Sterling Cooper Pryce: Joan Harris, Roger Sterling, Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), Pete
Campbell, Don Draper, Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse), and Peggy Olson. AMC/Photofest ©AMC. Photographer: Frank Ockenfels
The characters in Mad Men (especially lead protagonist Don Draper) are shown reading or discussing books more frequently than are the characters in perhaps any other commercial series in television history. Who but Draper, for example, would run across a man reading Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poetry collection Meditations in an Emergency in a bar—and then later actually read the book himself (Episode 2.1, “For Those Who Think Young”) before sending it on to someone else (Anna Draper) to read? This phenomenon has stirred much interest among fans, as when several different websites have sprung up detailing the books featured in the series, providing guidance to those, too, who would like to read like a mad man. Even the New York Public Library has established a “Mad Men” Reading List site, apparently hoping that the series might spur resurgence in literacy.
To cite a typical example, in Episode 7.13 (“The Milk and Honey Route”), Draper’s car breaks down while he is on a cross-country car trip of a kind that might have come from any number of American books, from Lolita (1955), to On the Road (1957), to Clancy Sigal’s left-leaning Going Away (1961). That all of these books feature cross-country road trips situated in the 1950s, a crucial formative decade for Draper, may be no accident, suggesting that he has grown up at a time when American men, in particular, were taught by their culture that such trips could be crucial to any attempt to redefine oneself. On the other hand, the direct referent of the episode’s title would appear to be the 1931 volume The Milk and Honey Route: A Manual for Hobos, by the sociologist Nels Anderson (writing as Dean Stiff), suggesting the way in which Draper has, by this time, become a peripatetic wanderer rather than a Madison Avenue ad executive.
In any case, it’s now 1970, so Don is able to kill some of the time he spends while holed up in a seedy motel outside the sleepy town where his car is being repaired by catching up on his reading—in this case by reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, which had been published the year before. The town, we know, is Alva, Oklahoma, a piece of information the sharp-eyed can garner from the inscription on the side of the tow truck that gives Draper a ride to the Sharon Motel, where he stays while his car is being repaired. The Godfather was a major bestseller, of course, so it comes as no surprise that Draper is reading the book, especially to attentive viewers of the series, who know that Draper is in fact a voracious reader and that his taste in reading material runs to the middle brow, tending to focus on relatively high-quality books that are at the same time relatively popular.
As an advertising man, Draper needs to know what clicks with the American public, so it makes perfect sense that he would try to read currently popular books, just as he tends to try to watch most of the popular movies of the day. The Godfather, of course, is a very cinematic novel that would become the basis for one of the most important of all American films only a couple of years after Draper reads it in this episode. The book is displayed only in a single scene and without comment, though viewers also know by this point that the producers tend to choose Draper’s reading material quite carefully, having him read books that will not just help him stay plugged into the popular American consciousness, but that will also have further relevance to the series and to Draper’s characterization.
The Godfather is relevant to Draper’s situation for any number of reasons, and no doubt an entire essay will someday be devoted to those connections. For now, it is sufficient to note that The Godfather is centrally concerned with the breakdown of traditional family relations in modern America, including a utopian fantasy of the family connections that still obtain in the Corleone family. Given Draper’s own troubled family past, this sort of fantasy would no doubt have great appeal to him, even if it is ironized by the fact that the family connections in The Godfather lead directly to murderous criminal activity. And, of course, Draper here could have no idea that, some years later, the first sequel to the film version of The Godfather would unmask these family fantasies as rooted in the backward and regressive social practices of an essentially still-feudal Sicily. In any case, the connections between gangsterism and capitalism that underlie the narrative of The Godfather (including a suggestion that capitalism ultimately destroys traditional social relations of all kinds) provide ideal thematic support for the interrogation of capitalism that runs through Mad Men from beginning to end.
My reading here of The Godfather as an expression of a utopian fantasy of collectivity via the traditional family owes much, of course, to Fredric Jameson’s similar reading of the film (along with Jaws) in his now classic essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” For my purposes, it is important that Jameson sees the family-based fantasies of gangster films such as The Godfather as providing images of utopian fulfillment that play a cultural role similar to the one once played by idyllic small towns. He thus argues that the film “offers a contemporary pretext for a Utopian fantasy which can no longer express itself through such outmoded paradigms and stereotypes as the image of the now extinct American small town” (1992, 33). It is thus important that Draper reads the book in just such a small town—and one that had lost all pretense to innocence when it became the site of a World War II internment camp for German POWs who were considered among the most troublesome and dangerous, a little historical tidbit that becomes especially interesting given Draper’s later experience as the victim of violence at the hands of a group of U.S. military veterans in the town. This experience, combined with the town’s history as the site of a prison camp, confirms Jameson’s suggestion that small towns have lost their utopian sheen in American culture and verifies the suspicion (also confirmed by Draper’s experience) that the small town has an ominous side, as such towns often do in American popular culture, especially post–World War II.
Of course, this reference to The Godfather in Mad Men also almost inevitably evokes a link to that other major masterpiece of the gangster genre in American popular culture, The Sopranos, a show on which Mad Men creator and showrunner Matthew Weiner served as a key writer and producer. Among other things, The Sopranos (whose gangster characters are virtually obsessed with the Godfather films, especially the first) makes particularly overt connections between gangsterism and “legitimate” American business of the kind potentially made by Draper’s reading of The Godfather in Mad Men. But a major reason why the Sopranos characters are obsessed with The Godfather (the main action of which is set in the 1950s) is their sense of a breakdown in the utopian sense of tradition and community that the novel and film associate with the family ties of mobsterism. The constellation of images and connections surrounding Draper’s reading of The Godfather is thus much richer than might at first be apparent, strongly reinforcing the insistence of Mad Men that the 1960s were a turning point in American history.
Meanwhile, in this same episode, Draper strolls out to the motel’s rather unimpressive pool, only to find a surprisingly attractive swimsuit-clad woman lounging poolside. The sight of the woman immediately kicks Draper’s old womanizer’s instincts into gear, though we should probably not underestimate the extent to which he is partly attracted to the woman because she herself turns out to be a reader. She is, in fact, reading a paperback copy of Alberto Moravia’s The Woman of Rome (originally published in Italian in 1947), a relatively weighty volume exploring, among other things, the theme of prostitution (as a metaphor for bourgeois materialism), a theme that also runs through Mad Men. It is not clear, of course, whether Draper has any idea what the book is about, but it is probable that he knows enough to know that Moravia was a writer who explored serious themes with sufficient literary dexterity to gain significant critical attention. Moravia, for a serious novelist, was also relatively popular and had several novels adapted to film, including (most notably) The Conformist, a 1951 novel that was prominently adapted to film by Bernardo Bertolucci in the very year in which this episode of Mad Men is taking place—and a book that includes a substantial amount of material related to the “Mafia.” (The Woman of Rome had itself been adapted to film in 1954.)
That Draper seems to find the woman more exotic and sexually alluring because of her reading material might simply suggest that he feels attracted to a fellow reader, though it is also possible that he feels a sense of potential connection to the woman because he has been reading the Italian-oriented Godfather, while she is reading an actual Italian novel. More generally, however, it suggests the extent to which books and reading play a special role in Draper’s life—and one with considerable erotic investment. Draper, after all, is a brilliant man who has virtually no formal education, an autodidact whose lack of learning is still able occasionally to embarrass him but who has, in fact, been able to accumulate a rather large fund of knowledge on his own. Books have a mysterious, almost fetishistic, power for him. In the Lacanian terms recently popularized by Slavoj Žižek, books for Draper are erotic objects that stand in for the objet petit a, the original lost object (usually associated with the mother) that all of us spend the rest of our lives in a futile quest to recover, thus filling the hole that lies at the heart of our identities. Draper’s own motherless and underprivileged (both financially and emotionally) childhood means that his urge for such objects is particularly strong, thus the never-ending string of erotic conquests that constitute his romantic adventures in the series, as well as the general sense of longing and lack of satisfaction that seems to inform all of his activities.
As an undereducated man who moves in circles populated by less intelligent and less talented men who nevertheless find it easier to make their ways because of their Ivy League degrees, Draper clearly associates education with exactly the kinds of privilege and connectedness that he has never known. In his mind, the quest for women and the quest for books are very much a part of the same, more general quest for personal validation. Little wonder, then, that the woman by the pool is all the more attractive to him because of the book she is reading, just as it also comes as no surprise that Draper immediately loses interest when the fantasy bubble is burst by the quick revelation that the woman is not a mysterious, vacationing intellectual exploring the hinterlands, but an ordinary wife and mother with a schlumpy husband and noisy kids along with her on the trip.
The double episode (Episode 6.1–2, “The Doorway”) that opens the sixth season of Mad Men begins as Dr. Arnold Rosen (Brian Markinson) attempts an emergency resuscitation of a fallen patient as a woman’s voice (clearly Megan Draper’s) exclaims, “Oh my god!” in the background. Rosen is a neighbor who lives in the same building as Megan and husband Don (in addition to being the husband of Don’s mistress Sylvia), so this scene is clearly constructed to make viewers at least suspect that Don’s high-pressure, hard-drinking, chain-smoking lifestyle has finally caught up with him and that he has perhaps had a heart attack. The screen then goes black as an ambulance is heard approaching. Suddenly we hear Don’s voice, just before the scene switches to a shot of Megan’s belly as she lies on a beach in what will turn out to be Hawaii. Don is, somewhat ominously given the preceding scene, reading the beginning of Dante’s Inferno, “Midway in my life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road, and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” This choice of reading material suggests that Don does indeed have an occasional taste for high-brow literature, though in this case the reading material is also particularly appropriate given the growing sense that he is at somewhat of a crossroads in his life. He stops reading and looks at his paperback, seemingly puzzled at the fact that the words seem to describe his own mid-life-crisis situation so well. Viewers, meanwhile, are wondering if this narration of the beginning of a descent into hell is occurring in a flashback that foreshadows Don’s own descent into hell after his death in the opening scene.
It is not, of course, surprising at this point in the series to see Don reading because we have seen him and the other characters reading so many times. Moreover, this motif in Mad Men is not simply gratuitous or even simply a way of suggesting the cultural tastes of the characters or setting the cultural context of the episodes. The books that are introduced in the series quite consistently function as intertextual glosses that comment upon and significantly enrich the events that are narrated in the series itself. As it turns out, Don is not the victim in the first scene (a few minutes later the victim will be revealed to be the doorman in his New York apartment building), and he doesn’t get past these first lines in his reading, while the Inferno is never mentioned again. But Don’s reading of Dante does, in fact, foreshadow a descent into hell of sorts as he gradually unravels through much of the sixth season, leading eventually to a meltdown during one of his patented nostalgia-trip client presentations, this time involving a depiction of Hershey chocolate bars as emblems of happy childhood memories, leading him to openly confess to the Hershey’s reps the nature of his own decidedly unhappy childhood. This confession leads to his suspension from the company that he himself helped to found and still partly owns, sending him off into a sort of Purgatory through which he must struggle to get back to his former professional status.
The enigmatic first seconds of this movie-length double episode already contain a wealth of material that indicates the way in which literature itself is often used to enrich the fabric of Mad Men, and viewers are clearly invited to think of Dante throughout the episode (or even throughout the season and beyond, given how intricately interlinked the individual episodes of Mad Men tend to be). Indeed, this opening is typical of the way Mad Men often achieves a richness that can only be described as literary. In this same episode, for example, Don will soon encounter a soldier on leave in Hawaii, where he is about to be wed (with Don ultimately giving away the bride at the ceremony). In this encounter, the soldier colorfully expounds on the destructive power of the M2 machine gun that he has seen in action in Vietnam. Then, later, Don gives Dr. Rosen a Leica M2 camera, of which his firm has a supply because they are conducting an ad campaign for the camera company. Interestingly, Don also tells Rosen that he believes the M2 is the “best” Leica camera, even though it was an old model about to go out of production and had already, in December 1967 when this episode is taking place, been supplanted by the M4 as the top Leica model. We are not given this information in the episode, but viewers aware of this fact about the camera model might wonder if Don is expressing a sort of subtle violence against Rosen (as is perhaps indicated by the correspondence between the model of the camera and that of the machine gun). This event is only one of many moments in Mad Men that potentially take on a much different meaning (even if that meaning is not entirely clear) if certain intertextual or extratextual information is brought to bear.
Television viewers are not accustomed to being asked to seek out this sort of information, but this same sort of intertextual information is key to the experience of reading certain literary texts, most obviously James Joyce’s 1922 modernist classic, Ulysses—which turns out also to be the first major literary text whose central protagonist is an advertising man. Jennifer Wicke has noted the ways in which Ulysses uses advertising not merely as a source of material but as a discursive model, with Joyce constructing certain elements of his text very much like an advertisement—or very much like numerous other works of popular culture:
Ulysses is indisputably allied to mass cultural narrative roots, to Chaplin films, fancy postcards. . . . The “everyday” is charged, an extraordinary effusion of sentiment and wonder taken from popular culture, above all working class culture. Advertising is here a class diction. (1988, 125)
The same might well be said for Mad Men. With its famed colorful set design, its highly productive use of music, and its play upon a variety of narrative clichés, the series itself is constructed very much like an advertisement, and like a film, and so on. It is, in fact, constructed very much like Ulysses, with the main difference being that Mad Men understands, as Wicke apparently does not, that, while advertising is indeed a “class diction,” it is a diction belonging not to the working class but to their middle-class masters (such as the affluent ad men of the series), even if it is designed to manipulate the working class and to ensure their compliance with the capitalist system.
