[The fifth 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]
"Loyalty"
Written by: Caroline Levine (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“The Runaways” was an episode that returned us again and again to questions of loyalty, and I found myself wondering whether the show might be referring in some way to the precarious loyalty of its audiences. Ratings have dipped over time. Lots of viewers have been willing to let Mad Men go, and if my acquaintance is anything to go by, many who have stuck with it are more disappointed than satisfied, their commitment to watching now brittle and strained.
Of course, the series’ slow pace has always been hard on those who are afraid of commitment. Critic Logan Hill says, “It’s a show that has always been built for the obsessive fan, and hasn’t really cared very much for the casual fan… It’s been kind of cocky about that.” Casual—like the worker who lounges on the sofa or like the boyfriend who would rather go back to jail than stick with the mother of his child. If Mad Men has always sought a loyal, committed relationship with us rather than a sequence of one-night stands, its characters’ stories, dominated break-ups and firings, haven’t given us great models.
Should we be more loyal? Should “guys like us” stick together, as Harry Crane says, because “we go back a long way”? Should we try to do our best to make sure that Mad Men is “still important,” even though we are really having trouble figuring out exactly how to do so? Certainly loyalty feels like a troubling value coming from a Philip Morris executive, who moralizes that his company “won’t turn on his friends as easily” as Don does. It’s tough to be inspired by those who stick to their friends precisely so that they can go on killing them.
Mad Men teaches us a lot more about falling out of love than about building loyalty. But then what, exactly, has happened to the relationship between the show and its audiences? Perhaps these days we are more likely to dally with Game of Thrones, to be excited by True Detective or Top of the Lake. But what was it that attracted us to Mad Men in the first place, and what’s turning us off or splitting us up now?
There were once many kinds of attraction. Some who loved the first seasons fell for the early sixties style, and dwelled happily on the elegant clothes and sleek furniture. The late sixties is now quite deliberately betraying that style. Don looks awkward in his sports shirt compared to Megan’s sexy dance partner, and beautiful Stephanie clearly needs a bath. The couch that used to be an object of desire is now in the wrong spot and too heavy to move.
Another group who loved Mad Men in its youth were drawn to its richness as historical fiction. From casual racism to littering to drugged childbirth, Mad Men invited us to imagine a time just long enough ago to feel distant, just close enough to feel familiar. Matthew Weiner is famously obsessed with historically authentic detail, and the show has always raised interesting, troubling questions about his glossy, glamorous version of an old boy past. These days, the show offers up a world that feels less gorgeous and less exclusive, and yet not ever radically disruptive enough. It’s a hodge podge of approaches to life—West Coast as well as East, hippie commune emerging out of suburban elite, behatted executives alongside beards and miniskirts—that won’t let us settle into a single, smooth vision of the past (nostalgic or critical as the case may be).
Some early viewers were just there for the plot. It started out a really good one: we were drawn into the precariousness of a life built on secrets. Would exposure of Don’s past unsettle his career, with his talent for seducing us with appearances? Would plotting blue-blooded Pete take down Don, the social impostor? That plot is distant, now. We’ve had some good dramatic tension since that has been organized around the success or failure of the company, and yet those moments too feel far away in this season. The narrative is not just slow but motiveless. Don seems to be sinking slowly, or is he rising again? Joan has climbed to the top and seems secure there. Peggy remains single. Roger sits perched pretty well in his own complacency. There’s no suspense here, no readiness for sudden crisis or revelation.
For many audiences, the series once did really well when it came to complex and richly rounded characters. Especially the white women who were trying to figure out how to live satisfying lives: Peggy, Joan, Betty, and Sally. Pete was also fascinating in his aspiration to succeed, and amoral Roger was disturbingly charming. All of them have receded into minorness now. The number of characters has expanded, but most are forgettable. Who is that Cutler, again? Who are the many boy creatives who laugh at Lou?
The show holds on, wrongly I think, to a loyalty to Don as its central character. Megan’s a frustrating figure, I believe, in part because she too keeps up her hungry adoration for Don. She holds him too much at the center, just as the show does. In “Runaways,” she’s first warm to Stephanie, and then suddenly jealous when Stephanie blurts that she knows all of Don’s secrets. Megan drives Stephanie away, despite her promise to hold on to her for Don. Megan then tries to make herself important to Don by making him feel important, at the center of a sexy threesome: will sharing him with Amy, whom he has continually tried to reject and dismiss, put Megan back at the center? Structurally, this seems like a strategy that can’t possibly work. It’s as though Mad Men both did and did not get its own message that it’s impossible to try to organize a meaningful life around a debonair professional ad man.
