On the main page of CULTURE 11, Michael Brendan Dougherty has written an incisive if obvious criticism of the excellent TV show MAD MEN: It’s not a nostalgic or even balanced look at the greatness and misery of the white and prosperous urban American early Sixties. It’s a politically correct, bourgeois bohemian exaggeration of the characteristic vices of that time, with no redeeming virtues. Even THE SOPRANOS showed more affection for its murderous characters. For me, the show is still entertaining and instructive, because the vices are portrayed accurately in terms of detail, even if somewhat misleadingly in terms of frequency. Despite the smug sense of chronological superiority of its writers, the show still suggests that people in those days had more class (in dress, for instance) and probably had a a lot more real fun than we do. The smart lead characters actually seem less conformist, more self-reliant and manly (including the women), and more deep than similar types would today. They’re also somewhat more self-destructive, but that might be better than becoming superstitious fanatics about health and safety, as our bobos have. Imagine a world without jogging and hardly any health clubs, and where people only exercised for fun ! MAD MEN’s lead characters are a lot less like caricatures than most people–fictional and real– on TV these days.
Saturday, October 4, 2008, 4:22 PM
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October 4th, 2008 | 6:26 pm
Very well put.
October 6th, 2008 | 9:16 am
Michael’s piece is fun and insightful, do read it. I have no intention to go out of my way to watch the show. However, we really do need a smart cultural account of the darker sides of the pre-60s state of things, the things that inspired various Howls against hypocrisy/plasticity. The Apartment and the Graduate work to some degree, but from a 2008 prespective, SMART means seeing why people rebelled against the old order, having a sense of why that old order would collapse given the technological nudge of the pill, etc., wny that order was a war-shocked half-way house b/t the liberation of the 1920s and the older staid “Victorian” ways, and most of all SMART means knowing that the new order would bring today’s calamities and banalities, and thus having a sharp-eyed notice-of the orderly, civilized, and genuinely enviable features pre-60s America. Correct me if I’m wrong but Madmen seems like a 2008 sexual fantasy, a la that spanking-chic art-house film a few years back called Secretary, with the obligatory over-righteous tearing down of the inequities upon which the fantasy is based.
October 6th, 2008 | 10:28 am
MADMEN, I agree, is somewhat too kinky and not all that smart. But as even Michael’s article shows that the show does some of what Carl wants. MADMEN does show the vices that would produce rebellion, especially among women. It doesn’t aim to show, in some Marxist/Tocquevillian fashion, that democratic rebellion against Fifties banality would actually produce its radicalization. Michael did well, though, to show that the priest in the show actually suggests that: He’s bored by the Fifties “establishment” church and poised to make it more boring still with bad music and the cliches of liberation and relevance and the disappearance of the real, personal God. I’m a little disturbed that Carl was so impressed by SECRETARY, although a memory or two of that movie caused me to dissent from the common opinion that “the girl” in the most recent BATMAN is not sexy enough.
October 6th, 2008 | 12:57 pm
I did not see Secretary, nor do I think I would have been impressed by it. I saw the trailer for it, and read the NYT chatter. I assume the tease was superior titilation to the full experience, as Peter only retains a “memory or two” of it.
October 6th, 2008 | 1:10 pm
Well, I’m getting pretty old, and so a memory or two is a lot. Actually, the trailer must have been better than movie, which was mostly boring and creeping (and I really didn’t watch the whole thing). It did challenge the actors in ususual ways, though. My apologies to Carl for assuming he saw it. If I had time I would say good and bad things about NICK AND NORA’S UNLIMITED PLAYLIST, which does manage to be funny without being needlessly gross and really not kinky at all.
October 7th, 2008 | 7:33 am
Well, take the time later…’tis an intriguing title. The blurbs I’ve read make it out to be a standard teen-romance, a Pretty in Pink for 2008.
October 7th, 2008 | 9:38 am
Well, it’s no PRETTY IN PINK. It would be more like SIXTEEN CANDLES–insofar as it’s one big night of adventure and love for a displaced (but rich and smart) girl and a nerd. And I guess it is an updating the John Hughes-type movie. But NNUP aims much higher, the very title is a “cultural allusion” to the sophisticated THIN MAN etc. , while been almost as funny as SIXTEEN CANDLES–a pretty high standard.
October 22nd, 2009 | 3:33 pm
[...] review last year. Unfortunately, the original article is lost to the Internets, but I found a decent summary at Postmodern Conservative. var addthis_pub = ''; var addthis_language = 'en';var addthis_options [...]
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