Mad Men, in fact, has far more in common with Ulysses than might at first be obvious. In one of the key motifs of the early seasons of Mad Men, we learn that Don Draper has a variety of secret items (including cash and artifacts from his secret lost childhood) locked away in a special drawer in his home desk. Wife Betty, after several attempts, finally manages to get into the drawer in Episode 3.10 (“The Color Blue”). Betty’s shock at the evidence she finds there that Don has not been honest with her about his past initiates a chain of events that will ultimately end in divorce—though it is not entirely clear whether this shock is due simply to Don’s dishonesty or whether it is due to the discovery that he does not have the proper bloodlines and background for a pampered Bryn Mawr girl like herself, sending her running into the arms of blue-blood Henry Francis.
In short, the simple event of the opening of Don’s secret drawer, however seemingly clichéd and melodramatic, has multiple potential ramifications of a kind that might best be described as literary. The whole motif of the secret drawer, for example, is quite reminiscent of a similar motif in that most literary of literary works, James Joyce’s Ulysses. There, protagonist Leopold Bloom keeps a variety of private items in a secret drawer as well, including his secret correspondence with a woman apparently named Martha Clifford. Indeed, Bloom has an entire clandestine life he thinks his wife, Molly, knows nothing about. As it turns out, however, Molly does know most of Leopold’s secrets, partly because she has already broken into and searched his secret drawer, which might be one of the things that have driven her into the arms of the oafish Blazes Boylan, though the text does not say so.
To link Don’s secret drawer in Mad Men with Bloom’s secret drawer in Ulysses might seem a stretch if Mad Men were not otherwise so consistently literary. Mad Men, in fact, is reminiscent of Ulysses in a number of ways. Joyce’s monumental novel, after all, is (like Mad Men) a vastly complex work that addresses a wide variety of issues in its contemporary world by way of a plot that might have been derived from a soap opera. Formally, both Mad Men and Ulysses are intricately interwoven works, individual parts of which take on added power and significance from their resonances with other parts of the same work. In terms of content, there is an obvious connection between Ulysses and Mad Men in that the central character of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is himself an ad man, engaged both in the selling and in the creation of ads, combining (in that simpler era for the advertising industry) the “accounts” and “creative” jobs of Mad Men.
Ulysses, of course, is famed for its extensive engagement with other literary texts by predecessors such as Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, a phenomenon I have discussed extensively in my book Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition. But Mad Men, especially for a television series, is also an unusually allusive work whose intertextual tentacles reach out to a number of other cultural artifacts. Both Ulysses and Mad Men, in fact, explicitly thematize their own intertextuality by including a number of scenes in which various characters consume other cultural products, including books. For example, early in Ulysses, when we first meet the Blooms, we see Leopold’s wife, Molly, asking her husband to bring her some new reading material. We also learn that Molly has somewhat questionable taste in reading material, preferring titillating titles such as Sweets of Sin or Ruby, Pride of the Ring or even authors with titillating names, such as Paul de Kock—though the latter was actually a quite respectable author and a favorite of Karl Marx because of his ability to represent the lives of ordinary working-class people (Lafargue 1947, 139). Bloom, meanwhile, fancies himself as having a bit more literary sophistication and hopes that he can perhaps improve his wife’s mind (and her taste in reading materials) through the power of suggestion—perhaps the same power that drives the advertisements that he helps to compose.
Don Draper, like Leopold Bloom, is something of an autodidact with little formal education, though he might have more reason than Bloom to think of himself as a sophisticated thinker and reader. He might also have reason to question the reading material of at least his first wife, Betty (though she certainly has more formal education than he). Thus, in Episode 1.6 (“Babylon”), Don settles into bed to find that Betty has been reading Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel The Best of Everything, a rather trashy account of the lives of several New York publishing house secretaries. Don flips through the book as he waits for Betty to join him in bed; he is clearly amused by what he finds inside, commenting sardonically on the fact that the book seems to be “dirtier” than its film adaptation.
Betty does occasionally show better (if not entirely different) taste in her reading material. In Episode 3.10 (“The Color Blue”), for example, she is shown reading Mary McCarthy’s then-recent 1963 novel The Group in the bath tub. On the other hand, while The Group is by almost any standard a better novel than The Best of Everything, it was, at the time, also a somewhat sensational bestseller that explores the lives of a group of young women, including the treatment of such controversial topics as sex and sexism.
Meanwhile, Don’s second wife, Megan (the daughter of a Marxist professor), turns the tables by occasionally flaunting the fact that she is more educated than is her husband. For example, she gets in at least one shot at what she seems to perceive as Don’s questionable reading material. In Episode 5.7 (“At the Codfish Ball”), Megan’s French Canadian parents pay a visit to the Drapers. During the visit, we see Don in bed reading Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer, which Megan suggests he is doing just to impress her father, Raymond, a leftist intellectual. “My father won’t care,” she teases him, “if he finds out you read James Bond.” Don, indicating The Fixer: “You know what? This is a good book. You should read it.” And a good book it is, having won the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Based on a real-world story of the persecution of a Jew in tsarist Russia, it also addresses the engagement with Judaism that runs throughout Mad Men—and, for that matter, Ulysses.
Don, in fact, reads Jewish American literature at several points in Mad Men. For example, in Episode 1.6 (“Babylon”), Israeli representatives come to SC seeking aid in promoting Israeli tourism. To help with the process, they produce a copy of Leon Uris’s wildly popular bestseller Exodus, which is apparently supposed to help Don and his WASPish colleagues understand what Israel and Judaism are all about. Don, of course, actually reads the book. Meanwhile, in Episode 7.4 (“The Monolith”), he is briefly shown reading Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the relevance of which to the action of the episode is not really clear, though it is now 1969 and Portnoy’s Complaint was, in fact, the literary sensation of that year. It would seem that Don tends to read fashionable books, perhaps suggesting that he reads books at least partly for one of the main reasons he watches so many movies—to make sure he knows what is on the minds of the American people and thereby to garner potential advertising ideas.
Don’s reading of such books is, of course, part of an engagement with Judaism that runs throughout the series, beginning with the very first episode. A similar engagement runs through Ulysses, in which Bloom is regarded by his fellow Dubliners as Jewish, even though he has been baptized a Christian multiple times, hasn’t been circumcised, and is the son of an Irish Catholic mother (Jewishness being matrilineal). Bloom’s “Jewishness” in the highly anti-Semitic environment of 1904 Dublin makes him very much an outsider, just as Don’s debased childhood growing up as an impoverished orphan in a whorehouse in Pennsylvania makes it difficult for him genuinely to fit in among his affluent friends and colleagues in Manhattan.
Such parallels between Ulysses and Mad Men are surprisingly easy to find, perhaps because both are encyclopedic works that seemingly contain everything including the kitchen sink, drawing a great deal of energy from an extensive engagement with and vivid representation of their cultural and historical contexts. For example, in Episode 2.4 (“Three Sundays”), set during Easter season of 1962, Peggy has what might be described as an odd flirtation with the young priest Father Gill, who enlists her to help with one of his sermons and then later seeks her help in other advertising and marketing campaigns for his church as well. Though reluctant (and though her work is not entirely appreciated by the church ladies), she turns out to be quite helpful, suggesting a strong affinity between the kind of marketing she does and the kind of marketing in which priests such as Father Gill are engaged every day. Of course, Leopold Bloom had understood this affinity as early as 1904; he is a great admirer of the marketing expertise of the Catholic Church (as when he notes that the ritual of the Eucharist can be used to help convert cannibals in Africa), and at one point he even compares this expertise directly to that which reigns in his field of advertising. Overhearing a mass in a nearby chapel, Bloom notes the repetitive nature of the service. He then ruminates on the effectiveness of repetition in religious ceremonies: “Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads” (13.1122–24).
Joyce is not, in fact, the only major modernist author whose work is relevant to Mad Men. Other works, in fact, appear more directly. In Episode 2.11 (“The Jet Set”), Don has an encounter in California (land of the young) with an unconventional twenty-one-year-old named Joy, who reads William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in bed after making love with Don. Don, still looking a bit dazed from his recent exertions, asks her about it and is informed that she “took a survey of American literature” by way of explanation for why she is reading Faulkner. She then tells him that their sex was good but that “the book is just okay.” Don is apparently not all that impressed, either. Thus, still later, he arranges a mysterious meeting (we eventually learn that he is going to see Anna Draper, the widow of the original Don Draper), jotting down the details for the meeting on the last page of the book, which he then rips out to take with him, tossing the book itself aside on a table. There is no real indication that the gesture is meant as an expression of contempt for Faulkner’s work, though the moment is rather reminiscent of the scene early in Ulysses in which Bloom visits the “jakes,” then wipes himself using the paper from a story he has been reading there.
D. H. Lawrence also gets relatively little respect in Mad Men. His notorious Lady Chatterley’s Lover makes an appearance in Episode 1.3 when Joan Holloway returns a copy that she borrowed from another member of the secretarial pool at Sterling Cooper, leading to some giggly commentary about the racy content of the book. That content, of course, had led the novel (first privately printed in Italy in 1928) to be banned in the United States until 1959, when a U.S. appellate court judge ordered that it and similar works could be published under First Amendment protections on the basis of their “redeeming social or literary value.” The book was thus still quite new to most Americans in 1960, when the events of this episode took place, and it was definitely one of the books on the minds of American readers in that year—though much of its prominence in America came out of curiosity about its supposedly racy content rather than any perception of its literary value.
Numerous other books have found their way into Mad Men as well. Moving, for example, from the sublime of Ulysses to the truly ridiculous, we are told multiple times in the series that Bert Cooper, the firm’s seemingly avuncular senior partner, is a great fan of Ayn Rand and particularly of her then fairly recent 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. This novel, which promotes Rand’s notorious belief in unfettered laissez-faire capitalism and unrestrained individualist selfishness and greed, suggests that Cooper is not nearly as cuddly as he sometimes seems to be and that he might have gotten to where he is at least partly by sheer ruthlessness. Cooper is seen recommending the book to Don and other employees as early as the first season of the series (set in 1960), so he must have gotten to it fairly early in its career and fairly late in his, but it is easy to imagine that the book attracts him because it endorses certain attitudes that helped him get to the top of his profession decades earlier.
Atlas Shrugged thus directly supplements the critique of capitalism that runs through Mad Men, however vaguely. In other cases, books are simply props that help to create atmosphere, but do not seem to have any great thematic significance. In Episode 6.8 (“The Crash”), Don’s kids are left alone in his Manhattan apartment at night while both Don and Megan are away pursuing their professions. With her younger brothers already in bed, daughter Sally (now fourteen) settles into bed as well, reading Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby (the episode is set in 1968, so, again, the novel is quite new at this point). This now-classic tale of supernatural horror lurking in a New York apartment building is, of course, somewhat problematic as reading material for a young girl who is home alone in a New York apartment at night. To make matters worse, Sally does indeed hear something go bump in the night as she reads, only to discover an actual (if unconventional) intruder in the apartment. Her reading of Rosemary’s Baby thus helps to set a tone of foreboding (both for Sally and for the viewing audience) as she encounters the burglar, a black woman who claims to be Sally’s grandmother Ida.
This sequence is indeed quite scary, though not in a supernatural way—and it is debatable whether it is really made scarier by the presence of the book, which in this case is almost too clever to be truly effective. On the other hand, Sally’s reading of the book suggests just how popular the book was at the time and prefigures the role that would be played in the series by the 1968 film adaptation when Peggy Olson conceives the idea of using it as the basis for a baby aspirin ad in an arc that begins just a few episodes later in Episode 6.12 (“The Quality of Mercy”). This sort of “seeding,” in which a seemingly insignificant motif is planted in the text only to take on greater significance later, is a classic literary motif—and again one that is epitomized by Ulysses.
All in all, the many scenes in which Draper or other characters in Mad Men are shown reading books constitute an important part of the rich engagement with other cultural texts (and with historical contexts) that is so crucial to the series. Indeed, in this case text and context overlap: one implication of the prominence of books in Mad Men is that books represented a more important part of the cultural context of the 1960s than they do today. The effectiveness of the references to books is enhanced by the fact that the choice of books to feature in the series so often enriches the episodes in which the books appear. Finally, that the series itself is so literary makes these references to books and reading especially appropriate, while the reading motif that runs through the text is also used as a technique of characterization, particularly in the case of Don Draper.
When television burst on the scene as a major part of the texture of daily life in America, it was quickly established that music was a key ingredient in effective programming—just as it had long been in film and radio, the two media to which television can most directly trace its lineage. Similarly, especially in the age of television, music can be a crucial component in a successful advertising campaign.
