‘Mad Men’ America

Sunday may be the Lord’s Day, but I’ve spent the last 12 Sunday nights wholly preoccupied with sex, drugs, cigarettes and whiskey. Not that I’m participating myself (at least not on most Sundays). I’m talking about watching “Mad Men,” the best show on television and one that, regrettably, will come to an end until next August with this Sunday’s season three finale.

Even if you’ve decided to stubbornly ignore the immense hype that has surrounded the award-winning AMC series, you’ve probably seen the ads for it and, as a result, been unconsciously part of the show’s desire-as-commodity philosophy. And you can picture the show’s iconic images: the bustling streets of the Midtown Manhattan of a bygone era, where men wear tie clips to hold together their impeccable suits and don’t leave home without a slick fedora; the bottles of liquor that line every office in the headquarters of the show’s fictional ad agency, Sterling Cooper; the glamour of grand hotel lobbies before they were filled with BlackBerry-clad businessmen yakking away—go ahead and imagine because on one level, the show could be successfully watched even if you never turn on the sound.

But “Mad Men” does so much more than simply inhabit a version of the 1960s put together with an OCD-level of meticulousness—it is also a television show as powerfully relevant today as any series set in the present. Like the great novels that survive the eras that were contemporary to their releases, “Mad Men” is both a perfect embodiment of a specific time period and instantly timeless, grounded in a specific temporality without ever inducing the possibility that it may become dated. It is without a doubt a “Great American Novel,” a celebration and criticism of how this country operates, and a depiction of what had to happen in order for this way of life to be established.

The thesis at large is that societal changes resulting from the end of the 1950s and the advent of post-modern ideas account for a paradigm shift in how individuals recognize and act on their desires; and, as a result, how men in the advertising industry must access their own ability to self-analyze emotion and discover why desire operates the way it does, and how these inner dimensions of “want” can be tapped into through the medium of advertising. However, the message is only part of a larger schematic, one that incorporates the world of Madison Avenue to address how the advertising industry can act as both an indicator of the human psyche and a version of America itself.

But cerebral interpretations aside, we must not forget that “Mad Men” is a paragon of Cool. Don Draper—our distant, brilliant, controlled, hard-drinking, chain-smoking and adultery-prone hero/anti-hero—defines “Cool” with every sip from an Old Fashioned and every drag on a Lucky Strike, his tie and demeanor always perfectly in place. And just as the industry of advertising relies on the duality of appearance and reality, Don’s façade of effortless perfection cannot exist without the self-cognizance (and cognizance on the part of the viewer) of the fraud within him—the same fraud that the 1960s-era scions of America were benefiting from because their forefathers took advantage of a virgin country to make their fortunes. He’s the latest in the long line of protagonists in this nation’s fiction who act as the human representation of the American Dream—he’s a man who went off to war in order to erase his past and start a new future, away from the desolation of the outskirts of rural life, and came back as literally a different person. A Korean-war era Jay Gatsby, Don Draper renamed himself and fashioned a new persona in New York City, where his natural talent and determination could create his own heritage to compete with the legacies that produced his co-workers and clients. “Mad Men” is telling the story of “Who is Don Draper?,” and in doing so, it is telling the story of how America itself slipped into an identity and eventually became it.

But, when it comes down to it, I probably watch “Mad Men” for the majestic and enviable escape that it provides: the three-martini lunches, the perfectly mixed cocktails, the womanizing in Waldorf-Astoria penthouses, the whirr of a Cadillac rolling through a tree-coated Long Island town. And that is beauty of “Mad Men,” the ingenious commingling of style and substance makes it clear that this, too, is America.

Nate Freeman is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Friday.