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Waking the Past

The Historically Conscious Television Drama

Television has become the most important means of communication and education of our time. Do historians, who boast about the widening of their horizons and the opening of new fields of research, realize that it is television that has broadened our view of the world? . . . What I would like to suggest is that, when teaching history, when writing books, we adopt a style profoundly affected by the techniques of television.

—Pierre Sorlin, “Television and Our Understanding of History”

PIERRE SORLIN MAKES a radical claim for the impact television has had not just on the dissemination of historical knowledge but on the writing of academic history as well: “I am convinced that television is going to transform our comprehension and that the historiography of tomorrow will be fairly different from the one we have been used to. Cinema changed our vision but did not influence our intelligence of the past. On the other hand, it is our very conception of history that will be modified by television.”¹ Such claims are particularly unexpected given the overall academic contempt for popular history on television and given the conventional privileging of film over television as “higher brow.” Following Sorlin’s suggestion, I hope to show in this chapter that certain television genres might have structural and formal properties that enable them to produce historical knowledge in a way that is distinct from the way film produces such knowledge, ultimately forcing us to reconsider what the project of history looks like in the contemporary media landscape.

I begin this chapter by engaging some of the thoughtful and important recent work on historical representation on television. Much of this work focuses on either the documentary or the docudrama or the miniseries, texts concerned primarily with re-creating a specific historical event. Ann Gray and Erin Bell have labeled these sorts of television programs “factual history.”2 Factual history as they describe it encompasses not only documentary and historical reconstructions, but some more experimental genres as well, such as reality history TV (which is the focus of the next chapter) and even splashy programs such as Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One), where celebrities trace their genealogies. By contrast, the type of shows I consider in this chapter, which might be dubbed “historically conscious dramas,” are not “factual history” because they do not aim first and foremost to re-create historical events. Rather, they aim to reconstruct the lived contours of a particular historical moment and, in so doing, to provoke a historical consciousness in their viewers.

The study of history on television has blossomed as a field in its own right, attracting scholars from a range of disciplines. Gray and Bell’s groundbreaking and extensive work in the context of their long-term research project Televising History, 1995–2010, has done much to shape the field. Their research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, led to the publication of two volumes: a collection of essays entitled Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe³ and the monograph History on Television. Their research was motivated by the veritable explosion of history programming in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, a phenomenon that occurred on a slightly smaller scale in the United States, although, as their research suggests, historical programming on British TV is more weighted toward genres other than drama.⁴ Part of what they argue in the monograph is that history on television can properly be considered public history. This argument is in some ways resonant with the work by Jerome de Groot, who concludes his book Consuming History with the claim that “history is always a mediated experience, but the movement away from text toward virtual or material or physical history presents us with a new and developing historiography. The physical consumption of the historical—economic or otherwise—has been revolutionized.”⁵ De Groot explores the commodification of history but recognizes the way in which those processes also work to make history accessible and public in new ways. Gray and Bell use as a working definition of public history those “representation[s] of the past provided for and/or by people who are not university based historians.”6 They consider the kinds of responses that ordinary people post and the discussions they engage in as a form of public history. They also interviewed scholars to track the range of opinions about history on television. Although some scholars categorically refused to consider any of this alternative or experimental programming as history, others were more open-minded. One scholar, for instance, insisted that the opposition between academic history and public history is false, arguing that “television [is] not the poor step-sibling to academic dissemination; rather, as a form of public history it offer[s] the opportunity to reach different audiences and see scholarship represented in different ways, appropriate to the topics discussed.”⁷ Without downplaying television’s ability to reach an audience that academic history cannot, I also hope to show that history on television can offer a kind of complexity that, although different from the complexity of a monograph, produces a kind of historical knowledge that even an academic historian would recognize as having value.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of history on television is its perceived lack of historical accuracy. Indeed, most critical attention to historical miniseries or biographies takes the form of fact checking: Did that scene actually occur in real life? Did the protagonist say those words? Was he or she actually at the place as depicted? Although such questions are understandable, even legitimate, they miss the point that audiovisual representations of the past do not necessarily adhere to the same rules as historical monographs and that they produce historical knowledge in different ways. Robert Rosenstone’s discussion of the historical film is relevant to the case of historical drama on television. As he explains in Visions of the Past, film can never provide a “literal” truth because the past no longer exists, nor can it be represented in real time. He writes, “Of course, historical recounting has to be based on what literally happened, but the recounting itself can never be literal. Not on the screen and not, in fact, in the written word.” Rather, audiovisual texts create specific scenarios and dialogue that can produce knowledge about the past that resonates with more conventional written accounts; even if the scenario depicted did not literally happen, a fidelity to the spirit of the moment can foster historical understanding. Filmic depictions, Rosenstone asserts, “will always include images that are at once invented and true; true in that they symbolize, condense, or summarize larger amounts of data; true in that they impart an overall meaning of the past that can be verified, documented, or reasonably argued.”8 Gary Edgerton has similarly suggested that “any constructive evaluation of ‘television as historian’ also needs to start with the assumption that it is an entirely new and different kind of history altogether. Unlike written discourse, the language of TV is highly stylized, elliptical (rather than linear) in structure, and associational or metaphoric in the ways in which it portrays images and ideas.” Edgerton also underscores the idea that the pasts most often taken up by television are those that are most relevant to viewers in the present: “‘Television as historian,’ in general, is less committed to rendering a factually accurate depiction as its highest priority than to animating the past for millions by accentuating those matters that are most relevant and engaging to audiences in the present. On the most elementary level, this preference is commercially motivated and often results in an increasing number of viewers, but in a deeper vein the more fundamental goal of most popular historians is to utilize aspects of the historical account as their way of making better sense out of the current social and cultural conditions.”⁹

What I want to emphasize here is not only history’s broader reach in this format, but also a particular conception of the kind of historical understanding produced; it is more a consciousness of an ethos of a period or era than an attempted reconstruction of events. By looking at dramatic series that do not call themselves history but nevertheless have a historical sensibility and are the result of historical research about the period represented, I have selected an archive that enjoys even more license to experiment with the production of a kind of “period truth.” Even as I say that, though, I am wary of the very idea of historical “truth.” The notion of historical truth is problematic because history only ever exists as a representation of the past: it is never the past itself. In Frank Ankersmit’s words, “The relationship between (a historical) representation and what it represents cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of truth.” His point is not completely nihilistic because he suggests the importance of considering the “adequacy of historical representations of the past.”¹⁰ Furthermore, as any historian will admit, history is an interpretation of the past and as such is not static but changes over time. All history makes an argument, emphasizes certain details over others.¹¹ The analytical focus, despite the media or format of the representation, should be on what kind of historical argument is being advanced and toward what end.

Although film and television as audiovisual media share many conventions, there are important differences. Pierre Sorlin has suggested, for instance, that close-ups are the “standard format” on television versus the knee-up shot that dominates film. This stylistic convention “frames a part of the human body, head and shoulders or just a face[,] . . . introduces a radical change in the representation of living beings,” and has ramifications for the kinds of engagement solicited by television. As Sorlin notes, “The camera operators do their best to catch a face and keep it within the frame. This kind of inquisitive glance gives spectators a special feeling; the larger the image, the more they believe themselves to be directly involved.”12 Indeed, much scholarship has emphasized television’s ability to “add flesh and bones to history,” to add an emotional component, to draw viewers in. Part of the reason television is a formidable disseminator of ideas about the past clearly has to do with its power to make the past seem real, palpable, and meaningful, but that power alone is not enough to produce historical knowledge. Such knowledge is predicated on a recognition that the past is a “foreign country.” On some fundamental level, the past is gone, inaccessible. Accepting this claim is epistemologically important to the project of history, for it is the first step in acknowledging that any attempt to represent the past is inevitably imaginative work, a construction. Any television show that attempts to produce historical knowledge must also convey that fact. In other words, the production of historical knowledge requires an understanding on the viewer’s part that the past really is distant and that it looked and felt different.

The type of engagement that televised or filmic historical representations might foster—of feeling connected to but different from some other person or historical situation, of feeling both compassion and distance—is the structural condition for empathy. Empathy is a modality quite different from, though often confused with, sympathy. Sympathy assumes similarity, a preexisting connection. In sympathy, one shares the feelings of another person. And most notably, when one person sympathizes with another, she focuses on herself, on how she would feel in the other’s situation. Empathy, a much more modern concept, also seems the more complicated of the two in that it requires the person to imagine the other’s situation and what it might feel like while simultaneously recognizing her difference from the other. With empathy there is a leap, a projection, from the empathizer to the object of contemplation, which implies that a distance exists between the two. The experience of empathy requires an act of imagination—one must leave oneself and attempt to imagine what it was like for that other person given what he or she went through. Empathy, unlike sympathy, requires mental, cognitive activity; it entails an intellectual engagement with the plight of the other. When one talks about empathy, one is not talking simply about emotion, but about contemplation as well. Empathy takes work and is much harder to achieve than sympathy because it entails negotiating distance and difference.13 Having an empathetic relationship to the past can be a constructive mode of engagement because it discourages individuals from reading the present back into the past even as it creates a sense of emotional investment, and it will stay with the viewer, affecting and perhaps even orienting his or her future ideas and beliefs. In her book Empathic Vision, Jill Bennett is interested in the way that art, “by virtue of its specific affective capacities, is able to exploit forms of embodied perception” in ways that create “critical awareness.” Art that fosters “affective and critical operations might constitute the basis for something we call empathic vision.”¹⁴ Theorists of trauma have begun to consider the relationship between narrative representation and empathy. E. Ann Kaplan, for instance, has considered the ways in which “telling stories about trauma” creates the conditions for what she calls “empathic sharing.”¹⁵ Dominick LaCapra has used the term “empathic unsettlement” to describe “being responsive to the traumatic experience of others” without appropriating their experience. It involves, he suggests, “a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position,” fostering “a desirable affective dimension of inquiry which complements and supplements empirical research and analysis.” Furthermore, LaCapra suggests, by resisting uplifting accounts of trauma, empathic unsettlement “poses a barrier to closure in discourse.”¹⁶ These theorists have made a compelling case for how certain high-cultural texts might produce empathy. I suggest in this chapter and the next two that the formal properties of certain kinds of popular texts also have the potential to orchestrate and foster this particular mode of engagement.

The format of the serial drama—ongoing and meandering rather than closure oriented—opens up possibilities for the representation of history that are quite impossible in a film or even a history monograph. Glen Creeber begins his book Serial Television by challenging the belief commonly held by British television critics that the film or “single play” was politically progressive, “somehow epitomising quality television’s golden age,” whereas the long-form drama—the series or serial—is “commercially standardised and aesthetically conservative.” He then proceeds to delineate the ways in which long-form drama can allow for narrative complexity that cannot be realized in a single play, largely through an analysis of TV miniseries such as Roots (ABC, 1977), Holocaust (NBC, 1978), and Heimat (WDR, 1984). Although series and serials have often been pejoratively likened to soap operas, Creeber argues that “soap opera techniques (generally derided by so-called ‘serious’ television writers, directors and producers of the 1960s and 70s) have now become the very means by which ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’ drama is frequently conceived and constructed for a contemporary audience.”17 Although Creeber’s analysis focuses on these particular miniseries, many of his insights about the value and complexity of drama in “long form” are useful in thinking through the dramatic series I consider in this chapter.

