Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 7.1
"Terminally Uncool, Unfunny, Lame"
Guest Writer: Bruce Robbins

Monday, April 14, 2014

posted under , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[The first in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 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]

 "Terminally Uncool, Unfunny, Lame"

 Written by: Bruce Robbins (Columbia)

The opening credits have been predicting Don Draper’s fall at the beginning of every episode since Mad Men began airing. Last year, at the end of season six, it looked like the moment of professional collapse had finally come. But it also looked like Don’s breakdown in front of the Hershey brass and the indefinite time-out decided for him by his partners might be balanced by some sort of moral redemption. The breakdown itself comes in the form of compulsive and disinterested truth-telling, and the final sequence of last year’s final episode involved more of the truth: Don showing his children the brothel where he was raised.

As the new season premiered last night, many viewers must have been asking themselves how this impulse would or wouldn’t take over and work itself out as the show draws to a close. To put this in a series of questions: what might moral redemption look like, if that’s what’s coming? Would it mean turning against advertising itself? When Don says (during the meeting where he self-reveals and self-destructs, but also earlier) that Hershey’s chocolate doesn’t need advertising, he is echoing a theme that the show has already raised and that may be its most fundamental link with the political vision of “the Sixties”: is the work these advertisers do worth doing at all? Is it good for us? If the answer is no, then what? We find ourselves lost in a dark forest of contradictions. Wouldn’t a rejection of all that professional success mean turning against the vice-ridden virtues by which viewers have been so charmed--turning against what got us so involved in the show to begin with? Are we ready for that? 
In particular, what would a critique of the profession mean for the gradual emergence of women into the ranks of the professionally successful? After all, that emergence has become the show’s single most emotionally compelling line of development as, season by season, the men seemed to get more and more exhausted, empty, and self-repeating. Could Don redeem himself morally without undercutting the rising trajectory of Peggy and Joan? And if their success, too, is going to be undercut, will we get the familiar and distorted logic that associates women’s achievement at work with failure and desolation in private life? I’m not sure I can survive any more of that moral.

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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 5.13
"You've Come a Long Way, Baby"
Guest Writers: Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Caroline Levine

Monday, June 11, 2012

posted under , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
Leo Burnett’s 1968 ad for Virginia Slims    
[The twelfth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 5 of AMC's Mad Men, was posted prior to the publication of  MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing. Kritik welcomes anonymous comments so long as commentators choose an identification such as initials or a number. We also welcome you to check out our series of posts on Season 4 of Mad Men which begins here and ends here.]

"You've Come a Long Way, Baby"

Guest Writers: Lauren M. E. Goodlad (English/Unit for Criticism) and Caroline Levine (Wisconsin)

In a plangent moment from Season 5’s finale, “The Phantom,” Pete Campbell tells his story to a lover who believes she is talking to a stranger. It is the second time this season that Pete’s life has become the subject of fiction: in “Signal 30” (5.5) he was the inspiration for Ken’s transition from science fiction to a bleak narrative of suburban despair. It is all the more fascinating, then, that the opportunity to tell his own tale finds Pete describing himself as the would-be hero of a rather different genre, the Bildungsroman. That is, when Beth asks why Pete’s “friend” had an affair, he replies: “Well…he needed to let off some steam, he needed adventure….he needed to feel that he knew something, that all this aging was worth something because he knew things young people didn’t know yet.”

This gesture toward Bildung is important to Mad Men’s viewers for at least two reasons. According to Franco Moretti, the Bildungsroman—usually translated as the “novel of development”—is modernity’s archetypal narrative form. That is to say, while the actual conditions of modernity entail never-ending transformation subject to the demands of technological and economic change, youth’s destiny (as in the classic examples of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet), is to mature. The function of the Bildungsroman, therefore, is to reconcile youthful desire to social demands and--in so doing--to portray modernity’s ceaseless change through the guise of a human story of meaningful growth and compromise. The function of the Bildungsroman, in other words, is to make men like Pete believe that “all this aging is worth something.”

For the very same reason, Mad Men has generally resisted this formal compromise: the show has been a “Bildungsroman without the Bildung,” or as Lilya Kaganovsky wrote in her post on this season’s premiere, a series in which “nobody grows wiser,” “only older.” That has especially been the case for Don who, while never quite young, has managed to trump the ephemerality of youth through seemingly boundless self-invention. At the end of Season 4, when Don impulsively proposed to a young woman he hardly knew, he seemed more than ever to be rejecting maturity (Faye Miller) in favor of a fantasy of self-creation.


But Season 5 has had more than a few surprises.
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