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: The Show People Love to Love and Hate to Hate

WHEN THE TELEVISION SHOW Mad Men, debuted on AMC last year, it was an immediate hit. Hipsters loved it for its irony-free vintageness, middle-of-the-roaders cottoned to its nostalgic representation of the late 50s-early 60s, and lefties claimed it made subtle yet powerful arguments about gender. Impossibly, all of these seemingly disparite reactions are valid (and even accurate) readings of the show.

No doubt, Mad Men's ability to "mean" on all of these different levels is one of the main reasons for its success, but its many hats also raises questions about the relationship bewteen nostalgia and interrogation. By this, I mean, can a show be both nostalgic and interrogative at the same time? Can it sentimentalize the very past it calls into question? Can a text accurately examine an era it is seduced by?

On one hand, it would seem that Mad Men--a full-on period drama that looks at the birth of big-time ad agencies on Madison Avenue in 1960--has to choose between objectively recreating an already romanticized time (and place) in American culture and asking probing questions about that time and place. And, indeed, at times this is exactly what seems to be happening. The era gets a big hug.

People relish smoking and drinking at work. There is relatively easy and repercussion-free sex in the office. Gender roles are clearly defined, and everyone knows exactly what is expected of them. And, everyone just looks so . . . not postmodern.

The structure of the show adds to this feeling. Close-ups on old school phones, comments about hair curlers, visits to the switchboard, conversations about the advances in typewriters, remarks about the prices of everything, and the unfolding of the Nixon/Kennedy presidential race reinforces at every possible moment the same mantra: this is 1960, this is 1960, this is 1960. And, it seems to do so happily, jubilantly, without hesitation.

Part of this derives from the acting, which is fabulous and completely without arch. The actors play it straight--no winks, no nods, so dramatic irony. The show seems so fully in itsself.

But, some of the darker sub-plots of the show--the unhappiness of the housewives, the fallout of infidelity, the various gender-based pressure to pass as alpha male or super female, and the pervasive racism and sexism--ultimately serve to undermine the veneer of play than animates so much of the program.

In many ways, the program is about identity--who we are and what makes us who we are. For men, it's work. For women, it's work; just a different kind. But each have their own set of rules, and, most importantly, their own sets of expectations. An inability to measure up can mean, for either gender, failure. And since there are few alternatives, failure (or the fear of failure), can mean disaster.

Critics of Mad Men claim the show wants it both ways--to passively luxuriate in a period piece and to be progressive and edgy and political. The question is, why can't a text do this? Isn't the benefit of history the carte blanche to see a text of the past through a different lens?

Ultimately, desipite all of the fun at the office, no one in the show is happy. Everyone is miserable, aware of all that they don't have. As the great American poet Wallace Stevens notes, "not to have is the beginning of desire."

It is possible that the most political project is one that so fully immerses the viewer in a time and place, they see just how restrictive the culture was, how few choices people had, and how ubiquitous social norms and mores were--enabling us, now, to see the totality of narrowness, and the dangers of exhuming it.