The notion that there is a potentially progressive quality to serial drama also comes through in Alexander Dhoest’s analysis of television in Flanders. Period serials were very popular in Flanders in the 1980s. What is particularly interesting to Dhoest is these serials’ class consciousness as they “portray[] a rural world of simple people, not the higher classes.” For Dhoest, Wij, Heren van Zichem (BRT, 1969), the show on which he focuses and which he sees as a precursor to the shows of the 1980s, fits most comfortably under the umbrella of popular history, which he sets in opposition to official history. Although in some ways what the show represents seems mythological, he asks what it has to offer from a historical point of view, positing that, “clearly, it’s not intent on creating accurate pictures of ‘the past,’ although ‘surface realism’ through the use of accurate period details is important. Costumes, settings, buildings, objects: every detail is selected to effectively and accurately evoke a particular episode from the past. . . . on the whole, Wij, Heren van Zichem does not offer much in terms of ‘proper’ history, but to dismiss it as completely historically irrelevant would underestimate its impact.”¹⁸ This history, he ultimately suggests, has a kind of use value in the present by becoming part of popular memory and is thus available for various uses in the present. It is a politically charged history in that it focuses on poverty and the poorer classes rather than on the elite.

As this brief historiography suggests, much of the work on “factual history” has focused on European or Australasian television largely because there is simply more of it there than in the United States. As I have indicated, the specific genre I examine here might be called the “historically conscious drama,” whose emergence can be traced to some of the fundamental changes to the U.S. television industry brought about by the advent of cable TV. In fact, the economic structure of cable was instrumental in creating the conditions of possibility for the historically conscious drama. As Gary Edgerton suggests in his introduction to The Essential HBO Reader, the advent of cable led to a departure from the existing economic model wherein the three major networks “sold specific audiences (most recently targeting young urban professional viewers above all others) to sponsors”; this “[s]hift ing [of] the center of gravity in this sector of the television industry away from advertisers and more toward serving the needs and desires of their monthly customers” had a dramatic effect on the kind of programming produced by HBO.19 The freedom from sponsors and from the Federal Communications Commission broadcasting guidelines, which banned the broadcasting of “obscene, indecent, or profane programming,”²⁰ had a dramatic effect on the content distributed. HBO tried several business models—offering first-run movies and sporting events—before landing on one in the 1990s that would be financially successful: the creation of original productions. HBO was the first cable network to produce an original series. As Edgerton has suggested, HBO became an idea or an identity brand and was “marketed with the tagline, ‘It’s not TV, It’s HBO,’” which in effect promised that “series and specials produced by and presented on HBO are a qualitative cut above your usual run-of-the-mill television programming.”²¹ This production and marketing context gave HBO and the other cable networks that followed its example greater license to experiment with both form and content. These networks invested not only in writing but also in research, some of them hiring historical consultants; the effort to produce prestigious shows led HBO and its competitors to invest energy and resources in their efforts at historical reconstruction.

Three claims can be made for this genre of historically conscious television drama, some demonstrated to a greater and some to a lesser extent in the shows under consideration. First, these cable shows are marketed as drama, and yet they have a historical consciousness in that they are set in a distinct, researched, historical moment in the past. But rather than re-creating a pivotal event from the past or tracing the life of a famous person as the primary plot motivation—which has been the form of much of the factual television in the United Kingdom and Australasia—these shows, I argue, function more like an experiment in social history22 because they make visible the contours of life for everyday people as they were shaped or circumscribed by historical parameters and conditions. Second, their serial nature enables them to have a much more complex and nuanced narrative, to follow smaller side plots than would be possible in a film, and to be less motivated toward closure, thus acknowledging the messiness of the past itself. And third, as audiovisual texts, they have the capacity to orchestrate a complex mode of address (visual, aural, even tactile) and can, as I suggested about the films I discussed in the previous chapter, move the viewer through affective engagement from a position of proximity to the story to one of alienation from it, the effect of which is to provoke historical thinking along the lines Collingwood describes. I illustrate these points by means of the particular kinds of knowledge I see being produced in the television shows Deadwood (HBO, 2004–2006), Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015), and Rome (HBO, 2005–2007). I am by no means suggesting that all history-conscious dramas are equally able to produce something we can legitimately call historical knowledge. Nor am I suggesting that these shows are uniformly “accurate” or constructive or even the only or best examples available. Rather, I am using these particular texts to highlight the ways in which the format and the specificities of the audiovisual medium itself have the potential to produce historical knowledge, even if that potential has only occasionally been realized. To see the potential requires us to think more expansively about the range of different kinds of historical knowledge and to examine moments of complex historical engagement even within shows that are otherwise considered mere entertainment.

None of the long-form series I interrogate here is aimed primarily at reconstructing a particular historical event, and yet all of them are set within a clearly discernable historical frame against the backdrop of real-world historical events. None of them calls itself history, and yet they all have aspirations beyond the “costume drama.”²³ Although Deadwood, Mad Men, and Rome are not equally successful at producing historical knowledge or provoking a historical consciousness, they all aspire to depict an era, promising something more than mere soap opera. Insofar as these shows are effective, it is in their capacity to function like social history experiments. For the most part, these shows do not teach people about the world historical events that occur in the background or even about the lives of any world historical figures. Instead, viewers watch a group of people—a particular class or community or social entity within a specific socioeconomic milieu—live. These shows makes visible the horizons of possibility, the possible courses of action, the way public and private spheres are defined, the expectations of gender—in short, how individual lives are circumscribed by the political, economic, and social constraints of a given historical moment.

The long form enables viewers to detect change over time and, importantly, that change does not always mean progress. It enables viewers to see the complexity of characters as well as the many different and countervailing forces that affect which possibilities are open to a particular character and which are not. The long form also challenges the formal constraints of short-form drama, such as film, particularly under the dominance of classical Hollywood cinema, a film style heavily invested in closure. In the historically conscious drama on cable TV, struggle and conflict take central stage without the reassurance that there will be closure. There is a messiness here seldom allowed in either classical Holly wood cinema or academic monographs. As a result, these shows are particularly well suited to reveal contradictions in that neither a given character nor a given situation can be drawn as simply “good” or “bad.”

DEADWOOD

I start with Deadwood because it seems to me the most effective of the three in producing the kinds of historical knowledge I have discussed. David Milch’s critically acclaimed dramatic series on HBO fosters in viewers a kind of empathetic engagement with the past. As a long-form drama, it offers a more complicated engagement with time and exploits the potential afforded by the form to see how historical conditions were worn by people and shaped their existences. The series aired for three seasons, from 2004 to 2006, and was based on the lives of real people and documented events. The setting is the Black Hills of South Dakota in the gold-rush town of Deadwood in July 1876. Because the Black Hills belonged to the Oglala Sioux then, Deadwood was outside the sovereignty of the U.S. government and thus, as the show insistently reminds viewers, beyond the reach of U.S. law. The show begins with the arrival in town of former Montana sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and his partner, a Jewish immigrant named Sol Starr (John Hawkes). They plan to start a hardware business. But first Bullock and Starr must purchase land from Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), owner of the Gem Saloon and the most powerful man in town. Also arriving in Deadwood are the notorious Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), and the show follows the ways in which all of these characters’ lives intersect. Although based on the lives of historical figures and circumstances, the show makes no documentary claims for itself, adamantly resisting the label docudrama. As Milch has declared, “I’ve had my ass bored off by many things that are historically accurate.”24 Nevertheless, Milch himself is no stranger to academia or historical research; he graduated from Yale University and was then employed there as a lecturer in English. In preparation for writing the show, Milch conducted extensive primary research over the course of two years on the town of Deadwood and its inhabitants, relying quite heavily on the local newspaper, the Black Hills Pioneer. But Milch claims that, rather than write in documentary fashion, he “learned as much as he could and then threw out most of what he knew when he began writing the show,” as Nancy Franklin of the New Yorker puts it. “‘Deadwood,’” she continues, “draws on history without being slavishly beholden to the facts.”²⁵ By acknowledging its own createdness and boldly asserting its status as imaginative reconstruction, the show abandons claims to a kind of literal “truth” on the level of fact for truths about the contours of experience at that historical moment.

In an exchange that is certainly meant to have resonance beyond the diegetic world of the show, E. B. Farnum (William Sanderson), the local hotel proprietor, converses with the recently arrived Francis Wolcott (Garrett Dillahunt), an agent for mining mogul George Hearst (father of William Randolph Hearst):

FARNUM: Some ancient Italian maxim fits our situation, whose particulars escape me.

WOLCOTT: Is the gist that I’m shit out of luck?

FARNUM: Did they speak that way then?26

This question of whether people really “sp[o]ke that way then” has dominated much discussion about the show and is at the heart of my analysis of Deadwood. Neither journalistic nor academic appraisals fail to mention the show’s language. As Alessandra Stanley writes in the New York Times, “Black hat or white, everyone in Deadwood uses the kind of crude language more commonly associated with ‘The Sopranos.’”²⁷ But as she and others have noted, the pervasive use of obscenity is paired with a stylized, poetic form of language. Writes Franklin of the dialogue, “It is ornate and profane—far beyond on both counts, anything that’s ever been on television.” Interestingly, Franklin moves directly from describing the show’s language to the brutality of its depiction of bodies: “What I find more brutal than the language is seeing freshly dead bodies fed to the pigs.”²⁸ The way she moves seamlessly from the issue of the sound of the language to the brutality of the depiction of bodies unwittingly betrays something deeper about the show. It gets at how powerfully human sounds function in this text in a visceral, affective, bodily way. And yet there are other elements of the show’s sound—the dialogue in particular—that work in the opposite way: to hold spectators off and outside of the show. The various sound strategies, in other words, move spectators between spectatorial identification and alienation.

I think the way language is used in the series has important ramifications for both the way the show engages and holds off viewers on the one hand and engages with and transmits a sense of the past on the other. The show makes visible two distinct kinds of knowledge about the past. The first is more structural. It is the point that history is only ever representation and constructed narrative and that we can only ever get so close to events of the past. The other kind of knowledge is more specific to the period depicted. However, it is not the “what-really-happened” kind of knowledge—not that that is possible anyway—but more knowledge of what the conditions of existence might have been like, how masculinity was worn or experienced, where power resided, how and where the lines between public and private were drawn, and so forth. As a television series or long-form drama, Deadwood has the luxury of time. Unlike a film, where everything must happen within two hours, a television series allows viewers to grow acquainted with characters slowly, to gradually develop a sense of place and time, by witnessing and listening to more aspects of daily life than would be possible to depict in a single play.

