"Mad Men": postmodernism and history

  
In Series 3 Sally's grandfather lets her drive around the neighbourhood!

This post is about an area I forgot to mention during the revision of our post modern media texts.

Several but not all post modern texts draw their meaning from real historical events, together with nostalgia. In literature texts that filter real events through fictional characters' lives are called historiographical fiction. "Mad Men" draws much of its meaning for audiences from real historical events as well as attitudes and behaviour from nearly fifty years ago.

Real events such as the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Cuban  missile crisis of 1962 and the assassination of President Kennedy are filtered through characters' lives and experiences.

Prejudices, behaviours and attitudes are also presented in such a way that modern audiences would find them surprising and perhaps, even callous. Visit You Tube for a range of clips from "Mad Men" in which the following attitudes and behaviours are revealed through characters's lives:

• Smoking ( pre the health warnng period of our time )
• Drinking to excesss. Again, pre our concerns with units, etc.
• Drinking during pregnancy: Betty Draper smokes and drinks her way through her pregnancy for her third child in series three.
• Sexism and male and sometimes female attitudes towards roles in the workplace, promotion and pay.
• Attitudes towards children and their safety. Betty Draper is more concerned with her children not creasing freshly dry cleaned clothes than running around wearing the plastic covers for those clothes!
• Homosexuality and the descrimination and hypocricy practiced against gay people during the 1960s
• False liberal attitudes: in series 3 Betty thinks people are not ready for equality for black people in 1963!  Paul Kinsey thinks he is a liberal but does not really practice what he speaks.
• Several characters show no concern for the environment. In an episode in Series One Betty Draper casually throws away rubbish after a picnic in a park by flapping it away from a picnic blanket.
• There are lots of others!

Of course, all kinds of intertextual references have their own historical and cultural origins which audience either get, if they are either old or savvy enough or they do not. There are also several parodies and pastiches of the programme on You Tube which make fun of the characters's attitudes towards these issues.

Perception and Reality in "Mad Men", Episode 10, Series 3

Here's a well-written write up of a remarkable episode, "The Color Blue" from Mad Men's Season 3. The episodes deals with the characters perceptions of reality - a post modern idea our class is "looking at" presently with "The Truman Show".


televisionaryblog.com/2009/10/its-not-london-its-not-even-england.html

A Kodak TV ad from the early 1960s - nostalgia

Was this the inspiration for Don Draper's Kodak Carousel presentation from episode 12 of the first series of "Mad Men"? Examples of Don's nostalgic view of early married life can be found on YouTube. Of course, the audience knows about his life as a serial adulterer.

Mad Men's advertising campaigns are more postmodern than modern

This connects with our recent work on the Cadbury's Gorilla TV advert and Sony's bouncy balls advert for it Bravia TV. Mad Men is a postmodern programme which is set in a late modern period. However its advertising pitches represent early postmodern advertising even though they are not as abstract as Cadbury's and Sony's! As excellent as Mad Men's attention to detail is it still discloses its origins as being produced in OUR TIME. Each of these texts were produced between 2005-7.

It's a postmodern trait that adverts should emotionally connect audiences with brands. The products are less important than the emotional connection forged between the user and the brand. Old style, late modernist adverting, which is still with us, tries to sell the product rationally and pumps away at why we need the product and how it is "good value" and is better than rival brands, etc.. Such adverts leave no room for audiences to interpret, engage and emotionally connect with the brand. The classic "Kodak Carousel" scene from Mad Men's last episode from series 1 is all about emotion; in this instance it is the post modern attachment to "nostalgia" and our emotional attachment to photographs that makes Don Draper's presentation so effective.

To enlarge click on the Full button (under the presentation) to read the relevant pages to know more.

Russo Revelation on Mad Men Vol 1.7

View more documents from Jaci Russo.

Key Terms for Post Modern Media

Click on the image to enlarge

Click on the images to enlarge

Semiotics- the study of signs

We've been touching on some of this stuff in lessons: "the sign structures that we call culture". This is a great little video which illustrates signs as icons - indexes - symbols.

Bricolage "Mad Men"

Key Terms for Post Modern Media
Try constructing one of these yourselves for either Mad Men or Grand Theft Auto IV. It'll help you remember the term bricolage. Bricolage – a collection or putting together of images, ideas etc to make a new piece of media art.



Click on the image to enlarge

Intertextual References in the Opening Credit Art Sequence of "Mad Men"

Saul Bass’s innovative title sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s “North By North West”, set against Manhattan skyscraper (1959). Notice also how this is an early example of "reality" being reflected against the skyscraper, which is iconic of New York. There is certainly "a play" on images here.