Not surprising, then, music is also a crucial ingredient in Mad Men, which so richly combines the resources of conventional television programming with those of advertising in order to achieve its objectives of both entertainment and social commentary. In addition, Mad Men engages in an extensive dialogue with the context of the American 1960s—and especially with the popular culture of that period. Music was one of the most distinctive elements of that culture, providing a soundtrack to the revolutionary changes in American culture that saw young people rise to the fore as a political force—and as a key new market demographic for a rapidly expanding consumer culture that needed new customers in order to sustain the explosive growth that had begun in the postwar years. Historian Howard Brick may be correct when he concludes that our understanding of the role of music in the sixties counterculture is still “sketchy,” but it is clear that this role was a major one, whatever the details (2000, 114).
Many scholars have attempted to elaborate the role of music in the culture of the 1960s, as when Michael J. Kramer (2013) provides a good overview of the issue that makes clear the importance of new forms of popular music in the historico-cultural phenomenon we know as the “sixties.” Among other things, the rise of rock music as a pop cultural phenomenon is among the many narratives that Mad Men tells as part of its effort to establish the 1960s as a pivotal decade in American history. For example, as Tim Anderson demonstrates, one of the ways in which Mad Men uses music is to demonstrate that American pop culture (like American culture in general) was not as simple and innocent in the pre–Kennedy assassination years as it has sometimes been portrayed to be, allowing us instead “to hear the despair and discontent that percolated through the period” (2011, 83).
The importance of music as part of the texture of the 1960s, of course, is one of the key reasons that music takes on such importance in Mad Men. Indeed, most of the most memorable music from Mad Men involves well-remembered popular songs from the 1960s, though the series also occasionally employs more recent music, as in the case of its well-known opening theme music, “A Beautiful Mine,” which was taken from the instrumental portions of the 2006 album Magnificent City, by the rapper Aceyalone in collaboration with the hip-hop producer RJD2, who also included an instrumental version of the song in his 2006 album Magnificent City Instrumentals. Finally, the most conventional use of music in Mad Men occurs when its use of popular tunes is supplemented by original scores by David Carbonara, used to help provide atmosphere for various scenes, as is the case with most film and television music.
The role of music as a key element in Mad Men is clearly reflected in the strong role played by music amid the highly visible online presence that the series established over the course of its eight-year run. One of the key elements in the show’s fandom, for example, involves the online availability of a variety of playlists that allow fans of the show to relive, in a convenient way, the music they had encountered in the series. The online music service Spotify, for example, includes an “Ultimate Mad Men Playlist” that includes original recordings of more than one hundred songs that played a role in the series, either directly (as with the weekly closing songs that became a much-anticipated part of the show) or indirectly (as when they are simply related to or illuminate events or motifs in the series). YouTube, meanwhile, contains a “Complete Mad Men Music Playlist” that includes more than two hundred videos of songs that made an appearance in one way or another in the series, including Carbonara’s original scores. In fact, Mad Men playlists are so popular online that the site 8tracks Internet Radio includes a meta-list of 196 different Mad Men playlists that are available online.
The popularity of such playlists can be taken as a testament to the quality of the music selected for use in the series, which makes that music stand up quite well on its own. On the other hand, the music employed in Mad Men is quite carefully integrated with the series itself, so that it is impossible to appreciate the significance of the show’s music when that music is heard in isolation from the show itself. For example, Episode 4.8 (“The Summer Man”) features the Rolling Stones classic “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” one of the iconic songs of the 1960s. The song is not mere background music, but emanates diegetically from a small portable radio on a beach near Don Draper, who clearly hears it.
One irony of this scene, of course, is that Draper does not exactly have his finger on the pulse of contemporary rock music, however good he otherwise is at gauging what might interest American audiences. Nevertheless, the choice of this music is brilliantly appropriate. The song shifts into a nondiegetic mode that fills the background of the scene that proceeds from this beginning, the clever timing of cuts at which Mad Men is so good syncing up the song’s references to cigarettes (and cigarette advertising) with Don lighting one, while aligning a line about shirts (and shirt advertising) to a shot of Don’s signature nicely starched ultra-white dress shirt. This cleverness aside, the song (like so many of the show’s references to popular culture) serves the obvious function of helping to locate the episode in time.
Released in the United States on June 6, 1965, the song was an immediate hit, placing on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart that same week and reaching No. 1 on the chart by July 10, staying on the charts into September. It was the first No. 1 hit in the United States for the Stones and thus has special importance in the history of rock music. It is the perfect accompaniment to an episode set in the summer of 1965, helping to establish the historical context as a moment when American popular culture was in the early stages of a revolution that would change it forever. Even the fact that the song is playing on a transistor radio on the beach contributes to this contextualization—such radios first appeared only in 1954 and exploded in popularity in the 1960s, consonant with the rise of precisely the kind of rock music of which “Satisfaction” is a key example.
The song would also seem thematically appropriate as a sort of anthem for Draper, given his well-established wandering eye and seeming inability ever to be satisfied with what he has, sexually or otherwise. However, despite the fact that “Satisfaction” has often been seen as an anthem about the insatiability of youthful lust (or, more idealistically, about the never-ending demand of youth that we should constantly strive to build a better world), the song is actually about advertising and consumerism, which makes it about as appropriate a musical companion to Mad Men as one could possibly imagine. Thus, the line in the song that “rhymes” with the shot of Don’s sparkling white shirt actually refers to a television commercial in which an announcer comes on to tell the singer “how white my shirts can be.” It is, in short, a reference to an ad for laundry detergent. Similarly, the line that immediately follows (accompanied by a cut to Draper lighting up still another cigarette) is a reference to cigarette branding by association with manliness (“He can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me”). Given Draper’s extensive smoking habit—as well as his professional adventures with (and against) cigarette advertising—the reference is particularly rich.
Given these overt references to advertising, it seems fairly obvious that “Satisfaction” is, first and foremost, a commentary on consumerism—and one that is conducted from the point of view of a youthful rebellion against materialist values of the kind that are Draper’s lifeblood. Little wonder, then, that the song focuses on the inability to attain satisfaction, on the unquenchability of desire. After all, the desire upon which consumer capitalism is built is, of necessity, a desire that can never be satisfied. Consumers are urged (by people like Draper and his fellow mad men) to believe that purchasing certain products will solve all their problems, but of course this promise is and must be a false one. If purchasing any product could solve all of one’s problems, then one would need to make no further purchases after that one, bringing to a halt the cycle of consumption while at the same time bringing the capitalist system to its knees. Consumerism, by definition, must create a desire that cannot be fulfilled, so that consumers must continue to buy in an ongoing attempt to fill, through participation in the capitalist economy, a void that this economy works hard both to produce and to perpetuate.
Of course, from a Lacanian perspective, the desire that drives consumerism (unfulfillable by definition) is structurally quite similar to sexual desire, which is similarly driven by a doomed quest for fulfillment and completion, by a never-ending and hopeless search for the lost objet petit a, for the original sense of wholeness and satisfaction that fill the world of the infant. To a large extent, a recognition of this parallel has driven the entire career of Slavoj Žižek, whose combination of the seemingly incommensurate theoretical worlds of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis is centrally informed by an understanding of the way in which a never-ending quest for romantic/sexual satisfaction so closely resembles consumerist desire.
The recognition of the connection between eroticism and consumerism is neither unique nor new to recent theorists such as Žižek. It is crucial to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), in which the title character so desperately (and hopelessly) seeks escape from emptiness and boredom through the twin expedients of adultery and shopping. But this parallel is also crucial to Mad Men, where it is clear that Draper’s crippled childhood endows him with a particularly strong sense of incompleteness and loss that both drives his quest for sexual fulfillment and fuels his ability to tap into and stimulate consumer desire for the products he hawks as a mad man. He, of all people, understands all too well just what it feels like to want something and to keep wanting, no matter how much you seem to get what you want.
From this point of view, “Satisfaction” lies at the very heart of Mad Men’s main narrative and thematic projects and is thus the perfect tune to accompany the series. It also raises some key issues in the interpretation of the series and especially of its treatment of the counterculture of the 1960s, especially in relation to consumer capitalism. However anti-consumerist it might be, for example, “Satisfaction” was itself a huge hit and a major consumerist success. As Thomas Frank has outlined, rock music in general was a boon to advertisers in the 1960s, and many of the hip new stars in the field established their hipness by demonstrating a familiarity with the new music (1998, 113). But then, for Frank, the counterculture as a whole was more a product of consumerist expansion than of resistance to that expansion. Four decades later, Mad Men would emerge with many of these same issues intact, and the exact status of the series as an endorsement or critique of consumerism is clearly debatable.
Given the close connection between the issues raised by “Satisfaction” and those addressed by Mad Men, perhaps it is not surprising that the series associates the Rolling Stones with marketing in other ways as well. In Episode 5.3 (“Tea Leaves”), which takes place early the following summer (1966), Don and Harry Crane try to sign the Stones to record a jingle for Heinz beans, having been asked to do so by Raymond Geiger (John Sloman), the Heinz beans rep, whose daughter is a big Stones fan. Aware of the song “Time Is on My Side,” Geiger loves the idea of having the Stones record a new jingly version called “Heinz Is on My Side.” (Unfortunately, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which might make a hilarious beans anthem, was not released until 1968.) Draper is repeatedly portrayed in the series as being clueless about the landscape of 1960s rock music, so it is not surprising that he has no idea that the Rolling Stones are a really big deal—probably far too big at this point to record a jingle for beans. Both Don and Harry seem to feel that the Stones are some sort of teenage bumpkins who will probably be thrilled at the chance to appear in a real TV ad. In reality, though, the two ad men (the latter of whom should really know better, being the SCDP media consultant) don’t even manage to get to meet with the Stones, who have far better things to do.
On the other hand, Draper in this episode might not be quite as out of it as he seems because he himself points out that there is a precedent, the Stones having two years earlier recorded a jingle for cereal back in Britain. And he’s right, the Stones actually did record a spot for Rice Krispies that plays on the notion that this particularly noisy cereal (advertised for years in the United States on the basis of its signature “snap, crackle, pop” sound) is so loud that some in the older generation might find it unpleasant—much in the same way that they react to the music of groups like the Stones as extremely annoying sonic pollution.
Of course, the landscape of popular music was changing rapidly in the mid-1960s, and the Rolling Stones were a huge phenomenon in 1966 (when Draper tried to sign them to hawk beans), as opposed to 1964 (when they were just releasing their first studio album and were still hungry enough to be willing to pitch cereal). In addition, neither Don nor Harry appears to have any idea what the Stones really represented to their legions of new, young countercultural fans in 1966, for whom the raw, brash, blues-inflected sound of the original bad boys of rock ’n’ roll seemed both a challenge to and a repudiation of the very establishment values that are embodied by Don and Harry as they awkwardly make their way backstage to try to sign the band. In short, signing to do a beans commercial in 1966 would have no doubt made the Stones seem like sell-outs to their fans, the result being that signing them to try to help sell such a lowly commercial product would have probably resulted in significantly reduced sales for their music, which of course was their main commercial product. Effective marketing required that the Stones not be perceived as participating in marketing.
As an interesting side note to this episode, it might be pointed out that this segment of Mad Men, which serves so well to help establish Draper’s estranged relationship with both contemporary music and the counterculture, might also be a reference to a real event in rock history. The Who, only one tier below the Beatles and the Stones in the hierarchy of British rock royalty, themselves recorded a number of commercial jingles in the mid-1960s (obviously the advertising industry was quick to realize that something potentially marketable was going on in the new world of rock music), but then attempted to distance themselves from that practice through self-parody in their 1967 album The Who Sell Out, which is filled with mock advertisements, including (oddly enough) a song entitled “Heinz Baked Beans.” It is in fact featured in the album’s title art, which shows Roger Daltrey (no Mick Jagger but a major figure in 1960s music nevertheless) sitting in a tub of Heinz baked beans while holding up a giant can of the gooey legumes. This brief parodic jingle (written and sung by John Entwhistle, it runs for exactly one minute, like many TV ads of the time) features a British mum who decides to serve Heinz baked beans for tea, thus theoretically opening up a whole new market for this quintessentially American product.
The prominent role played by the Rolling Stones in Mad Men is just one example of the way in which most of the major players who made 1960s popular music such a special phenomenon make an appearance in one way or another in the series. For example, Bob Dylan’s classic breakup anthem “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” plays over the closing scene of the first season, in which it is becoming clear that Draper’s first marriage is spiraling downward into doom. Meanwhile, the Beatles probably play an even more important symbolic role in the series than do the Stones, their music factoring in via a string of episodes that help to establish both the changing face of American culture in the 1960s and the inability of Draper (very much a man of the 1950s in many ways) to keep up with it. For example, just two weeks after the “Satisfaction” episode, in Episode 4.10 (“Hands and Knees”), Draper’s new secretary Megan Calvet wins some points with him by delivering tickets to the upcoming (and now legendary) concert of the Beatles that was held before a record crowd at New York’s Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965. Draper himself hopes to win some points with daughter Sally by taking her to the concert, though he is only half kidding when he threatens to wear earplugs through the whole thing. We don’t actually know, incidentally, if he carries through with the threat, because we never see Draper and daughter attend the actual concert, which seems to have been forgotten by the next episode. It’s one of those perplexing moments of failure to follow through that often happens in Mad Men, another of which, interesting enough, also involves Shea Stadium (then home of the New York Mets baseball team). In Episode 7.4 (“The Monolith”) Draper finds an abandoned Mets pennant in an episode set in 1969, appearing to set up the ascent to baseball legend of that year’s “Miracle Mets,” who went from ninth place (out of ten) the year before to win the National League pennant in a stunning late-season drive, then won the World Series against the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles (considered one of the greatest teams of all time) in one of the great upsets in Series history. Mike Bertha has presented a spirited argument for the metaphorical importance of this pennant as a sign of Draper’s own arc in the series, but the fact is that—while Draper does attend a Mets game with Freddie Rumsen—the Mets are largely forgotten after this episode and their stunning world championship victory is never mentioned in the series. Shea Stadium is apparently the place in Mad Men where motifs go to die.
