Mad Men, Mad World

Front matter

LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD LILYAKAGANOYSKY ROBERT A. RUSHING

SEX, POLITICS, STYLE & THB 1960S

MADIVIEN, VIADWORLD

Part I Mad Worlds

ONE

Maddening Times Mad Men in Its History DANA POLAN

TWO

Mad Space DIANNE HARRIS 53

THREE

Representing the Mad Margins of the Early 1960s Northern Civil Rights and the Blues Idiom CLARENCE LANG

FOUR

After the Sex, What?

A Feminist Reading of Reproductive History in Mad Men LESLIE J. REAGAN

FIVE

The Writer as Producer; or, The Hip Figure after HBO MICHAEL SZALAY

Part II Mad Aesthetics

SIX

Mad Men's Progressive Realism CAROLINE LEVINE

SEVEN

Mod Men JIM HANSEN 145

EIGHT

Mad Men, Fashion, and Cultural Memory MABEL ROSENHECK

NINE

Looking at Surface through the Kodak Carousel IRENE V. SMALL

TEN “Tt Will Shock You How Much This Never Happened”

Antonioni and Mad Men ROBERT A. RUSHING 192

Part III Made Men

ELEVEN

Multiple Identity (Dis)Orders in Mad Men LYNNE JOYRICH

TWELVE “Maidenform”

Masculinity as Masquerade LILYA KAGANOVSKY 238

THIRTEEN

Mad Men, Misrecognition, and the Masculine Mystique JEREMY VARON

FOURTEEN

The Homosexual and the Single Girl ALEXANDER DOTY

FIFTEEN

Mad Men’s Postracial Figuration of a Racial Past KENT ONO

SIXTEEN

Seriality and Identity in the Modern Babylon LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD

Afterword A Change Is Gonna Come, Same as It Ever Was MICHAEL BERUBE

A Conversation with Phil Abraham, Director and Cinematographer LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD, JEREMY VARON,

CARL LEHNEN

Appendix B List of Mad Men Episodes 381

Index 415

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every scholarly work is, in some sense, collaborative, but edited volumes are particularly so. We thank first and foremost our fantastic contributors for their hard work and dedication to this project over the past two years. Our anonymous reviewers were some of the best intellectual interlocutors we had, and we thank them for their detailed engagement with this volume and the many ways they helped to make it better. We thank our editor, Courtney Berger, and everyone at Duke University Press for their enthusiasm for this book. And we particularly thank our incredibly hardworking graduate student research assistants at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory: Mike Black, Carl Lehnen, Katherine Skwarczek, and, toward the end of the project, MC Anderson and Amanda Monson.

All three of the editors of this volume share a common academic home in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, but we also thank our more traditional academic homes for their support: the Department of English; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; and the Program in Comparative and World Literature. This project originated in a symposium in Urbana in 2010, and we are grateful to the many cosponsors and participants, including Pat Gill, Jennifer Greenhill, Diane Koenker, Michael Rothberg, and Paula Treichler. Nancy Abelmann, our associate vice chancellor for research in the humanities and arts, brought the project to the attention of the Campus Research Board at the University of Illinois, which provided generous funding for copyediting and permissions.

Many, many colleagues and friends contributed to this project — too many to mention individually —sometimes through their personal support, sometimes through animated discussions about the show, and most often through x both. Jason Mittell’s superb writing on seriality was an inspiration for our work. Michael Bérubé, Caroline Levine, Dana Polan, and Jeremy Varon were endlessly generous in providing expertise and illuminating thoughts at various stages of this project. They also contributed to the multi-authored series of posts for seasons 4 and 5 of Mad Men on the Unit for Criticism’s weblog, Kritik. For their witty and on-the-spot blogging, we are also indebted to Sandy Camargo, Eleanor Courtemanche, Jim Hansen, Konstantine Klioutchkine, Adam Kotsko, Sanja Lacan, Carl Lehnen, Todd McGowan (whose post brought the blog and this volume to the attention of the New York Times), and Faith Wilson Stein. For permission to reprint Jerry Yulsman’s stunning photograph of Dick Gregory and Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Club, we (and Clarence Lang) thank Barbara Woike and Tom Yulsman. We owe special thanks to Phil Abraham for his generosity in sharing his time and his insights from inside the show’s production, as well as Eileen Gillooly for her kindness in making this introduction.