If the series has turned off audiences by failing to deliver up some of its earlier pleasures—pleasures of style, historical detail, suspenseful plot, and complex character—one place where it continues strong is in the complex interweaving of its themes. Advertising brings together seduction and work, social climbing and courtship, nostalgia and strategy. There are rich resonances in every episode.
In “Runaways,” for example, Lou’s absurd dream of a wholesome Saturday cartoon that upholds values of patriotism and loyalty finds intriguing echoes in both Megan and Betty, “who can take anything but an order.” Betty rebels against Henry’s authority, paradoxically, when she holds on to her right to speak up in favor of traditional authority and against youthful rebellion. “Leave the thinking to me,” Henry orders. This command never works in Mad Men, where women always refuse this particular model of loyalty. As Betty says simply, “I can think all by myself.” Meanwhile, the computer, which poor paranoid Michael is not entirely wrong to see as coming for all of us, hums away where the writers and artists used to work, literally taking the place of human thought.
Mad Men plants echoes in its smallest details. Two characters in this episode passingly exclaim that Megan’s apartment is “out of sight,” at once offering up a little pieces of sixties lingo and hinting at the distance between what is on view—Stephanie’s “obvious” pregnancy, exposed in a public phone booth—and what is protected from prying eyes. Betty and Stephanie both refuse to eat outside, asserting their will by remaining, each in her own way, out of sight.
This thematic interweaving is a very literary pleasure. As a literary critic myself, I was trained to notice such patternings, and I love to feel their richness, and to unravel the connections. Other television often fails at this, even when it does well on other grounds. And for this viewer, it is enough to keep me coming back to Mad Men.
I can’t imagine that simple loyalty—just “going back a long way"—will work for audiences in part because Mad Men simply doesn’t teach us loyalty as a value. It goes so far as to mock its characters’ demands for loyalty, and its plot thrives precisely where loyalty fails. Perhaps the show knows it needs to woo us in some other way. It’s no accident that Don spells “strategy” carefully in “Runaways” and concludes the episode with a surprising new strategy for the cigarette business. But then again, as Lou says, it may be too late for that now.
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posted under
Medieval
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Nostalgia
,
Reading
,
Trilling
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Amity Reading (English)
Shortly after listening to Renée Trilling’s paper and the provocative discussion it sparked, I found myself trying to very roughly summarize her ideas for an undergraduate in my medieval literature and culture course. I explained as succinctly as I could that Trilling was exploring the aesthetic function of nostalgia both within modern constructions of the medieval and within medieval texts’ constructions of themselves. Although different, both nostalgias perform the work of fantasy: they are a longing for an idealized past, a time when things were different, better, other than they are now. These fantasies of the past provide the present with something it is perceived to lack even though, of course, the ‘past’ that is mourned is imaginary, constructed based on the needs and desires of the now.
“Oh,” said my student. “Isn’t that what you do every day in class? Talk about how great the Anglo-Saxons were and what a disaster the Norman Conquest was?”
I smiled politely.
Of course, my student was not incorrect. It is hard to keep scholarly distance when you love something, but you have to love something to study it as a scholar. Thankfully, we can get ourselves out of this pickle by studying our method of studying. As both a medievalist and a lover of medievalisms, the question of distance, nostalgia, and the medieval is one that I find both extremely interesting on a personal level and also crucial for understanding the intellectual tendencies of medieval scholarship—not too surprising, given my own interests. But Trilling’s talk was relevant to more than just the sub-field of Anglo-Saxon studies, or even medieval studies in general. Her arguments were about our own historical moment as much as they were about the medieval one.
Trilling began her paper with an amusing and incisive summary of popular “medieval” movies, focusing on Michael Curtiz and William Keighley’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Robert Zemeckis’s more recent Beowulf (2007). Although ticket and DVD sales reveal that such movies are clearly appealing to modern audiences, Trilling pointed out that they are rarely good cinema and are obviously not concerned with representing a historically accurate or even feasible version of the Middle Ages. How, then, can we begin to explain their popularity? By looking at the cultural work they perform through their nostalgia, separate from their function as mere entertainment.
