Mad Men

I received the first season of Mad Men as a birthday present from a good friend. Since I am working only part time I decided to watch the series when I was not working. I have made it through the first five episodes. While being incredibly well made, the series gives me the creeps! It is beautifully filmed and acted, the scenery oozes of the early 1960's, with odours from the 50's sipping through...

While watching, I realise that Mad Men is not at all about the 1960's. The 60's is merely used as the fond against which our contemporary anxieties are displayed. Men's fear of and attraction to independent women and their simultaneous admiration for the 'tamed' Lady. Their difficulty in reading the relational undertext in times of social change is matched by the women's confusion over their own bodily re-actions to the imprisonment by socially defined happiness, or the use of sexuality in the politics of survival in the work place.

The series show us that we are still in the loop—but probably at the end of it, or maybe rather at the end of the first one. The loop take-off was the early pre-revolutionary feminist writings in Europe and the North American Colonies, while the speed slowed during the early and mid-19th century it picked up again during the 20th, particularly during the 1920's, the 1940's and 1960's onwards. Mad Men tells us that while things certainly have changed since 1961-62, we still behave the same way, we still have the same expectations, the same ideals, we are still hunting for perfect-ness of a very particular kind; bought and not-bought at the same time. We are searching for authenticity, and when it cannot be found we go shopping for it.

Love, says one of the characters, does not exist, it was invented by people who want to sell stuff... Or in another phrasing; if you are so numbed by life and circumstance that you have lost touch with yourself, your authenticity, you will need people like the guys in Mad Men to invent it, and money to buy it. On the same account, it seems we find the stability of the very old gender structures guiding the lives of the characters in Mad Men as well as in our contemporary private and working lives, from the US to China, the North Cape to the South...