We thank our families and friends for their support, help, and encouragement with this project (and in particular, our parents, the real Mad Men generation). Mark Sammons has earned a special note of gratitude for his help with many things, not least of which was this volume’s title.

Finally, a very special and sad acknowledgment of our colleague, contributor, and friend Alex Doty, who died while this volume was in production. Our condolences to his family and friends everywhere—he will be missed. We are grateful to Corey Creekmur for writing Alex’s contributor biography.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD, LILYA KAGANOVSKY, AND ROBERT A. RUSHING

On 16 July 2010 the New York Times online edition ran an interactive feature on what reviewer Alessandra Stanley, in an accompanying piece, called a “cultural phenomenon.” The occasion was the season 4 premiere of Mad Men, scheduled to air nine days later. As most readers of this book know, Mad Men is an amc television show about Don Draper, a fictional character who is creative director for Sterling Cooper, a fictional New York advertising agency in the 1960s. What stood out in July 2010, therefore, was the seriousness of the Times reportage, which interspersed photographs from the 1960s with scenes and stills from a television drama. In a piece labeled “Seeing History in ‘Mad Men,” the Times oscillated between describing the historical 1960s and Mad Men’s characters (Egner). “The Korean War created Don Draper,” the newspaper of record wrote, as though asserting a biographical fact. Mad Men, the Times seemed to say, was creating a window on the nation’s past through which viewers might experience America’s history in narrative form. Don Draper was not fiction but biography; Mad Men was not television but a repository of the past. Pastness itself was redefined as the past of the 1960s, the past of postwar America, a past of knowable events about which one might read in the New York Times.

The Times’s soft spot for Mad Men is hardly surprising. The show, set in the last golden age of print, appeals to the same well-heeled professionals who read newspapers, re-creating a time before television and the Internet supplanted broadsheet journalism as the premier venue for news and opinion. Season 4 thus gave us Don announcing his withdrawal from cigarette advertising in the same venerable pages that had just proclaimed Mad Men a “cultural phenomenon.” Such paradoxes have become common. An article on Cary Grant in the August 2010 issue of Vanity Fair opened: “Our story is set in the years before Mad Men, when Eisenhower was in the White House and America had only 48 states” (Beauchamp and Balban). What does this willful conflation of fact with fiction suggest? As the show invites its audience to look with post-Mad Men eyes on iconic media from the 1960s, is it reconfiguring our conception of the past?

At one level Mad Men has simply awakened memories of an early-1960s America that had been lost between the vintage 1950s of Leave It to Beaver and the late-1960s explosion of Woodstock, feminism, black power, and The Mod Squad. It is also clear, however, that Mad Men is not simply jostling memories but creating them: as the historian of the 1960s Jeremy Varon writes in this volume, “The show is more plausibly the staging of a fantasy than the rendering of history.” Likewise, as Mabel Rosenheck proposes in her chapter on fashion, the show’s relation to the vintage artifacts it displays is performative: an active construction that bespeaks twenty-first century representation of the 1960s. Thus media commentators on the Mad Men zeitgeist are not so much seeing the 1960s in the show as seeing them through it. Their doing so arguably tells us less about the 1960s than about the current desire for collective memories of the past.

By and large, the essays in this volume do not look to Mad Men for an accurate depiction of the 1960s, but they do explore the show’s remarkable impact on how history is experienced. Americans have generally been a presentist people, seldom invoking the past beyond occasional nods to forebears. Recent soothsayers have announced “the end of history” (the title of Francis Fukuyama’s bestseller of 1992), as well as technology’s reshaping of the globe (Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat [2005]). If Mad Men has seemed to put history back on the map, it is a sign of the show’s groundbreaking approach to period drama: its use of the forms of historical fiction to capture and create an intense experience of the present day. In this way, phantasmatic and millennial though it may be, Mad Men has altered the vision of the 1960s, and of pastness itself.

The show’s ability to do so, we suggest, rests on a few interrelated premises. First, despite the hype about the show’s historical accuracy, Mad Men is as selectively anachronistic as it is showily mimetic. Perhaps never before has a television show been praised so effusively for its “realistic” qualities and painstaking attention to period details. Fan participation ritualizes this fetishism of the detail, with websites such as Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s The Footnotes of Mad Men following each new episode with research on early- 1960s artifacts and events.' Viewers get caught up in discussions about the books in Don’s office, the clothing used to develop principal characters, and the use of nuanced interiors such as season 3’s update of the Drapers’ living room or season 4’s creation of a new office space for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.” Paradoxically, the spotting of occasional inaccuracies (Bryn Mawr didn’t have sororities when Betty would have attended; the 1mm typewriters featured in the pilot, set in March 1960, weren't available until 1961; Joan quotes Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message” three years before it was published) seems to intensify the show’s mimetic halo, exacerbating the tendency for discourse about the show to “forget” that it is fictional.

