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Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s
Since the show's debut in 2007, Mad Men has invited viewers to immerse themselves in the lush period settings, ruthless Madison Avenue advertising culture, and arresting characters at the center of its 1960s fictional world. Mad Men, Mad World is a comprehensive analysis of this groundbreaking TV series. Scholars from across the humanities consider the AMC drama from a fascinating array of perspectives, including fashion, history, architecture, civil rights, feminism, consumerism, art, cinema, and the serial format, as well as through theoretical frames such as critical race theory, gender, queer theory, global studies, and psychoanalysis. In the introduction, the editors explore the show's popularity; its controversial representations of race, class, and gender; its powerful influence on aesthetics and style; and its unique use of period historicism and advertising as a way of speaking to our neoliberal moment. Mad Men, Mad World also includes an interview with Phil Abraham, an award-winning Mad Men director and cinematographer. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that understanding Mad Men means engaging the show not only as a reflection of the 1960s but also as a commentary on the present day.
Contributors . Michael Bérubé, Alexander Doty, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Jim Hansen, Dianne Harris, Lynne Joyrich, Lilya Kaganovsky, Clarence Lang, Caroline Levine, Kent Ono, Dana Polan, Leslie Reagan, Mabel Rosenheck, Robert A. Rushing, Irene Small, Michael Szalay, Jeremy Varon
Contributors . Michael Bérubé, Alexander Doty, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Jim Hansen, Dianne Harris, Lynne Joyrich, Lilya Kaganovsky, Clarence Lang, Caroline Levine, Kent Ono, Dana Polan, Leslie Reagan, Mabel Rosenheck, Robert A. Rushing, Irene Small, Michael Szalay, Jeremy Varon
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 2, 2013
A very academic bunch of essays on my favorite show. If you're ever tired of reading recaps the next day (some are quite good, others silly), this is the remedy. Who else is going to tell you that Don is a secret Jew or that the whole show is just one big Victorian serial novel? Many of the essayists write for Kritik, a U of Illinois lit/culture blog that I found while dredging the web for better recaps. If you don't pick up the book, at least read Kritik if you love Mad Men.
May 20, 2014
as with any collection of essays (especially those more academic leaning), there's always some great ones and some not-so-great ones. unsurprisingly, the essay on mad men and feminism stood out the most to me, especially how watching through a feminist lens can make you both love & hate the show. the various essays on don being an outsider in correlation to other outsiders on the show were also worth the read.
May 10, 2015
Because I’ve recently been reading and thinking about AIs, it occurs to me to wonder what a machine consciousness of the future will make of Mad Men, the long-running period drama on AMC that will soon reach its end. If those AIs are anything like their makers (that is, us), the answer will likely depend on which one you ask. It’s clear from reading this book that reasonable minds see different things, even contradictory things, when they survey the series. I’ll mention here only a few of the points that struck me.
The show’s very title is critiqued, for Mad Men is not only about Madison Avenue advertising men but also about women. Dana Polan proposes that the reductive title is deliberate: “This is not a total or totalized picture of the times as they were but a deliberately partial and incomplete picture of how some people lived some parts of those times and, in some cases, groped toward other ways of living them.” Other contributors aren’t so favorably disposed toward the show’s limited viewpoint; Clarence Lang, for instance, argues that “Mad Men portrays the freedom struggles African Americans waged during the early 1960s in a casual, sporadic, and arguably dubious manner.” Alexander Doty, after discussing the show’s rare explicit treatments of homosexuality (mainly in the case of Sal, the art director) and what he calls the “straight queerness” of Don and Peggy, admits that he gave up on the show altogether.
In a discussion of Don Draper as a modern instance of the dandy, Jim Hansen compares him to Roger O. Thornhill, the Madison Avenue ad executive played by Cary Grant in North by Northwest, who, like Don, is “caught between two identities.” Robert A. Rushing takes the discussion of identity further with his analysis of connections between Antonioni films and Mad Men. As he puts it:
Caroline Levine presents a subtle response to those critics who feel the show invites us to feel complacent and superior. The gist of her argument is that the early-60s world presented by Mad Men (the contributions in this volume cover only the first four seasons of the show) feels both familiar and strange to us rather than simply distant. In other words, though she doesn’t put it this way, Mad Men demonstrates that change, then and now, is both necessary and possible, rather than an accomplished fact that we’ve somehow moved beyond.
Jeremy Varon takes another angle on this question. With a nod to the pilot-episode title, which was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Varon says that “History, fetishized by both the show and its audience, seems to have gotten in our eyes, yielding distorted views of Mad Men as being fundamentally about the past—about history and our relationship to it,” and he goes on to suggest that “Mad Men screams that we have not found a solution to the happiness problem.… Far from being an object of distant scorn or longing, the show may well offer a despairing portrait of postwar American life in a permanent twilight.”
Lauren M. E. Goodlad, in a wide-ranging (and for me sometimes elusive) discussion that encompasses Jewishness, Victorian serial novels, and György Lukács’s analysis of historical fiction, contends almost in passing that “If Mad Men invites its audience to believe in anything, it is not social movements, but isolated feats of self-invention.” She also compares Don Draper to Emma Bovary and finds a “Flaubertian eye for detail” in the show’s presentation.
The show’s very title is critiqued, for Mad Men is not only about Madison Avenue advertising men but also about women. Dana Polan proposes that the reductive title is deliberate: “This is not a total or totalized picture of the times as they were but a deliberately partial and incomplete picture of how some people lived some parts of those times and, in some cases, groped toward other ways of living them.” Other contributors aren’t so favorably disposed toward the show’s limited viewpoint; Clarence Lang, for instance, argues that “Mad Men portrays the freedom struggles African Americans waged during the early 1960s in a casual, sporadic, and arguably dubious manner.” Alexander Doty, after discussing the show’s rare explicit treatments of homosexuality (mainly in the case of Sal, the art director) and what he calls the “straight queerness” of Don and Peggy, admits that he gave up on the show altogether.
