Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.4
"Out in the Open"
Guest Writer: Robert A. Rushing

Monday, April 22, 2013

posted under , , , by Unit for Criticism

[The third in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"Out in the Open"

Written by: Robert A. Rushing (Italian/Comparative Literature)



Joe Namath card from 1968
A great deal happens—perhaps too much—in the fourth episode of Mad Men’s sixth season, “To Have and to Hold” (the title is that of Megan’s soap opera, and a reference to marriage vows in general). The Vietnam War continues to emerge into the explicit content of the show (“they should stop dropping napalm on children”), rather than remaining in the marginal radio and TV news that viewers can’t help but notice, but which the characters in the show ignore. Harry Crane’s plan to distract the people from napalm by giving them bread and circuses (“Joe Namath in a straw hat!”) seems woefully behind the times (and doomed to fail besides). For several years, viewers have waited to see if we would ever “follow Carla home” —that is, explore the lives of the show’s African American characters, rather than having them also remain as marginal background that Don and others pay no attention to—and indeed, last night’s episode follows Dawn, if not home, then to an African American diner and into a glimpse of her personal life. And late 1960s counter-culture, perhaps most prominently the sexual revolution (bisexual swinging! casual hookups! a near-threesome in the back seat of a taxi!), begins to take a commanding role in the lives of the characters on the show—and even in the style of the show itself. 

“To Have and to Hold” opens with a three-shot: Don, Pete and Timmy from Heinz ketchup, discussing the possibility of an “exploratory mission” to see if SCDP can capture the lucrative and prestigious condiment account, in addition to (or in place of) the Heinz baked beans account they already have. They agree to give it a shot, and Timmy stands up to leave, noting that he has a rendezvous with a lady in a few minutes. In a rapid, much-practiced and rather repulsive gesture, Timmy licks his wedding ring and then slides it off into his pocket, pointedly noting that he doesn’t “need much of an excuse to come to Manhattan.” Don smiles his forced business smile in response, and a minute later, Pete offers his own rather sad apartment to Don, should the need arise to “spend the night in the city.” Don, as is so often the case when dealing with Pete, marvels at Pete’s tactlessness and foolishness. “I live here,” Don he reminds him.
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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 4.13
"Groundhog Day"

Monday, October 18, 2010

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[This first of two final entries in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, was posted prior to the publication of MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (Duke University Press), is co-written by Lauren Goodlad and Rob Rushing, The second entry, a follow-up from Lilya Kaganovsky, appears next.]

"GROUNDHOG DAY"

Written by Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Unit for Criticism/English) and Robert A. Rushing (Unit for Criticism/Italian/Comparative Literature)

In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a narcissistic weatherman with an itch for his producer Rita, played by the fetching Andie McDowell. In the words of Wikipedia, “during a hated assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day,” Connors “finds himself repeating the same day over and over again. After indulging in hedonism and numerous suicide attempts, he begins to reexamine his life and priorities.” In the end, a wholly reformed Connors wins Rita’s love, breaking the cycle of repetition. Fans of the film will remember that Connors’ entrapment in the events of a single day, with his own moral agency the only variable that changes, is signaled by an alarm clock on his nightstand waking him each morning to the same tune: “I Got You Babe,” the 1965 pop hit by Sonny and Cher. When the new-model Connors wakes up to find Rita beside him, he knows that Tomorrowland has finally come.

And Don Draper?

Season 4 of Mad Men vividly poses the question of whether Don can make the kind of change which made Groundhog Day “a tale of self-improvement” which emphasizes “that the only satisfaction in life comes from turning outward and concerning oneself with others rather than concentrating solely on one's own wants and desires.” When we first find Don in the season premiere (“Public Relations”), he is so devastated by the ruin of his marriage and family that he has temporarily lost his mojo—his inspired knack for selling.

The art of selling (and the practice of salesmanship as art) has always been the core of Don’s character, whether he is selling fur coats, Lucky Strikes, and the Kodak carousel, or—that most crucial of all commodities—Donald F. Draper. Season 4 sees Don descend into alcoholism, a sad caricature of his former self, before finally steadying himself through the symbolism of journal-writing and swimming (4.8, “The Summer Man”). The episode is remarkable for its introduction of voice-over, enabling Don to narrate parts of his story like a latter-day Jane Eyre. When he passes the chance to bed Faye Miller on their first date, telling her “That’s as far as I can go right now,” he signals the potential for a new kind of Don: Reader, I am different now.

But, while Mad Men has always been a neo-realist narrative (adapting the forms of nineteenth-century serial fiction to television), it has never been a classic Bildungsroman in which the narrative arc coincides with the protagonist’s moral growth. Indeed, Don’s morality has always been the subject of debate since he is both an anti-hero (the “handsome two-bit gangster” Faye describes in “The Summer Man”), and a character with an almost Nietzschean potential to creatively transcend his hollow milieu. The show’s genius is to convince us that while Don is a fraud by every measure we can imagine—a liar, a seducer, even a coward at times—he is also better than the world that made him. We must believe in Don’s nobler instincts and thrill to his moments of transcendence even while knowing that if he ever sustained them, he would no longer be Don—and we would no longer be watching Mad Men.