On closer examination, however, Mad Men’s lovingly tended mimicry is selective and deliberately counterpoised with other features of its diegesis. Thus, as Lauren M. E. Goodlad observes in this volume, the show’s overall realism tends toward a literary naturalism associated with groundbreaking nineteenth-century novels such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1874-75) —both of which, like Mad Men, first appeared in serial form. By contrast, the show’s visual aesthetic (as Robert A. Rushing notes in his chapter) takes its cues from the most glamorous cinema of the mid-twentieth century, along with glossy period magazines such as Vogue, Playboy, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Mad Men thus combines naturalism’s relentless exposure of social pathology with a surface allure culled from the most glittering self-representations of the era. The show’s most significant anachronisms, therefore, are not the occasional errors, but the conspicuous departures from all but the facade of the period texts that Mad Men invokes.

THE BEST OF EVERYTHING

In “Six Month Leave” (2.9), wise-guy comedian Jimmy Barrett hails Don as “the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” a reference to Sloan Wilson’s novel of 1955 and Nunnally Johnson’s film of 1956. Mad Men thus inserts itself into a period archive that includes Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (1956) and Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency (1957). To be sure, Don’s sartorial panache, as performed by Jon Hamm, re-creates the aura of matinee idols such as Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, and Sean Connery (see Jim Hansen in this volume). Yet despite Jimmy’s determination to peg Don as a Peck look-alike —“I loved you in Gentleman’s Agreement,” he tells him in “The Benefactor” (2.3) —Don is hardly the double of characters like Philip Schuyler Green in Elia Kazan’s movie of 1947, Thomas Rath in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or Atticus Finch in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Don may bea suburban commuter with a wartime secret, but his problems have little to do with the Fordist-era conformity that Wilson saw threatening postwar America.

In a memorable scene from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, three men, one of whom is Rath, walk into a business meeting wearing nearly identical garb, an iconic statement of the “uniform of the day” (S. Wilson, 11; fig. Intro.1). As Catherine Jurca observes, “Tom Rath’s renowned attire” signifies “the massification of the middle class” and “the deterioration of [its] status and privilege” (85). Wilson’s answer to this engulfing corporate culture is a return to moral values: Rath saves his integrity and marriage by telling the truth about past infidelity, putting family and community before corporate ambition. Of course, deteriorating middle-class privilege—albeit of a post- Fordist and neoliberal kind —is a defining experience for Mad Men’s audience. But Don is hardly a likely candidate for moral redemption. Indeed, while Mad Men sustains identification with Don by holding out the possibility, even the hope, that he will change or grow in Rath-like manner, it also makes clear that the impulse to “believe in Don” is the ultimate sucker’s bet (witness season 4’s Faye Miller as a memorable reminder of the odds).

If Don cannot be Rath —if he is in fact an anti-Rath who casts doubt on the very idea of male virtue — that is partly because films like Gentleman’s Agreement, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and To Kill a Mockingbird are firm in their conviction that secular progress, however precarious, is achievable through moral agency, an expectation that naturalistic narrative tends to flummox. Thus, while Rath learns the value of being true to himself, Don hardly recognizes a boundary between self and self-invention. Though rarely unfeeling, and even quixotic, Don reflexively brings Madison Avenue to bear on the non-office world Rath holds sacrosanct. Whereas Rath defines himself against the limitations of his job in public relations, Don is an ad man to the roots of his Brylcreemed hair.

Here is where a second premise behind Mad Men becomes especially significant: although the show’s investments in historical contexts are multifold, history functions first and foremost as the material fabric of an arresting aestheticism. Aestheticism explains how Don Draper—whose very name suggests the artful donning of masculine drapery—transforms the well-cut business suit into a mark of nimble self-fashioning. Thus, like much

FIGURE INTRO.1. Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), surrounded by colleagues in the “uniform of the day.”

else in the show, the riff on the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit adopts tropes from a pre-counterculture 1960s to articulate experiences relevant to a post-counterculture twenty-first century. If this is hardly a magical time machine, like the “Carousel” Don pitches to Kodak, it represents an innovative play between mimesis and anachronism.

