Mad Men, “Mad Masters,” and Mimesis

The irony stems from the fact that one primary meaning of authentic has to do with being the real thing, being in reality just what you are in appearance as opposed to being a mere copy or a fake. Needless to say, in the world of television drama nothing is authentic because everything is simulated or faked. At its best, television is just a copy of real life or, to use a philosophical and literary term of art derived from the Greek word for imitation, it’s a case of artistic mimesis. Instead of praising Mad Men for its authenticity, maybe we should praise it for its extraordinarily accurate and beguiling mimesis of the world it depicts.

Authenticity and mimesis are important terms to many philosophers, not just because they’re part of the vocabulary we use to describe artistic creations like quality television shows, but also because they’re relevant to our assessment of what makes a worthwhile human life and our diagnosis of some of the difficulties we all face in trying to live well. But these two concerns—the creation of art and the conduct of life, poiesis and praxis in Greek—aren’t entirely unrelated, at least not in the mind of Plato (428-348 BCE), the ancient Greek philosopher who over two millennia ago began a discussion about truth, goodness, beauty, and, yes, even popular entertainment that continues to this day.

One of the first and most penetrating critics of popular culture, Plato was none too happy with the popular entertainment of his day: the epic Homeric poems that were recited by professional rhapsodes and the tragedies that were performed on the stage as part of an annual festival held in honor of Dionysus. It wasn’t that he thought there was necessarily anything shabby about them from an artistic standpoint. To the contrary, he thought that many of them had achieved a degree of perfection in their artistic mimesis that was downright spellbinding—and that’s what he thought was the problem. To put it perhaps a little too simply, Plato feared that the very mimetic perfection of the emotionally riveting dramas to which audiences of his day were drawn impaired the audience’s ability to distinguish between reality and theatrical illusion.

Now our initial reaction to this claim is probably to dismiss it as patently ridiculous. After all, we may reel from the intensity and violence of the scene from “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.” (episode 313) in which a drunken Don Draper awakens his wife Betty in the middle of the night, yanks her out of bed by her pajama blouse, and snarls “You’re a whore” in her frightened but defiant face. But even as we ’re riveted to our seats, our stomachs knotted with Betty’s fear and our jaws tight with Don’s anger, we know—intellectually at least—that we’re watching two very good actors playing a scene and that nothing bad is really going to happen to January Jones or Jon Hamm. We don’t mistake their mimesis for reality. That would be insane and we are, of course, rational beings and not . . . well, not madmen.

Or are we? Plato develops his critique of popular entertainment in the course of his most famous dialogue, the Republic, which recounts a wide-ranging, all-night conversation between the philosopher Socrates (469-399 BCE) and a group of his friends and acquaintances. Early in the dialogue, the retired arms merchant Cephalus, at whose home they are gathered, remarks on how old age has finally secured his release from bondage to the “mad masters” that had held him in thrall for most of his life.¹ Those mad masters are his passions, which in his younger days he experienced as tyrants that took his reason hostage and drove him to do things that he would later regret. He makes it sound as if the force of these upstart passions could sometimes be so uncontrollable that they would mow right over his better judgment like some boorish American John Deere tractor over an elegant British foot.² No surprise, then, that in the calm afforded him by old age he looks back on his days of bondage to his passions as a time of madness.

Think of Pete Campbell and his sad cycle of indiscretion and remorse, first coercing the German au pair in 14C into having sex with him one night while his wife is away and then, only a short time later, begging Trudy not to leave him alone ever again, clearly afraid of what other shameful deeds his “mad masters” are waiting to lure him into doing the next time she’s not there to keep an eye on him.³ In the throes of his booze-fueled lust (and, as always, looking for a way to bolster his fragile self-esteem), Pete does what seems best to his brainless and bloated passions rather than what his reason judges to be really best.

In the Republic, Socrates cites similar cases of passions prevailing over scruples as evidence that the human psyche is a complex and often internally conflicted entity, something we can envision as being like a political community, albeit not necessarily one that’s always ruled by its best members. The best part of us, and the only really sane part, is our rational intellect. In a healthy, stable, and well-integrated personality, the passions always listen to reason. But with an inconstant, emotionally immature guy like Pete, the “mad men”—his powerful but irrational passions—rule the asylum.