Marriage to Faye would mean a Don who has outgrown the fantasy of replacing the mother he never knew—quite literally a whore—with the “beautiful and kind” “angel” he describes to Betty after he torpedoes her modeling career in Season 1 (Episode 8 “Shoot”). It is a fantasy of wedlock that creates the need for a fantasy of escape as Don repeatedly splits himself between the man who provides for the angel in his house, and the man who craves stronger femininities like those of the bohemian Midge, the professional Rachel, and the ballsy Bobbie Barrett.

One of the most moral characters ever depicted on Mad Men, Season 4’s Dr. Miller holds out the prospect of monogamous romance—Ah, love let us be true to one another!—along with a turn from the gendered separation of spheres which doomed the Draper marriage, as it does most unions that find a man telling his wife, “It’s my job to give you what you want” (“Shoot”). Miller’s professional gift is to know what people desire even before they know it themselves (she is the first person to cast Don as a “type,” and predicts that he will remarry within a year). If on one level this makes her just another player, her efforts to separate the intimacies of private life from the instrumental relations of a “stupid office” strike us as sincere.

The conflation of love and work has come up before in Caroline Levine’s post on Episode 11 (“Chinese Wall”), and it reaches a kind of apotheosis when Don diverges from the path of health, openness, and growth which Faye has represented throughout this season. In “Tomorrowland” Ken Cosgrove becomes the surprising exemplar of a principled refusal to use his father-in-law to win a new client: “I’m not Pete,” he insists, adding that his wife “Cynthia is my life, my actual life.” Later, Ken and Peggy express the distinction between work and love with their gleeful but unerotic embrace when they land a new account.

Don’s engagement to his secretary Megan, is explicitly marked as repetitious first by Roger Sterling (“See, Don? This is the way to behave,” Roger says, implicitly referring to his own marriage to a young secretary), and later by Joan (“It happens all the time” and “he’s smiling like a fool, like he’s the first man who ever married his secretary”). Ironically and recursively, in last year’s third episode (“My Old Kentucky Home”) it was Don who was calling Roger a fool.

Don’s following in Roger’s footsteps has been a recurring theme throughout the season. It is the central narrative twist of the sixth episode, “Waldorf Stories” (in which Don’s hiring of Danny Siegel after drinking too much parallels Roger’s hiring of the young Don). And it persists in Don’s taking to journal-writing while Roger composes his risible memoir, Sterling’s Gold. Most poignant of all, when Don first climbs on top of Megan in “Chinese Wall,” the camera cuts to the loveless Sterling home—anticipating the tomorrow that Season 5 may yield.

Though Don—as ever gaga in California—may believe that his impromptu proposal is heaven-sent by Anna Draper, it seems all too clear that Megan is not the “right woman,” like Rita in Groundhog Day, who can liberate him from the cycle of repetition. Indeed, every episode of Mad Men begins with precisely this narrative: in the iconic credit sequence the world dissolves and collapses, and Don falls, only to find himself miraculously reconstituted with a cigarette in one hand and—one assumes—a drink in the other. Like his son Bobby who wants to visit Tomorrowland (a Disney exhibit that opened in July 1955), Don does not seek the tomorrows of what Ken calls “actual life.” He seeks the fantastic, non-existent tomorrows conjured up by theme park planners and ad execs like himself. As always with Mad Men’s depiction of California as magic kingdom, Tomorrowland is not a realistic future, with all of its promise and menace, but an infantile withdrawal from the present.

Whereas the season ends with Betty ready to admit that the future augured in last year’s haunting "Shahdaroba" sequence has not turned out to be “perfect,” it leaves Don, who “only likes the beginnings of things” at the very crest of fantasmatic bliss. More keen to sell himself on marriage than to sell to clients, Don upstages Peggy’s professional coup with the kind of engagement he once called “foolish.” In the brilliant seventh episode, “The Suitcase,” Don and Peggy sealed their platonic bond and mutual dedication to work over an ad for Samsonite. But Don now believes that he can have it all. The secretary who caught his eye at the end of “Hands and Knees” and craftily seduced him in “Chinese Walls,” is now not only Maria von Trapp (a better version of Betty’s maternal angel), but also Peggy to boot (she has “the same spark as you,” Don tells his incredulous protegé).

