The Seeds of the Culture War Sprout Here

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 5:04 PM on May 5, 2008.

Tired of the movies, where women barely exist onscreen at all, and when they do, they’re treated like imbeciles or cardboard cutouts? The assumption in the movie industry is that men make the vast majority of the movie-seeing decisions, and that women are therefore a niche market that only needs a couple of intelligence-insulting bones thrown for a twice-annual girl’s night out.* But TV is another story. For whatever reason, it’s beginning to be understood that shows with fully realized female characters that have more going on than being fuckable and having babies do quite well on the small screen, thank you very much. And TV meets a variety of entertainment gaps that weren’t being filled. You have your fantasies of female empowerment that still aren’t realized in the everyday world—like on “Battlestar Galactica” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and you have shows that address women’s lives in an honest way, patriarchal warts and all, like on the comedy “Ugly Betty” and the drama “Mad Men”, which is a show that we power-chugged last week, watching most of the first season flying to and from New York.

The first season of “Mad Men” is set in 1960, which means it’s an exceedingly relevant program for modern times, because it’s this turning point in time that all culture war madness turns off of. When conservatives talk bitterly about the 60s, it’s because they romanticize the 50s as the ultimate moment of the American patriarchy, and to varying degrees, also the last gasp of blatant white supremacy, a utopia of white male dominance that was cruelly snatched away and needs to be restored through government intervention.

It’s clear from the get-go that “Mad Men” is going to be a show about how the 50s weren’t really as the romantic images show us, and that’s a message that’s a little well-worn at this point. We know that single women were treated like prey (the show mercifully namechecks its obvious predecessor, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which came out in 1960 and made many of the same points through dark comedy), housewives were so stifled they were losing their minds, the country was so racist that merely having an Italian-American work a position in a major advertising firm was treated like a huge step forward, and that men treated their female coworkers like dumb bunnies, too stupid for real work and mainly existing for typing, coffee-fetching, and sexual release. Sure, your average conservative who gets teary-eyed at the thought of “Leave It To Beaver” apparently needs a harsh reminder, but for those of us who know better, “the 50s weren’t as great as they were said to be” is a well-trod fact.

But because this is a TV show and there’s plenty of time available to the writers, they lift the show out of cliche-land, by dint of their ability to really make each character a fully realized human being just trying to get by under the weight of social expectations. And that also means that the women get to be fully realized characters, too, even though the show has the word “men” right in the title. There’s a myriad of characters on the show, but the ones that get the most screentime are the main character Don Draper, his wife Betty, his secretary Peggy Olson and his colleague/wannabe competitor Pete Campbell. Don’s story is too complex to get into here, but it’s definitely a symbolic retelling of the idea that the 50s weren’t what they were cracked up to be, and yet it escapes cliche and tedium. Betty initially seems like the kind of woman “The Feminine Mystique” was written for, but as the show grinds on, you find that she’s even worse off than that, because she was trained from the get-go to be the dumb bunny housewife, she has been robbed of her ability to articulate her frustrations, and probably wouldn’t know what to do with that book if she got a copy. Pete is a young executive who grew up in a privileged family and is trying to prove that he’s worth everything he’s got and more on talent alone and not name. And Peggy is probably the most sympathetic character on the show, even if she’s rude and unsociable at times. She’s definitely the Ugly Betty character, but in a dramatic sense—the dowdy girl from Brooklyn who first is besot by her ambitions to be a big-time Manhattan secretary and then gets even more ambitious when her bosses discover she’s got a skill for copywriting and start assigning her that kind of work on the side. Her struggles to get recognition for her talents will warm the feminist heart.

The patriarchy crushes everyone on the show, which is one place where the writing soars above the usual cliches. Even the obvious predecessor The Apartment doesn’t dive into the way that even the alpha males get ground down by their own stifling social roles, but since the main character on this show is Don Draper, we slowly get to see how even those who supposedly have it all in this world are adrift. Don got his ideal housewife and children and he’s moving up in a job that is both lucrative and creatively fulfilling, but he’s a mess of longing for something else. He finds himself starting affairs with women that are everything his wife is not—intelligent, independent, with a short patience for crap. I’m particularly infatuated with Rachel Menken, the manager and heiress of a 5th Avenue department store that Don’s agency takes on as a client. From the moment Don suggests she’d be happier getting married and being sequestered in the suburbs instead of running her department store, and she looks at him like he just spit on the table, it was true love for me for her. Don also keeps a beatnik mistress, which gives the writers some fun opportunities to portray both the bright side of the counterculture (particularly its artistic side) but also its seeds of destruction in the preening self-importance of it all.

What really makes the show remarkable is that with the combination of The Apartment as an inspiration and the hindsight of being able to write this in the 21st century, they’re able to tack out on a subtle point missing in a lot of examinations of how the 50s turned into the 60s, which is that the middle class American patriarchy collapsed from its own weight. The feminist movement did a lot for women, but they were effective because they had good timing, sweeping in with solutions as the cracks began to really show in the old system. This show is about how the cracks are forming, and how they were inevitable in the post-war America where the values states of ambition and self-fulfillment made it increasingly hard for people to just accept their roles as assigned. And every character on the show chafes because they are striving, and they are striving because it’s an exciting new world where striving is the ur-value. It’s not a mistake that all the action centers around the advertising industry. Instrumental to the striving new American world was the place of the consumer capitalist mentality, for better or for worse. It’s easy to condemn that mentality for the damage it does women, but it’s also true that it created a foothold for women to gain power, because their talents in the workplace were needed and their opinions as consumers suddenly became valuable.

It’s an uncomfortable space, but it’s all the more intriguing for it. What puts the show a notch above is the willing to sink you into those gray areas there. Most shows would have you rooting for Kennedy over Nixon during the election that hangs over the entire first season of the show, but on this show, the characters are so firmly in the Nixon camp that you find yourself empathizing with their disappointment when the notorious American villain loses. A show that can do that can walk you down some thought-provoking roads.

The new season starts in July.

*Whether or not this is true—i.e., that men still rule over women’s lives and choices on an individual basis to this degree—is up for debate, but considering that the U.S. now has more single adult women than married adult women, I’m dubious. And even married women probably see a lot more movies without men than they used to. And while I don’t doubt that women lose most battles still when it comes down to Him vs. Her on what movie to see, I’m sure more and more couples are interested in seeing something that interests everyone involved.