In his book How Early America Sounded, historian Richard Cullen Rath begins the daunting task of reconstructing how the world sounded to people in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century United States. Rath makes two claims: first, that sound used to be more important—or, rather, that it had more immediate power than it does now—and, second, that acquiring knowledge through reading written words is a learned and by no means natural process. By way of introduction, he writes:

The subject of this book—how people heard their worlds in early America—requires an ability or at least a willingness on your part to be repeatedly decentered. It requires you to think about the process of taking in knowledge through the eyes from a black and white two dimensional page and to think of that act as a socially learned rather than natural way of coming to know things, one that has had profound effects on how one perceives worlds beyond the printed page. This denaturalization, this historical situating of one’s own reading and its cognitive effects, is a necessary starting point for coming to grips with a sometimes alien world of powerful sounds.29

Rath reminds us of how powerful sound can be in producing social meanings and, in particular, how powerful it can be in transmitting certain kinds of knowledge about the past. He calls attention both to the power of sound to provoke response—even cognitive response—and to the possibility that certain aspects of life, or lived experience, are more effectively conveyed through sound than through the written (and then read) word. His point about the unnaturalness of learning about the past through reading about it resonates with some of the important claims made by historians interested in thinking about film and television as powerful and effective vehicles for the transmission of certain forms of historical knowledge.

I would like to emphasize here the way sound and language can elicit particular kinds of spectatorial responses. It is worth noting that the body of literature that addresses itself to the relationship between cinemagoer and film—tellingly called “spectatorship”—unwittingly privileges vision as the primary sense experience of the cinema. This is not to say that film sound has not been studied. The study of sound in film has a long and, some might say, vexed history. In a recent review essay in American Quarterly aptly titled “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?” Michele Hilmes notes that the study of sound is “always emerging, never emerged.” She attributes this quality—as have others—to sound’s subordinate position vis-à-vis the visual, as “fundamentally secondary to our relationship to the world and to dominant ways of understanding it.”30 Furthermore, although we think of cinema as an experiential medium, we tend to pay less attention to sound experience than we do to visual experience. This insight is at the heart of the groundbreaking work by Rick Altman and others who have painstakingly analyzed the complexity of film soundtracks.³¹ Michel Chion, in his elaborate discussion of how sound works in cinema, argues that “there is always something about sound that overwhelms and surprises us, no matter what—especially when we refuse to lend it our conscious attention; and thus, sound interferes with our perception, affects it. Surely, our conscious perception can valiantly work at submitting everything to its control, but, in the present cultural state of things, sound more than image has the ability to saturate and short-circuit our perception.”³² For Chion, our response to sound is more reflexive, less mediated by cognition, than our response to images. In this way, hearing is a profoundly sensuous, bodily experience. Sound thus has extraordinary—and often unappreciated—power to shape the way viewers see the images before them. Furthermore, Chion writes, film sound can be far more complicated than film image; sounds can be piled up one on top of the other and are not bounded by the frame in the way that visual images are.³³ Furthermore, sound can actually work against images, complicating or challenging the visual narrative. What I would like to emphasize here is that sound produces specific kinds of cognition and knowledge, and although cinema is a multisensory experience, sound by itself can work in complicated and varied ways, even within a single show. One of the ways in which Deadwood is different from other shows of its kind is that it largely resists nondiegetic music—that is, music that is heard by the audience as opposed to the characters and that often works to cue specific emotional responses in viewers. For most of each episode, we hear only dialogue and diegetic sounds; not until the end of an episode, when we hear either the show’s theme or another song chosen for its feel and lyrics, are we presented with nondiegetic sound, and then it really serves the purpose of initiating closure. For that reason, I have chosen to focus on the soundscape within the town of Deadwood; as I demonstrate, these diegetic sounds and dialogue structure the conditions of audience engagement in a way that fosters empathetic engagement with the past.

As I have suggested, it is on the level of language—and other human sounds—that this show both invites and holds off spectatorial investment. In a powerful scene from a second-season episode of Deadwood, sound compels affective response—we are drawn in by the sound of another’s cry of pain. I call this particular form of connection achieved by sound the “aural visceral.” In this scene, Al Swearengen, proprietor of the Gem Saloon (and whorehouse) and the most powerful player in the town of Deadwood, is suffering from a kidney stone. He is upstairs in his room, and his henchmen are there with him, along with the camp doctor. He is lying in bed, visibly in pain. The doctor says, “All right, Al, I’m in your bladder, I can hear the fucking stone. I’m gonna try now to move the stone to release your water—so you push now if you can, son.” Swearengen responds with heavy breathing and low guttural groans. He cries out, “Mother of God!” (see figure 2.1). His cries are so loud that Trixie (Paula Malcomson), a favored prostitute with whom he often shares his bed, hears him from the street below. What we are hearing is clearly a man’s cry, a cry to which we are rather unaccustomed. The visuals cut here from Swearengen’s room to other locations in Deadwood, where characters look up, listening to Swearengen’s cries of anguish (see figure 2.2). In other words, while the visuals cut from character to character in the town, the soundtrack, dominated by Swearengen’s cries of pain, plays uninterrupted.

This combination of image and sound underscores that this is a heard and not seen event in Deadwood. I find it almost impossible to listen to this scene without feeling my own body tense. The scene is challenging for the viewer: enduring Swearengen’s cries of agony, witnessing a man reduced to no language. Listening to and watching his guttural moans and wails beg a response, invite mimesis. As noted in chapter 1, according to anthropologist Michael Taussig mimesis means “to get hold of something by means of its likeness,” which for him implies both “a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.”³⁴ This response has both social and physiological components. The aural visceral makes an indelible impression by affectively engaging the listener; as a result, the content of that entreaty stays with him or her. Similarly, much recent work on cinematic spectatorship has focused on just this phenomenon; eschewing older, psychoanalytic models of spectatorship, these theorists have moved toward more phenomenological and cognitive-perceptual models. A key tenet of this approach is a conviction that affect matters—that, in the words of film theorist Carl Plantinga, “the viewer’s affective experience in part determines meaning, and a lack of attention to, or an inability to understand, affective experience could well lead one to misunderstand and mischaracterize the thematic workings of a film, and perhaps even to misunderstand the story itself.” He calls “affective mimicry” the spectator’s response to human forms; it “depends on the fact that viewers see the bodies of film actors/characters and hear their voices.”35 Plantinga, in other words, attempts to theorize the specific kinds of scenarios that produce affect in spectators and the constitutive role that affect plays in constructing the film’s meaning. And yet, despite his inclusion of sound as an important stimulus, he offers very little analysis of the aural sensorium.

FIGURE 2.1   Al Swearengen screaming in pain. From Deadwood.

FIGURE 2.2   Town residents looking up in response to Swearengen’s cries. From Deadwood.

I want to underscore here that this scene from Deadwood is meant to be heard. We are quite literally shown what Chion refers to as the “point of audition”36—the people listening. We see people hearing Al suffer. We see shots of townspeople looking up to the balcony of the Gem Saloon; we see the uncertainty on their faces. We watch them react affectively. Their bodies respond, and so do ours. We might say that sound works here to transmit affect from character to viewer. But what kind of knowledges does this sound produce? We have to begin by acknowledging that sound works primarily here to draw viewers in, to elicit compassion for the sufferer. And yet even as we are drawn in and prodded to feel something, we have a cognitive response. We literally cannot imagine what it would be like to endure this sort of medical procedure without anesthetics. There is something profoundly foreign about what we watch him endure. As viewers, I believe, we oscillate between these two poles of mimesis and difference, moving back and forth across the bridge.

But another kind of knowledge about the past also gets disseminated here. In a superficial sense, the scene makes visible the vulnerability of the body and the unreliability of nineteenth-century medicine. But there is more to it than that. People in Deadwood are unmoored by Swearengen’s condition, which he unsuccessfully tries to hide from them by locking himself in his room. Although he is the most powerful person in town, he is not invulnerable—he is still fundamentally at the mercy of his body. In Deadwood, there is a very fine line between life and death, and what is riding on Swearengen’s condition is nothing less than the entire social order. There is no law in Deadwood and therefore no official positions of power. The order in the town, as contingent as it seems, hinges on Al Swearengen, who commands respect (and fear) in part because he is the wealthiest man and can thus influence who can buy land and where. His power is not a vested social power, nor does he occupy a preexisting position of authority, but rather power seems to reside in his body, in his person. Thus, a threat to his body means a threat to the social order—and the townspeople know it. This is a powerful form of knowledge about sovereignty on the frontier at the margins of the nation.

The scene also makes visible a radically different drawing of public and private spheres—or, more precisely, the profound lack of what we now think of as the private sphere. This lack of privacy comes across in many ways in the show: characters urinating into chamberpots or on the street, prostitutes out and about with their breasts and other anatomical parts uncovered, the sounds of characters—even the more well-to-do—engaged in intimate sexual acts. In this scene, though, Swearengen does not want to be heard or seen. He has barricaded himself in his room and is chewing on a piece of cloth to suppress his cries. Nevertheless, he is heard, and the camera shows us the town reacting to this aural event.

If those human sounds that address us viscerally work primarily to engage us affectively, to evoke a mimetic response, to mark us, other sounds in Deadwood—in particular the verbal—work to hold us off. Most of the show’s dialogue is ornate and intricate. According to Jesse McKinley of the New York Times, “More than anything however characters in Deadwood are addicted to words: big looping passages of quasi-Elizabethan prose that immediately set the show apart from the usual western repertory of variations on the word ‘pardner.’”37 Milch believed that through re-creating the turns of speech of the period, listeners would be invited into a foreign aural field. “Many of them [those who lived in the historical Deadwood] might have been illiterate,” Milch notes, “but they knew the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and that’s what shaped the way they thought and the way they expressed themselves.”³⁸ The creation of voices with their own particularities transports viewers to a different time and place and at the same time reminds them that it is not their place.

Another scene from season 2 shows language functioning in precisely this way—by conjuring a world to which we have only limited access. Mining mogul George Hearst intends to buy up all of the “claims” in Deadwood—that is, the plots people have purchased to pan for gold. Toward that end and to expedite the process, his agent, Wolcott, is spreading a rumor that the claims will be overturned by Yankton (the Dakota territorial capital) if they are not sold immediately, and the rumors are working the town into a frenzy, encouraging a sell-off. In one scene, Alma Garrett (Molly Parker), owner of a particularly successful claim, and Mr. Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), the man who is managing the claim for her, discuss how to proceed in the face of the rumors:

ELLSWORTH: Mornin’, ma’am.

GARRETT: Good morning, Mr. Ellsworth.

ELLSWORTH: I’m sorry I’m late. I hope you spent a restful night.

GARRETT: I did. And you’re forgiven. But this morning I note an amount of confusion and anxiety abound and words of panic about Yankton’s disposition of the claims.

ELLSWORTH: Panic’s easier on the back than the short handle of the shovel.

GARRETT: I see.

ELLSWORTH: The Creator in his infinite wisdom, Miz Garrett, salted his works so that where gold was, there also you’d find rumor, though he decreed just as firm that the opposite wouldn’t always hold.

GARRETT: You understand I needn’t be comforted at the expense of the truth.

ELLSWORTH: I’m late, ma’am, over shooing a man away from your diggings named Francis Wolcott that scouts for George Hearst that wouldn’t spare attention for a camp or the sun itself if he didn’t think it likely to fill his coffers. Nor the sort who’d shrink from a lie or more than one to advance his purpose or be ignorant of how to circulate his falsehoods without anyone knowin’ their source. And now I come to camp to hear the waters called muddy and the current quickened, though I see no change in the creek. And the Hooples [slang for foolish, ridiculous, people], certain sure the flood crisp fast approaches, have begun to think keenly, “I’ll get ahead of the event, maybe I’ll sell my claim at discount,” anything to unharness so they can head for the higher ground. Myself, ma’am, I’d be betting that the levee will hold.