On some level, of course, Don understands that Tomorrowland is an illusion, but without ever being consciously aware of it. Early in the episode, he makes his pitch to the American Cancer Society, and they ask him why he boldly (and unilaterally!) withdrew the firm from cigarette advertising. He tells them, “I knew what I needed to do to move forward.” But in fact Don knows exactly how to not move forward, both personally and professionally, precisely because this is what advertisers understand best. Advertising, we have been told repeatedly this season, is what negotiates between our desire and our conscience, allowing us to gratify ourselves and salve our consciences at the same time. It mediates, as Faye says, what people want to do, and what they think they ought to do.

Hence, cigarette advertisers know just how to snare a teenage market, though Don’s explanation applies at least as much to himself as it does to teenage smokers: cigarette advertisers offer “a two-pronged attack, promising adulthood and rebellion. But teenagers are sentimental as well.” He suggests a campaign showing children and parents together, while making it clear that the parents—thanks to their smoking—are “not long for this world.” The chairwoman objects: “But [teenagers] hate their parents!” She has realized that an appeal to the future, to avoiding a tomorrow without parents, is fruitless—it’s all conscience, without the gratifying desire. Don reassures her: “They won’t be thinking about their parents. They’ll be thinking about themselves—that’s what they do. They’re mourning for their childhood, more than they’re anticipating their future.”

In other words, we can sell people self-pity and narcissistic self-interest under the guise of altruistic love. That’s a product Don himself—just like his cigarette habit—can’t give up. The “tomorrow” that Don wants to sell to potential smokers is a fantasy, not in the sense that it doesn’t exist, but precisely in the Disney sense: a gratifying playground of self-interest and escapism. In this way Don’s New York Times gambit in last week’s “Blowing Smoke,” is not so much deconstruction as reconstruction of the show’s famous pilot, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

Don's teenage rube is, of course, Don himself, even if he doesn’t recognize it. And this lack of recognition may be why he is doomed to repeat, like Phil Connors, an endless cycle of “hedonism” and, figuratively at least, “suicide attempts.” Mad Men has always used its advertising campaigns as a way of speaking about larger thematic concerns, as well as a way of talking about what’s happening inside its characters. At its very best, the show portrayed Don as simultaneously completely manipulative and completely sincere, talking about himself and the product, but also –in a more self-referential vein—about the viewer and the show, all at once.

But lately, Mad Men has reached beyond the realism that made its early seasons so novelistic. This may be inevitable for a show so wholly cathected to a narrative of secret identity which has already been thrice revealed (by Pete in Season 1; by Anna, retrospectively, in Season 2; and in the kind of denouement that makes the serial form so engrossing, by Betty in the last season). By now Don’s secret has exhausted itself and Season 4 has found the show’s inventive writers experimenting with different forms. The Mad Men of this season is more formally eclectic, more melodramatic (the panic attack that leads to Don’s confession), and more self-referential (the playful feint in last week’s episode which makes us think Don is returning to journal writing when he is pulling off the kind of stunt which worked in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”). Yet, for all its experiments, the season has not been more attentive to people of color: one hopes that the regrettable departure of Carla may find next year’s season including the show’s first principal African-American character.

Season 4 has also seen the show’s foray into meta-textual references (as Sandy Camargo noticed about the allusion to Mad Men’s own Emmy nominations in “Waldorf Stories.”) This is the same kind of reference that we find in the music chosen for the credit sequence of this season’s finale. As Don lies in bed, turning uneasily to look at his nightstand, the tune we hear, of course, is “I Got You Babe.” To be sure, the song is just the sort of kitschy sentimentalism that expresses what we think about Don’s marriage, and, though he is not young, impoverished, or long-haired, it is from 1965. But, like Don’s telling glance at the nightstand, the song surely points to Phil Connors’ “wake-up call,” both literal and metaphoric, in Groundhog Day.

Don will have to repeat this story, evidently, unless and until he finally gets it right.
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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 4.2
"Potemkinville"

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[ The second in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 4 of AMC's Mad Men was published in anticipation of MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press.]

"POTEMKINVILLE"

Written by Robert A. Rushing (Associate Director, Unit for Criticism/Italian/Comparative Literature/Cinema Studies)

Like virtually every episode of Mad Men, “Christmas Comes But Once a Year,” which aired this Sunday, is an episode about appearances, usually deceptive ones. The title refers back to a 1936 cartoon of the same name from Fleischer Studios (Superman, Betty Boop, Popeye, etc.) in which Professor Grampy, singing the title song, pretends to be Santa Claus for the children in an orphanage.

This Mad Men episode is anything but a consoling fable for orphans: the increasingly creepy Glen Bishop (played by Matt Weiner’s son Marten) warns Sally Draper that, despite the apparent stability of her new family, changes are coming: “After a while, they'll have another baby.” And later he notes about their equally apparently stable house: “you’ll be moving soon.” Meanwhile Peggy becomes a virgin for the second time with her new boyfriend—yet another example of “something that never happened,” a virtual mantra for Mad Men; Don suggests as much to his secretary, Allison, after having sex with her on his couch (although “next time on Mad Men” suggests that perhaps this storyline isn’t over).