Seeing Is Believing

“True enough,” you may be saying, “but what has that got to do with Plato’s beef with the popular entertainment of his and (by implication) our day?” Everything, as it turns out. We noted before that Plato worried that the undeniable power of artistic mimesis would leave audiences unable to distinguish between reality and illusion. Quite sensibly, we objected that we’re rational beings and that only a madman would be unable to tell the difference between television and real life. On that last point, Plato would entirely agree. But he would then remind us that all those gripping emotional dramas to which we turn for entertainment, whether classical Greek tragedies or contemporary television shows like Mad Men, owe their primary appeal not to the way they engage our intellects but to the way they arouse our passions and excite our emotions, those parts of our personalities that Plato believed had the potential to become mad when not governed by reason.

None of this is meant to deny that reflection on Greek tragedy has inspired some brilliant philosophical analyses by geniuses of the rank of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). And, of course, Mad Men and Philosophy, the book you hold in your hands, is evidence of just how thought-provoking tawdry extramarital affairs, dastardly office politics, and wily business intrigues can be when they involve the men and women of Sterling Cooper. But what makes these dramas work artistically, the reason we’re drawn to them in the first place, is the reaction they elicit from that part of our psyches that feels rather than reflects and believes what it sees rather than seeking the reality behind the appearance.

Our passions don’t discriminate between reality and illusion. They respond to carefully crafted mimetic surfaces, such as the feigned fear and anger on the faces of January Jones and Jon Hamm, as if they were the real deal. That’s why despite what we know intellectually about that disturbing scene in the bedroom between Betty and Don—namely, that we ’re watching actors and not an actual couple teetering on the edge of a full-blown violent altercation—we’re still rattled by it. Ontologically (or in reality), there could hardly be a greater gulf than the one between two professional actors playing a scene and an actual married couple swept up in the emotional turmoil of their unraveling relationship. But that’s not a difference we perceive with our eyes; it’s a difference we are able to recognize only by using reason. On the surface, they’re indistinguishable. And our “mad” emotions react only to the surface, the façade, the appearance.

“Sally, Go Watch TV! ”

Now, you may have noticed that we’ve really identified two distinct ways in which the emotional and passionate side of our nature can be considered mad: First, the passions are often so madly insistent on their own gratification that they deafen their ears to the reproaches of reason, at least until they’ve spent all their energy on their foolish or shameful deeds. Only then does someone like Cephalus or Pete Campbell hear the voice of reason loud and clear in the form of remorse. Second, like a madman, the passions not only do a poor job of discriminating what’s genuinely good from its counterfeits, but they also can’t distinguish truth from fantasy, since both feel more or less the same.

Combine these two forms of madness and you have the reason why Plato took such a dim view of the sort of dramas performed back then on the stage and nowadays also on our television screens. But that’s not all. Plato can also teach us the secret of the mad men, not just the mimetic magic through which the actors bring their characters to life, but also the secret of how the advertisers they portray are so successful at getting us to buy Lucky Strike cigarettes, Right Guard deodorant, Secor laxative, Clearasil pimple cream, and Playtex bras—not to mention how they get us to vote for politicians like Richard Nixon.

But first let’s tie up the loose ends of Plato’s case against dramatic mimesis. The problem isn’t just that for the brief time we spend watching Mad Men or a play by Sophocles, reason has relaxed its rule over the rest of the personality and has handed the reins over to the passions. No, Plato believed the problem is that our emotional responses to fictional drama tend to shape how we respond to events in real life, since our passions can’t tell the difference between the two. Laughing at Jimmy Barrett’s insensitive buffoonery, for example, might make us more prone to say cruel things after we turn the television off. Wallowing in self-pity with Pete Campbell or Roger Sterling could make it easier for us later to indulge that same emotion when facing our own misfortunes. And, as Socrates explains in the Republic, the same holds for

sex, and spiritedness, too, and all the desires, pains, and pleasures in the soul that we say follow all our actions . . . For [dramatic mimesis] fosters and waters them that ought to be dried up, and sets them up as rulers in us when they ought to be ruled.⁴

We vicariously experience the emotions of characters on the stage or screen, picking up habits of emotional response that we then more or less unwittingly transfer to real life—a further, but in this case unconscious, mimetic operation.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a concern if we were exposed only to wholesome models. But, as we dedicated viewers of Mad Men know, sensible and sound-minded characters living well-ordered lives just aren’t good dramatic material. They’re certainly not as exciting as lurid tales of shameful or wicked behavior, or even stories of ordinary people who occasionally lose their grip on their emotions due to life’s big and little adversities. Referring to the ubiquitous human tendency to imitate not only the actions of others, but also the desires and emotions on display in their actions, Socrates observes that “imitations, if they are practiced continually from youth onwards, become established as habits and nature, in body and sounds and in thoughts.”⁵ Mimesis is so powerful—and potentially so dangerous—because it operates prior to reason, taking root in us “before [we’re] able to grasp reasonable speech”⁶ and continuing to exert its influence throughout our adult lives underneath the radar of reason.