Nearly one season later in the evolution of the series after the Beatles concert episode, a client requests music that sounds like the Beatles for use in his firm’s ads. Draper seems puzzled by the request, still having failed to grasp the marketing potential (or overall cultural import) of the rock revolution of the decade. Seeming, in fact, surprisingly out of step with the times, he consults new wife Megan (presumably because she is much younger and thus might be more in touch with contemporary music) about the phenomenon. “When did music become so important?” asks Draper, suddenly feeling old.
Trying to help out (and to remedy Don’s cluelessness), Megan responds in the very next episode (Episode 5.8, “Lady Lazarus”) by giving her husband a copy of Revolver, perhaps the greatest of Beatles albums. Revolver, incidentally, was released on August 5, 1966, so it was still new at the time of the action of this episode, as a radio broadcast embedded in the episode (one of the time markers that appear so frequently in Mad Men) identifies it as set in October 1966. Megan especially recommends the album’s acclaimed closing track “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which Draper subsequently plays, alone, after she leaves. A song filled with references to death, it seems an ominous choice, especially for someone as seemingly self-destructive as Draper. On the other hand, the song (whose lyrics were inspired by an adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead co-authored by none other than drug guru Timothy Leary) is actually about the death of the ego during the experience of meditation under the influence of LSD, so that the references to death in the lyrics are metaphorical and not nearly as dark as they might first sound.
This Eastern-inspired erasure of the ego (somewhat analogous to the nihilation of the self in Sartrean existentialism) is, in fact, meant to be a positive experience. It is also a quintessentially countercultural product (in terms of the music, as well as the lyrics), and “Tomorrow Never Knows”—one of numerous Beatles songs inspired by their experiences with drugs and/or their encounter with Eastern (especially Indian) mysticism—can be taken as a rejection of precisely the same Protestant-work-ethic, materialist striving that has driven Draper throughout his adult life. This striving has gained him a certain amount of professional recognition, two beautiful wives, and a boatload of money, but it hasn’t made him happy. He is not, however, quite ready for the anti-materialist message of the Beatles song, and it is not surprising that he isn’t impressed. It could be argued that this moment sets up the ultimate end of the series, when Draper possibly finds a sort of enlightenment at a California hippie-esque New Age institute, but at this moment he simply dismisses the song and turns it off before it has played through.
In addition to the role played by popular music by major artists such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones within episodes of Mad Men to help place them within the context of the 1960s, the show also gets considerable mileage from the well-chosen ending music that plays over the closing credits each week. Indeed, this ending music became one of the most anticipated features of the show as audiences eagerly waited to see which of their favorite songs from the 1960s might show up as a kind of coda to the action that had gone before. In this (and in many other ways), Mad Men follows in the footsteps of predecessors such as The Sopranos, though the technique is especially effective in Mad Men because the music is typically taken from the same time period as the action of the show, thus enhancing the impact of the episode that had just gone before. A good example occurs at the end of Episode 6.10 (“A Tale of Two Cities”), which is filled with psychedelic sixties imagery and even ends with the square accounts man Pete Campbell sparking up a doobie. It is thus highly appropriate that the ending music to this episode is the Big Brother and the Holding Company recording of “Piece of My Heart,” not only because of the psychedelic tenor of the entire episode, but because this song appeared in the album Cheap Thrills and was released in August of 1968, the month of the action of this episode itself. It was also the group’s last album with Janis Joplin on vocals, as she left the group almost immediately afterward, thus reinforcing the things-fall-apart tenor of the entire sixth season of Mad Men. At the time, though, Cheap Thrills was a success, launching Joplin into a short period of major stardom that made her an icon of the sixties counterculture, though she would die of a drug overdose only two years later—in October of 1970.
Joplin would thus die just a month, as it turns out, before the action of the final episode of Mad Men, though her death does not factor in the series. Still, including her in the ending music of the “A Tale of Two Cities” episode contributes to a network of images of death that gave the entire sixth season undertones so ominous that numerous fans were assuming the series would eventually conclude with Draper’s own death. Indeed, Draper himself smokes hashish at a pool party in this episode and then very nearly drowns in the pool. It would, however, be Don’s first wife, Betty, who would be done in by smoking, consigned to death by cancer at the end of Mad Men, thanks (no doubt) to the cigarettes she had puffed so assiduously throughout the series; she was thus killed by her own kind of drug overdose.
The use of music to create ominous imagery in Mad Men was also effectively employed in the final season’s Episode 7.3 (“Field Trip”), which used ending music from the other sixties icon of towering talent, soaring success, and early death: Jimi Hendrix, who died of a drug overdose the month before Joplin did the same. This episode closes with Hendrix’s raw and bluesy recording of “If 6 Was 9,” which appeared on the 1967 Jimi Hendrix Experience album Axis: Bold as Love, but is also well remembered for its appearance on the soundtrack of the 1969 countercultural film Easy Rider. Among other things, the song includes an in-your-face challenge to a “white collared conservative . . . businessman,” whose values Hendrix defiantly rejects in the song. This businessman, of course, could easily be Draper, though (given the ending of the series) the song could also be taken as an anticipation of either Draper’s own ultimate rejection of the materialist values that had driven his advertising career or of Draper’s response to Hendrix via his ultimate realization that the imagery and ideas of the counterculture could be conscripted for use in big bucks marketing campaigns.
“Field Trip,” incidentally, has some fine moments and includes major turning points in Mad Men, including Megan’s announcement to Don that their marriage is over and Don’s return to SC&P after a period of exile. This return, of course, is extremely problematic and seems to take place on terms that are designed to humiliate Draper and teach him, with his low-class background, not to be so arrogant and uppity at work. These terms, in fact, might be taken as the beginning of an arc that will lead to Draper’s sudden bolting from a business meeting, followed by his cross-country drive to California in apparent search of the kind of spiritual enlightenment that his career in capitalism can never bring him.
Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9” clearly reinforces this motif, while its title imagery reinforces the “world-turned-upside-down” tenor of the entire episode. Of course, the song is also an anthem to sixties-style individualist authenticity, with Hendrix essentially declaring his determination to be his true self whatever pressures the society might bring to bear upon him to conform to narratives imposed by others. The song thus ironically addresses Draper’s key existential dilemma involving the inauthenticity of his own identity: the one thing he has never done is remain true to himself despite such pressures. He has, in fact, continually remade his identity on the fly, as it were, seeking (in good ad man style) to do and say whatever works and whatever helps him to get what he thinks he wants.
By this point in the series, though, what Draper wants is a mystery, even to him, though it is clear that he is fed up with the inauthenticity of his previous tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear style. The Hendrix song is extremely effective at providing a focus on this aspect of Draper’s character, while at the same time placing his individual existential dilemma within the larger historical dilemma of American society in the 1960s, also struggling to define itself and to find an identity based on something more meaningful than capitalist greed. The song is thus central to one of the key themes of the entire series and to the central strategy by which Mad Men carefully interweaves the private stories of individual characters with larger public narratives, giving all of the characters something of an allegorical quality.
Draper, of course, is the Mad Man character who is most directly involved in a struggle to find a viable identity for himself, and by this time in the series he has become an almost textbook example of Sartrean existentialism. Having broken free of the facticity of his original existence as Dick Whitman and gone through the nihilation of that self, Draper finds himself trapped in a new facticity associated with his new identity as an ad man. He seems, in this segment of the series, to be approaching a new nihilation as he struggles to break free of the cutthroat world of Madison Avenue advertising in order to move toward the newer, more authentic existence that Sartre calls the Being-for-itself.
This motif of the search for one’s true identity—or of “finding oneself”—was, of course, a favorite avocation of Americans in the 1960s, and we should remember that existentialism was still a very current mode of thought at the time. Indeed, Sartre was himself still around, working against the Cold War grain by attempting to reconcile his youthful existentialism with his newly adopted Marxism. Little wonder, then, that many characters in Mad Men are involved in such identity searches, including women characters such as Joan Holloway Harris or Peggy Olson, who struggle to find viable identities for themselves in a context in which the roles available to women were under significant revision.
Other than Draper, however, the character who seems most overtly to be in search of an identity for himself is Roger Sterling, who seems to have an odd connection with Draper throughout the series, despite the dramatic differences in their backgrounds. Unlike Draper, Sterling grew up with every advantage. The son of one of the founders of the Sterling Cooper ad agency (the “Sterling” refers to his father, not to Roger), he has inherited considerable wealth and everything has pretty much been handed to him on the silver platter to which his name might be taken as a reference. Sterling is something of a lovable rogue; capable of highly selfish and irresponsible conduct, he nevertheless has a number of charming qualities.
The unpleasant side of Sterling’s character is summed up in one of occasional moments in Mad Men when the characters themselves perform music, adding still another element to the importance of music in the series. For one thing, their performances are usually quite good, highlighted, perhaps, by Megan’s sexy rendition of “Zou Bisou Bisou” in Episode 5.1–2 (“A Little Kiss”)—a performance that leaves an uncomfortable Don squirming in his seat at his wife’s display of sexiness in front of all his friends and colleagues in a way that perhaps presages the coming end of the relatively short marriage. Megan, of course, is a show-business professional, so perhaps her performing talents should come as no surprise. Not so for others in the show, though, including those who appear in Episode 3.3 (“My Old Kentucky Home”), which includes not one, but three counterpointed musical performances that turn out to be key moments in the episode.
The first of these performances occurs at a posh (but somewhat outré) country-club garden party being held on the occasion of the 1963 Kentucky Derby. The event is being hosted by Sterling and new wife Jane, the dazzling young secretary he has recently married in an apparent attempt to stave off aging, at the same time ending a long-term marriage that was punctuated by an ongoing affair with Joan Holloway, another of his secretaries. Many of the principals from Sterling Cooper (including Don and Betty Draper) attend, but the party (something of a throwback to earlier, more genteel days for rich folks) is attended mostly by pretentious rich snobs. The musical highlight of the party is Sterling’s own stirring, banjo-playing rendition of the Stephen Foster classic “My Old Kentucky Home” (official song of the Kentucky Derby) in full blackface, with a giggling Jane by his side, already well on her way to being falling-down drunk, the show wife become spectacle. Sterling seems to have no clue that his performance might be racially offensive, and there are no black guests anywhere in sight. But even in 1963, this performance is problematic enough that it causes Draper to retreat from the garden party to seek refuge (and a drink) inside the club.
Intercut with scenes from this upper-class Derby Day party are scenes of a much more modest middle-class dinner party hosted by that same Joan Holloway (now Harris) and her husband, Greg, for some of his doctor buddies and their wives. At this party, Joan delivers her own musical performance, which serves as a sort of counterpoint to Sterling’s. Among other things, the talk at this party reveals to us the news that Greg has recently had a mishap (previously unbeknownst to Joan) that calls his skills as a surgeon into question. Joan, meanwhile, regales the guests (at Greg’s insistence) with a nicely sung rendition of “C’est Magnifique” while accompanying herself on the accordion. This song was written (in French) by American songwriter Cole Porter for the musical Can-Can in 1953 and had, by 1963, become a standard, though it was not a hit when first released as a single ten years earlier.
“C’est Magnifique” is a rather light-hearted number, and the attendees at the party receive Joan’s performance of it as a mere entertainment. Nevertheless, the lyrics of the song, suggesting an on-again-off-again love affair, can be taken as a commentary on Joan’s former relationship with Sterling—which in fact will briefly flair up again in Season 4, leading to Joan’s pregnancy with a child she will pass off as Greg’s. Interestingly, “C’est Magnifique” is all about the sweetness of the renewal of a former love, when in fact, Joan conceives her child in a moment of rather rough sex fueled by the adrenaline rush experienced by Joan and Roger after they are mugged on a New York street. The song thus anticipates the brief resurgence of the affair between Joan and Roger but in a highly ironic way. Meanwhile, its suggestion of a long-suffering woman who continually (and gladly) welcomes back her straying lover oddly anticipates the use, three years later, of “Piece of My Heart” in the ending music, indicating the way in which the music used in Mad Men participates in an ongoing and developing dialogue of the kind seen in other elements of the series as well.
In addition, if Sterling’s blackface performance indicates the cluelessness of his class, Joan’s faux-French performance can be taken as a suggestion of the (somewhat halfhearted, middle-brow) pretentions of the middle class to culture. Meanwhile, as the two parallel parties in this episode proceed, another group of characters is engaged in a sort of working-class counterpart to the upper- and middle-class parties. In particular, a group of “creative” characters is back at the office working through the weekend to develop new ideas for an advertising campaign for Bacardi Rum. Embittered at having to work while their rich bosses play, they spend much of the time smoking marijuana and don’t really get a lot of work done. After all, they are not truly working class, but in fact envision themselves as “artists.” They do, meanwhile, get in a musical performance of their own, this time performed by copywriter Paul Kinsey, who himself once had a fling with Joan, though apparently a brief one. Goaded by a former Princeton classmate (who is now a drug dealer) into demonstrating his singing talents, Kinsey breaks out (in an homage to his days as a member of the a cappella singing group the “Tigertones” in college) into a performance of “Hello! Ma Baby,” an 1899 Tin Pan Alley song that resonates with Sterling’s performance in that it was initially marketed as a “coon song,” complete with racist lyrics and racist caricatures as illustrations for the sheet music.