Referring to the chic but sterile decor of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce advertising agency, Roger Sterling says that his visitor shouldn't be fooled—“it's really Potemkinville.” Roger is referring to the so-called “Potemkin villages,” towns originally created to impress the Czar, but most memorably used by the Soviets for pure show, propaganda to show off the happy wonders of socialism. In the last post on Mad Men, Lilya Kaganovsky referred to the “missing piece” of SCDP, the absent second story, but this is just as easily represented as a question of surface and depth. SCDP, in this episode, is just a façade.

SCDP’s Potemkin village status returns later in the episode, when the financially strapped agency has to put on a cinematic Madison Avenue Christmas Party for Lee Garner, Jr., the son of the owner of their main client, Lucky Strike cigarettes. “I've seen the movies,” Lee Jr. says, no doubt referring to the infamous Christmas office party in The Apartment (1960). “We need to change [the party's] rating from ‘convalescent home’ to ‘Roman orgy,’” quips Roger. In other words, both economic systems are revealed as essentially hollow: if the Soviets preferred to show unexpected visitors villages filled with happy peasants overflowing with grain, SCDP will offer up instead the glamour of advertising magic fused with cinema, something that they now specialize in after Don's High Noon Glo-Coat commercial (itself a flat prison surface revealed to be an open three-dimensional space). But instead of selling Glo-Coat by way of High Noon, they will sell SCDP by way of Caligula.

Mad Men itself has always done just this: sold itself by way of cinema. Its cinematic references are too numerous to enumerate exhaustively, but as I argue in my chapter in the Mad World volume, it shows a number of debts to Antonioni, the modernist Italian director responsible for L'avventura and Blow-Up. Those debts are thematic, but they are also stylistic, even purely formal: long takes, slow action, an absence of dialogue in key scenes, elaborate framing and positioning of characters for purely visual or geometric effect, and so on.

Mad Men here faces a kind of stylistic dilemma: on the one hand, it has dedicated-- famously--vast resources and energy to an exact and faithful mimesis. That is so much the case that the few trivial mistakes (Bryn Mawr didn't have sororities, so Betty can't have belonged to one) are well-known, the exceptions that prove the rule. Mad Men is invested in realism (perhaps more of the 19th-century variety than of the postwar Italian film sort), and the attendant socio-economic depth that realism wants to reveal behind the façade of customs and trappings. And yet the show's realist impulses constantly run up against its love of style and form. Let us take three shots from this past Sunday’s episode.

This is a typical shot from the show: a meticulous mise-en-scéne, with period wallpaper, precisely the right clothes, the clutter of half-done homework and half-finished food preparation (carrots, potatoes and, are those turnips?)—no doubt the spices in the spice rack are all in period bottles with the tint labels for 1964. But on a second or third glance, one notices the strange color harmony of the shot, the way that Sally Draper's dress picks up the patterns of the wallpaper, that Carla's apron and dress match the tonal palette of the Draper kitchen. It is their space, but in a way that Mad Men's formalism renders almost uncanny.

Sally's dress does not just pick the geometric squares of the wallpaper; it is also black and red, the colors of Glen Bishop's lanyard, which we see in the episode's opening sequence. “Those are good colors,” Sally announces when she sees it, and now the colors appear on her dress, just as she receives a phone call from Glen. The cosmic formalism of the show is one in which a perfect realism, chaotic and contingent, shows the constant distorting traces of a god—one fond of symbolic color matching.

All of the same observations apply here: perfect period costumes, a meticulous recreation of appropriate Christmas foods for 1964, lovingly warmed in chafing dishes atop period cans of Sterno, and a typical conga line dance. And yet Joan appears to have selected the party decorations to match the exact shade of her dress, or vice-versa. Still shots of Mad Men begin to resemble a Gursky photograph: socio-economic realism transformed into a beguiling limited color palette, played out across repeating geometric patterns. This apparent contradiction is surely one of the things about the show that puts off those who don't like it: in this view, Mad Men transforms important depth into attractive but superficial surface. At times, the show reaches for a degree of stylization that goes beyond Antonioni’s cinematic arrangement and Gurksy's formalist photography, and reaches for the painterly: Don Draper in an Edward Hopper painting.

But appearances also tell the truth: In a sequence both comic and disturbing, Lee Jr. forces Roger into an impersonation of Santa Claus, and then photographs him with the men of the agency sitting on his lap. Those images are simply a double exposure of the truth about both men: Roger is indeed a dirty old man (one can easily imagine him saying just so to his beloved “Joanie” in a different context), and Lee is perfectly happy to have his same-sex desires made visible, but sadistically projected onto another—particularly in a way that perverts the traditional figure of authority, the father he loathes and whose shadow he stands in.