Then too, it is not only Don but also the show’s strong female characters whose embedding in “realistic” early-1960s contexts relies on motifs abstracted from period texts. In “Babylon” (1.6), Betty and Don discuss The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s novel published in 1958 and Jean Negulesco’s movie of 1959. Mad Men cannily borrows from the movie a template for the offices of Sterling Cooper (figs. Intro.2-Intro.3) as well as the set piece of the young woman’s first day at work in a sophisticated Manhattan firm. As Dianne Harris writes in her chapter in this volume, “Location lends reality and authenticity to action.” Mad Men’s borrowing inspiration for its ad agency interior from Negulesco’s comparable set for Fabian Publishing Co. (based on Jaffe’s real-life experiences at Fawcett) thus imports the topos of female clerical workers spatially and professionally ensconced by male executives (an aspect of midcentury office life that male-centered narratives like Wilson’s occlude). As Harris suggests, the extensive open space in which Sterling Cooper’s secretarial staff labors mobilizes “panoptic qualities that not only permit but actually produce the sexual tensions and sexual harassment” that make the show so arresting.

Like Mad Men, The Best of Everything is a tell-all tale of the midcentury working girl. As the movie opens, Caroline Bender (Hope Lange) is a young secretary starting a new job in the big city, much like Peggy Olson. Another secretary, Gregg Adams (1950s supermodel Suzy Parker), is an aspir-

FIGURES INTRO.2-INTRO.3. Office space in The Best of Everything (1959).

ing actress. Notably, Fabian employs a female editor, Amanda Farrow (Joan Crawford), who has chosen career over domesticity. The New York Times review described this genre as a cautionary tale of “the hearth vs. the desk” (H. Thompson). Behind the comic air of pink opening credits and Johnny Mathis crooning that “romance” promises “the best of everything,” the film insists that young women balance the enticements of urban freedom against the hazards of premarital sex and defeminizing professional ambition.

As in Mad Men, the sexual double standard is everywhere on display: an older editor, Mr. Shalimar (Brian Aherne), puts his hand on Caroline’s knee while offering to advance her career; Gregg ends up in the arms of a ladies’ man (Louis Jourdan) who quickly tires of her; and when another secretary accidentally becomes pregnant, her boyfriend tricks her into thinking he will marry her while driving her to an abortionist. Less familiar to Mad Men’s audience is the depiction of career aspirations as antithetical to female nature. Thus, when Caroline, a Radcliffe graduate, begins making savvy business suggestions, the eligible executive Mike Rice (Stephen Boyd) accuses her of angling for his job. Toward the end, Miss Farrow decides to find domestic happiness with a widower, only to discover that it is “too late” for her to dispense womanly care. The movie closes with Caroline happy to restore “the desk” to her returning boss, and to embrace “the hearth” as Mike’s wifeto-be.

The Best of Everything provides a number of interesting insights into Mad Men. As Don lies in bed reading Jaffe’s novel, Betty zeroes in on Farrow— the character whom she least resembles. “Joan Crawford is not what she was,’ she tells Don. “Her, standing next to Suzy Parker—as if they were the same species. . . . To think, one of the great beauties, and there she is so old” (1.6). Betty thus refuses the proffered identification with Caroline: a well-educated, upper-middle-class blonde, much like herself, whose happy ending is marriage to a handsome executive. Instead, she idealizes the youth of the most self-destructive character, Gregg, who falls to her death from a fire escape while clinging to the heartless playboy who discards her. Fittingly, the scene closes with Betty confessing a dependence that recalls Gregg’s desperate need for the errant lover who deems her “suffocating” and “possessive.” “I want you so much,” Betty whispers. “It’s all in a kind of fog because .. . I want you so badly.” When Don replies reassuringly, “You have me, you do,” we know he is lying. If Betty intuits that her storybook marriage to a handsome executive is as precarious as Grege’s affair with an infamous ladies’ man, the reason, of course, is that Don is playing both parts.