Ellsworth is explaining that the rumors were starting to scare people into selling and that Garrett should ride out the storm. And yet notice the involved, allusive—and elusive—language. Viewers are not lulled passively into the story, both because the language calls attention to itself and because they must work to make sense of what is being said. Interestingly, the dialogue, which is clearly part of the diegesis, actually forces viewers out of the diegesis. The distancing effect of the language and the cognitive work required to keep up with the plot prevent viewers from slipping into an easy identification with the characters or their situations.

At other moments, the stylized language works to convey notions of propriety and social mores and to highlight the range and complexity of social relations in Deadwood. Following the death of his brother, Bullock marries his brother’s widow, Martha (Anna Gunn), to take care of her and her son. In a scene that takes place after they have shared a bed for the first time, they awake awkwardly and sit on either side of the bed with their backs to each other:

MARTHA: Let me light the lamp.

BULLOCK: I’ve misplaced my boots.

MARTHA: I put them downstairs, by the kitchen door.

BULLOCK: I was asleep when you took ’em and did that.

MARTHA: Yes. Would you rather I not?

BULLOCK: No. No. Only I’d intended to be awake last night so we could talk, which what with how it’s been we have not done in the peace of the evening as I would like since your arrival.

MARTHA: I would enjoy to converse in the stillness after the day like that.

BULLOCK: Tonight I will have two cups of coffee, and I will not fall asleep.

MARTHA: In the morning, in the quiet before we each take up our work, is also a pleasant occasion for such intercourse.

BULLOCK: Yes.

MARTHA: Would you like to start a discussion this morning?

BULLOCK: I wouldn’t want to . . . disturb the boy.

MARTHA: William sleeps sound. If you will see to the bedroom door, Mr. Bullock.

And with that Bullock rises from the bed, walks toward us, and closes the door, as if right in our faces. In this scene, the language not only holds us outside of their relationship and room but also registers the characters’ discomfort with one another and their clumsy attempt to navigate the social mores. This scene, like the one with Swearengen’s kidney stone, also tells us about the operative lines between public and private by illustrating what can be spoken of and how. Unlike the scene with the stone in which Swearengen cannot have privacy, here viewers are denied access to Mr. and Mrs. Bullock’s emotions. In part, the scene registers the awkwardness of the moment. The language the characters use avoids emotion and refuses easy conclusions about what they are feeling, the stilted nature of their conversation conveying something of their discomfort with one another. Voyeuristic pleasure is thwarted as viewers are ultimately pushed out of the room. But that, too, is a form of knowledge about public and private, the sayable and the unsayable. In Deadwood, then, a range of strategies is at play for creating the kind of estrangement necessary to work against a simple identification with historical characters and situations.

Most discussions of language in Deadwood, though, have revolved around the pervasiveness of profanity. Says Milch, “Profanity, I’ve come to believe, was the lingua franca of the time and place, which is to say that anyone, no matter what his or her background, could connect with almost anyone else on the frontier through the use of profanity.”39 In the following exchange, Trixie, who has recently become enamored of Bullock’s Jewish business partner, discusses Swearengen’s kidney stone and his character with Calamity Jane. The scene opens with the women out on a porch, paired symmetrically on either side of the screen, each taking swigs from huge whiskey bottles.

JANE: [Burps.] Now that’s fucking progress.

TRIXIE: Cocksucker upstairs, across the way, whorehouse where I work.

JANE: He is a fucking cocksucker.

TRIXIE: Locks the fucking door so people can’t get to help him. Fucking ashamed to be sick.

JANE: You know he had a design to murder that little one.

TRIXIE: No, I didn’t.

JANE: Hell yes. He had a design. Charlie and me spirited her from camp, forced him to a second victim more suitable to his cocksucker’s purpose.

TRIXIE: Think they’re any different if they’ve had their fuckin’ dicks cut on? They ain’t no fuckin’ different. You got to like their friends or they won’t teach ya numbers or every other fuckin’ regulation they set.

JANE: Anyway.

TRIXIE: Far as it fuckin’ goes, he also brought the cripple from that orphanage.

JANE: What orphanage?

TRIXIE: Don’t buy his bullshit about the nine-cent trick.

JANE: What cripple?

TRIXIE: Jewel. That he says he’s got around against some Hooplehead only having nine cents and wanting a piece of pussy. That ain’t it. Why she’s around is, it’s his sick fuckin’ way of protectin’ her.

JANE: I’m gonna get whisky.

TRIXIE: There’s entries on both side of the fuckin’ ledger is the fuckin’ point, as I already talk like a fuckin’ Jew.

JANE: It’s shaping up to be a nice cool evening. Maybe he has a good side to him too that I entirely fuckin’ missed. It’s always fuckin’ possible, drunk as I am fuckin’ continuously. It’s nice to see you.

Trixie and Jane are debating whether Al Swearengen has any redeeming features or not—“entries on both sides of the ledger,” because the man is sometimes a monster and at other times a saint—but the women speak as if in code, with veiled references and allusions. Their dialogue is punctuated with profanity. Again, as in the dialogue between Mr. Ellsworth and Alma Garrett, viewers must struggle to understand the content of the conversation, which stands in the way of any simple identification with them. Michel Chion distinguishes “theatrical speech” from “emanation speech.” In “theatrical speech,” the more common of the two, “the dialogue heard has a dramatic, psychological, informative, and affective function” and is “perceived as dialogue issuing from characters in the action,” whereas “emanation speech” “is not necessarily heard and understood fully, and in any case is not intimately tied to the heart of what might be called the narrative action.”40 As this exchange demonstrates, the writers of Deadwood seem to move back and forth between these two modes of speech; clearly, some dialogue functions as much to create a mood or round out a character as to advance important plot information. I would even suggest that the use of profanity in particular functions as emanation speech in that it is more about affect and creating a mood than about advancing narrative action. On first viewing Deadwood, I was troubled by its use of profanity because it seemed to me that it broke the illusion of historical reconstruction, that it was anachronistic, presentist. Even though Milch claims that profanity was omnipresent on the frontier, its contemporary feel seems to me to work against realism. I now believe that this lack of realism is productive. Frequent obscenity does break the illusion of verisimilitude or historical accuracy, forcing us to consider whether people really did, in E. B. Farnum’s words, “speak like that back then.” In fact, it invites the kind of skeptical questioning gaze encouraged by the intermingling of archival and re-created footage that I described in the previous chapter. But the profanity also, perhaps even simultaneously, has the opposite effect of drawing us in because it is the only really familiar aspect of the show (as many have noted, Deadwood sounds like The Sopranos). In that complicated moment, viewers are both drawn in and held off. Elements of the diegesis, in this case the dialogue, seem to push viewers out of the diegesis and in so doing to preserve the distance between the viewer and the past depicted.

Through these strategies—the simultaneously familiar and anachronistic feel of profanity on the one hand and the affective engagement coupled with formal, ornate language on the other—Deadwood oscillates between drawing viewers in and holding them off, and this oscillation, I think, can be a very constructive way to engage viewers with the past in a more complex fashion. The notion that filmic or televisual history can effectively draw people in and promote interest in the historical past has been borne out by the popularity of affective modes of historical representation. Furthermore, as film scholars have shown, the filmic or televisual narrative and editing conventions that are associated with classical Hollywood cinema are powerful tools for promoting identification or eliciting “affective mimicry.” What requires more investigation—what I hope I have at least gestured toward here—is how such texts can work in the opposite direction to hold viewers outside of the story, in this case through the use of sound. It does not so much matter if the series reproduces how people actually spoke back then or not—there is no way to verify that anyway. Milch and the writers of Deadwood have used letters, diaries, and other primary sources in their effort to reconstruct the kinds of language and the particular turns of phrase used at the time. And yet what is more important is that the language works to alienate us, to conjure up a foreign place—a place where we do not really belong. Because we are not allowed to feel that we live there, our own emotions are not elevated to evidentiary status in the way that concerns Vanessa Agnew in her critique of affective history (see the introduction).

I think, though, that Deadwood does something more interesting than simply force the viewer to recognize that the past was different from the present. Viewers are called by Deadwood, compelled to listen or, as Kaplan would say, to witness in a way not so different from what happens when they are watching Hotel Rwanda. The viscerality of the aural experiences calls us to our bodies and in so doing produces certain kinds of knowledge about the past. It is not that we literally know what it feels like to have lived then but rather that we learn something more general about the vulnerability of the body and its lack of privacy as well as about the nearness of death in a nineteenth-century frontier town. This knowledge is not transhistorical. Rather, it is tied to the experience of a particular place at a particular, definable historical moment.

MAD MEN

In part because Mad Men (2007–2013), the AMC series created by Matthew Weiner, is set in the not so distant past, it does not cry out “history.” Nor does it lay claim to “history” in the way that even Deadwood does. Nowhere in the promotional material is it claimed that the show is history—at least in the sense of academic written history. Its aim is not primarily to highlight the major historical events of the period it depicts, though they do appear with varying degrees of prominence in certain episodes. And yet the show aspires, as creator Matt Weiner says again and again, to the highest verisimilitude in terms of mise-en-scène. Costumes, props, and sets are meticulously researched to create a visual impression—a historically specific style—of the 1960s. But the show also attempts fidelity to the modes of behavior and the social norms of a particular class of people in a clearly drawn socioeconomic milieu: ad men, office workers, and their families in New York City in the 1960s. In other words, the show attempts to create the parameters (both tangible and intangible) within which a historically specific group of people in a particular geographical environment once lived.

In writing on Mad Men, many critics have pointed, rightly I think, to the way in which the series undermines the “sheen of nostalgia” that has been endemic to most popular depictions of this period, such as Happy Days (ABC, 1974–1984) and American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973).41 One of the ways in which it undercuts nostalgia is by registering how precarious, perhaps even untenable, was the image of the ideal nuclear family both popularized and endorsed in the postwar years. As the promotional material on the show’s website suggests, the show aims to “depict[] authentically the roles of men and women in this era while exploring the true human nature beneath the guise of 1960s traditional family values.”⁴² The show, in other words, challenges the myth of the idyllic suburban home that was created and disseminated in popular culture and official discourse beginning in the 1950s. Although this historical insight is a cornerstone of Elaine Tyler May’s important monograph Homeward Bound,⁴³ the myth of the ideal 1950s family has been quite tenacious in popular culture. Mad Men gives the lie to that representation by exposing its fault lines: the gendered division of labor, the boredom women endured, the complexity of having “colored” help, and so forth.

The evolution of the fictional ad agency at the center of the show, first called Sterling Cooper after its executives Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse), unfolds over the course of the 1960s. The enigmatic Don Draper (John Hamm), head of “creative,” is the show’s central protagonist; Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) is hired as a secretary for Draper in the show’s pilot and eventually works her way up to copywriter. Alongside these characters is a group of junior executives jockeying for position within the agency. Don Draper’s wife, Betty (January Jones), stays home with their children, Sally (Kiernan Shipka) and Bobby (Mason Vale Cotton), in Ossining, New York. Unlike in Deadwood, the characters Weiner has created are not people who actually existed; he has not gone through the books or employee rolls at the large Madison Avenue advertising companies to identify actual people. But they are people who could have existed, given what can be known about the advertising workplace, gender norms and gender roles, and race and racial ideologies in New York at this historical moment. The show aims to construct the specific parameters and constraints under which such people would have lived if they were of this particular class at this particular historical moment. It is not a story about the big events of the 1960s; instead, like a social history experiment, it opens up a window onto the contours of daily life as it would have been lived by a particular subset of the population. In so doing, it makes palpable the social norms and expectations within that socioeconomic milieu in the early 1960s.