The overtly racist lyrics are missing from the portion of the song performed by Kinsey (and from the part of the song that is still a well-known artifact of American popular culture), but the implication seems clear: racism has long been a part of the fabric of American society and continues to be well into the 1960s, especially among the very rich and on the hallowed campuses of the Ivy League. Meanwhile, Kinsey’s participation in the singing group seems to have been part of a concerted effort to fit in at Princeton, despite the fact that he was a young man from a modest background who was able to go there only because he had a scholarship—a fact he himself appears to find embarrassing because it undermines his pretentions to social status.
Sterling’s sudden blackface performance of a mid-nineteenth-century minstrel song is pretty startling, but perhaps the most surprising musical moment in Mad Men occurs at the end of Episode 7.7 (“Waterloo”). This episode, which ended the first half of the final season (leading into a break of nearly a year between episodes), features the death of longtime Sterling Cooper patriarch Bertram Cooper. Yet it ends, oddly enough, with a sterling soft-shoe musical number featuring a seemingly resurrected Cooper as he performs Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee” (from the 1932 musical comedy Face the Music), accompanied by a bevy of dancing mini-skirted secretaries.
The strangeness of the performance seems to invite viewers to try to interpret its significance, and significant it may well be. The song seems to express values that are diametrically opposed to the Ayn Rand–inspired cutthroat capitalist values that had driven Cooper while alive. Meanwhile, the performance suggests the variety of ways music is used in Mad Men, from seamless integration of songs such as “Satisfaction,” to the jarring intrusion of Roger Sterling’s blackface, to the perplexing, estranging weirdness of Bert Cooper’s soft shoe. But this diverse and innovative use of music is but one aspect of the way in which Mad Men uses the resources of American culture in diverse and innovative ways throughout. Draper might cannibalize the broader culture in building his ads, but Matt Weiner and the other makers of Mad Men avowedly do the same in constructing their series.
One of the things that makes Mad Men special is the meticulous effort that it makes to remain engaged with its cultural context throughout the series, from its beginnings in the first season (set during the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign of 1960) through its end. One of the most important ways in which Mad Men effects this engagement is by incorporating specific works of contemporary culture, including movies, which are often introduced in episodes of the series that take place within days or weeks of the premieres of the films that are involved. Characters in the series often punctuate their conversations with passing references to films—as do people in real life. But movies figure in the series in more prominent ways as well, and we often see characters (especially central character Don Draper) actually in theaters watching movies, sometimes as research in an attempt to get ideas for their work in advertising.
Of course, Mad Men itself is overtly cinematic, and virtually anyone who has watched the series extensively must surely have experienced those moments in the show when the action suddenly seems like something from a movie—even if one cannot always tell which movie. For example, in Episode 3.13 (“Shut the Door. Have a Seat”), when Mssrs. Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Pryce decide to bolt their old advertising firm to form a new firm of their own, there is an entire sequence in which they make off with as many resources from the old company as they can in order to help start the new one. That sequence, which takes place over a weekend in which the original Sterling Cooper offices are otherwise deserted, reads like some sort of heist film, as they daringly steal whatever they think they can use, in the meantime threatening to lock up witnesses in a closet until the weekend has passed.
In other cases, situations in Mad Men are reminiscent of more specific films, even though those films are not referred to directly. The title of Episode 1.10 (“Long Weekend”) might sound like a reference to the Billy Wilder classic The Lost Weekend (1955), but in fact the episode revolves around the motif of men being left behind in the city while their families flee to escape the summer heat. This motif, of course, lies at the center of another Wilder classic from the same year, the Marilyn Monroe vehicle The Seven Year Itch.
Mad Men engages with film in much more specific and concrete ways as well. Thus, however enigmatic he might be in so many ways, one of the things we know about Don Draper is that he is a frequent watcher of movies. In Episode 3.2 (“Love Among the Ruins”), Sterling Cooper hopes to land the account for “Patio,” a new diet soda from Pepsi, which hopes to compete with Diet Coke via the product. Their idea for a Patio TV spot is essentially a re-creation of Ann-Margret’s career-boosting musical performance that both opens and closes the then-new Bye Bye Birdie (released in New York on April 4, 1963). However, when Peggy shares the idea with Don, he notes that he hasn’t seen the film. Peggy is taken aback: “You see everything,” she says with surprise, indicating her realization of his status as a frequent moviegoer.
It is certainly the case that movies, for Don, are grist for the advertising mill, just like pretty much everything else. But Don also watches movies because he likes movies. They often play a part in his casual conversation, as in Episode 1.6, which begins at bedtime on Mother’s Day in the Draper house. Settling into bed, Don is somewhat amused to find that Betty has been reading Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel The Best of Everything, a rather trashy account of the adventures of several New York publishing house employees that was adapted to film (starring Joan Crawford) in 1959. Flipping through the book, Don sarcastically declares it “fascinating,” to which Betty responds that “it’s better than the Hollywood version.” “It’s certainly dirtier,” says Don with a smile, at which point the conversation devolves into Betty’s critique of Crawford’s prominent eyebrows and Don’s counter that “some men like eyebrows, and all men like Joan Crawford.”
Bye Bye Birdie might not be to Don’s taste in movie fare, but it is a perfect choice as a model for an ad campaign that derives its energies from contemporary popular culture, because the film itself is a light-hearted satire of that culture. Adapted from a 1960 stage play of the same title, the film is a musical comedy that derives its central plot from Elvis Presley’s famed drafting into the U.S. army in 1958. In particular, it explores the drafting of young rock star Conrad Birdie (whose name is derived from that of Conway Twitty, in the late 1950s himself a budding rock idol, though he would ultimately make his name mostly in the field of country music). The texture of the film, meanwhile, is very much like the texture of a television commercial, filled with bright colors, jingly music, and general silliness.
Don, of course, sees “everything” partly as research for his job, at which he actually works hard, despite seeming to come up with brilliant ideas effortlessly. For Don, watching movies is a way to take the pulse of contemporary American culture so that he can immediately know the kinds of things that American audiences respond to in the here and now. It is, of course, part of his genius to be able to recognize such things and to distill them to their very essence, which, among other things, means that his use of film as a source of advertising ideas tends to go beyond pastiche of specific films, instead drawing upon general motifs or even whole genres, as when his award-winning Glo-Coat ad from Season 4 draws upon recognizable iconography from the Western.
Don’s ability to get to the root of the way ads work on consumers can clearly be seen when Peggy expresses her doubt about the efficacy of the Ann-Margret figure as an attraction for Patio’s intended female audience. Ann-Margret works as a lure for both men and women, Don tells Peggy, because, while men might want Ann-Margret, women want to be Ann-Margret. Peggy realizes that he is right and then spends much of the rest of the episode trying to be like Ann-Margret herself, including one scene in which she re-creates the Bye Bye Birdie title song in front of her mirror at home.
Movies (and related entertainment of various kinds) often provide useful fodder for advertising in Mad Men. In Episode 5.3 (“Tea Leaves”), Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman) secures a job as a copywriter at SCDP thanks to his portfolio of sample ad ideas, one of which (described by Don as “provocative”) he admits was inspired by his watching of a Times Square peep show. In Episode 1.6 (“Babylon”), Israeli representatives come to SC seeking aid in promoting Israeli tourism. To help with the process, they produce a copy of Leon Uris’s wildly popular bestseller Exodus and note that it “is soon to be a major motion picture starring Paul Newman,” as if that fact automatically means that the book must contain ideas that will appeal to American consumers, suggesting a strong correlation between the work done in Hollywood and the work done on Madison Avenue.
In perhaps the most extended engagement in the series with a particular film as a source of advertising ideas, Peggy, once again following Don’s lead, also uses film as a sort of inspiration for her advertising ideas. In Episode 6.12 (“The Quality of Mercy”), she is charged with coming up with a campaign for St. Joseph’s Aspirin. Despite the Shakespearean title (and the fact that the episode was first broadcast on Bloomsday), the principal cultural referent for this project is a film, the 1968 Roman Polanski horror classic Rosemary’s Baby, still new in theaters (and making a sensation) as the events of this episode are taking place. In fact, the film is such a hit that Peggy decides to use it as the basis for the aspirin ad. Early in the episode, Don and Megan go to a late afternoon showing of the film and are visibly shaken by it. Preparing to exit the theater, they run into Peggy and Ted Chaough, who are seeing the film together (and who are in the early stages of a soon-to-be-aborted affair). Embarrassed to be caught together, Peggy and Ted quickly explain that they had to catch the film again as research for the TV spot they are doing based on the film. The ad is to be shot from the point of view of the ailing baby, who is offered various cures by the Satan worshippers from the film, only to have his mother step in and say, “You don’t need anyone’s help but St. Joseph’s.” It’s a great ad, but far more complex and costly than the aspirin manufacturer originally bargained for. At the pitch, Don steps in when the client balks and gins up an explanation that Ted is so devoted to the idea because it was the last one proposed by Frank Gleason, Ted’s recently deceased partner.
The implications of the ad are, incidentally, also more complex and ironic than might be indicated by a casual viewing. Mad Men in its earlier seasons had already addressed the question of the advertising of cigarettes and other tobacco products in the light of growing evidence of the health risks associated with such products. What the episode involving the Rosemary’s Baby aspirin ad does not indicate (as Peggy and others in 1968 would not know) is that there are serious health risks associated with administering aspirin to babies. In particular, evidence of a link between aspirin and the onset of the potentially deadly Reye’s syndrome in infants began to mount in the early 1980s, leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to demand warning labels on aspirin in 1986 that caution against its use with infants. As a result, Peggy and her colleagues, by working to encourage parents to give aspirin to their babies, are acting to promulgate a serious health risk, just as the advertising industry had earlier made a significant contribution to the spread of lung cancer and other health risks associated with tobacco use. The implied criticism of capitalism (and especially of the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries) as a system fueled by greed and willing to do untold harm to its customers in the quest for greater profits is quite clear.
From this point of view, Rosemary’s Baby serves as an effective gloss on Mad Men’s critique of capitalism because its presence in the episode suggests that there is something downright Satanic about capitalist greed—though of course it also suggests that this greed, and not Satan, is a principal source of true evil in the world. In a similar way, Rosemary’s Baby is a terrifying film not because it involves a conspiracy against a vulnerable young woman that is led by Satan, but because this conspiracy involves virtually all of the seemingly ordinary people who surround Rosemary, including her own husband, who has essentially sacrificed his wife in the interest of his own greed and professional ambitions, which Satan has promised to further. Rosemary, in short, is in many ways very much in the same position as the one in which Peggy (who is also surrounded by more powerful men, though she herself gradually gains more power as the series proceeds) continually finds herself in Mad Men, which helps to explain why Peggy might have found the film inspirational in the first place.
Incidentally, Rosemary’s Baby had already figured in Mad Men a few episodes earlier—in Episode 6.8 (“The Crash”)—when Don’s daughter, Sally, was shown reading the Ira Levin novel on which the film was based. This double appearance suggests the importance of Rosemary’s Baby as a marker of American culture, circa 1968; it also indicates that the story might be particularly important as a gloss on Mad Men. Within the context of “The Quality of Mercy,” reading Rosemary’s Baby in this way would clearly cast Peggy in the role of Rosemary, and it is certainly the case that she and Rosemary Woodhouse have much in common, including the fact that both come from relatively unsophisticated backgrounds but now live in crumbling apartment buildings in Manhattan where they are exposed to considerable dangers. They are also both surrounded by powerful men who often try to use them to further their own agendas. One must, of course, avoid being overly literal in making such connections, as the allegorical resonances of Mad Men, like the allegorical resonances in contemporary culture in general, are far more subtle and complex than a simple “table of one-to-one correspondences.” Draper himself, for example, has many things in common with Rosemary Woodhouse, as he almost must given the careful way in which the series has constructed its representation of Peggy as a sort of female Don following in the footsteps of her male mentor and role model. Meanwhile, both Peggy and Don might sometimes be seen as Satanic in their efforts to advance the interests of their soulless corporate clients.
In addition to using Rosemary’s Baby as the source of the most prominent ad campaign she constructs in the series, Peggy also shares Don’s love of the movies in their own right. In Episode 5.6 (“Far Away Places”), for example, she turns down boyfriend Abe Drexler’s invitation to go see The Naked Prey (1965) because she is too preoccupied with work on Heinz beans. Even Abe’s claim that the film sounds dirty and that it might give her a chance to see a naked Cornel Wilde wrestling a boa constrictor cannot stay her from her appointed rounds. Later, though, following a run-in with the Heinz beans rep in which she excoriates the man very much in the style of the old Don, a frustrated Peggy goes to see the film alone in the afternoon. In the near-empty theater, she accepts a toke from a stranger and then ends up giving him a handjob in return for the favor.