Admittedly, Plato was making a controversial claim when he ascribed to certain forms of popular entertainment such power to shape and even deform the human soul, but it’s not entirely outlandish to think that there may be some truth to his view. Would it be all that far-fetched to imagine that the sexism displayed by most of the men at Sterling Cooper, as well as Betty Draper’s expectations of married life, may have been significantly influenced by the cinematic depictions of gender roles to which they were exposed in their formative years? And, while pondering that, we might also take a moment to consider what sort of soul-shaping Betty might be unwittingly fostering every time she dispatches her daughter out of the room with the command, “Sally, go watch TV!”⁷

When Plato voiced his concerns about the dangers of popular entertainment, he was probably thinking primarily of its effect on youngsters like Sally and Bobby Draper, as well as on those slightly older but still highly impressionable “spotted masses ” to whom Don Draper wants Peggy to “deliver” Clearasil.⁸ It’s doubtful that he had in mind intelligent, mature, and reflective viewers of the sort who read books like Mad Men and Philosophy. In fact, many critics have thought that Plato didn’t give enough consideration to the more salutary effects that a good drama can have on its audience, such as educating us about our past, offering insights into our present, and shedding new light on perennial features of the human condition. These are some of the things for which we love Mad Men, a show most of us manage to watch on a regular basis without succumbing to the temptation to light up a smoke, toss back a martini, and rush out to commit serial adultery.

Don Draper Knows What Love Looks Like

It was Plato’s great student Aristotle (384-322 BCE) who described how the mimetic effects of drama on the human soul can actually be morally beneficial in some cases. But even Aristotle agreed with Plato that we human beings are mimetic animals who take our cues about how to act and feel from others around us, sometimes deliberately but often without much conscious awareness that we ’re doing so. “Imitating is conatural with human beings from childhood,” wrote Aristotle, “and in this they differ from the [other] animals in that they are the most imitative.”⁹ So when Don Draper declares, “People want to be told what to do so badly that they’ll listen to anyone,” ¹⁰ he’s making a claim that Aristotle would regard as only a slight overstatement. That’s one reason why Aristotle thought it was vital to ensure that people—not just children, but also the general public, whom he, like Don Draper, regarded as highly impressionable and, hence, childlike—have plenty of good role models to imitate.

In order to be virtuous, according to Aristotle, it isn’t enough just to honor your contracts, keep your hand out of the till, and play within the rules. If that were the case, then a stuffy penny-pincher like Lane Pryce could be called virtuous, despite his insufferable snootiness. Just as important as the outwardly virtuous actions are the inward dispositions—the feelings, desires, and emotions—that accompany them, since “goodness consists in feeling delight where one should, and loving and hating aright.”¹¹ In other words, the virtuous person is someone who genuinely loves virtuous deeds, not just someone who performs them grudgingly. And when it comes to instilling emotions like love, the dramatic arts are much better suited to the task than dry rational arguments that have no power to move the heart.

Presenting noble deeds in a way that inspires our enthusiastic admiration—or, as happens more often on Mad Men, base deeds in a way that elicits our derision—is one way that the arts can help to train us in virtue, since, as Aristotle explains, “to acquire the habit of feeling pain or taking delight in an image is something closely allied to feeling pain or taking delight in the actual reality.”¹² The upshot is that once we associate pleasurable feelings with an artistically created image of something, say, a virtuous character trait, we automatically transfer those feelings to the real thing, since, as Plato had already observed, our emotions can’t tell the difference between (to use the language of a Clairol hair color ad)¹³ a real blonde and a fake.

Don Draper understands all too well how to employ this strategy of using images to stir up emotions that we then come to associate with something actual, in his case, a product. Consider, for example, two memorable statements we hear from him on the subject of love. First, speaking to his then mistress Midge Daniels about a photograph he believes reveals her to be in love with her friend Roy: “Every day I make pictures where people appear to be in love. I know what it looks like.”¹⁴ Never mind whether Don is right about Midge and Roy. The important thing is that Don not only believes he knows how to create an image or appearance—a mimesis—of love, but is also tacitly conceding that the appearance is all he needs to elicit whatever response he wants from the viewer. Of course, on an intellectual level most viewers will understand perfectly well that the people who appear to be in love in Don’s pictures are in reality simply models or actors, but, as Plato argued, mimesis bypasses reason and works directly on the passions, feelings, and desires. We see an image that “looks like” love, and even when we know better, our feelings respond as if we were seeing the real thing.