In this section, I consider the particular types of historical knowledge the show produces for viewers, the strategies deployed to position viewers vis-à-vis that historical narrative, and the effect of the serial format on historical understanding more generally. The show privileges a social history of everyday life, a history closer to the ground, which attends to ordinary people and how they lived against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s. Within each season, well-known historical events intrude on the characters’ lives, but, interestingly and perhaps accurately, they do so in a peripheral way. Mad Men thus resists imposing any explanatory, cause-and-effect narrative, focusing instead on how people of the time experienced or came to understand those events. In Mad Men, we are not offered an account of the political machinations that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we do witness how it was received by people in their daily lives in the midst of the other mundane events that made up their lives. When world historical events occur—the death of a president, a natural or man-made disaster, or even war—people’s lives do not grind to a halt. Rather, those events compel attention for a short time and then are assimilated into otherwise full lives, and yet they cast shadows, subtly affecting people’s ideas about the future and its possibilities and foreclosures. In Mad Men, we gain access to the way those events were mediated to the people at the time and how the effects were felt at the local level, something we rarely see in academic history.

In Mad Men, world historical events interrupt the characters’ lives via television or radio reports and newscasts, much as they do in Hotel Rwanda. Aside from the fact that those media were in fact the primary mechanism by which individuals encountered traumatic national and international events, calling attention to the media technologies underscores the fact that such events, even for people at the time, were mediated—experienced not directly, but indirectly—as news. Each season correlates with a specific calendar year, and I focus my analysis on the first few seasons.44 Late in season 1, the Kennedy–Nixon presidential campaign culminates in election day. The episode begins with grainy black-and-white archival footage filling our screen. A voice-over declares, “America is still going to the polls at four o’clock with some precincts opening as early as twelve this morning. Voters across the country are deciding who will hold the most important office in the free. . . .”⁴⁵ The camera slowly pulls back to reveal that the footage we are watching is actually being broadcast on what looks to us like an old-fashioned, wood-paneled television. Depicting a television within a television, the show foregrounds the televisual reception of historical events and by extension their mediated quality. Later, the junior executives roll in a TV set and gather around it. A reporter announces: “With early returns just coming in, our NBC computer is putting Senator Kennedy’s odds for a win at a grim-sounding twenty-two to one.” Cheers erupt from the office. Shortly thereafter, in the Drapers’ family room, the television set is also tuned to election coverage. Draper’s daughter, Sally, sits on the floor inches from the TV screen. Again, we watch as she does, her screen within our screen. A reporter announces, “Senator Kennedy seems to be closing the gap on the vice president’s early lead—state by state.”

We are both watching the election unfold over time as people at the time did and reminded of the act of mediation, which is also between us and the historical moment conjured up by the series. Furthermore, the stylistic device employed here—cutting between different groups of characters in different places, all watching television—is used every time a major historical event occurs within the show’s diegesis. In addition to making the case that the event compelled the American public’s attention, it also underscores the historical importance of television itself as a medium for the dissemination of live news. This was in fact television’s golden age, a moment when live news constructed a public sphere of sorts wherein Americans all over the country could watch the same news report simultaneously. In other words, the particular situation depicted—a group of people gathered around a set watching the news as it unfolded—was a historically specific phenomenon (see figure 2.3). Although of course people still watch television today, it no longer promises the simultaneous reception of news; now there are many more news outlets, including the Internet, and therefore much less shared reception.

FIGURE 2.3   Group in the office watching the news of the Kennedy assassination on TV. From Mad Men.

In season 3, several major historical events punctuate the show’s drama: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of John Kennedy, and the murder of four African American girls in Birmingham. The inclusion of these events lends credibility to the smaller, more local, social history work the show performs, but they also function as an eruption of the “real” into what appears to be a stylized, fictional environment. What is powerful about this format is not only that we are gaining access to how people in 1963 came to learn about these events but also that the experience of learning about it is replayed to a certain extent for us because we, too, are watching these historical events unfold over time. We, in the present, encounter the actual news footage from the past that brought world historical events into popular consciousness; this situation is thus a version of what Ankersmit describes as historical experience.46

The episode “Grown-Ups” in season 3 is set during and in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Unlike the characters in the show, we in the audience know that Kennedy was assassinated, and most of us know that Lee Harvey Oswald was the primary suspect.⁴⁷ What we are learning, then, is less about the event itself than about how it was mediated, how that event interrupted daily life, and how it unfolded over time for those people living through it. As the episode opens, two of the junior executives are discussing office politics, a TV playing in the background. On that screen, we see and hear a news bulletin, which is barely audible over their conversation, announcing, “In Dallas three shots were fired on Kennedy’s motorcade.” The executives seem not to have heard the announcement or taken note. For the rest of the episode, newscasts, from which the characters are increasingly unable to pull their eyes, punctuate the flow of action. These news broadcasts are archival footage, replete with well-known newscasters: “This is Walter Cronkite in our newsroom, and there has been an attempt, as perhaps you know now, on the life of president Kennedy. He was wounded in an automobile driving from Dallas airport into downtown Dallas, along with Governor Connally of Texas. They’ve been taken to Parkland Hospital there, where their condition is as yet. . . .”

This stylistic decision—to allow the news coverage to tell the story as it would have unfolded in time—has enormous affective potential. We both experience the unfolding of the news story, literally watching it on our screen, and witness the characters responding to it. This strategy makes palpable the sense of shock and bewilderment (as shown in figure 2.3), how profoundly destabilizing the news was. Don’s wife, Betty, is at home watching television. A point-of-view shot positions us to look at her TV screen as if through her eyes. A newscaster declares, “Excuse me, Chet, here is a flash from the Associated Press, dateline Dallas. Two priests who were with President Kennedy say . . . ,” Betty sits up straighter and stares at the set, alarmed, “he is dead of bullet wounds. There is no further confirmation, but this is what we have on a flash basis.” The Drapers’ African American housekeeper, Carla (Deborah Lacey), comes rushing in, and when she sees Betty in front of the television, she asks, “Is he okay?” Betty responds, “They just said he died.” Carla’s hands go to cover her mouth in disbelief. The voice on the television continues: “This is the only word we have indicating that the president may in fact have lost his life.” When the Draper children, Sally and Bobby, come into the room, they look at the shell-shocked women. Sally puts her arm around her mother to comfort her. They all are still fixated on the television set when Don returns home much later and asks in disbelief, “Why are the kids watching this?” He turns to Betty and says patronizingly: “Take a pill and lie down. I can handle the kids.” He tells the kids to turn the TV off, but they cannot look away (see figure 2.4). We hear the report in the background as eyewitnesses are describing what they saw and heard. Don tells the kids to look at him, “Everything’s gonna be okay,” and in the background we hear a voice saying, “. . . fell over on him and said, ‘Oh my God, he’s shot.’” Don continues, “There’s a new president, and there’s going to be a funeral.” Bobby asks, “Are we going to the funeral?” Don looks at them and then sinks back into the couch, and they all continue watching. This scene is affecting because it brings us into proximity with the unfolding situation, but not exactly as one of the characters. And yet the way in which we are forced to encounter not only the realization of the assassination but its effect on people at that time makes palpable the profound sense of social instability that was fundamental to the structure of feeling of the 1960s.

FIGURE 2.4   The Draper family watching Cronkite reporting on the Kennedy assassination. From Mad Men.

However, even as we are brought into the emotional drama, offered access to the shock, confusion, and fear wrought by the uncertain historical times as well as to the tempo at which information was revealed—much slower than in the present moment with the Internet—we are held at a distance. I have asserted that for popular texts to produce historical knowledge requires both that they invite viewers in, encourage them to engage affectively with the material and conditions of the past, and that they hold viewers out, reminding them that the past was substantially different from the present. Mad Men achieves this distancing effect in various ways. The television sets that the characters watch look and feel different, reminding us even as we watch the news that the very material conditions of existence were different. For many viewers, even those well aware of these historical events, watching archival news reports is a novel experience. And yet because the news reporters look and speak differently, because the footage is grainy, because the TV sets have a curved glass front, the viewer’s distance from the moment is continually reasserted. Our relationship to these events is experiential but mediated, once removed. We are not allowed simply to slip into the past.

This sense of distance or difference from the past is also asserted by the show’s representation of the social mores and values of the period. In fact, Mad Men revels in moments that reveal how much daily life has changed since the 1960s. As many commentators have noted, characters smoke incessantly in buildings and cars and in the course of all activities (Peggy’s gynecologist smokes during her examination). They ride in cars without seatbelts, and they allow children to play with plastic bags over their heads. And they casually espouse prejudices that are no longer acceptable—anti-Semitism (when Roger asks if the company has ever hired any Jews, Don responds, “Not on my watch”), racism (in response to the violence provoked by the civil rights movement, Betty suggests that “maybe it’s not the right time”), and, of course, sexism, which I talk about at length later. These moments of alterity work on the viewer in a variety of ways. Most importantly, they tend to work against immersion in the narrative. Instead, by shocking or outraging—or even titillating—the viewer, they break the narrative illusion, forcing him or her to consider the difference between now and then. A self-consciousness is awakened here. At first, the viewer is led to critique and to a kind of smug knowingness and superiority: They let their children do that? But the fact that the viewer is positioned in other ways and at other moments to like these characters complicates the reception and the analysis required to make sense of the events. Instead of simply looking down on these characters, the viewer is compelled to look more closely at, say, the sexism and to assess to what extent it is actually gone, as opposed to gone from view. As creator Matt Weiner describes, “There are a lot of things you can’t talk about now that you can talk about in this world. . . . You can look at these men and say, my God, how sexist they are, how racist they are, how anti-Semitic they are. And the darker point is that we haven’t changed that much. We’re just better at being polite.”48 The dialectic emerges once and again between difference and sameness, the oscillation that enables a distinctly historical consciousness. It is worth noting that style here, even the style of the 1960s, does not necessarily cut one way. In Good Night and Good Luck, for instance, the same stylistic gesture that marks a break with the past offers the past as a model for the present. In Mad Men, the past that is marked as different through style is scrutinized. Once marked as different from the present, the past can be mobilized in a range of ways and toward a range of ends—even within a single show, as is the case with Mad Men.