Robin Hood, for example, is obviously a product of its own historical moment—the economically- and politically-fraught 1930s—more so than it is a representation of twelfth-century England. With its forceful assertion of class equality and its vivid depictions of the plenty of Sherwood Forest, the film takes the desires and concerns of the moment in which it was produced and projects them onto another moment that was perceived as similar-but-better, this one situated vaguely in ‘medieval times.’ It would be an over-statement to say that the medieval setting of the movie is purely accidental—after all, it is the story’s very medievalness that made it appealing and appropriate. But certainly it is the idea of history behind the figure of Robin Hood that is of importance here, not his historicity.
And because medieval movies like Robin Hood are fantasy only loosely disguised as history, it really shouldn’t surprise us that they scoff at accuracy, textual or historical—their whole purpose runs counter to it. In order to function as they do ideologically, they must make use of the ideas of facts, not facts themselves. As Trilling phrased it, they must be and are “a pastiche of stereotypical images,” images that easily and quickly conjure medieval for a modern audience but that do not risk acknowledging the complexities and uncertainties that must necessarily accompany the study of a period’s history and culture. Onto this fabricated and homogenous but nevertheless ‘historical’ background, we are able to fling fantasies and anxieties about our own culture—an act in which we find pleasure despite the discomfort of our longing.
Trilling then turned to the modern and the medieval versions of Beowulf. Beowulf is interesting, Trilling posited, because its fantasies are harder to identify. What are we longing for when we watch the movie Beowulf? And if we ask this question, we must ask another: What were the Anglo-Saxons longing for when they read or heard the poem Beowulf? This question is crucial because the poem itself is thick with nostalgia, as are all Anglo-Saxon texts. The heroic culture of the poem, the culture that modern nostalgia attributes to the Anglo-Saxons, was already a thing of the past even in the late Anglo-Saxon period (ninth- to eleventh-centuries) when Beowulf was committed to manuscript. The poet, in essence, was already engaged in his own nostalgic act: Beowulf is a commemoration of the heroes of old, the pagan ancestors of the poem’s Christian audience. But in its nostalgia, the poem also maintains distance—men like Beowulf were heroes, yes, but they were not Christian, and while they can be judiciously celebrated, they are not meant to be emulated. So, in Beowulf, our longing for the medieval period, concentrated on the idea of Anglo-Saxon heroic culture, collides with the period’s longing for its own past, creating something of a nostalgic mise en abyme.
Trilling finished her paper with a solid reading of the Old English metrical and linguistic features of the poem that contribute to its own sense of ‘pastiche’ and nostalgia. While Beowulf itself ought not to be read as history or as a window into the ‘historical’ heroic culture of the Anglo-Saxons, one of the things the poem does do, and quite fruitfully, is tell us something of what the Anglo-Saxons thought about their own past. The same model can be useful for us: what can our versions of the medieval tell us about our own culture? Trilling concluded with the thought that the violent and sexually explicit Beowulf movie presents us not with the idealized past of Robin Hood, the past as it should have been, but rather the past as we fear it might have been. What does this anxiety say about our own moment, our own project of nostalgia?
Eleonora Stoppino’s response reformulated the questions raised in Trilling’s paper and presented them back to the audience as touch-points—a technique that encouraged a wide range of enthusiastic and productive responses from the audience. What does it mean that movies like Beowulf are produced in America? We didn’t actually experience the medieval period (not in the United States as a country, nor in our own personal lives as people), so we are being nostalgic for a time and place largely unconnected to us. This, too, links us to the object we are romanticizing: Beowulf itself, although an Anglo-Saxon poem written in Old English, was nevertheless a poem about Danish and Geatish heroes set in Scandinavia. In what ways is the idea of Beowulf, both the poem and the movie, related to a desire for origins, a desire for a foundational myth? Is nostalgia also a desire for belonging, community, history? Can we think of personal or individual nostalgia as separate from group nostalgia? Is the aesthetic function of nostalgia altered when it is employed in an epic as opposed to a novel? Why is it that violence seems to be an inherent feature of our modern nostalgic desires? Was the Anglo-Saxon conception/use of nostalgia different from the modern?
And perhaps most strikingly: is nostalgia always backward-looking? That is, could the fantasies and desires and longing intrinsic to nostalgia ever look forward to the non-existent, the unavailable, rather than back? Such questions left the audience thinking about more than just the medieval.
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