection might be between this poet and their beloved show.

Perhaps even Katie Couric was wondering about O'Hara and if she'd like his poems.

"In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love." That's O'Hara with one of the best lines in one of the best poems from Meditations. It's a line that, when taken out of context (like in a blog), appears to be about romantic relationships in a time of war, or the complexities of divorce, or love and death during the Great Depression. But, one reason O'Hara is great is the simple fact that this line refers not to any economic, natural, or emotional disaster but to movies!

It's true.

This line is the catalytic moment in a funny, goofy, over-the-top poem called "To the Film Industry in Crisis." Had Walt Whitman been around in the 1950s and been obsessed with Johnny Weissmuller, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe, this is the poem he would have written. Expansive and ambulatory, its catalogs of names and notions actually make you believe that Hollywood is/was in crisis.

No American poet was more enamored with visual culture than O'Hara, and no poet would have loved contemporary TV (and having his poem appear on TV) more than he. Many of the poems in Meditations are homages to celebrities (James Dean), to the love of celebrities, to love itself as embodied by celebrities.

Obviously, this awareness of celebrity presence is one reason Katie Couric would like O'Hara's poems, but she (and most readers) would also be attracted to O'Hara's love of attraction. Drawn to everyone and everything, O'Hara looks at everything through the lens of love:

O boy, their childhood was like so many oatmeal cookies.
I need you, you need me, yum, yum. Anon it became suddenly.
(Blocks)

Love, love, love,
honeymoon isn't used much in poetry these days
(For Janice and Kenneth to Voyage)


I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence
and sometimes, returning, I become the sea--
in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.
(Ode)

One thing I love is O'Hara's knack for playing with easy assumptions and cliches about authenticity, depth, and what we might call "appearances." O'Hara is a master at teasing out the nuances of interior and exterior. "It is easy to be beautiful;" quips O'Hara, "it is difficult to appear so."

Indeed!

No doubt Katie Couric thinks something like this every day, just before that red light atop Camera 1 flashes on.

Mad Men: Season Two

THE BEST CHARACTER ON Mad Men is not a man and is only a little mad. While the men do dominate the main text, the more interesting, more nuanced women, rule the roost of the subtext, effectively taking over what passes for the primary narrative. Joan Holloway, played exceeding well by Christina Hendricks, is the first character viewers see in the opening frames of the premiere of season two of the show, and she functions as a metaphor for all of the women torn between their dependence on and frustration with men.

Set in a Manhattan advertising agency in 1960 (last season) and beginning in February of 1962 (this season), Mad Men has garnered positive critical remarks for its portrayal of open sexuality and sexism in the office. Indeed, there is hardly a scene featuring a woman and a man in which either positive or negative sexual tension is absent. It's always there--sometimes ambiguously positive and negative--spilling over onto the floor and staining the fabric of the co-ed but not co-equal work place.

One of the themes is the effect that men and their decisions have on the women in their lives--whether they are lovers, wives, or colleagues. With almost no agency and even fewer options, the show's women are forced into perpetually reactive positions, sometimes with dire consequences. When Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss)--one of the young women from the vast secretarial pool at Sterling Cooper--discovers that her one night stand with an engaged male colleague has resulted in her pregnancy, she makes what appears to be a shockingly unsentimental decision to give up her baby; a decision prompted largely by her promotion from secretary to copywriter. Similarly, Betty Draper (January Jones), the attractive and polished wife of the lead character Don Draper (Jon Hamm) has all the right things and does all the right things but suffers from a perpetual ennui. She loves her life. She hates her life. She loves her husband and his salary. She hates her husband and his infidelity. But, what are her options? In a great scene from the Season Two premiere, Betty runs in to a former roommate who is now a call girl. There but for the grace of Don goes Betty?

Last season, the feeling of being trapped, of being confined within a system and the anxiety and frustration that elicits was the sole domain of women. But, now, it's 1962, and last night's episode suggests that in this season such emotions will cross the aisle and sidle up to both genders. The surprising use of Frank O'Hara's small but revolutionary collection of poems Meditations in an Emergency is a bellwether both for the characters in the show and, for the viewers who know the book, for the audience itself. O'Hara's funny, iconoclastic, non-poetic book of poems signals the end of what Tom Brokaw has called "the Greatest Generation" and heralds the beginning of what we now know as "the Sixties." What this means for Draper and the rest of the men at Sterling Cooper (read: typical white Republican men in America) is that all of the easy assumptions he has been making about gender roles, capitalism, equality, and progress, will soon butt up against the century's most revolutionary decade. Like his wife and his former secretary, he, too, will feel passed by, out of control, even paralyzed.

Alessandra Stanley argues in The New York Times that Mad Men "became such a critical hit last summer is that it glows with amused nostalgia for a lost but not-so-distant era."

I disagree.

In fact, TWR was the first to argue that Mad Men's real draw is the dialectic between nostalgia and interrogation. It's wrong and simply too easy to claim the show uncritically sentimentalizes the 60s. Rather, the show reminds us how lazy and perhaps even how dangerous facile nostalgia might be. At a time when Americans find nostalgia for a plurality of eras, Mad Men might just prove to be its generation's Meditation in an Emergency.