Casino Royal's brilliant opening sequence was inspired by Maurice Binder's opening sequences for Bond Films from the 1960s-1980s. Binder died in 1991. The theme of identity is also reflected in the images and the song's lyrics.



The opening sequence to Alfred Hitchock’s “Notorious”. The second scene’s introduction of Carey Grant’s character influenced the cinematic style of Mad Men’s, Cinematographer, Phil Abraham’s repeated shots of Don Draper back portraying him as enigmatic and deceptive. The sequence to note begins three minutes in.



"911 and The Falling Man". Of course, skyscrapers have always been a key part of the iconography of New York.

Why We Love "Mad Men" - by Lauren M.E. Goodlad

Lauren M.E. Goodlad is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois. Her article is academically thoughtful, crisp and insightful. It's a great read for students who want to understand how audiences in our time share similar issues with the programme's fictional characters of the early 1960s. "We also recognise that our lives are long Meditations In An Emergency".

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-We-Love-Mad-Men/48234/

Mad Men Essay Questions

In the exam you will need to discuss two or more media forms. To keep things for now we will examine one text for now.

Q. How would you define Mad Men as a post modern text? And explain why you would give this programme this label.

or,

Q. Consider the ways in which post modern media challenge conventional relations between audience and text. Focus on Mad Men for your answer.

What follows is from page 39 of OCR's AS and A2

Syllabus

The four main prompt questions from the syllabus are as follows:

Post-modern Media

 What are the different versions of post-modernism (historical period, style, theoretical approach)?

 What are the arguments for and against understanding some forms of media as post-modern?

 How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation?

 In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world?

Candidates might explore combinations of:

How post-modern media relate to genre and narrative across two media, computer / video games and new forms of representation, post-modern cinema, interactive media, reality TV, music video, advertising, post-modern audience theories, aspects of globalisation, parody and pastiche in media texts or a range of other applications of post-modern media theory.

RETRO: The Camera & 'Mad Men'

This is Jefferson Robbins's excellent video essay on the series which he originally posted on Film Freak Central. The video essay form is an exciting new way to analyse films and television. I've posted one or two from other authors on another blog, http://asanda2filmstudies.blogspot.com/

In the near future film and media students might well be expected to try their hands at making video essays themselves.

Postmodern texts - their themes and issues

Post modern texts usually have something serious to say about themes and issues in our lives by setting these texts either in the present or in the recent or distant past. When we look at a "Banksy" there is a serious issue underlying each piece of his humorous, "guerilla art" which often ironically subverts figures of status, institutions, hypcritical attitudes towards morality, and so forth. He does this to foster more democratic attitudes and a questioning attitude towards authority figures and coventional ideas in our time.

Historical fiction texts, set in the recent and distant past, also have something to say about issues and themes that resonate and matter for us today - but are so often buried under the welter of our every-day lives that it is difficult for us to see them as clearly as might. "Mad Men" offers us an opportunity to examine how the following themes and issues were represented in the early 1960s: sexism, misogyny, drinking, smoking and drug-taking, early mass consumerism, various forms of love, homophobia, masculinity, femininity, racism, dubious family values, our responses to fads, fashions and social trends, ambition, identity, loneliness and, of course, alienation and how this affected society then and affects us today. No doubt, there are others.

An important way to examine the idea of "alienation" in Mad Men would be to focus on Don Draper's estrangement from his wife and family and his attitude towards his office. He is not the only character estranged in this way but he is the main protagonist. Consider alienation in the context of Don's identity and how he has "become someone else" and what this does to his way of seeing himself and others. Don's representation of masculinity is another way to explore his "alienation" from home and how he views himself in at his workplace, Sterling Cooper.

Much of this text's purpose is to make us think about how our society responds to issues and themes like these today. And it is presented at a pace which imitates the pace and rhythm of programmes from the early 1960s.

