Mad Mentality

Deconstructing then reconstructing the 1960s

A Media Shmedia column

by Scott Patrick Wagner

There's an election coming up. Perhaps you've heard about it. It's interesting that Election Day comes on the heels of the new fall television season. (To be accurate, it comes on the heels of Halloween, but that's only good for a cheap joke about the walking dead and John McCain.)

Even without my compulsive need to correlate media zeitgeist to world events, TV has had a particular impact on politics, this go-round. Saturday Night Live has become newly relevant in its 33rd year (which, in the TV-longevity version of dog years, makes it older than John McCain). This is due not only to the coalescing genius that is Tina Fey — and for which I hope her returning series 30 Rock receives an appropriate amount of audience love — but also because this campaign season has reached such absurd proportions that the satire almost writes itself.

But this campaign — and the current status of our society — are only absurd from one angle; from another, things are ironic, iconic, and strangely retro. Presidential elections have an extra impact because they only come every four years; we have an opportunity to take stock and ask if we're better off than we were four years ago. Only Sarah Palin and her closet are probably answering yes to that one (the "closet" reference is to her hundred-fifty-grand wardrobe, not her ever-clearer disdain of gay people). This is an interesting moment, however, to ask another question: Are we better off than we were forty years ago?

The AMC series Mad Men just aired the finale to its second season, and I am a crazy mad man for this show. While the newly premiered Life on Mars gives us a revealing and thoughtful hour of drama/cop-action/existentialism from its 1973 setting, the real perspective is to be gleaned from the early-'60s highball that is Mad Men. There is so much to wax ecstatic over about this series, and a few details that resonate with our singular point in time.

In the pre–Civil Rights time of Mad Men, the sanctioning of prejudice provides a fine, ironic counterpoint to the imminent possibility of the first African-American in the White House — while it shines a light on the lingering racism that is still meandering about wordlessly. Equally compelling this election has been the role of women, from Hillary Clinton to the Sarracuda. And this leads me to one particularly zealous observation about Mad Men.

Though the series is overflowing with male characters in dominant roles (as is accurate for that unabashedly chauvinistic time frame) — and though they are all finely etched and beautifully written — it is the women of Mad Men that steal it. The subdued near-psychosis of Peggy (Elizabeth Moss), the imperious yet dominated Joan (Christina Hendricks), and — most of all — the stunningly beautiful but utterly fucked-up Betty Draper (January Jones). It is Betty who speaks for how outwardly perfect the post-Eisenhower, Donna Reed period looked, while a post-traumatic, alcohol-preserved silent scream festered under the surface. And part of why Mad Men is so startling is in its reveal of this deep damage with a palette that resembles Father Knows Best — though Robert Young never let us see any of this (at least not onscreen).

This last episode of Mad Men was set against a backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Observing the characters' alarm, one can't help but conjure up comparisons to 9/11. And watching the interspersed clips of JFK addressing America, one can't help but draw a parallel to the junior senator from Illinois who will hopefully be our next President before a new issue of this paper hits the stands. (Have you noticed how Barack Obama's suits even seem to have the skinny profile of the Kennedy era?)

We are a nation that is every bit as fucked-up as tortured-but-lovely Betty Draper. I have often felt that we lost our collective innocence (and our hope) when JFK was assassinated. There were brief, idealistic counters during the Free Love period and the Clinton administration (not the same period, if you were going there). But the trajectory has been a downward vortex through Vietnam, Watergate, Reaganomics, Iran-Contra, 9/11, and the cynical, Neo-Con manipulations that led to the inexplicable reelection of that person in 2004. But we always had the implacable beauty of a robust Wall Street and ever-revaluating real estate to make our outsides look good.

And here's the utter retro-irony: Now that we look as fucked-up as we've been feeling, perhaps there is help to be found through a man who seems to embody the solid qualities we've been feigning. Or at the very least, maybe health care will become manageable enough for our inner–Betty Drapers to get some therapy.