This oscillation is literally orchestrated on the level of mise-en-scène. Much has been made of the show’s distinctive style, but one cannot talk about style apart from mise-en-scène—ranging from clothing and body type to furniture, décor, and setting—which is the mechanism through which the style is expressed. Because form is instrumental in the production of meaning, we must attend to the role such details play in the construction of specifically historical meanings. Style, which is formal and atmospheric, can provoke a range of affective responses from nostalgia to disgust and thus can be usefully explored to get a clearer sense of how viewers are being positioned to understand the historical period represented. It is important to state the obvious: there is something seductive about the show’s style—the sleekness, the emphasis on clean lines and modern design in the office—even the clothing and hairstyles are appealing. One might even posit that the show’s depiction of the period is stylized, that it calls attention to itself and thereby calls attention to the distinctness of the historical moment represented. Instead of flattening time, it visually conjures a different time. The show, in other words, visually, aurally, and even sensually evokes a distinct historical moment, and in asking us to look critically at it even as we are seduced by it, it provokes a distinctly historical consciousness. In an essay on Mad Men, Jeremy Butler posits that “visual style has been called upon to signify the historical.”49 Indeed, Weiner and his production crew take great pride in their re-creation of an era through stylistic details and period objects. As Amy Wells, the set decorator explains, “Authenticity is everything. It’s really important to us that it looks like they’re really there at that place and that time.”⁵⁰ Butler draws on C. S. Tashiro’s claim that “the most consistent means to achieve a convincing image of history is through the saturated frame” to argue that the mise-en-scène “showcases historical specificity and urges us to engage with it,” which it does by “saturat[ing] its small-scale frames with ‘exotic apprehensible details.’” The painstakingly chosen props for Mad Men, from clothing to food packages, Butler writes, “urge us to acquiesce to its signification of the past. . . . 1960 speaks to us through these details. They construct a picture of domesticity, work and leisure at that time.”51 This fidelity to chronologically accurate detail is the logic that undergirds historical reenactment more broadly, as evidenced by historic sites such as colonial Williamsburg or Plymouth Plantation. The assumption underlying both the show’s mise-en-scène and these historic sites is that authentic historical objects, or props, transport the modern viewer into the past. But the inverse is also true: those objects, the dated clothing and hairstyles, construct a world that looks different, and thus they also have the effect of reminding viewers that the past was different. It is in part through style that our relationship to the past is managed.

In a long-form drama, the mise-en-scène has the capacity to work in a range of ways, some of which are complicated and even contradictory. The sense of duration, which is different from short-form drama such as a movie, which lasts only two hours, enables the construction of a place that feels enduring, to which one returns again and again across the span of several years. It also offers the viewers a long view on the characters. It is not possible to assess, for example, who is “good” or “bad,” whom we are meant to like or dislike, which is as true of historical figures as it is of any people past or present. Don, Betty, and Peggy have admirable characteristics alongside their flaws. By means of the long-form drama, we see their strengths and weaknesses, their mistakes and accomplishments, and how they change over time, not always for the better. There is no single point of view or perspective from which the events are seen—at some moments Don’s adultery seems glamorous, exciting, all in good fun, but at other moments when we are granted access to the sorrow of the women around him and even to his own regret, it seems tragic and pathetic. The series does not offer a linear trajectory from fallen to redeemed or ignorant to enlightened. In fact, it is not teleological even in the way that written history is, all minor events leading toward some culminating event or situation. The characters are neither monolithic nor internally coherent. At times, we are disgusted by them. At others, we see them living with the mistakes they have made, and through empathy we can come to understand the structural constraints placed upon them.

If we are to consider in a more concrete sense the particular knowledge about this historical milieu produced by the show, perhaps the most obvious and complex has to do with gender and gender roles. Weiner has said that his depictions of women and “women’s condition” were inspired by the groundbreaking work of Betty Friedan and Helen Gurley Brown.52 Perhaps as a result, Mad Men shows not only women’s limited possibilities but also the conflicted positions in which they find themselves. The mise-en-scène is effective in highlighting the different sides of a character; this is quite clear in the case of Betty, who at times is represented as a naive little girl, in shorts or baby-doll pajamas, and at other times as a desexualized, depressed housewife in her housecoat. It makes visible the different roles she is forced to inhabit by the social world in which she lives. At times, she seems pathetic and vapid, but at others we feel empathy for her as her circumstances reveal the kinds of constraints and limitations placed on wives and mothers in the early 1960s, their disempowered positions within the family economy. It is in grappling with these contradictory, conflicting images—images that confront us through the use of costume, makeup, and so forth—that we are forced to come to a more complex understanding of not only how gender ideologies were played out differently in different contexts but also how women were subject to conflicting demands.

The show’s depiction of women is also inevitably informed by the exploits of the handsome protagonist Don Draper, who, we learn in the very first episode of the series, is a philanderer. In much the same way that this long-form drama forces us to see Betty Draper occupying a range of roles, Don’s treatment of women elicits a range of responses in us. He exudes charm and sexiness, and it is with a kind of voyeurism and perhaps even antifeminism that we watch him seduce and be seduced by myriad women over the course of the shows seven seasons. But that pleasure is undercut by the show’s feminist consciousness, its ability to bring into focus the plight of the women injured by such actions. In one scene, Betty’s friend Francine comes over, extremely distressed: “I’m so stupid, so damn stupid,” she tells Betty. She inadvertently got her hands on the phone bill and, because it was so high, took a closer look. She found dozens of long-distance calls to Manhattan and surmised that her husband was having an affair: “I’m so stupid, two nights a week at the Waldorf. . . . Damn it, Betty, I know everything.” Betty is unsure what to say, prompting Francine to explain why she came over: “I thought you’d know what to do.” When Betty says, “Me? Why?” the audience cannot help but feel sorry for her because we know that she is in exactly the same situation as Francine, who ends the conversation by saying quite honestly, “I’m so embarrassed.” Indeed, this exchange becomes the foundation for Betty’s doubts and insecurity about her own marriage, compelling her to pick up and pocket the Draper phone bill. When Don returns that evening, he finds Betty seated at the kitchen table in a puffy white bathrobe in semidarkness. She’s smoking and drinking wine, and her back is to the camera. “I had a terrible day, sit with me,” she says, and he does, tentatively. She describes the conversation with Francine and says, “She’s in pieces, Don. I didn’t know what to say to her.” Don says, “I’m surprised she told you.” She looks directly into his eyes and says, “How could someone do that to the person they love? That they have children with? Doesn’t this all mean anything?” In this moment, seated in their dark kitchen, Betty makes visible and palpable the cost of Don’s infidelity and even more the charade of domestic bliss. She gives voice to the discontent many women would have felt. All Don can think to say is, “Who knows why people do what they do?” In other words, it is in conversation with her female friends that a kind of consciousness is born, a shared discontent, the likes of which Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique. Furthermore, as the show forces us to move back and forth from enjoying Don’s sexual escapades to being critical of them and then to enjoying them again, it forces us to think critically about the attitudes toward women; it gives us access to a moment when conflicting ideologies about gender roles existed uncomfortably side by side.

Part of what the show makes visible is how infantilized many of these married women are. And as I suggested earlier, much of this is achieved on the level of mise-en-scène. For the most part, Betty literally has nothing to do. She is trapped in the house. She is denied access to the true state of affairs, pun intended. She neither keeps house nor works. His locked desk epitomizes her alienation from her husband and from knowledge of who he really is. In one scene, a desperate Betty tries to break into the desk with a screwdriver. Shortly after her suspicions about Don’s affairs have been raised, she is in a complete funk. When her friend drops by to borrow a dress for a party, the woman holds several up to herself as she looks in the mirror: “It doesn’t matter, I’m invisible,” she says. Like Betty, she is seeing a psychiatrist, and she tells Betty, “I got my diagnosis the other day—I’m bored.” The show is able to give texture and voice to this discontent, to the deep sadness, emptiness, and purposelessness that many women in their socioeconomic milieu felt at that time. Betty confides in one of the other mothers that “sometimes I feel like I’ll float away if Don isn’t holding me down.” These women’s lives are defined and circumscribed by their husbands, and yet their husbands are both literally and figuratively elsewhere. In popular culture and official discourse, the suburban home was touted as the site of familial bliss: as Elaine Tyler May describes, “The sexually charged, child-centered family took its place at the center of the postwar American dream. The most tangible symbol of that dream was the suburban home—the locale of the good life, the evidence of democratic abundance.”53 Mad Men, however, reveals the fundamental flaws in that picture. And unlike in short-form drama, the discontent here does not get wrapped up and resolved.

The show is also interested in re-creating the parameters within which women would have operated at work and in showing what was and was not possible for them given those constraints. Aside from the rampant sexism, catcalling, lewd comments, and inappropriate touching that the show suggests were endemic to office life, Mad Men wants to make visible both the possibilities open to ambitious women and the price they had to pay. Peggy Olson, for example, who at the start of the series is brought in as Don Draper’s secretary, must distinguish herself from the other women similarly employed. Instead of wearing form-fitting, leg- and cleavage-revealing clothing, she opts for more serious and conservative attire. In fact, when Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), one of the junior executives, first meets her, he asks if she is Amish in a way meant to register his critique. In other words, the mise-en-scène—costuming and hairstyle in particular—desexualizes Peggy. Although she does have some relationships with men, they are largely unsuccessful, suggesting that work and love/marriage are mutually exclusive for women. Because of a one-night stand with Pete Campbell, Peggy becomes pregnant but does not know it until she goes into labor. She does not even consider keeping the baby, which would have been an obstacle to her career. This either–or scenario appears later in the series, when Don’s second wife, Megan, who was once his secretary, aspires to an acting career. Their marriage becomes complicated when she has her own separate world while working on a soap opera. Historians such as Elaine Tyler May and Stephanie Coontz have written about the bind in which many women in the 1950s and 1960s found themselves, but to see it dramatized this way calls attention to the costs for women of having ambition and makes it visible to a different and significantly larger audience.

FIGURE 2.5   Peggy Olson and Ken Cosgrove auditioning voice girls. From Mad Men.

In a particularly poignant scene, Peggy and Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton), another of the junior executives, are testing “voice girls” for a radio advertising spot. Peggy and Ken watch the “girls” through a one-way mirror—they can see and hear the girls, but the girls cannot see or hear them unless spoken to by electronic means. The fact that Peggy and Ken are on one side of the glass and the “girls” are on the other seems to suggest that Peggy and Ken share rank. Of the voice girls being considered, Peggy has a favorite, and Ken concedes to her choice, but when they ask the girl to run the lines, neither is pleased with the results. Peggy tells the girl that she needs more confidence. First, Peggy offers, “Try to imagine you’re you, Annie, and you have everything. You’re beautiful, you’re slim, you’re the beloved prize of a handsome man,” which does not achieve the desired result. She turns to Ken for help: “Make her feel beautiful. You know, the confidence that comes with beauty.” But Ken turns to her and says, “Peg, a woman who looks like that will never sound confident because she never is confident.” As Peggy looks at the girl, her own reflection on the glass is superimposed beside the girl, pairing them (see figure 2.5). Whereas the scene opened with Peggy as quite literally separated from the voice girls, in a position of social power above them, they are now depicted side by side, mirror images of one another. The girl tries a few more times and then says, “I don’t know that I understand.” With each attempt, her voice sounds less and less confident. Peggy says coldly, “This isn’t working out—we have to let you go,” and the girl leaves in tears. This brief episode highlights the precarious nature of a woman’s position in the workplace: she has to be able to feign confidence that she neither possesses nor is accorded. This is as true for Peggy as it is for Annie. Peggy occupies an uncomfortable position: neither one of the boys nor one of the girls.