Notes and comments on "The Hobo Code" from the first series of "Mad Men"

This is worth a visit for its summary, explanations and analysis of episode 8, "The Hobo Code". There is also a short video summarising parts of this intriging episode.

http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/2008/11/22/mad-men-the-hobo-code/

This link offers the same information for an earlier episode (6) entitled "Babylon".

http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/2008/11/08/mad-men-babylon/

The same, useful information and analysis for episode 1, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes".

http://www.webomatica.com/wordpress/2008/10/13/mad-men-smoke-gets-in-your-eyes/

Chubby Checker in 1960 singing and doing "The Twist"

The song is featured in episode 8, "The Hobo Code" from "Mad Men". Notice the new dance's appeal for girls and young women constitute most of the audience. Some of them appear unused to any kind of movement, perhaps reflecting the "stiff", conventional society of the late 1950s. Notice also the ethnic origins of the audience. The representation of race and class in this video is particularly interesting. One wonders if Chubby did not dress in a jacket and tie he would have had the chance to perform on television! At first, with his teddy-boy hair-style one could mistake this African-American for being white.

"Mad Men's" opening credit sequence

Much of the following should prove very useful for anyone preparing and writing essays on opening credit sequence of "Mad Men" and why this series can be viewed as post modern.

Of course, there are scenes from a variety of episodes for which you could plan and write an essay:

• the representation of signs and symbols (recurring motifs, camera shots/angles/movement, images, buildings, names, hobo signs, language, etc.); http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/7823
• the representation of gender through women and femininity and men and masculinity;
• "Mad Men's" representation and intertextuality through camerawork;
• the use of non linear narratives and the "bending" of time;
• the representation of "truth and reality";
• the representation of class, age and sexuality;
• how alienation is represented through the themes of identity, home, ambition and loneliness;
• the blurring of the genre conventions between television and cinema.
• Any one or more of these issues can be studied in particular scenes. These issues regularly provoke post modern audiences into thinking about how they were thought about then (if at all) - and now. Mad Men's historical and fictional presentation of the recent "primitive" past invites post modern audiences to make comparisons between the attitudes and behaviour of early 1960s society with our own time.

For Research and for making notes

You might also examine and study the exchange of Web 2.0 offerings which have emerged out of the main text(s) over time, such as blog sites, AMC's "Mad Men's" website and what it has to offer, fan-sites, YouTube video compilations, video essays, websites such as "What Would Don Draper Do" (see an earlier post), reviews on Amazon and IMDB, newspaper and magazine reviews, retro-fashion of the series in stores, etc.

These links and essays should help you with the opening sequence and credit art of Mad Men and why it can be considered to be a post modern text.

The YouTube video of the opening sequence of "Mad Men":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRr-Fb5xQo

Here's a brief, sharply drawn analysis by The Guardian's Mark Lawson from February 2009

"Mad Men (2007-)
The silhouette of a black-suited man falling out of an office and past skyscrapers billboarded with advertising images invokes the glamorous past (alluding to Saul Bass's titles for Alfred Hitchcock and Maurice Binder's for James Bond) but also the terrible recent past: the helpless, plummeting bodies on 9/11. The music (using a synthesised instrumental by RJD2) is brooding and ominous. Yet the dropping body miraculously recovers to smoke a cigarette, thus setting up Don Draper's two main qualities: mystery and buoyancy."

Here's a link to a great essay and discussion on the opening credit sequence of "Mad Men":

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/04/14/falling-man-and-mad-men-154

"Mad Men's" creator, Matthew Weiner gives his ideas and views on the opening credit sequence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqX_WMNi_gM

On of the distinguishing post modern features of the programme is that it lends itself very readily to parody, "The Simpson's" pastiche of the opening sequence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcmM7Jh2Y3k&feature=related

Film Freak's page on "Mad Men" with that excellent video essay on camerawork and representation

http://filmfreakcentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-retrograde.html

‘Mad Men’ Strains to Stay as Button-Down as Ever - a review

New York Times's Alessandra Stanley's review of Series 3 is helpful for understanding post modern audiences' reactions to characters and scenes in the program. Her examples span all three series.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/arts/television/14mad.html

Mad Men 'promo' trailers

The first trailer by AMC is a 'promo' for Season 1, the second is for Season 2. The others are for Season 3. They are quite 'retro' as they pastiche TV trailers from the past. However, being post modern, these ones are less naive and more cleverly stylised. The cinematic nature of the show is highlighted in each trailer. Postmodernists would argue that the generic boundries between television and cinema are being blurred here. Perhaps this is to be expected as AMC stands for American Movie Channel.

Basket of Kisses - a blog dedicated to Mad Men

Basket of Kisses - a great looking blog by the Lipp sisters dedicated to all things Mad Men.

http://www.lippsisters.com/

Advertising Age - on "Mad Men"

Several pastiche news story pages from the early 1960s featuring Mad Men characters, the agency, Sterling Cooper, mixed with actual news stories from the time.

http://www.adage-360media.com/adage360/madmen/