Here once again Mad Men reproduces the resplendent surfaces of Hollywood cinema while stripping out the stark moral contrasts and idealized domestic norms. This signature fusion of glamour and naturalism works quite differently from other recent retrospectives such as Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002). In this celebrated tribute to Douglas Sirk, Haynes reconstructs the world of the 1950s — not as it might really have been, but as it was represented in Sirk’s magnificent Technicolor melodramas. What viewers and critics loved about Far from Heaven were not only its period details and capturing of Sirk’s visual richness, but also its filling in of the gaps left in his narratives. In a literal return of the repressed, homosexuality and interracial romance are made visible, while vices like cigarettes are hidden. Subtext becomes text as Haynes brings to the surface what Sirk circled around and disavowed. In doing so, Haynes seems to correct the movies he commemorates, taking his revision of midcentury narratives much further than Mad Men’s. As many critics have noted, Mad Men unmasks — but does not decenter — the white middle-class narratives that dominated the period. If the risk for the show is the disturbing dissonance of a luscious mise-en-scéne saturated by jarring prejudice, the risk for Haynes is a complete rupture from what made Sirk’s aesthetic compelling in the first place —the social tensions that Hollywood’s mainstream could not yet openly render.

“YOU'LL LOVE THE WAY IT MAKES YOU FEEL”

Consider historical fiction as it typically appears on television: Foyle’s War (ITV, 2002-) depicts a middle-aged police chief in a small English town during the Second World War. In one episode (“Among the Few,” 2.2), Foyle’s son is training to be a pilot in the Royal Air Force when his squadron-mate comes under suspicion of a crime. Foyle learns that the young man is innocent of the crime but is homosexual. As most viewers would agree, in the 1940s a provincial policeman’s most likely reaction to discovering that an RAE pilot was homosexual —and in love with his son to boot— would be to arrest or report him. But Foyle displays an open-minded compassion that would be unusual in such a figure even today. Foyle’s War thus allows us to have our enjoyment and eat it, too: viewers can both warm to Foyle and the glamour of wartime flyboys and have them untarnished by the prejudices from which the show’s feel-good heroism is abstracted.

Ironically, period shows like Foyle’s War are rarely if ever singled out as “smug,” while, for some viewers, the charge of smugness clings to Mad Men like the stale odor of cigarettes. Alongside profuse acclaim from every quarter, including Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama for four consecutive years, Mad Men has been subject to this line of critique from several academic and literary corners. Thus, according to Sady Doyle in the Atlantic, Mad Men “affords viewers an illusion of moral superiority”; and for Benjamin Schwarz, also writing in the Aflantic, the show “encourages the condescension of posterity” by inviting its audience “to indulge in a most unlovely—because wholly unearned — smugness.” Both writers echo Mark Greif’s earlier claim in the London Review of Books that “Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.” In the most extensive critique so far, Daniel Mendelsohn argues in the New York Review of Books that the show’s “attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug.” Why is a show that lays bare the racism, sexism, and decadence of the past judged to be self-congratulatory, when more conventional historical fare spares viewers entirely from reflecting on injustice? The question points to a set of ongoing debates about Mad Men that this volume explores in multiple ways.

To be sure, Mad Men does not have the mass appeal of a network hit. For some audiences the pace is unnervingly slow. Many viewers old enough to have experienced the 1960s report that Mad Men brings back memories they would rather forget. Similarly, some younger viewers find realistic depiction of racism and misogyny too uncomfortable to tolerate. For still other audiences, Mad Men’s aestheticism is itself an obstacle to pleasure. As one colleague mused, “I think I may be too personally ambivalent about style to have the same response . . . as some of my better-dressed friends. I hate myself at some level if I spend too much time on clothes and décor.” The assumption here is that watching Mad Men entails positive embrace, perhaps even emulation, of its glamorous style (although plenty of Mad Men watchers neither sport vintage fashion nor throw elegant cocktail parties). Then too, some male viewers find it difficult to identify with the show’s spectacularly flawed protagonist. “I think Don is harder to take for men than [for] women,” writes one interlocutor. “Heterosexual women can likely assume that he is hardly relationship material, and fantasize about pleasure without strings or commitment. But for men, he’s a threat—someone who sinks their esteem and incurs a sense that ‘life isn’t fair’ insofar as a mysterious lout is rewarded with his choice of beautiful women.”* Writing on his blog, Just rv, the television scholar Jason Mittell wrestles with the disconnect between his critical “habitus” and his reflexive “dislike” for the show: “I fully acknowledge that it is a ‘good’ series. . . . It is objectively better made . . . than the vast majority of programs airing on American television. But . . . I would rather watch many programs that are less well-made, less intelligent, and less ambitious, as I find them more satisfying and pleasurable” (“On Disliking”). Such reactions not only illustrate the intense feelings the show incites, they also suggest that part of understanding Mad Men’s strong appeal means recognizing that it is not for everyone.

