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MAD (WO)MEN DE BEAUVOIR ON MADISON AVENUE The slick title sequence is a masterclass of clever graphic design. An anonymous suited man in Manhattan falls as his office disintegrates, down past shapely legs of billboard adverts, in a plume of images and consumerism, as the man is falling the buildings grow taller, the connotations with 9/11 avoided through its smooth style, its dream like quality.
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Emma Lennox
This is then, not now. An era when people wanted, instead of needed, a grotesque age when racism and sexism are flaunted, and men were men, or pretended to be. AMC’s Mad Men (BBC4 in the UK) is a deep show about shallowness. It’s the world of a Madison Avenue advertising company caught between a new breed of 1960s consumerism and out-dated social values. Don Draper (John Hamm) is creative director for Sterling Cooper, a maverick, who is star talent of the company, surrounded by oafish, squabbling men, trying to either impress or usurp him. There are women too; Betty Draper (January Jones), Don’s wife, a suburban princess with two beautiful children, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), the plain secretary who breaks her way into copy-writing against the odds, and Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks), office manager and queen of her domain, small as it is. On the surface Mad Men is about business; a dry schedule of board meetings, presentations and corporate take-overs, which is why the general criticism of the show is that ‘nothing happens’. Nothing does indeed ‘happen’ but in a sense Friedrich Nietzsche would tune in for. ‘Are we not wandering, lost, through an infinity of nothingness?’ Nietzsche asks, ‘Are we not falling incessantly?’ Don, we are led to believe, is the falling man; falling in love with an array of women, falling into trouble, or down into the bottom of a bottle. He is an Ubermensch rejecting the ideas that society constructs around him. He tells one love interest; ‘you’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget this fact, but I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.’ With chat up lines like that, who wouldn’t be enamoured? But these moments of clarity are rare for Don, who can portray a number of roles for different social circles, and not least of these is the role of Don itself (for at least an entire series, none of the principal characters know his real name is Richard Whitman). There is something dangerous and attractive about believing in nothing at the expense of everything, especially as it is not our values being undermined, but those of this constructed past. Viewers, safe in our contemporary understanding, can marvel at this species of mankind who think woman and black Americans are unequal to them. We can squirm as the values they uphold begin to collide with the civil rights and feminist movements of the late 60s, and we delight in the slow revelation that this society, their emperor, has no clothes.
‘you’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget this fact, but I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.’ With chat up lines like that, who wouldn’t be enamoured?
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The drama of Mad Men isn’t the surprise pregnancies, or even Don’s unlockable secrets, it’s the barely visible internal battles of its characters. RD Laing talks of the ‘false self’ or what a patient in his book, The Divided Self, calls his ‘personality’. Laing describes this personality as a mask worn to deal with oppressive societal rules, or to paraphrase Freud; the conflict between the demands of conformity and the demands of our instinctive nature. As we progress through the series with the mad men and women, we see their masks begin to slip. This is because everything in Mad Men is designed to pull and tug at their façade, until their true character bursts through the gaps. It’s the glamour of the show, the precise fashions, the delicate cocktail glasses, the same design elements that bestow the show so many column inches from the critics, which is a pressure cooker for its inhabitants. In her the excellent book, Dancing in the Streets: a History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich correlates the strain of high society life with a noted rise in depression. She looks at era of ‘the self’; the 18th century, a time when mirrors became fashionable, autobiographies first appeared in popular literature and melancholy was a dangerous affliction for the individual; “It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self: What seems to most concern the new and supposedly autonomous self is the opinions of others, who in aggregate compose “society.” Mirrors, for example, don’t show us our ‘selves,’ only what others can see, and autobiographies
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reveal only what we want those others to know. The crushing weight of other people’s judgements – imagined or real – would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure...” For the employees of Sterling Cooper, whose job it is to tap into the consciousness of society to sell products, every detail of life is subject to scrutiny. As Joan comments to the girls in the office ‘a mirror can be your best friend, or your worst enemy’. Peggy is a character who hasn’t yet reached the self obsessed ‘mirror phase’, she doesn’t know how to use her feminine wiles, as the image conscious Joan does. Instead Peggy relies on the traditional traits of the men: ambition and creative intelligence. In an episode entitled ‘Babylon’, Peggy abstains from an exercise in choosing lipstick for a focus group test. This small act of defiance, born out of her own individuality, is key to Peggy and her first career break. Lipstick, the men inform us, represents the first flush of colour on a women’s cheeks after ‘you treat her right’. Peggy is not only rejecting the aesthetic norms for women’s attractiveness, she is refusing to wear a mask for the benefit of male pleasure. Peggy’s look, her weight, and her ‘silhouette’ are cause for concern for almost all the characters in the first season, except Peggy. Whereas Don occupies several masks permanently, Peggy doesn’t wear any at all, if she tries she is caught for being unconvincing and pretentious.
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We know Peggy will eventually be the future, but here we see her as a new-born babe, caught between two conflicting eras. Peggy is the token woman in the Sterling Cooper creative team, a dangerous role as described by Simone de Beauvoir in her 1977 work The Forces of Circumstance. On an individual level, Peggy is accepted as part of the team and so her status as a woman isn’t threatening. What this could lead to, as de Beauvoir herself confesses to, is a complacency and ‘blindness’ to other women’s plights. Sometimes it is the trailblazing, token woman who is ironically an obstruction to the feminist cause. In the opening of the second season Peggy forgets her own humble beginnings and scolds a secretary for her lack of professionalism. It is this ambiguity which makes Peggy an intriguing character and one of the most complex females in a TV series. Peggy cannot be pinned down by the constricting myths of femininity; the roles of wife, mother, prostitute, mystic or even feminist, because she is written first as an individual, second as a woman.