Lee Jr. briefly becomes a character from a David Lynch film (we already knew he was a monster from his previous interactions with Sal Romano), arranging his helpless victim into a perverse mise-en-scéne and taking picture after picture, ripping the cover off of each Polaroid with a kind of sexual glee. The truth of the sequence is all on the surface: Lee Garner Jr.'s sadism and psycho-sexual conflicts, his Oedipal issues, Roger as dirty old man—even Christmas itself as an already perverse scenario of sexual dependence.

Everything about the episode insists on this last point, the fundamentally “adult” character of Christmas in capitalist America, from the Roman office orgy to Don's drunken grappling with his secretary. All of them are based on the figure of the “sugar daddy,” the one who provides “gifts” (two fifty dollar bills, the continuing business of Lucky Strike cigarettes) in exchange for sexual acts (quickie on Don's sofa, humiliating Polaroids of yourself in costume). (It doesn’t always work: the SCDP artist Joey attempts to win over Allison with a cartoon of her as Aphrodite, goddess of love, but it doesn’t take.)

The horror of Glen Bishop is that he has always been ahead of the curve, too sexual too early, and he both sadistically defaces Betty's home in revenge for her “infidelity,” while offering Sally Draper in her unspoiled room a “Christmas gift,” whose sexual promise—or menace—is clear (it is the black-and-red lanyard that was attached to his knife, left on her bed). All of these “concealed truths” are completely open, on the surface, self-developing Polaroids. The shallow and formulaic Christmas card that Don leaves for his secretary really is thanking her for all her hard work (in the office, and on the couch), just as the truth of Christmas is on display every year and in the closing credits in the form of a grotesque hit song: “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” (If you like, this is the “work” of the episode, the transformation of the sweet and child-appropriate 1936 song “Christmas Comes But Once a Year” into the sexual and ambiguous 1952 Jimmy Boyd hit.)

Dr. Faye Miller, a specialist in consumer evaluation (an early form of focus groups) who seems both professionally and personally fascinated by Don, offers a differing view: advertising exists, she suggests, in order to resolve the conflict between depth and surface. There is, on the one hand, what people secretly want, their most venal and banal of desires, and there is how they are supposed to behave (civilization and its discontents): depth and appearance. Advertising, according to Dr. Miller, is what mediates between the two, offering a lie that also tells the truth, the deepest desire in the guise of something socially acceptable.

The trick in viewing Mad Men is not to look for the ways in which it fails to address “serious” topics of weighty political importance (the show is trivial, superficial, glamorizes mere consumption, etc.), but instead to seek out the many ways in which the show's superficiality, and the superficiality of its characters, speak to precisely the realist truths its gloss sometimes seems to slide over. This is not direct, didactic and political speech, however—and as a result, it can maintain the fascination and glamorous power of images.

Surfaces that conceal, surfaces that reveal. This double play of the surface appears quite forcefully, and very early on in the episode. When Freddy Rumsen arrives with a new account, he is momentarily distracted from his double dealings (the essence of depth—depth and deception are the same) by a modernist image on the wall, an optical illusion (i.e., cinema, television) that combines depth, a flat screen and the illusion of movement.

“I feel like I'm getting sucked into that thing,” Freddy says, but the feeling he's describing is both an irresistible attraction as well as the falling sensation of vertigo. This is, of course, another Mad Men reference to Hitchcock, but it is also once again nothing but the opening credit sequence. (I have been able to discern two absolute constants in the Mad Men universe: Pete Campbell is always right, and everything about the show can be derived from the opening credits.) The interminable play of three-dimensional spaces that turn out to be flat vector graphics, the creation of depth (falling, falling), ultimately revealed as a blank, flat, unreadable service that nonetheless exerts a magnetic attraction.

I, too, feel like I'm getting sucked into this thing.


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MAD WORLD: "Looking at Gender, Antonioni, and the Soviet Sixties"
Guest Writer: Andrea Ferber

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism


[The last in our series of posts from the Unit's 2/19 symposium, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, describes a panel that featured papers by Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing, and Diane P. Koenker.]

“Looking at Gender, Antonioni, and the Soviet Sixties”

Written by Andrea Ferber (Art History)

Though Roger Sterling, speaking from Mad Men's vision of the early 1960s, firmly believes that “psychiatry is just this year’s candy pink stove,” every presentation in last month's MAD WORLD symposium focused heavily on psychology in relation to both sides of the screen—from fictional characters to the appeal for audiences. The second panel, which included talks by Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing, and Diane P. Koenker, addressed character development through analysis of cinematic techniques, style, spectatorship, and sexuality.


Lilya Kaganovsky discussed the gendered gaze and the spectacle of masquerade á la Berger and Mulvey, focusing especially on season two’s “Maidenform” episode of Mad Men in which Sterling Cooper is approached to rethink advertising for feminine undergarments. While arguably most shows (and any media, for that matter) display sexualized bodies for the pleasure of consumers, this episode seems tied together by a web of gazes. In addition to Don, the three main female characters Betty, Joan, and Peggy flaunt themselves for their own gratification and ours; the men at Sterling Cooper categorize each female employee as either a “Jackie” or a “Marilyn”; and the episode ends with a striptease—during which the gaze with the most tension is not the audience's ogling the showgirls but Pete’s mean stare toward Peggy.