Still, it is worth pointing out that none of these reactions is at all self-congratulatory. For Caroline Levine, writing in this volume, shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) give us characters who, despite their flaws, are too compelling to enable the thorough detachment that a smug attitude requires. Mad Men “does not invite us to displace pernicious assumptions about sexism, racism, and homophobia onto an exotic, far-off place or time,” she argues, “but brings them just close enough to us to give us [a] feeling of uncanny familiarity.” Following Levine, one needs to ask, Who are these smug viewers whom Mad Men allegedly flatters? In Greif’s analysis, unexamined hostility toward the show and its cast stands in for the answer. Assessing the role of Draper, Greif writes, “[Jon] Hamm looks perpetually wimpy and underslept. His face is powdered and doughy. He lacks command. He is witless. The pose that he’s best at, interestingly, is leaning back in his chair; it ought to be from superiority, but it looks as though he is trying to dodge a blow.” One can appreciate the critical bravado here without being convinced by the argument it purports to confirm: Is it likely that Mad Men “flatters us” because its leading man looks doughy and witless? Doyle’s feminist analysis also invites questions. Disturbed that audiences do not recognize that Joan Holloway was raped by her fiancé in season 3— not “sort of” raped— Doyle unaccountably blames the show: “our inability to identify misogyny, even on a show that presents it so melodramatically,” points to the persistence of sexism.

While Doyle is surely right about continuing sexism, she offers no evidence for the theory that Mad Men somehow obscures this reality. “We can’t face [sexism] directly unless we're assured that it’s behind us,” Doyle claims. When she cites a female story editor who explains that several incidents depicted on Mad Men “come directly from experiences that I and the other women writers have had in our lifetimes,” Doyle seems to think that viewers will be shocked to hear it. This presumption of a gullible audience, indulged by a show that panders to its weakness, echoes the premise embedded in Greif’s title— “You'll Love the Way It Makes You Feel.” Adopted from the tagline that Peggy writes for a weight-loss device-cum vibrator, Greif’s title likens watching Mad Men to masturbation. In a comparable essay, Anna Kelner of Ms. worries that Mad Men “is crafting a whole new generation of would-be Bettys (Draper’s stylish wife) not Peggys (the show’s ambitious ‘career girl’).” Yet since many viewers dislike Betty (or, perhaps, love to hate her), the commentary surrounding this much-criticized character hardly suggests that the show is inspiring female viewers to become neurotic housewives and unhappy mothers. Instead, viewers’ favorite female characters by far are Joan, Peggy, and the unforgettable Rachel Menken from season 1—all three formidable “career girls” whose stories underline the tensions between marriage and work.> Condescension is also at play in Mendelsohn’s critique, though to do this essay justice, many of its perceptions are accurate: Mad Men’s plotlines are melodramatic; its interiors airless and “boxed”; and the style of acting it cultivates, mannered and flat. But Mendelsohn’s tack is less to elucidate how such supposed flaws produce “unattractive” smugness than to establish the viewer as rube: “That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of people who invent them.” This critical condescension concerns characters and viewers alike: “The writers don’t really want you to think about what Betty might be thinking; they just want you to know that she’s one of those clueless 1960s mothers who smoked during pregnancy.” This said about a character who is on to her husband’s infidelity from the start, who takes out her neighbor's pet pigeons with a shotgun — a woman who is complex and frustrated enough to lure a friend into a vicarious affair while she herself has sex with a stranger in a public rest room. Can it really be true that none of this prompts viewers to ponder what Betty is thinking?

In what is perhaps his most damning criticism, Mendelsohn argues that the writing in Mad Men is “very much like the writing you find in ads.” This interesting analysis of Mad Men and advertising (a topic explored in this volume by Lynne Joyrich, Lilya Kaganovsky, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, and Michael Bérubé) might be different if Mendelsohn did not accept the muchhyped premise of a show that accurately documents America’s history. As several contributors to this volume show, Mad Men is less interested in reproducing 1960s advertising than in capturing what the late-capitalist social world surrounding advertising means to viewers watching the show today. Like the best historical fiction, the show adopts resonant material from the past to speak audibly to the present. Historical realism of this kind directly contrasts with the “capitalist realism” that Michael Schudson, in one of the most penetrating studies of the topic to date, aligns with advertising. What advertisements portray, writes Schudson, is “relatively placeless,” “relatively