Finally, in Episode 5.4 (“Mystery Date”), Peggy shares a moment with Don’s new African American secretary, Dawn, noting that she herself was once a secretary but was then “discovered” as a copywriting talent, comparing herself with Esther Blodgett, the rising star of A Star Is Born (played by Judy Garland in the 1954 version, which is probably the one of which Peggy is thinking). In fact, Peggy, modeling herself on Don here as in so many other ways, seems to become more and more immersed in film as Mad Men proceeds, while film in general becomes more important as a backdrop as the series goes on—even as the series also makes clear the advancing shift of cultural power from movies to television as the 1960s proceed.
Often, the series combines Don’s attendance at movies with the use of movies to provide commentary on the historical context of the 1960s. For example, Episode 6.5 (“The Flood”) is dominated by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred on April 4, 1968. Much of the episode deals with the awkward attempts of the white characters to cope with the news, though it ends with an attempt by Don to bond with son Bobby by taking him to the movies, though Don here of course is also seeking a way to cope with the shock of King’s death. Among other things, this motif suggests the way in which the shared experience of watching movies can facilitate such bonding. What is particularly significant, however, is their choice of viewing fare, which in this case is the original Planet of the Apes, which had opened in the United States one day earlier. The outing is a success for the two Drapers, and father and son decide to remain in the theater to see it a second time. Between the showings, Bobby sums up one of the important functions of film in American culture when he says to the African American usher who is cleaning up in the aisle, presumably as a way of offering condolences for the death of Dr. King, “Everybody likes to go to the movies when they’re sad.”
The choice of this particular film is a good one for Mad Men as well because it so nicely illustrates the way in which Don is in fact correct in his perception that the movies often have a striking ability to reflect what is going on in American society at the time. Planet of the Apes is, most obviously, a science-fiction film that serves as a cautionary Cold War tale about the dangers of the nuclear arms race, which certainly makes it relevant to the political climate of the 1960s. However, it is also an allegory about the damaging social impact of racial intolerance, which makes it the perfect accompaniment to this particular episode—and which makes the timing of its release one day before the King assassination especially striking.
What is also striking about this timing is that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the landmark films in science-fiction history, premiered in New York on exactly that same April 3, making it perhaps the most important single date in the history of the genre. That film also becomes a particularly important intertextual referent later in Mad Men, especially in the way that film’s crucial use of the HAL-9000 intelligent computer serves as a commentary on the introduction of a new IBM-360 computer into the advertising firm’s offices in Season 7. Episode 7.4 (“The Monolith”) takes its title from one of the central images of 2001 and includes many other visual references as well, calling attention to the thematic relevance of this film to what is going on in the series at the time.
Interestingly, despite such thematic use of films (and despite the acknowledgment of a correlation between films and advertising as cultural phenomena), Mad Men makes relatively little use of the obvious expedient of referring to movies that are explicitly about advertising or business or in other ways directly relevant to the series. Perhaps the most obvious film in this category is the 1956 entry The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, based on the 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, one of the signature books of the decade. In the film, ad man Tom Rath (also a man with a secret in his past) is played by Gregory Peck, probably (along with Gary Cooper) the major movie star of whom Jon Hamm’s turn as Don Draper is most reminiscent. But Rath comes from an earlier era, his conformist manner of dress indicating the banal conservatism of the marketing and advertising strategies of the 1950s. Granted, Don is something of a throwback, somewhat old-fashioned in many ways. And he often doesn’t “get” the sixties, but he does get the need for more diverse and innovative advertising of a kind that would have been out of place in the stodgy world of Tom Rath. He is also a stylish if conservative dresser, his business suits always somehow looking a bit better than those of the other suit-clad businessmen who surround him, so it is no real surprise that the 1956 film is seldom evoked as a precedent in the series. In fact, it is mentioned only once, in Episode 2.9 (“Six Month Leave”), when Don’s old nemesis, shock comedian Jimmy Barrett, greets him in an illegal gambling establishment by exclaiming, “Well, if it isn’t the man in the gray flannel suit!” Don lets us know what he thinks of Barrett (and the allusion) when he answers with a punch to the face.
Even more subtle is the allusive casting of an aging Robert Morse as old Bert Cooper, Sterling Cooper’s patriarch and senior partner, forty years earlier an inspired young go-getter but now just a touch out of it. For many viewers, this casting is itself allusive and cannot fail to evoke the 1967 musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which featured a young Morse in what was surely his best-known role—as an inspired young go-getter who rises to become chairman of the board of his firm—exactly forty years before the premiere of Mad Men. In the film, Morse’s Ponty Finch uses rather unscrupulous (though charming) methods to rise to the top, and one can imagine that the Ayn Rand–loving Cooper has used some pretty ruthless methods in his day as well, even though he now seems a rather avuncular old coot.
In addition to their use as a source of advertising ideas, movies often impact the world of Mad Men in other ways, as they do the real world. In Episode 3.11 (“The Gypsy and the Hobo”), for example, Annabelle Mathis, a long-ago flame of Roger Sterling, hires Sterling Cooper to help rescue her struggling dog-food company, whose sales have plummeted in the wake of the recent film (starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe) The Misfits (1961), which cast a bad light on the dog-food industry. Meanwhile, The Misfits itself plays a special role in American film culture, as it was the final film for both Gable and Monroe, two of the biggest stars in film history. “We’re all dying, aren’t we?” says Monroe’s Roslyn Tabor early in The Misfits , and she couldn’t have been more right. Within months after the film wrapped, both she and costar Clark Gable would be dead.
Monroe, possibly the Hollywood star whose image had the most impact beyond film of any star in history, casts a long shadow over the early seasons of Mad Men. In Episode 2.6 (“Maidenform”), Paul Kinsey comes up with perhaps his best advertising idea of the entire series when he suggests (in a campaign for Playtex bras) that American womanhood is embodied in the two opposed (but complementary) figures of Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. The campaign doesn’t fly (due to Playtex’s conservatism), a fact that comes as a great relief to Sterling Cooper soon afterward in Episode 2.9 (“Six Month Leave”) when Marilyn dies of an apparent suicide, an event that casts a pall over the entire episode—and that would no doubt have torpedoed the proposed Playtex campaign.
Marilyn Monroe, of course, was one of the most recognizable stars in Hollywood history, and all of the characters in Mad Men seem quite familiar with her. Importantly, though, Don Draper’s awareness of film goes well beyond a simple knowledge of the best-known films and stars. In Episode 2.5 (“The New Girl”), Don’s lover Bobbie Barrett invites him to her beach house in Stony Brook (Long Island), having learned that he likes the ocean. On the drive out, she also learns that he likes bridges and asks what else he likes. “Movies,” he immediately responds, with a thoughtful smile. She agrees that movies are appealing, citing Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus as an example, then notes that foreign films are especially appealing because they are “so sexy.” Don nods knowingly and simply says, “La notte,” citing the 1961 Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, which deals with the infidelity that is part of a deteriorating marriage. The film thus might have special relevance to Don’s own life, but his familiarity with it suggests that his engagement with film goes beyond the American hits that might be expected to be most valuable as advertising material.
As Robert Rushing has pointed out, La notte is not merely sexy: it is an intellectually challenging film that “stresses interpersonal, socioeconomic, and existential forms of alienation” (2013, 193). Moreover, Rushing notes that Antonioni is a prominent presence in Mad Men, which is entirely appropriate given both Don’s love of film and the extent to which Italian films were popular in the United States in the early 1960s (192–93). Rushing goes on to suggest that Mad Men shares three basic concerns with the films of Antonioni in general: “(1) the impenetrable surface of things, especially other people; (2) the fragility and fluidity of identity . . . and (3) a dedication to watching things—especially people—disappear” (194). In short, Rushing sees Mad Men as a complex work of art that explores fundamental issues in a manner reminiscent of the best and most complex of films.
As in the case of La notte, the specific films referenced in Mad Men are often chosen quite carefully for their thematic relevance, though it sometimes takes some digging to determine just what that relevance is. At the beginning of Episode 7.3 (“Field Trip”), Don is once again at the movies in a New York theater, this time watching Model Shop (1969), an English-language French-American coproduction directed by French director Jacques Demy—in a mode that is, in fact, reminiscent of Antonioni. We see a brief moment from the film in the episode, though not enough to reveal the full relevance of it to the situation of the episode, which deals with Don’s problematic relationship with his actress wife, who is now living in Los Angeles to pursue her career. Model Shop does have a plot (featuring a problematic relationship between an American man and a French woman) that vaguely speaks to Don relationship with his French-Canadian wife. But the strength of the film is its ultra-colorful cinematography, which provides a vivid and fascinated portrait of late 1960s Los Angeles, which seems (for the European Demy) to serve as a sort of mysterious and exotic locale, much as Los Angeles tends to feature in Mad Men in general.
Demy, incidentally, was at the time still riding a wave of international prominence from his earlier film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), which itself garnered a passing mention in Episode 4.3 (“The Good News”), when a lonely Don hangs out on New Year’s Eve with an equally lonely Lane Pryce (who has just learned that he is seemingly about to join Don in the ranks of the divorced) in the offices of the still-new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. They decide to pass the evening (as is Don’s wont) by going to the movies, and one of the films they consider seeing is none other than The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a prospect that brightens Don’s visage for a moment when he recalls that it stars Catherine Deneuve. In the event, however, they simply get drunk and attend a screening of Godzilla in a seedy theater before going on to spend the rest of the night at dinner and with prostitutes.
As Deanna K. Kreisel (2014) usefully points out, George, the protagonist of Model Shop, is a rather typical cool-but-aimless-and-troubled French New Wave male hero, as such serving as something of a role model for Don himself. Meanwhile, the scene that Don watches features George driving in an antique auto that is surrounded by more contemporary autos, potentially suggesting the situation in which Don (who is at least in certain modes an old-fashioned guy) often finds himself. Kreisel also notes that this episode of Mad Men includes a scene in which another character, the ultra-mediocre Lou Avery (Allan Havey) explicitly, though fleetingly, compares Don with Longfellow Deeds, the protagonist of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). The comparison is apt, as Deeds (like Don, a country bumpkin who becomes a rich New Yorker) serves as another clear cinematic analog for Don’s identity, even if on distinctly different terms. Of course, the cool nouvelle vague hero and the hardy Deeds are about as far apart as two movie characters can be. That both of them clearly echo parts of Don’s personality demonstrate just how strained and fragmented and contradictory that personality can be.
That Don’s personality can be so multifarious should come as no surprise. The “Don Draper” featured in the series is a self-made man who has literally manufactured his own identity, and it is clear that his self-fashioning has included a liberal contribution from his viewing of films, somewhat in the same way (as convincingly demonstrated by Michael Rogin) the identity of Ronald Reagan was carefully crafted from materials that were largely derived from the movies. For Rogin, Reagan “found how who he was through the roles he played on film,” ultimately merging his real-life identity with those of the characters he played in movies (1988, 3). Of course, Don has essentially abandoned his real-life identity (though it still haunts him); he is always playing a role, always performing the identity of someone else, though it is also the case that this someone else is not the “real” Don Draper who died in Korea, but simply a fictional version invented by the substitute Don Draper, who is thus a sort of walking simulacrum, a copy of a man who never existed in the first place. Dick Whitman, in becoming “Don Draper,” merely assumes the name of the dead man, not his identity. That identity itself remains an empty container, a blank slate ready to be written on and loaded with content, but also subject to constant erasure and re-emptying, to ongoing change and revision.
The movies are, for Don, a prime source of this constantly evolving content, so it should come as no surprise that he also turns to cinema when he is in need of content for the advertising campaigns that he is so noted for creating. Indeed, his creation of his identity and his creation of advertising are very much part of the same process. He is a builder of images, whether they be the images used to market products to potential consumers or the images of himself that he presents to the world, which is also, of course, a matter of marketing as well. His own identity, in fact, is very much like the ads he creates. Don lives in a hyperreal world of images that is essentially devoid of any contact with concrete reality; this fact, combined with the fact that his identity is so fragmented and tenuous, his temporal bandwidth so narrow, suggests that Don is the prototype of the postmodern subject, as described by Fredric Jameson.
One can, in fact, describe the overall project of Mad Men as the narration of the emergence of postmodernism (which, per Jameson, is also the story of the emergence of late capitalism) as a cultural dominant in America. Then again, Mad Men can also be seen as the narrative of the rise of technology as the most important force determining the texture of daily life in America—or as the story of the rise of the media (especially television) as a force saturating and penetrating every aspect of life in America. Most fundamentally, the series can be seen as the narrative of the death of the American Dream. It is, in fact, a series that lends itself especially well to characterization via such capsule summaries, very much in the mode of the advertising slogans Don and Peggy and their colleagues are so good at creating. Mad Men operates, in fact, very much like an extended advertisement; but it is also a highly cinematic series that acts very much like a movie. Indeed, one of the things the series demonstrates most clearly is just how similar movies and advertisements really are, as they should be in the world of an emerging postmodernism in which all such cultural artifacts are in the process of being reduced to commodities, all commodities being interchangeable with all others.