Comparing Don to other male characters, Kaganovsky argued that Don may be more comfortable in his masculinity because he recognizes it as a construct to be performed. Don’s character is the epitome of smoothness—he can save the otherwise-bombed business meeting with Lucky Strike with a catchy sales pitch (“It’s Toasted”) and always has a suave reply to his woman-of-the-hour. Yet it is his innocent, doe-eyed daughter Sally who most unnerves him. Don finds Sally’s loving, admiring gaze extremely disconcerting because he knows that she sees him as something he is not: a virtuous man of integrity worthy of respect. Pulling all these gazes together, Kaganovsky argued that even beyond this episode, Mad Men questions the meanings and effects of looking.

Borrowing from the season two episode “The New Girl,” in his title, Rob Rushing presented “It Will Shock You How Much This Never Happened: Antonioni and Mad Men” drawing numerous parallels between the AMC television show and the work of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni.


Both Matthew Weiner and Antonioni emphasize visuals or surface appearances, especially that of people, and the fragility of identity. Just as Antonioni’s characters have little or no interiority, so Mad Men encourages us to read superficially, based on clothes and body language. Furthermore, Rushing asserted, both Weiner's show and Antonioni's films reveal an interest in watching things disappear. Citing the interchangability and shallow subjectivity of characters such as Claudia and Anna (L’avventura, 1960, image right), Locke and Robertson (The Passenger, 1975), and Dick and Don in Mad Men, Rushing persuasively made comparisons beyond obviously similar sixties chic. Overall, “[Mad Men’s] larger project is tracing the disappearance of a set of economic, sexual, and racial relations that seem unimaginable to many of today’s spectators. Don knows that the first thing that people want is to forget,” Rushing stated.

Maintaining the focus on cinema, Diane Koenker aligned early sixties youth culture in the Soviet Union as depicted in films of the era: in particular, Nine Days of One Year (1961) by Mikhail Romm, and I Am Twenty Years Old (1965) and July Rain (1966, image below), both by Marlen Khutsiyev.




The young protagonists, not unlike the American counterparts depicted in Mad Men, are decidedly hip with thick eyeliner, bouffant hairdos, skinny neckties and grey suits. Likewise they share an addiction to chain smoking and concern themselves with pursuing romantic relationships. On the other hand, according to Koenker, sex and sexuality was depicted far less openly in the media of the Soviet sixties than in the United States and Western Europe.



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Photos from MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, 2/19/2010
First series

Monday, February 22, 2010

posted under , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
Michael Szalay delivers his morning
keynote address on the advent of market
segmentation in 1960s advertising.

Leslie Reagan and Clarence Lang speaking, respectively. on women's reproductive experience and civil rights in the 1960s.


Lilya Kaganovksy discusses gender and spectatorship.

Photos from the MAD WORLD symposium,
February 19, 2010.




Irene Small discussing art and aesthetics in Mad Men and its contexts.







Lynne Joyrich delivering the second keynote address with allusion
to a Sesame Street satire on Mad Men.



Dianne Harris speaking on Mad Men and interiors.

 Rob Rushing fielding a question on the topic of the Italian director Antonioni.
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Cinema on the iPhone

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

posted under , , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Robert Rushing, Comparative Literature and Italian

Michael keeps sending me pieces from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a recent one by Thomas Doherty, entitled "Celluloid Under Siege" (April 18, 2008), makes two claims about what's happening to cinema. The first claim is almost beyond question, but the second is almost certainly wrong. The first claim is that celluloid or analog film is poised to disappear. While initial experiments in high-definition digital video seemed esoteric (or in the case of the most recent trilogy of Star Wars films, motivated more by a fetish for technology than any real necessity), it does seem clear that there is a move toward digital currently underway. It is cheaper, easier to edit, picks up a wider range of contrast in low light, and so on. Some films, like Haneke's Caché (2005), actually depend on being shot in high-definition video for their effects (in the case of Haneke's film, a persistent doubt in the viewer's mind about whether you're watching events that are "live" or "taped"). Doherty's second claim, however, is a little more surprising, and as one might guess from his title (and subtitle: "The future of film studies after the digital deluge"), somewhat alarmist: cinema studies in the American academy is in crisis, "scrambling" as the filmic substrate itself crumbles under our feet.