Although the depictions of women in the show only some of the time provoke visceral, affective responses—either discomfort at their naïveté or anger at the way they are treated by men—the depictions of racism and racial prejudice almost always occur as jarring and disorienting affective encounters. What these encounters ultimately make visible, though, as Allison Perlman has pointed out, is a corrective to the dominant understanding of the civil rights movement in the North. She argues, “Set in the early 1960s, Mad Men certainly is not the first popular text to address racism during the Civil Rights era and to position shifting race relations as an integral part of how we remember the 1960s. Yet unlike other narratives, Mad Men finds racial discrimination in the modern offices of a New York advertising agency and the posh suburban homes of its executives rather than in the brutal climate of the Jim Crow south.” The show, in other words, works against the “triumphalist narrative of racial progress in which racism, embodied by redneck southerners, is tamped out and American ideals of equality and justice are affirmed and strengthened.”54 Furthermore, the presence of African American characters on the periphery—as maids, bellhops, and busboys—indicates the prevalence of subtle and yet clearly structural racism and racial hierarchies within supposedly sophisticated northern urban culture. Perlman also points out the way that the civil rights movement plotline in season 3 gives the lie to well-worn depictions of the white, northern, civil rights freedom rider as principled, acting on the basis of deep-seated moral integrity. Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis), one of the junior executives, has an African American girlfriend, Sheila White (Donielle Artese), whose presence it seems is meant to enhance his “bohemian credentials.”⁵⁵ He introduces her around and uses the occasion to tell Hollis (La Monde Byrd), the African American elevator man who in most of the series is largely ignored, to call him “Paul” instead of “Mr. Kinsey”: “Hello, Mr. Kinsey,” Hollis says. “Paul,” he corrects him, making a show of this informality to impress both the girlfriend and the others. It is also in this scene that Paul tells Sheila that a business trip to California has come up, and he will not be able to accompany her to the South to register voters for the fall election. As Perlman describes, Paul “lacks the moral sensibility, [the] personal integrity of commitment to civic equality. . . . [His] investment in African Americans has more to do with his own search for meaning and style than [with] a commitment to the rights and lives of actual black people.”56 He ultimately does accompany her, but only after Don removes him from the team going to California. In other words, Paul’s relationship to civil rights activism is purely opportunistic.

Moments of racism—both subtle and blatant—have a powerful affective charge. They cause the audience to cringe because they are embarrassing and awkward. In a different episode, Carla, the Draper’s black housekeeper, is listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on the radio following the murder of four black girls in Alabama. Betty walks in, and Carla changes the station:

BETTY: You can leave it on your station. I don’t mind.

CARLA: It’s all right.

BETTY: What was that?

CARLA: The funeral for the little girls in Birmingham.

BETTY: Hmm. It’s so horrifying. [The two women are standing on opposite sides of the table, putting things on it] Are you okay? Do you need a day off?

CARLA: No, I’m fine. Thank you.

BETTY: I hate to say this, but it’s really made me wonder about civil rights. Maybe it’s not supposed to happen right now.

CARLA: [Says nothing.]

For Betty, the issue of civil rights is not a matter of life or death or even of equality, and it certainly is not pressing. To reconcile our empathy for her as a disempowered woman at this moment with our critique of her racism requires intellectual work, which ultimately produces historical insights about the relationships between differently marginalized groups. In another scene, Betty is seated at the table with her children while Carla serves them dinner. As Carla carries over plates, Bobby complains about the salad. Betty jumps in and says, “Watch your tone, young man.” We assume his offense was being rude to Carla, but instead Betty explains, “Carla works for me, not you.” In other words, Bobby’s infraction here is not a lack of respect for Carla but failure to understand the power hierarchy or chain of command in the household. These moments of encounter with racial prejudice snap the viewer out of the narrative and compel cognitive processing. Betty’s lack of concern about or investment in civil rights resonates with the majority of the characters’ responses in the series. As Perlman has noted, instead of offering viewers access to the iconic images of the civil rights movement, the series “trouble[s] the way we have imagined radio and television broadcasts of [civil rights] to have mobilized northern white support, igniting the moral outrage of their audiences.”57 The primary characters seem unaffected by the civil rights movement and treat it as something that is largely relevant elsewhere.

For the most part, any contact and engagement that the white characters do have with African Americans are meant to enhance their own personal agenda; this self-interested attitude toward racial equality is particularly clear in the opening scene of the series. The very first face on screen in the pilot episode belongs to an African American man. The camera does not rest on this face or follow it but remains impassive as the man moves across the screen. Next we see Don Draper from behind, writing on a cocktail napkin in a bar. A busboy, also African American, carries over Don’s drink. Don asks him for a light, and the busboy lights his cigarette. Don says, “Old Gold man, huh?” The busboy looks him in the eye. Don says, “Lucky Strike here. Can I ask you a question? Why do you smoke Old Gold?” Before the man can respond, his white boss comes over and says, “I’m sorry, sir, is Sam here bothering you? He can be a little chatty.” Within moments of the series’ commencement, we encounter racial prejudice in a visceral way as the boss lays bare the assumption that a white businessman might be made uncomfortable by the lingering presence of an African American waiter. Don, however, challenges that assumption, telling the boss, “No, we’re actually just having a conversation—is that okay?” And then, once the boss leaves, to the busboy, “So you obviously need to relax after working here all night.” The busboy agrees. While this scene sets us up to see Don’s humanity, his lack of racism, it shows us something else as well. His interest in the busboy and his cigarette preferences are not simply unmotivated chat, but market research. He is using this exchange to come up with an ad campaign for Lucky Strike:

DON: But what is it? Low tar? Those new filters? I mean why Old Gold?

BUSBOY: They gave ’em to us in the service. A carton a week for free.

DON: So you’re used to them. Is that it?

BUSBOY: Yeah, they’re a habit.

DON: I could never get you to smoke another kind? Say, my Luckies?

BUSBOY: I love my Old Gold.

DON: Let’s just say tomorrow a tobacco weevil comes and eats every last Old Gold on the planet.

BUSBOY: That’s a sad story.

DON: Yes, it’s a tragedy. Would you just stop smoking?

BUSBOY: I’m pretty sure I’d find something. I love smoking.

DON: “I love smoking.” That’s very good.

Like Paul, Don, in the guise of being above racial prejudice, exploits his interaction with an African American for his own gain. These scenes reveal a particular self-interested investment in African Americans, which was also visible on a larger scale in Cold War racial attitudes. Indeed, as historian Mary Dudziak has argued, “At a time when the United States hoped to reshape the postwar world in its own image, the international attention given to racial segregation was troublesome and embarrassing. . . . The need to address international criticism gave the federal government an incentive to promote social change at home.” The U.S. government realized that in order to combat the Soviets and communism, social change at home was going to be necessary. Dudziak describes this change as no less than an attempt to “fight[] the cold war with Civil Rights reform.”58

But Mad Men also offers a microhistory of the role of advertising as a crucial and yet underrepresented front of the Cold War. Historians have established the fact that the 1950s marked a new kind of consumerism in America.⁵⁹ As May has argued, “Consumerism in the postwar years went far beyond the mere purchases of goods and services. It included important cultural values, demonstrated success and social mobility, and defined lifestyles. It also provided the most vivid symbol of the American way of life: the affluent suburban home. . . . It is also evident, however, that along with the ideology of sexual containment, postwar domestic consumerism required conformity to strict gender assumptions that were fraught with potential tensions and frustrations.”60 As the famous Nixon–Kruschev “Kitchen Debate” made visible, consumption as a capitalist practice was hailed as a foil to communism. Americans could take solace in the fact that their individual acts of consumption were part of the larger ideological battle with the Soviet Union.

This idea of advertising as part of the Cold War struggle is borne out in several of the advertising campaigns Sterling Cooper Draper undertakes, but most notably in its work for Hilton. The company’s CEO, Conrad Hilton, routinely phones Don in the middle of the night to discuss ideas. In one such call, Hilton says, “It sounds like pride, but I want Hiltons all over the world, like missions. I want a Hilton on the moon, that’s where we’re headed. . . . America is wherever we look, wherever we’re going to be.” The rhetoric taken up by ad men, in other words, is of a piece with the Cold War rhetoric about the importance of consumption and the superiority of the United States to the Soviet Union. Hilton’s emphasis on the moon speaks directly to this Cold War struggle and the role of capitalism when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a “moon race,” each side intent on getting there first. On another evening, Hilton summons Don to his room:

HILTON: It’s my purpose in life to bring America to the world, whether they like it or not. You know, we are a force of good, Don, because we have God. Communists don’t. It’s their most important belief. Did you know that?

DON: I’m not an expert.

HILTON: Generosity, the Marshall Plan, you remember that? Everyone who saw our ways wanted to be us.

DON: I’m glad you’re telling me this.

HILTON: After all those things we threw at Khrushchev, you know what made him fall apart? He couldn’t get into Disneyland.

In other words, Hilton’s capitalist mission is inseparable from America’s political-imperial mission to defeat the Communists and the Soviet Union. Advertising becomes the language in which these imperial ambitions—and their attendant ethnocentrism—are voiced, uniting the assertions of the power of capitalism and an imperial sense of American superiority. Don’s advertising pitch to Hilton betrays these intertwined sentiments:

How to lure the American traveler abroad? Now there’s one word that raises the thrill of international travel with the comfort of home . . . Hilton.

How do you say “ice water” in Italian? . . . Hilton.

How do you say “fresh towels” in Farsi? . . . Hilton.

How do you say “hamburger” in Japanese? . . . Hilton.

Hilton, it’s the same in every language.

Hilton is displeased, however, for although the campaign advances U.S. cultural imperialism, it does not engage directly enough with the Cold War. He asks Don, “But what about the moon? There’s nothing about the moon. I said I wanted Hilton on the moon. I couldn’t have been more clear about it.”

What Mad Men offers is a kind of decentered history, an interpretation of what life might have looked and felt like for a particular group of people who were not directly involved in the major events of the day but who nevertheless lived in the shadows cast by those events. The show, I think, reveals the messiness of history and offers a critique of the narrative of progress. The road does not run from failure to success or from an unethical America to a suddenly moral America. The depiction of the 1960s is not teleological. The serial format offers the possibility of representing the complexity of the journey. Being put in a position to feel compassion for a character who is racist or sexist can be uncomfortable in a way that compels one to look at the past in a more complicated way—not in terms of how far we have come, how much better we are now, but rather with how easy it was for them to feel the way they did, which we otherwise might not understand. We are made to feel uncomfortable as we are put in a position to have insight into how people could have believed things that we see as morally reprehensible. Again, the experience here cannot be reduced to identification. We are not simply positioned to identify with the characters here—instead, our proximity to them offers us insight into their motivations and forces us to confront difficult questions of racial and gender inequality. That we can be put in a position to understand and have compassion for those characters whose beliefs on the surface seem so different from our own compels us to interrogate and think critically about our own beliefs.