In Episode 7.10 (“The Forecast”), Roger Sterling, now president of a Sterling Cooper that has been reconstituted as a subsidiary of the much larger McCann Erickson, assigns Don Draper the corporate-bullshit task of producing a “Gettysburg Address–type statement” outlining the firm’s vision for its future. “Just reasonable hopes and dreams. It doesn’t have to be science fiction,” Sterling explains. But Mad Men, we know, is in a very real sense science fiction. At the inception of the series, creator Matt Weiner (a self-professed fan of science fiction) famously declared his view that the series was a form of science fiction that was intended to address issues in the here and now (such as racism and sexism) by presenting those same issues through the defamiliarizing lens of a shift to a different time. Thus, the series employs a strategy similar to that of conventional science fiction, except that the normal science-fiction leap into the future is replaced by a leap into the past. In addition, one of the key ways in which Mad Men situates itself in the historical context of the 1960s is through a careful tracing of a variety of cutting-edge developments in contemporary technology, from space-age rockets to disposable diapers. In addition, Mad Men situates itself in the culture of the 1960s through references to a variety of contemporary works, many of which are themselves science fiction. Finally, Mad Men often relies for its effects on surprising, even shocking moments that produce cognitive estrangement in viewers of a kind that theorists of science fiction have long associated with the genre.
Sometimes, the defamiliarizing perspective of the 1960s is used for largely comic effect, but even then the reminders of how clunky certain technologies were in the 1960s serves as an important reminder of just how far we have come. For example, in Episode 7.2 (“A Day’s Work”), the newly bicoastal Sterling Cooper & Partners attempts to hold a partners’ meeting via conference call, two of the partners (Ted Chaough and Pete Campbell) now being located on the West Coast. Communication turns out to be comically difficult, as everyone stumbles over themselves trying to determine if the partners on the other end can actually hear them, with most participants yelling at the top of their lungs in an effort to be heard, while others worry about the astronomical cost of the long-distance call. This scene, however amusing, provides a stark reminder of just how far the technology of business has come since 1969 (when this episode is set), while also reminding us that it was indeed for the convenience of capitalist enterprise that the vast increases in communications technology (so vast, in fact, that they have the texture of science fiction) since that time were primarily made.
Of course, science fiction itself is not always set in the future and has sometimes achieved cognitive estrangement through settings in the past, as in the cases of alternate histories and steampunk. In addition, as Fredric Jameson has noted, science fiction set in the future often plays a role in today’s culture similar to that played by the historical novel in the past, but with a focus on the future rather than the past. Noting Lukács’s identification in The Historical Novel of the work of Flaubert as a marker of the collapse of the conventional historical novel in the late nineteenth century, Jameson suggests that it is no coincidence that this same historical moment also saw the rise of science fiction in the work of Jules Verne. For Jameson,
We are therefore entitled to complete Lukács account of the historical novel with the counter-panel of its opposite number, the emergence of the new genre of SF as a form which now registers some nascent sense of the future, and does so on the space on which a sense of the past had once been inscribed. (2005, 285–86)
For Jameson, the historical novel and science fiction are twinned genres that can be viewed as performing similar functions because past, present, and future are all part of the same historical process. If the historical novel reminds us of the pastness of the past, science fiction conventionally reminds us of the futurity of the future. In both cases, we are urged to recall that the present in which we live is not eternal but part of an ever-evolving process that can work fundamental changes in the way we live.
This suggestion that thinking historically works both forward and backward in time resonates in an interesting way with the advertising strategies typically employed by Sterling Cooper and its various successors in Mad Men. Many of the firm’s younger creative personalities (such as Paul Kinsey) tend to favor what might be called science-fictional advertising strategies, touting the futuristic properties of the products they are attempting to sell. Thus, very early in the series (Episode 1.2, “Ladies Room”), the firm is charged with coming up with an ad campaign for Gillette’s new Right Guard deodorant in a spray can. Kinsey responds with an approach that emphasizes the high-tech nature of the product, building upon the physical resemblance of the can itself to a rocket. This campaign points toward the important role that will be played by the space race throughout the series, at least up until Episode 7.7 (“Waterloo”), which features the Apollo 11 moon landing. On the other hand, Kinsey’s high-flying idea is immediately shot down by Don Draper, who is in a bad mood from budding domestic problems at home. But, bad mood or not, Draper’s dismissal of Kinsey’s idea is rather predictable given Don’s consistent preference for the sentimental and nostalgic campaigns, often attempting to hawk new products by linking them in the imaginations of consumers to good times in their own pasts.
Kinsey, in fact, is often shot down by Draper in the series, as in Episode 2.11 (“The Jet Set”), in which Kinsey (representing “creative”) and Pete Campbell (representing “accounts”) are set to travel to Los Angeles to attend a “Rocket Fair,” hoping to round up new business from the high-tech aerospace firms that will be attending the convention. At the last minute, Draper decides to displace Kinsey and go to the convention himself, leaving Kinsey (something of a would-be science-fiction writer) stewing because he will now be unable to visit the land in which Edgar Rice Burroughs had established his Tarzana Ranch nearly half a century earlier. It eventually becomes clear that Kinsey had other motivations for wanting to go to California, as the trip would give him an excuse to escape his commitment to his new black girlfriend to accompany her on a Freedom Ride into the Deep South, a trip about which Kinsey (not the bravest of souls) is experiencing severe trepidations. This motif is presented in the episode without comment, though anyone with a knowledge of the background of Tarzana will appreciate the delicious irony of the fact that the Tarzana community had initially been established by Burroughs as a segregated white enclave, complete with a panoply of racist discourse derived from the history of the British Empire.
A little knowledge might be a dangerous thing, but it can sometimes go a long way in helping one to appreciate such moments in Mad Men. Of course, in line with the notion that Mad Men is science fiction set in the past, even Don sometimes turns to the language of science fiction in constructing his past-oriented pitches. Season 1 of the series ends, for example, with Episode 1.13 (“The Wheel”), in which Don delivers what is perhaps his greatest pitch of the entire series. Here, Don describes his campaign for the new Kodak carousel slide projector, which, because of its shape and innovative technology, was envisioned as a flying saucer analog. Don, though, argues that the carousel is not a spaceship, but a nostalgia-fueled time machine that takes its users back to the fondest times of their past lives. The pitch is, of course, a success, and Sterling Cooper gets the Kodak account. In fact, it is such a success that even Don is overtaken by a fit of family-oriented nostalgia, given the fact that his own childhood family history was so grim. Having already arranged to send the wife and kids off packing to visit Betty’s family for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, Don rushes home after the pitch so he can join them after all. Of course, when he arrives home, he finds that they have already left, leaving him in his customary lone state as the episode and the first season of the series come to an end. Families may function perfectly in Don’s carefully tailored advertising visions, but they don’t work very well in real life as depicted in Mad Men, suggesting the extent to which idyllic images of family bliss are merely fiction, part of the mythology of an American life that is becoming increasingly manufactured and commodified as the 1960s roll forward.
The action of Mad Men spans the entire decade of the 1960s, a decade during much of which science fiction in both film and television was in something of a lull. Still, 1966 saw the emergence of what would go on to be arguably the most influential work in the history of the genre, television’s original Star Trek series, which debuted on NBC on September 8, 1966, and lasted for three seasons, despite consistently low ratings. Predictably, Star Trek makes an appearance in Mad Men, in Episode 5.10 (“Christmas Waltz”), which takes place during Christmas season of 1966. Here, Kinsey (having disappeared from the series amid the various reshufflings of its central advertising firm) resurfaces, now having become (in good 1960s fashion) a Hare Krishna. But he has also continued to pursue his dream of being a science-fiction writer, which we learn when he approaches Harry Crane (who has become the firm’s central liaison with the television industry) hoping that Crane can use his business contacts with NBC to help Kinsey market the new script he has just written for an episode of Star Trek.
Kinsey seems, by this time, to have fallen pretty much off the deep end, so it comes as no surprise that the script is not a good one. In fact, from what we hear about it, it reads more like a parody of Star Trek than an actual episode, though it is in fact a work of heavy-handed racial allegory, on which Trek episodes such as “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (January 10, 1969) fundamentally relied. Kinsey’s script is also a virtual parody of the science-fictional strategy of cognitive estrangement, presenting a world that is recognizably similar to our own history but with several key parameters reversed. In particular, it features a planet populated by a white race and a black race that employs slavery as a key element of its economic structure. The kicker is that the whites are the slaves and the blacks are the masters—and to make matters even more “surprising,” the “Negrons” of the title are actually the white race, rather than the black.
If Crane’s reaction is any indication, the clumsiness of this allegory is matched by the clumsiness of the writing in general. It’s so bad, in fact, that Crane elects not to risk his reputation by even attempting to hawk the script, though he tries to placate Kinsey by telling him that the Star Trek people loved the script but just aren’t currently in the market for unsolicited manuscripts. He then gives Kinsey money and urges him to head for California to try to make a new start there as a science-fiction writer, a suggestion that echoes Kinsey’s own earlier identification of California as a locus of science-fiction writing in “The Jet Set.”
Even when Mad Men refers to specific works of science fiction, it often does so in extremely complex ways the significance of which requires considerable unpacking. A good case in point is Episode 6.5 (“The Flood”), which centers on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. With practically everyone in the episode feeling sad and distraught (and awkward, as when they feel they must offer personal condolences to Dawn, Don’s black secretary) over the assassination, Don decides to take his son Bobby to the movies to see Planet of the Apes, which, in fact, had opened in New York on April 3, 1968, just one day before Dr. King’s shooting.
In addition to the coincidence of dates, Planet of the Apes provides a perfect gloss on this Mad Men episode, which focuses on race, racism, and the clumsiness with which Americans deal with both. Planet of the Apes was also a landmark in the evolution of science-fiction films. For example, the film is an impressive technical achievement in many ways, including its now-famous Oscar-winning ape makeup. However, most of the considerable serious critical attention given the film and its sequels has focused not on their technical achievements but on their political implications and their serious treatment of issues such as the possibility of nuclear holocaust. This particular issue is, in fact, the most obvious one in the original film, but the most important political commentary of that film (and, especially, its sequels) probably resides in the way the depiction of relations between apes and humans can be read as allegorizations of the relations between different human races in our own world, especially in the United States. As Eric Greene has argued, these racial allegories and other political aspects of the film are what make it truly important as a cultural artifact. For Greene, “the makers of the Apes films created fictional spaces whose social tensions resembled those then dominating the United States. They inserted characters into those spaces whose ideologies, passions, and fears duplicated the ideologies, passions, and fears of generations of Americans. And they placed those characters in conflicts that replicated crucial conflicts from the United States; past and present” (1998, 9).
Interestingly, Draper’s viewing of Planet of the Apes is quickly duplicated in Episode 6.9 (“The Better Half”), when Roger Sterling attempts to follow Don’s example of parental bonding by taking his four-year-old grandson to see the same film. Apparently, however, the cognitive estrangement in this film is a bit much for the underage boy, who is subsequently so traumatized that his mother fears they will have to get rid of the family dog because her son is now so “afraid of fur.”
Planet of the Apes was not the only major science-fiction film released that spring. While much of the 1960s was a relatively fallow period for the production of science-fiction film, that same April 3, 1968, also saw the New York premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, meaning that two of the most important films in all of science-fiction history were released on the same day, at least in terms of their official New York premieres. Not surprisingly, 2001 also figures prominently in Mad Men, more prominently, in fact, than does Planet of the Apes . Indeed, while Don Draper also attends 2001 in the course of the sixth season of the series, that film becomes particularly important in the seventh and last season when it becomes a crucial gloss of some of the most important themes of the series.
One example is Episode 7.4 (“The Monolith”), the title of which (accompanied by specific visual cues) is a clear reference to the large monoliths that periodically appear to announce the onset of a new leap forward in human evolution. The presence of the film in Mad Men thus helps to support the contention of the series that the decade of the 1960s was a major turning point in American history in a number of ways, including the importance and function of technology. One of the great achievements of 2001 is its ability to present technology as beautiful and graceful, almost more a form of art than of machinery. But it also suggests a sinister side to this technology, which can become so advanced as to outstrip its human makers, making them unable to control their own creations.
“The Monolith,” meanwhile, is built around the somewhat science-fictional theme of the introduction of a massive new computer into the offices of SC&P in 1969, a theme that had already been anticipated in Harry Crane’s complaints in the previous episode that the firm was losing a potential competitive edge by not having a computer.
Commenting on that previous episode (7.3, “Field Trip”), Donna Kreisel has noted that the role of the (then nonexistent) computer is clear, setting up an opposition between the work of talented humans like Draper and the soulless, number-crunching otherness of the computer: “The face-off is made explicit: an ‘old-fashioned’ and romanticized vision of humanistic (and human) inspiration and creativity versus a future-oriented, mechanistic brute intelligence that threatens to render human agency obsolete.” This opposition, of course, goes well beyond the offices of this specific advertising firm and was, in fact, a central reality of the trajectory of the 1960s, so that the events of the series, as always, are placed firmly within that trajectory.