While celluloid may indeed be disappearing (although it remains an open question whether it will vanish entirely, as it nearly has in still photography, or become one tool among many at the director's disposal), the faculty I know who work on cinema aren't "scrambling" to deal with the changes. I would think it would be obvious, but massive shifts in reception practices on the part of ordinary viewers (who are watching films in more ways and in more venues than ever before, including YouTube and iPhones), are of course very, very good for scholars--to put it bluntly, they give us something to write about. At the same time, "Leave Britney Alone!," "The Landlord" and the practice of Rickrolling aren't exactly replacing Casablanca, Blade Runner or The Bicycle Thief in cinema courses or for ordinary viewers, because they fulfill a radically different function for viewers. Who, exactly, is picking up a date for dinner and a romantic online viral video?

Despite the claim that this a "generational divide" between "graybeards" and "Young Turks," I haven't seen much indication that the older generation of cinema studies scholars is uninterested in—let alone threatened by—the shift from analog to digital. Cinema people in general tend to be pretty technically savvy, and many simply like technology. It's self-selecting: would you go into cinema studies if you didn't have an interest in technology? And while Doherty suggests that the shift is "ironic" because it's happening just as cinema studies is acquiring some actual prestige in the academy, it's not like those same battles will have to be fought all over again. New Media studies, for example, might have to do some further work in terms of legitimizing itself, but most of the resistance to the study of new media forms has already been overcome. Cinema Journal—which Doherty sees as symptomatic of the 'crisis'—will probably have to change its name eventually, but it's already changed its content. Recent issues have covered South Koran time travel films, tourism in The L Word, professionalism in soft-core TV productions like Girls Gone Wild, and "the Shifting Representation of the Penis on the Internet with User-Generated Content" (Summer 2007, since I know you'll want to look that up, along with a great piece by my colleague J.B. Capino in the same issue on the advantages and disadvantages of using the still frame in studying pornography), in addition to more traditional film topics. This doesn't sound like a crisis to me.

Perhaps I know the wrong people (or rather more likely, the right ones), but most of the faculty I know think this is a great time to be doing work on cinema—more material is more accessible and a higher quality, and with a greater variety of moving image formats going out to more viewers in more venues than ever before. More is good. (In the interest of balance, however, I will point out what Doherty would no doubt—and rightly—point out if he were here: it is an embarrassment that we have superb, state-of-the-art facilities here at Illinois, but cannot get secure funding for a projectionist to actually show our impressive archive of films on celluloid to students, scholars, or the public. And it will become harder and harder to convince the administration to do so in a digital age. Still, on the whole, I find there is more good than bad here.)

Doherty invokes Rodowick's book Virtual Life of Film to support his claims, but we're treated to choicely nonsensical, but apocalyptic-sounding pronouncements such as: "Forget the threat to Hollywood cinema; digital crashes the hard drives of Newtonian physics." Doherty is somewhat, but only somewhat, tongue-in-cheek throughout his article, but I'm not sure how else to read this: evidently because digital cinema can so easily create special effects that seem to deny the laws of physics, those laws themselves are somehow thrown into crisis. Sound familiar? My impression—although it's only an impression—is that the viewers who are watching Lawrence of Arabia (or more likely, Superbad) on their iPhone are not staying home from the theater to do so. Rather, in addition to watching the latest releases in the theaters, people are now also catching a flick while they're standing in line at the DMV, or watching a film of their own choice rather than what the airline has selected for them while flying across the country. And who can blame them? Would they rather see those same films on a 40 foot screen? Of course. Is it a good thing that they can watch them anyway, even on a small screen? I think so. I'll admit it: I watch movies on my iPod Touch when I fly. I'd watch them on the larger laptop screen, but usually my son manages to get dibs on it first. Anything is better than watching the execrable Yours, Mine and Ours (2005) and the scattering of infomercials and Everybody Loves Raymond that you're lucky to get on an airplane these days. Not only would I rather watch Snakes on a Plane, I'd rather have actual snakes on my plane. Anyway, the quality on the Touch isn't bad, and I'll catch a new release in the theaters after we land. It might be shot on digital, but it also might be good. Read more

The Impossible Middlebrow

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

posted under , , , by Unit for Criticism
Written by Robert Rushing, Comparative and World Literature

In a recent article (you'll need a subscription to read, however) in the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Shumway wonders why filmmaker John Sayles hasn't gotten much attention in the academy. So why doesn't cultural studies love John Sayles, as Shumway asks in the article's title? He offers several possible explanations, concentrating on the absence of critical articles on Sayles and cultural studies. He writes:


"Sayles's films are often described as didactic, and they are.… they promote a general set of political values, including equality, tolerance and appreciation of difference, and an ethic of community… [but] perhaps it is less that Sayles has political points to make than the way in which he makes them. A colleague remarked that despite feeling sympathetic toward his politics, she wished he wouldn't express them with such earnestness. Unlike in the 1970s, when directors like Robert Altman used studio-era genres ironically, Sayles plays it straight. Michael Moore draws audiences to his polemics by making fun of the other side, something Sayles rarely does.… It is worth recalling that Andrew Sarris's most damning classification in his seminal study of auteurs, The American Cinema, was "strained seriousness." It seems as though the worst sin an American film director can commit is to treat serious issues seriously."


