George Packer of The New Yorker, editor of the great collection of Orwell non-fiction called Facing Unpleasant Facts, explains why Mad Men is so frustrating...and so fascinating.
So the question is obvious: what’s so interesting about this annoying show?
Beneath the mesmerizing retro sheen lies the inversion of manners and morals: everything forbidden us is permitted to, even encouraged of, these men and women—smoking and drinking to excess, office sex up to and including blatant harassment, parental neglect, a kind of frank selfishness about ends and means. No one has to smoke outside the building like a furtive criminal, no one has to pretend to like his colleagues, adultery is a perk for men on the level of an expense-account Martini dinner. Relations between the sexes are openly exploitative, with only Peggy trying to make her way in a man’s world and paying a high price (among other things, she’s more single-minded and cut-throat about work than the men). Meanwhile, they go to self-destructive lengths to conceal what we accept and even advertise: childhood poverty, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. “Mad Men” is all about repression—every character has a tell-tale tic, and stiffness reigns over every scene—but it’s also about the license to indulge impulses that would soon be socially forbidden. Who wouldn’t like just once to leave their picnic garbage right where they finished eating it?
[cut]
“Mad Men” shows the last years of a social order in which middle-class American men were little kings—slimy, anxiety-ridden, petulant, lifeless, but kings nonetheless. It’s all about to come undone—Peggy is the harbinger of the change—and soon give way to an age of confusion and improvisation, which is the age we still live in. Watching “Mad Men” might be what it was like for Americans of an earlier age, around the time of Lincoln, to see an eighteenth-century European costume drama: this is what the world looked like just before the old order fell. The roles were rigid and constricting, but they had the advantage of being roles, ready-made for men and women to put on and live in.
Now that the "little kings" are dead, who will we become? I'm interested to find out...
