Sparing the Glamour, Serving the Dirt
MAD MEN: “FOR THOSE WHO THINK YOUNG”
AMC
THE NATIONAL POST
Being one of the Mad Men is just another job
Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss are giving great secretive performances in the two central roles of Mad Men. Their characters - Don Draper, head of creative at the Sterling Cooper ad agency and Peggy Olson, his former secretary and now a junior copywriter - have no relationship beyond the professional, that emotional distance being a crucial element of a show that thrives on defeating viewers' expectations. But they do in a sense belong together: They are two of a kind.
They admire one another. It's an admiration given willingly on Peggy's part, since she entered the show as an office novice while Don was the office genius. (And, at the start of the second season, still is, though cracks may be showing.) He, meanwhile, seemed hardly to notice her existence, except as a necessary cog in the machine, but proved willing to acknowledge and reward her talents, once they manifested themselves. He might even be proud of her, though he's never said so. Alone of the men in the office, he never patronizes, insults or exploits her; there was one scene towards the end the first season when both were at a low ebb and there even seemed to be an unspoken sympathetic bond between them.
Both actors excel at suggesting hidden depths, bottled feelings and mysteries even they themselves are unable to probe. One never knows just how naive - or how calculating - Moss's Peggy might be. Last season she managed to carry a baby almost to term without noticing; though in this case I'm not sure whether it was she or the show's writers who were in denial. Meanwhile she took control of an audition session for a radio spot as if by right. She's not only a born writer, apparently; she's a born director. (She gave Stanislavskian notes.) She'll probably end up running the place. And she's only 22. She pointed this out last Sunday, when the firm reluctantly decided to recruit or at least interview some youth, only to be told "you don't count." She's still a woman, and it's still only 1962. She also made Don's new secretary cry, just as she herself had once done. It may be neanderthal to say so, but she isn't as likeable as she used to be.
Don can be likeable because he's so hard to like. He's cold at work, cold at home - though he'd clearly prefer to know how to be otherwise - with his two children and his trophy housewife. Much of the first season was devoted to showing the elaborate lie he had been living, escaping the remnants of a miserable childhood by stealing the identity of an officer in the Korean war. We learned of this through flashbacks that felt hokey at the time but eventually justified themselves by the typical Mad Men method of failing to pay off. "You know what?" asked Robert Morse's fluffy senior partner when Don's would-be blackmailer confronted him with the evidence. "Who cares?" Our sentiments exactly. (And how one misses Morse in the episodes in which he doesn't appear.)
Don is rather like Tony Soprano in that one grabs eagerly at any stray signs of decency in him. It's part of television lore how Mathew Weiner, the creator and principal author of Mad Men, earned a berth as a writer on The Sopranos by sending David Chase the unmade scripts of his own show. The two series have a surprising amount in common; they both show greedy male-dominated societies operating by what are supposed to be outdated rules. Both feature plenty of eating, drinking and (on the male side at least) extramarital sex. Both have featured roles for doctors and psychiatrists. Tony, though, has more self-knowledge than Don, or at least wants more. He famously told his shrink that he knew he'd come in at the tail end of something, that he was in fact an anachronism. Don is caught in an earlier phase of the same extended time warp; the big joke of the show - or, more grandly, its central conceit - is that it's set in a world that doesn't know it's about to change. Don, who's only in his thirties, scoffs at the cult of youth, and in his own terms he's right to do so. Youth culture, in his world, meant the Beat generation, a minority group that the establishment might regard with distaste, fascination or simply boredom, but that it felt no compulsion to join.
Don, the commuting suburbanite, lost a mistress from the Village to one of her contemporaries for precisely this reason. It was only later in the decade that youth became power. None of the Mad Men - and maybe not even Peggy, the token Mad Woman - has yet shown signs of seeing it coming.
Mad Men beats The Sopranos on visual style, but loses in other respects. Maybe the WASP corporate life is just less dramatic than a life of ethnically centred crime (or of crime-fighting; see The Wire). Mad Men is notably lacking in rich supporting characters; after a whole season I still can't fit name to face to personality traits among most of the junior guys in the office. The only one who stands about among the tail-chasing males is the art director, simply because he's a closeted gay (and Italian). There is Pete, the young and well-connected account executive, but he's such a snivelling heel that it's hard to take an interest (though not at all hard to believe). Out in lovely Ossining, N. Y, there's Don's wife Betty, played by January Jones - a name unmatched since Tuesday Weld, with whom she shares a talent for portraying off-kilter fragility.
The tensions among the suburban wives often promise to be more fascinating than those among their Manhattan mates - with a lone divorcee who lights up the screen whenever she appears - but the show hasn't given them much rein. It's also been getting steadily less funny. Maybe there are a limited number of laughs to be garnered from showing racial and sexual prejudice. Or from advertising itself; we started on a highly satiric note with a campaign to make the health hazards of smoking glamorous. That was hard to top and the show, with a new product every week, has itself the equivalent of the "another death, another dollar" formula that encased Six Feet Under.
Maybe that's the point: It's just another job. What keeps us watching Mad Men isn't the glamour of the '60s or even the satire of it; that's worn off. It's the uncertainty of subtext, which is another term for grown-up drama.