Let’s connect Don’s pronouncement to Midge with something else he says on another occasion to Rachel Menken after she’s confessed that she’s never married because she’s never been in love. “What you call love,” he tells her, “was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”¹⁵ Obviously that’s not strictly true, since the public’s preoccupation with love predates the invention of nylons by several millennia at least. But making some allowance for the fact that even the candor of a consummate mad man like Don will often come wrapped in hyperbole, we can recognize a sense in which what Don tells Rachel might be true. What Rachel calls love—what love “looks like” to her—may be more profoundly shaped by those “pictures” that Don and his cohorts create than by any brush she may have had with the real thing (which Don cynically denies even exists). And, of course, when the mad men place those pictures in the same frame as nylons—or whatever product they’re trying to sell—they hope to get us feeling as excited about their product as we do about love. To the extent that they succeed, Plato and Aristotle help us to understand why.

“All That Is Solid Melts into Air”

Describing the social upheaval created by the unprecedented dynamism of capitalism, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his collaborator Frederick Engels (1820-1895) wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air.”¹⁶ Fans of Mad Men may have a hard time hearing that line without thinking of the opening title sequence of the show, which depicts the silhouette of a man in a black suit (almost certainly Don Draper) stepping into his high-rise corner office and setting down his briefcase as the pictures on the wall, the blinds on the windows, and even his desk and chairs begin to fall not just to the ground but right through the floor. A moment later, the office is gone and the same silhouette that had been standing bolt upright has joined the other items in free fall, his arms outstretched as his body tumbles through the air. It’s as though the unreality of Don’s world has suddenly been revealed. It was never anything more than a beguiling illusion, a fragile construct that dissolves the moment it’s recognized for what it is.

Don plummets helplessly past endless skyscraper walls on which are superimposed advertising images in soft, diaphanous pastels. Many of them are meant to convey an aura of glamour and sex appeal, but there are also wholesome images of family life tossed somewhat incongruently into the mix. All of these images seem to have been designed to induce some feeling or, more precisely, some variation on the feeling of love: romantic love, erotic love, familial love, even perhaps that form of self-love that goes by the name self-esteem. As Don’s body glides past some of the spicier images, it’s hard not to think of the old cliché that Peggy Olson in one of her brasher moments makes the mistake of reciting to Don: “Sex sells.” He corrects her: “Says who? Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this.” Tossing down a pink construction-paper heart, with dried macaroni glued around the edges and the words “I Love You Daddy” scrawled on it, he clarifies, “You are the product. You feeling something. That’s what sells. Not them. Not sex.”¹⁷ Each of the images we see represents some coveted feeling, in the warm and alluring glow of which the mad men seek to bathe their clients’ products. But as these images flutter past like a mobile collage of advertising copy, they become semitransparent to us, both literally and figuratively, and we are able to recognize them as the empty simulacra of real life that they are.

But just as we think that we may be witnessing the final collapse of the world that Don and his fellow mad men have constructed out of captivating images and mimetically induced emotions—and just as we ’re even beginning to wonder whether there’s any reality at all behind the mad men’s crumbling illusions—we’ re greeted with the final image. It begins as a tight shot of Don from behind, in which he initially appears to be still falling, but then the frame widens to reveal him sitting in a relaxed pose, his outstretched arm draped over the back of a couch, cigarette in hand. There he is projecting his trademark air of confidence—or, if not real confidence, then something that looks a lot like it. And in the mad world of the mad men world, that’s all that matters.

NOTES

1 The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed., translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 5 (329d).

2 As happens in “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency” (episode 306).

3 “Souvenir” (episode 308).

4 The Republic of Plato, 290 (606d).

5 Ibid., 74 (395d).

6 Ibid., 80 (402a).

7 Betty issues this command in “The Arrangements ” (episode 304), sending Sally off to the television just in time to witness the self-immolation of Thích Quáng Ðúc, who set himself on fire in the streets of Saigon as a protest against the South Vietnamese regime in June 1963.

8 “The Wheel” (episode 113).

9 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing/ R. Pullins Co., 2005), 22 (1448b).

10 “Babylon” (episode 106).

11 Aristotle, Politics, translated by Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 309 (VIII.1340a).

12 Ibid.

13 In 1957 Clairol launched their famous hair color ad campaign that posed the question “Does She or Doesn’t She? Only Her Hairdresser Knows for Sure.” The campaign was created by Foote, Cone, and Belding.

14 “The Hobo Code” (episode 108).

15 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (episode 101).

16 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Bel Aire, MN: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007), 10. 17 . “For Those Who Think Young” (episode 201).