I don't think this is a problem specific to cultural studies, since there isn't a ton of work on Sayles in cinema studies, either (it certainly isn't absent, but it does tend to biographies and interviews). Cultural studies, as Shumway notes, tends to be interested in texts that either appear to be non-ideological while actually concealing a reinforcement of the dominant ideology (often high culture texts) or those that are concealing a form of resistance to dominant ideology while appearing to be mere entertainment (often popular culture). But this bias (or preference) is not limited to cultural studies. Almost all of the humanistic disciplines that interpret in one capacity or another—that is, all of those fields that take something like a "text" as their object of study—duplicate it. They are all fundamentally exegetical in their approach, positing a model of the object of study that conceals a hidden message which must be laboriously unveiled by an expert for the uninitiated. This is the task of the scholar, and most theoretical models follow this approach (Hegel, Marx, Freud, Foucault, and so on—analysis or archaeology or whatever will reveal a hidden truth of ideology, economics, the unconscious…). Lacan offers only a slight variation on this formula when he argues that truth is concealed on the outside, in plain view. But it is still concealed, and it still requires an expert to decode, decipher, explicate, gloss, articulate—all of our favorite verbs.

The problem with Sayles is that his maligned "earnestness" is precisely the desire to speak plainly, to say what you mean without any concealment. He resists the dominant ideology, but not in a way that is hidden or concealed in some kind of pop confection. Numerous studies of action films done in the 1990s, for example, concluded almost universally that the hyperbolic masculinity of action films like Rambo or Die Hard was less about machismo than they were about masculinity in crisis, on the edge, in a panic. (Is Rambo secretly politically progressive?) Now that's a satisfying argument. This structure is familiar and pleasing to anyone who has "queered" a text that was formerly apparently heteronormative (one can imagine the MLA paper title already: "Lesbian Desire in Chick Lit: Bridget Jones' Secret Diary"), or discovered that an apparently progressive film actually reinforces the dominant ideology. Sayles' films leave the professional exegete with nothing to say, because there is no layer underneath the surface to be revealed.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this kind of work, of course (I'm guessing all of my research work falls into this "exegetical" category). In fact, I think that this is perhaps the single greatest pleasure of my job, but it is a pleasure that is not without its negative side. On the one hand, it is a pleasure that stems from a love of engagement with the text, knowledge about it and about its context; on the other hand, it owes much of its power to an exclusivity—"I possess the secret key to explaining David Lynch's films," or "We understand Lacan, and perhaps we will let you into our club—and perhaps we won't." At its worst, this kind of approach can be deeply elitist (you think Lynch is a mess of surrealist images, but that's because you do not see (you are too stupid to see) the hidden messages, the hidden kernel of the real, the de-subjectified voice, the…). Sayles, in short, poses the problem of the middlebrow: it has no unintentional camp humor, no incomprehensible or enigmatic imagery, no radical formalist experimentation, and as a result, there's nothing to elucidate. In this way, Sayles may be politically and socially progressive, but profoundly un-academic. To pose this all as a question, are academics unable to deal with texts that are straightforward, that need no interpretation, or is this an "impossible object" that we constitute ourselves around?

* * * * * *

My introduction to the films of John Sayles came surprisingly early, especially for a teenage fan of heavy metal in Southern California who'd seen at most 5 or 6 films by the early 1980s. My idea of intellectual depth at the time was Rush lyrics. But late one night watching TV with my best friend, whose parents were rarely around and let us stay up as late as we liked, we happened to catch Brother from Another Planet, and we loved it. We loved it in much the same way that we loved Monty Python, or Altered States, or any other film that we found "weird." I liked Joe Morton in the role of the alien who happens to appear as an African-American to Earthling eyes (he is mute throughout the film). But even at the age of 15 or so I understood that the film was an allegory (hey, there was allegory in Rush lyrics!), that Morton's alien was a refugee slave, that the film was duplicating America's history of slavery in space so we could see it as something still present.

I didn't see the film again until my first year in college. I went to UC Santa Cruz, and ended up at Oakes College there, the multiculturally-themed college. Our core course at Oakes was organized around different cultural identities, and had a rather tokenistic organization (this week, Asians! next week, gays!). And for each week, a film. For the week on African Americans, we saw Brother from Another Planet. The African American students in the class were outraged. "This was our film?" one African American student asked, aghast.

So here's a problem that cultural studies might find more appealing, one that it's potentially well-suited to: why did Sayles' progressivism "strike out" with the very community that he presumably wanted to speak to (and certainly was speaking about)? Sayles is much liked in the independent film community and by progressives, but the working class he's championed are far more likely to have seen Transformers than, say, City of Hope. Can culture be progressive (or revolutionary) and popular? Adorno? Benjamin?

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