ROME

Like Mad Men and Deadwood, HBO’s series Rome (2005–2007) attempts to exploit the distinctive attributes of the serial format to depict social history. Its strength is its representation of everyday life in ancient Rome, which reflects an awareness of historical scholarship. Like a social history experiment, political, economic, and social conditions or parameters are set by both the narrative and the mise-en-scène, and characters are then placed within those constraints—their actions revealing both the possibilities and limitations, what is thinkable and not thinkable given the constraints of the historical moment. The series opens with Julius Caesar and his army defeating the Gauls in 52 B.C. and then traces the political machinations that ensue, in particular the struggle between Caesar and Pompey for Rome; season 1 ends with the infamous death of Caesar. Although few academic historians have seriously engaged the HBO series, those who have assessed the show’s historical accuracy have suggested that as far as this particular plot line goes, the depiction is by and large borne out by the sources. Paul Harvey Jr., for example, writes:

These opening episodes of the series get the politics just about right: a faction of senators prod an overly optimistic Pompey into a confrontation with Caesar. That same faction of senators severely over-estimates Pompey’s military abilities and disastrously undervalues Caesar’s political shrewdness, ruthlessness, and speed. The result (as we all know) was that Pompey and a group of senators evacuated Rome while Caesar crossed the Rubicon—not invading Italy, mind you, as Caesar reminded his readers in the opening sections of his Civil War, but coming to the aid of the Roman people, whose tribunes that same faction had foolishly put to flight. The portrayal of several significant debates in the Senate (presented here, manifestly, on the model of the House of Commons) and of conversations among political potentates are plausible: issues of Caesar’s prestige and military record are set out well against vague expectations of what Pompey thought he could accomplish.61

However, the series is equally, if not more invested in some of the lesser-known figures portrayed, both among the elite and the plebeians. The strategy of the series is to tack back and forth between scenes featuring these well-known and often-depicted historical figures such as Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, on the one hand, and the lives and experiences of two little-known senior centurions from the Thirteenth Legion of Caesar’s army, on the other: Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. Though Vorenus and Pullo are actual historical figures who appear in the fifth book of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War, very little is known about them. And yet their friendship and the way in which historical events shape their daily lives becomes, in the words of New York Times TV reviewer Alessandra Stanley, “the bright spot of ‘Rome.’”⁶²

Although the depiction of well-documented historical events lends credibility to the subplots, the real work of the show and the site of its historical innovation have to do with the subplots themselves. Because of the nature of the historical records that survive from antiquity—written primarily by elites and focusing on great men—the contours of daily life for plebeians and ordinary Romans is less well known. Academic historians and archaeologists have learned a great deal about daily life, but that knowledge has not for the most part entered the public archive of representation. Part of this series’ historical work, then, is to construct a plausible account of what life might have been like. This is not so much an “alternate history” as a social history experiment enabled by the long-form, serial format, which affords the time necessary to construct the parallel though intersecting story lines in all of their complexity.⁶³ Jonathan Stamp, historical consultant for the show, is eager to challenge the popular myths that persist about ancient Rome and to paint a vivid—and visceral—picture of daily life, depicting in an unflinching way a crucifixion, brain surgery, death during childbirth, and other gruesome scenarios. Indeed, as a bonus included in the season 1 DVD box set, one can opt to turn on “All Roads Lead to Rome,” in which captions appear on the screen as the episodes play, detailing historical facts about daily life in Rome that pertain to the depicted scene, such as “Lucius Vorenus was a centurion in charge of roughly 80 infantrymen called Legionaires” or “The insulae, in which the majority of Rome’s population lived, were rented apartment buildings. In the poorest buildings, rent was payable by the day. Press enter to learn more about the insulae.”64 Although this commentary is available only on the DVD and must be turned on by the viewer, its existence suggests that the show takes historical interpretation seriously and that the details of daily life depicted are supported by the existing sources; these captions are meant to function as footnotes of sorts.

The series seeks in part to depict how everyday Romans lived and, in particular, how gender and racial ideologies were manifested in domestic and inter personal relationships. In popular consciousness, ancient Rome exists as a white city, both racially and architecturally. The series, however, paints Rome in bright colors. Whereas other popular depictions have emphasized democracy on the one hand and gladiator violence on the other, this one focuses on evoking the period. It also depicts the urban grime and filth; it was, after all, as Stamp’s commentary suggests, a city with a “population . . . close to a million at this time.” The streets are crowded with people selling wares, carrying goods for trade, and so on. The soundtrack emphasizes urban noisiness, leading one character to complain to another, “What a dreadful noise plebs make when they’re happy.”⁶⁵ Rather than depict Romans as “white,” though most of the main characters are, street scenes and side plots are replete with foreigners who are active traders in Rome and foreign slaves of varied races, attesting to the multicultural character of Rome. In one scene, Vorenus encounters some spice traders from India; Africans, too, are conspicuously present in the street scenes and in the Vorenus and Pullo subplots, which reflects the fact that Carthage in North Africa was one of Rome’s provinces.

The arguments that I have made about Deadwood and Mad Men hinge on what I describe as these shows’ complex mode of address, forcing viewers to oscillate between a visceral engagement with the story and an experience, also often visceral, of being alienated or held out by it. This dynamic exists in Rome only in a limited way, and yet the subplot about Vorenus and Pullo and their personal and professional lives—precisely because it is unfamiliar—has the potential to foster historical consciousness. If one of the dangers of history on film or television is that it flattens out the differences between past and present, part of what this engagement with social history attempts is a defamiliarization. The relationship that develops between Vorenus and Pullo draws us in, in part, because it is recognizable in Deleuze’s sense and therefore does not force us to think. Yet other aspects of daily life, in particular the Romans’ polytheism, which the show highlights, call attention to the vast differences between the characters’ beliefs and those of most contemporary viewers. Blood rituals—either with blood from an animal or with one’s own blood—are common occurrences and are offered in preparation for an upcoming event or to ward off negative outcomes. In one scene, Servilia, Caesar’s spurned lover, curses him. We see her carving a figure into lead with a stylus, the pressure of her hand registering her anger. She intones, “Gods of the inferno, I offer to you his limbs, his head, his mouth, his breath, his speech, his hands, his liver, his heart, his stomach. Gods of the inferno, let me see him suffer deeply, and I will rejoice and sacrifice to you.”

In an essay entitled “Accidental History,” Christopher Lockett emphasizes the way Rome serves as a countervailing force to great-man history, depicting a world in which ordinary people’s lives bump up against the lives of leaders and heroes. The show reminds us that history occurs by accident and happenstance, directed as much by everyday people’s small actions as by leaders’ conscious decisions.66 Yet I want to make a different claim about the historical knowledge produced by Rome. By suggesting that the show functions like a social history experiment, I am suggesting that its careful reconstruction of the socioeconomic, cultural, and political conditions of ancient Roman life serves as a sort of laboratory into which the show’s creators place largely invented characters such as Pullo and Vorenus. By subjecting these characters to the conditions and value systems under which Roman soldiers lived, the show offers up a plausible account of how people experienced their world and related to one another at the time. Lockett jokes that Pullo and Vorenus are reminiscent of Forrest Gump, popping up all over the place at important historic events. But, unlike Gump, who was not really at those events, Pullo and Vorenus, as documented members of Caesar’s army, could plausibly have been at the events depicted. And this is where the show’s innovation lies: in its use of the conditional to explore the contours of a historically specific moment.

In part, the Vorenus and Pullo subplot functions as a way to explore the effects of war on social and familial relations, on the relations between husbands and wives and parents and children. These relations as they are played out in the show are shaped by what is known about Roman laws pertaining to adultery and patriarchal authority. We learn early on that, unlike the unmarried Pullo, Vorenus has remained faithful to his wife, Niobe, over the course of the seven years and 140 days that he has been away fighting. She, however, assuming he was dead, engaged in a sexual liaison with her sister’s husband and is cradling the child born of that union when Vorenus returns home. He sees her first inside their upper-level apartment home, its simple, dark, and noisy interior quite unlike the lavish patrician houses. Shocked, she says, “You’re alive.” Unsettled by the baby, he asks accusatorily, “What child is that?” “He’s your grandson,” she replies, thinking on her feet. “Speak sense, whore,” he barks. “Son of your daughter . . . his name is Lucius,” she explains. This rocky reunion concludes with her allowing that she’s a “bit surprised to be called a whore.” The daughters, horrified by what they have seen, are afraid of him. This scene is followed by one of a slave market. Juxtaposing the scenes of slaves with the scenes of Vorenus and his daughters asks viewers to make a connection between women and slaves in this patriarchal society.

Laws, including those forbidding adultery, had palpable effects on the social world, and the series attempts to make visible the ways they structure modes of feeling and engagement. We see Niobe sending her lover away, telling him that she made a vow. Later Pullo overhears Niobe telling her brother-in-law that she loves her husband, and yet he suspects that there was something between them. After seeing Niobe’s sister and brother-in-law fighting, his suspicions deepen, and he confides in Octavian, Caesar’s nephew, whom he is training. To protect Vorenus, Pullo and Octavian track down the brother-in-law and begin an interrogation: “Tell us what’s between you and Niobe.” Octavian and Pullo begin to torture him. In obvious ways, these plot lines are in the tradition of the soap opera, yet what is different is that the actions that occur are structured by the “rules” governing the social world, and those rules in this case are historically specific. As the drama unfolds, the viewer is forced to confront, often viscerally on the level of affect, the legitimate, legal violence that was part of everyday life in Rome. This experience complicates commonly held views about the lofty Roman republic.

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Long-form serialized drama, in the form of historically conscious drama on the cable networks, opens up some potentially productive avenues for the production of historical knowledge. Their format enables them to represent change over time. They are inherently less focused on closure and thus more able to explore the complexity and contradictions within a given situation; they are less teleological than academic history. That they do not have to adhere to network television’s guidelines regarding profanity, violence, or sexuality affords them greater license to shock or provoke viewers in a visceral, affective way that ultimately compels analytical processing and meaning making. Because for the most part they are more interested in how people lived at a specific, clearly drawn historical moment than in re-creating the important historical events of the period, it makes sense to treat them as social history experiments that render visible the contours of life for everyday people as they were shaped or circumscribed by historical parameters and conditions. I have tried to elucidate these shows’ complex mode of address (visual, aural, even tactile)—which is more clearly the case in Deadwood and Mad Men than in Rome—and how, as with the films I discussed in the previous chapter, their formal structures and conventions move the viewer through affective engagement from a position of proximity to the story and its characters to one of alienation from them, the effect of which is to motivate historical thinking. By alternating over the course of an episode or several episodes from the experience of proximity to characters and their needs, problems, and desires to a position of distance from them, provoked by jarring moments of difference from the present or by feelings of disgust, the viewer is compelled to come to terms with those differences. It is in this oscillation—especially in those moments of being brought into intimate contact with racism or being alienated by the language in Deadwood, for example—that one is snapped out of the narrative and made to think critically about how those ideas about race were conditioned by the historical, social, and economic parameters under which those characters lived or even about how inaccessible the past is in some fundamental way. We are left to process intellectually the visceral reactions that wake us up, that make us uncomfortable. And it is in precisely these moments of being forced out of the narrative that something like Collingwood’s historical thinking can take place. I use these shows not because they are the only or the best examples of the historically conscious drama, but rather because they make visible a particular audiovisual methodology for the production of historical knowledge and illustrate how such a methodology can provoke something like historical consciousness in the viewer.