The significance of the new computer, an IBM 360, can best be understood by looking back to the key year of 1964, when that hugely successful line was introduced, for the first time making available an entire range of computers of different sizes with extensive compatibility and expandability, including interchangeability of a number of components and allowing smaller versions to be expanded to larger ones at any time. The introduction of the IBM 360, which turned the previously exotic (and science-fictional) device of the computer into a genuine commodity, brought about an unprecedented penetration of computers into various aspects of American life, so that, by the end of the 1960s, computers were being extensively used in a variety of American businesses and institutions, whereas before they had been largely limited to research facilities and large corporations.
It is thus appropriate that a key event in the final season of Mad Men involved the 1969 installation of an IBM 360 in the offices of the relatively small advertising agency featured in the series, an installation that requires considerable reshuffling of the limited space in the offices, making the computer the dominant feature—as opposed to the previous setup, in which the centerpiece of the offices had been a “creative lounge,” where various creative types interact and explore ideas. The symbolism of introducing this computer in an episode that overtly refers to 2001: A Space Odyssey is quite clear: the computer marks the beginning of a new stage in the development of the agency (and American advertising industry and American society as a whole), just as the famous monoliths of 2001 marked the beginnings of new epochs in the evolution of the human species.
2001: A Space Odyssey, through the figure of its HAL 9000 computer, which attempts (murderously) to wrest control of the central space mission in that film from the human crew, also deals centrally with the threat posed to human hegemony by ultra-advanced computers. Similarly, there is a certain implication in Mad Men that the introduction of the IBM 360 into the advertising agency’s offices represents a sort of spiritual death for the firm, signaling the end of the era when advertising was dominated by genuine human creativity, with artist figures such as Draper soon to be supplanted by bureaucrats and management types. The computer thus announces the beginning of a new machine-dominated age when advertising itself would become as commodified as the products it attempts to sell.
The brilliant, groundbreaking 2001 brought new cultural respectability to the whole genre of science-fiction film, demonstrating that such films could be genuine works of art. Indeed, even the technological devices featured in the film are often works of art, and one of the most striking aspects of this extremely striking film is the sheer beauty of the technology represented in the film. 2001 is, however, anything but an unmitigated celebration of technology. In particular, the film’s most remembered image is probably the intelligent HAL 9000 that goes off the rails and murders most of the human crew of the space expedition that provides the central plot arc of the film. As a major cultural event in its own right, 2001 firmly established the notion of artificially intelligent computers as potential dangers to humans, at the same time introducing a new wrinkle into the fear of intellectuals that pervades much of American cultural history. The ultra-logical HAL 9000 is a new sort of movie character. But in some ways he is a quintessential pop-cultural intellectual: devoid of human feeling, he is so caught up in logical thought that he loses touch with common sense, despite his vast processing power.
HAL was the first major example of a threatening artificial intelligence in American film. It is thus a key marker of the film’s achievement that he remains the most prominent example of this important motif nearly a half-century later. It was, in fact, the influence of 2001 that helped to establish artificial intelligences as key “villains” in science-fiction film. That the IBM 360 in Mad Men is also to be seen as villainous is marked in the series in all sorts of ways, including the fact that its introduction finally drives Michael Ginsberg (already a high-strung creative type) off the deep end into full-on paranoia.
A key sign of this paranoia, incidentally, occurs in the next episode (7.5, “The Runaways”), when Ginsberg observes Lou Avery (the firm’s new, highly uncreative head of creative in the wake of Draper’s exile) conferring with Jim Cutler (the new, less-charming counterpart to Roger Sterling, acquired in the recent merger of SCDP and CGC) inside the sealed glass room that contains the new computer, computers at that time requiring highly controlled environments in order to operate efficiently. Unable to hear because of the enclosed room, Ginsberg can nevertheless see the lips of the two men moving, and he attempts to read their lips very much in the way HAL attempts to read the lips of two astronauts who are plotting against him in 2001. Eventually, the perceived threat posed by the computer will drive Ginsberg into insanity and self-mutilation, though this odd moment of lip-reading complicates the reference to 2001 by placing the computer-phobic human Ginsberg in the position of the film’s human-phobic computer.
Ginsberg’s reaction to the computer, which involves a belief that the computer plans to turn them all into “homos” and ultimately involves cutting off his own nipple (to open the “valve”) and presenting it to Peggy in a gift box, seems a bit extreme. But Ginsberg, born in a concentration camp and then orphaned (though at one point in the series he claims to be from Mars), has had an extreme life and perhaps has good reason to be paranoid. And there have been signs of this paranoia before, as when, in Episode 6.10 (“A Tale of Two Cities”), he becomes upset with Cutler and calls him a fascist. Following the Freudian-Lacanian view that artistic types can ward off insanity by sublimating their unconscious energies into their creative endeavors, one might speculate that Ginsberg has now lost that remedy due to his feeling that the computer is making his work as a “creative” obsolete. Following a more historical arc, meanwhile, one could argue that Ginsberg’s mental illness is a sign of the general sickness of modern society, a sickness that at least partly emanates from having never properly dealt with the twin phenomena of Nazism and the Holocaust.
Ultimately, the claim that Mad Men can be viewed as a kind of science fiction probably rests less firmly on the series’ frequent references to science fiction and frequent use of the iconography of science fiction than on its use of the central aesthetic/affective strategy of science fiction: cognitive estrangement. One of the most striking overall characteristics of Mad Men is its ongoing ability to surprise even its most loyal viewers with sudden moments of jarring strangeness (such as Ginsberg’s surprising nipple-ectomy), very much in the mode of the best science fiction—as famously noted long ago by Darko Suvin. For Suvin, cognitive estrangement is the central strategy of science fiction as a genre, which for him is distinguished by its ability to unsettle audiences from their customary habits of thought by projecting them into strange, new worlds that are different from their own. Moreover, they are different in ways that encourage audiences to think about these differences and to wonder what has caused them—triggering a process of interrogation that presumably helps to open the audiences for science fiction to new ways of thinking about the world. Cognitive estrangement in science fiction (like the “estrangement effect” in the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, from which Suvin in fact took the basic idea) can thus potentially serve a strongly utopian function by helping audiences to realize that the world could be different than what it is.
Mad Men’s moments of strangeness often perform a similarly positive political function. A classic case occurs in Episode 3.3 (“My Old Kentucky Home”). Here, Roger Sterling and new wife Jane host a Derby Day garden party (placing this episode in the first weekend of May 1963, when the Kentucky Derby was won by Chateaugay) attended mostly by pretentious rich snobs, though a number of the less-rich principals from Sterling Cooper (including Don and Betty) attend as well. The setting itself is no doubt estranging to most of today’s viewers, who will never circulate in such an environment of genteel wealth and privilege, itself something of a throwback, even in 1963, to earlier times. Indeed, hearing of the party, Smitty immediately responds, “Going back in time?”
As it turns out, the party does indeed reach back into the past when it is highlighted (or perhaps lowlighted) by Roger’s stirring rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home” in full blackface, with a giggling Jane by his side, already well on her way to the full-on inebriation that will later in the party become something of an embarrassment. Roger, the charming rogue who has lived his life in a cocoon of privilege that often makes him indifferent to the problems of others, is clearly clueless concerning the racist implications of his song. But even in 1963, this performance is problematic enough that it drives Don (who has enjoyed no such cocoon until very recently in his life) from the gathering to seek sanctuary elsewhere. For viewers in 2009, meanwhile, the scene cannot help but serve as a jarring reminder of the extent to which racist attitudes could be publicly (and proudly) performed less than fifty years earlier. The rich, in 2009, were of course still rather indifferent to the sufferings of the less fortunate, but the scene serves as a reminder that some things have at least changed between 1963 and 2009; moreover, if some things change, other things can change as well. The scene thus serves both as a stern reminder of how deeply ingrained racism is in American society and as a suggestion that even such fundamental attitudes can indeed change over time. It thus contains a potentially powerful utopian reminder of the possibility of change, as does the best science fiction, per Suvin. Meanwhile, this episode’s representation of the party, which also features a rousing performance of the Charleston by Pet and Trudy, suggests the general way in which the rich are still rooted in the past, oblivious to the sweeping changes that are on the horizon in American society.
The sudden intrusions of shocking events that punctuate Mad Men often carry with them a similar political charge. In Episode 2.3 (“The Benefactor”), for example, as the principals at Sterling Cooper try to repair the damage done to their relations with the Utz potato chip company by the barbs of insult comedian Jimmy Barrett, Don pulls Barrett’s wife, Bobbie, aside for a consultation. That Bobbie clearly serves essentially as the manager of the out-of-control Jimmy makes this consultation perfectly understandable, even though the male-dominated world of the series makes Bobbie’s status stand out. What shocks us, though, is that Don turns vicious when he gets Bobbie alone: not only does he threaten Bobbie in no uncertain terms, suddenly dropping his smooth visage, but he violently grabs her by the crotch to emphasize his threat. Granted, it soon becomes clear that Don and Bobbie are involved in an affair (one that nearly wrecks the Draper marriage after Betty finds out about it), which makes this rather intimate threat a bit less out of the blue. Nevertheless, the revelation of this gangsterish/sadistic side of Don, already clearly the protagonist of the series, surely came as quite a shock to viewers conditioned to expect that such protagonists would be virtuous and heroic good guys. Moreover, the particular sexual violence with which this threat is issued was unprecedented on American commercial television—and really in American culture in general, where such crotch-grabbing threats had only been seen when directed at men. The implication is clear: if Bobbie wants to wear the pants in the family, she is going to have to face up to that responsibility like a man. The swirl of gender-based implications surrounding this moment is very rich—and made richer by the shocking nature of the scene as well as the disorienting reversal of genders that it involves.
Don’s sometimes erratic behavior is often the source of defamiliarizing moments in Mad Men, as when his rough treatment of Bobbie Barrett is to some extent echoed in “The Monolith” when he suddenly confronts Lloyd Hawley, the man responsible for installing the IBM 360 in the firm’s offices, with whom he had earlier had a perfectly friendly conversation about the possibility of creating an advertising campaign for Hawley’s computer firm. Out of the blue, Don warns Hawley that “you talk like a friend, but you’re not.” “I know your name,” he tells him, in a rather threatening manner. “No, you go by many names, but I know who you are. You don’t need a campaign. You’ve got the best campaign since the dawn of time.” Don’s hostility might be understandable given the structural opposition in this episode between the kind of humanistic tradition represented by Don and his typical advertising strategies and the runaway posthumanist modernization represented by the computer. Still, it seems a bit over the top, especially in the suggestive way Don describes Hawley almost as a kind of vaguely inhuman (perhaps Satanic, perhaps capitalistic) villain, his words echoing both 2001: A Space Odyssey and things such as the Rolling Stones classic “Sympathy for the Devil,” which had first appeared on the December 1968 album Beggars Banquet and which was still quite current at the time of this episode.
Draper also experiences several moments in which he undergoes what appear to be hallucinations or visions, though these can often be recuperated realistically as either simple flashbacks or the effects of alcohol or drugs. At other times, Draper’s “visions” are not so easy to explain away. Sometimes, as when he sees a clear vision of his father in Episode 3.7 (“Seven Twenty Three”), the event can fairly easily be attributed to the effects of mind-altering substances such as alcohol or drugs. In other cases, the source of the vision is harder to locate, as in the stunning moment at the end of the first half of Season 7, when Draper suddenly experiences a vision of the recently deceased Bertram Cooper performing a soft shoe and singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” accompanied by a group of scantily clad dancing secretaries and creating a scene that looks like something out of Dennis Potter. This moment is strange for a number of reasons, even beyond the obvious one that Cooper has recently died. In particular, the song itself is a sort of anti-materialist, even anti-capitalist anthem, and the irony of the fact that Cooper (a follower of Ayn Rand) chooses this particular song for his “comeback” is especially telling. One could, of course, argue that death has changed his perspective or that such a change was wrought by his last (somewhat science-fictional) experience in life—watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. After all, a key line in “The Best Things in Life Are Free” declares that “the moon belongs to everyone,” suggesting the moon as an image of the fact that there are bigger things than the tawdry capitalist scramble for profits.
Of course, one could argue that the choice is actually Draper’s and that it functions as part of his ongoing questioning of the ethos of business, which has driven his career to the brink of ruin even as he seeks to return to the real roots of his success in his love for the art of advertising, rather than its commercial aspects, which have gradually taken over his life and work. In short, as in the very best science fiction, Cooper’s posthumous soft-shoe routine raises questions that demand cognitive responses—and responses that might have strong political connotations, while suggesting that the world might be very different than it is. How are we to interpret this scene, for example? Self-referential, nonrealist postmodern shenanigans that mirror the workings of advertisements, while commenting on the fundamentally dishonest nature of those workings? A sign of Draper’s own cognitive dissonance due either to his impending psychic collapse or to his estrangement from the dog-eat-dog ethos of modern capitalism? A simple nod to the song-and-dance talents of Robert Morse—though one that possibly isn’t so simple, because it evokes a link to Morse’s best-known role in the 1967 musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which itself satirizes corporate ethics (or the lack thereof)?
Such questions clearly align Mad Men with the best science fiction. Given this alignment, the periodic allusions in the series to specific works of science fiction, the continual engagement with questions of technological transformation, and the occasional references to iconic science-fictional images (such as time machines or spaceships) all take on added significance. Together, all of these aspects of the series work to confirm Matt Weiner’s original characterization of Mad Men as a work of science fiction, though of course this complex series participates in a number of other genres as well.