American cinema. Instead it is the storylines of what de Beauvoir terms ‘the Other’ or ‘the second sex’ that shows the true existential crisis of the era. Look past Don, through the smoky haze and you’ll find a shaking, nervous shell of a woman named Betty. By all cultural expectations, Betty has succeeded in life. With the looks of Grace Kelly, Betty found her handsome prince in Don and lives a comfortable life, in a secure suburb with two healthy children. A maid looks after the home whilst Betty lunches with friends or rides horses for leisure. But in the opening episode, Betty loses control of her car and crashes into a tree, it is revealed she is deeply, psychologically unhappy.
As the title suggests, Mad Men is a man’s world, but existentially it is the women who give it depth and resonance to viewers. Don is flawed, but he has found a way to exist using several guises, sustained by a cocktail of nihilism and sex. He is far from the tragic, emasculated heroes of film noir, for instance, in what Robert Mitchum called ‘the era of the ugly leading man’, of lost, lonely social outcasts very different to Don Draper’s successful, guiltless sociopath. Literally a self-made man, Don only superficially resembles the existential ‘heroes’ of
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Would a middle class, oppressed housewife like Betty find comfort in de Beauvoir’s seminal work, The Second Sex, published in 1949? De Beauvoir takes an overview of women’s position in history and questions female subservience to men in terms of biology, sociology and philosophy. The Second Sex influenced generations of free-thinking women, some of whom understood for the first time the disadvantages of their role in society. De Beauvoir herself claims not to have been a feminist until after she wrote it- being a token woman in her own social circles, she had not appreciated the full extent of the female experience. Yet it is unlikely that in the 60s, Betty would be able to comprehend de Beauvoir’s existential considerations, having been butchered in its translation by H.M Parshley in 1953, by all accounts, to better conform to patriarchal American ideology. Decades of outcry followed over the poor translation which according to expert Judith Oakley cut 10% of the original, expunged
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the names of over 70 women, deleted lesbian poetry and randomly mistranslated existentialist terminology. A more faithful edition was finally published for The Second Sex’s 60th anniversary, and restores de Beauvoir’s original intentions, along with its controversies. In a 2010 review of the new edition for the New York Times, literary critic Francine de Plessix Gray writes the
the higher echelons of 1960s American society (and judging by Gray’s reaction, the 2010s) this is still a difficult pill to swallow, as the “American dream” (perpetuated by advertisers on Madison Avenue), cements the role of woman as wife and mother.
‘…pivotal notion at the heart of ‘The Second Sex’ — a more problematic one, which Beauvoir came to on her own — is her belief that, in Parshley’s translation, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ This preposterous assertion, intended to bolster her argument that marriage and motherhood are institutions imposed by men to curb women’s freedom, will be denied by any mother who has seen her toddler son eagerly grab for a toy in the shape of a vehicle or a gun, while at the same time showing a total lack of interest in his sister’s cherished dolls.’ Gray’s rebuttal of de Beauvoir’s ‘preposterous assertion’ (she prefers the Parshley version) is met with her own terrible choice of analogy, insinuating that all girls ‘cherish dolls’ as if it is a direct path to motherhood. This does at least serve to show the sometimes ridiculous and bitter arguments which can fuel feminist discussion. What Gray, (who also writes that every girl welcomes her first period with ‘excitement and pride’), is perhaps wilfully misunderstanding is how deeply ingrained and fixed women’s roles are. To consider, as de Beauvoir asks us to, that women are individual beings, is to free them from ‘subordination as social fact’. But in
On the psychiatrist’s chair, Betty talks of her own departed mother, and her current state of anxiety; ‘she wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man, there’s nothing wrong with that. But then what? Just sit and smoke and let it go until you’re in a box?’ Betty, having risen to the height of expectation, is now seeing through the charade, and her character arc through the series will be defined by her fall from grace. In fact, Betty’s existential angst is revealed early on in one of the most enduring images of the Mad Men series. In the episode ‘Shoot’ Betty is exposed to public humiliation and her role of mother is called into question. The writers, Chris Provenzano and Matthew Weiner have replaced Ehrenreich’s adversarial mirror with photographic lenses, as Betty attempts to regain some autonomy by reprising her modelling career. In her absence, the neighbour threatens the children when their dog attacks his pigeons, (a small moment of consequence which Mad Men writers love to drop in when nobody suspects). When Betty’s career revival does not go to plan, ending in underhanded dismissal, and she hears of the harsh treatment of her children, Betty handles it with the usual refined decorum. It is only when nobody is watching, Betty lets her mask slip. The set up is domestic bliss, typical of the adverts made at Sterling Cooper, Bobby Helm’s 50s hit ‘You are my special angel’
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rings out, it’s a sunny day, the children are laughing upstairs. Betty is in the yard, cigarette dangling from her lip, she seems to be admiring birds in flight. Then she raises her rifle skyward, and begins to shoot. Only the neighbour is there to be horrified. ‘Draper!’ he calls out, dropping the all important ‘mrs’. Betty is not a character likely to be burning her bra by the end of the decade, nor would she have been throwing rocks with the suffragettes in the early part of the century, but she is an individual, capable of violent expression. The trials and tribulations of the principal women of the series, including the development of Betty’s daughter Sally, reveal individual rebellions against prescriptive ideals of womanhood. It seems a shame then, that the graphic designers weren’t brave enough to show a woman falling in the title sequence, for undoubtedly it is the Bettsy Drapers of the world, the second sex, who have further to fall.
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