In a discussion of Don Draper as a modern instance of the dandy, Jim Hansen compares him to Roger O. Thornhill, the Madison Avenue ad executive played by Cary Grant in North by Northwest, who, like Don, is “caught between two identities.” Robert A. Rushing takes the discussion of identity further with his analysis of connections between Antonioni films and Mad Men. As he puts it:
What Mad Men really shares with Antonioni is three fundamental concerns: (1) the impenetrable surface of things, especially other people; (2) the fragility and fluidity of identity, which appears not as a foundational feature of the subject but as an external shell, discarded at will; and (3) a dedication to watching things—especially people—disappear.
Caroline Levine presents a subtle response to those critics who feel the show invites us to feel complacent and superior. The gist of her argument is that the early-60s world presented by Mad Men (the contributions in this volume cover only the first four seasons of the show) feels both familiar and strange to us rather than simply distant. In other words, though she doesn’t put it this way, Mad Men demonstrates that change, then and now, is both necessary and possible, rather than an accomplished fact that we’ve somehow moved beyond.
Jeremy Varon takes another angle on this question. With a nod to the pilot-episode title, which was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Varon says that “History, fetishized by both the show and its audience, seems to have gotten in our eyes, yielding distorted views of Mad Men as being fundamentally about the past—about history and our relationship to it,” and he goes on to suggest that “Mad Men screams that we have not found a solution to the happiness problem.… Far from being an object of distant scorn or longing, the show may well offer a despairing portrait of postwar American life in a permanent twilight.”
Lauren M. E. Goodlad, in a wide-ranging (and for me sometimes elusive) discussion that encompasses Jewishness, Victorian serial novels, and György Lukács’s analysis of historical fiction, contends almost in passing that “If Mad Men invites its audience to believe in anything, it is not social movements, but isolated feats of self-invention.” She also compares Don Draper to Emma Bovary and finds a “Flaubertian eye for detail” in the show’s presentation.
August 2, 2017
Do you ever read critical essays and wonder if the creator of the work being analyzed (in this case, Mad Men) actually intended all of the things the analysts see, or think they see?
As is true for most essay collections, this is hit-and-miss, but for the most part, the essays are good. They discuss topics such as race in the '60s and on the show, gender in the '60s, fashion, and comparisons to works by other directors. Some of the essays are long-winded (at least they are to me), and I didn't love all the comparisons to shows I've never seen, like The Sopranos and The Wire. But overall a good collection.
As is true for most essay collections, this is hit-and-miss, but for the most part, the essays are good. They discuss topics such as race in the '60s and on the show, gender in the '60s, fashion, and comparisons to works by other directors. Some of the essays are long-winded (at least they are to me), and I didn't love all the comparisons to shows I've never seen, like The Sopranos and The Wire. But overall a good collection.
May 18, 2014
This was a great book of academic essays on Mad Men - if you are a fan of the show, definitely read this.
May 11, 2024
Never sure what to say about nonfiction. Super interesting, did make me have to turn my uni brain back on and remember how to talk about film intelligently. I definitely had read a few of these essays before and cited them in my dissertation. When will I have more thoughts and write about Mad Men again?
February 20, 2016
This is a nice collection of essays about the AMC show "Mad Men." I don't know that I could recommend it to anyone who doesn't watch the show, because it wouldn't make a lot of sense otherwise, but I'm a huge fan and I enjoyed these essays.
The show is set in the '60s, so there are a multitude of social, gender, and racial issues that have been explored. I felt that some of these essays went a little too far in complaining about how things aren't explored even further. Why don't we get to see the home life of the Drapers' maid, Carla? Why are the gay characters marginalized and why don't we see more about them? I understand where these writers are coming from, but the basic truth is that this is a show about well-to-do Manhattanites in a Madison Avenue ad agency; the lives of the maid or of the gay characters are peripheral to the story of the core characters. It began with Don, Roger, Joan, Peggy, and Pete, and that is the main focus of the show. We don't see more about Carla because her home life doesn't really matter to the Drapers. We don't see more of Sal because he is no longer with the agency (no spoilers).
That is the crux of the matter and why this show is so fascinating to me. They are a fairly self-absorbed bunch, and although they are paying attention to what is happening in the world around them, they are looking at it in real time, not from the benefit of decades of discussion and deliberation. Peggy isn't involved in the women's movement because she is too busy trying to excel at her job and compete with the men in the agency. She is living it, and if the show doesn't preach about various things, it is because it is showing what is happening in the real life of these people. Were there people in New York City involved in the Civil Rights Movement? Of course...but I'm betting that they didn't work at a place like Sterling Cooper and Partners.
An interesting read for any fan of the show.
The show is set in the '60s, so there are a multitude of social, gender, and racial issues that have been explored. I felt that some of these essays went a little too far in complaining about how things aren't explored even further. Why don't we get to see the home life of the Drapers' maid, Carla? Why are the gay characters marginalized and why don't we see more about them? I understand where these writers are coming from, but the basic truth is that this is a show about well-to-do Manhattanites in a Madison Avenue ad agency; the lives of the maid or of the gay characters are peripheral to the story of the core characters. It began with Don, Roger, Joan, Peggy, and Pete, and that is the main focus of the show. We don't see more about Carla because her home life doesn't really matter to the Drapers. We don't see more of Sal because he is no longer with the agency (no spoilers).
That is the crux of the matter and why this show is so fascinating to me. They are a fairly self-absorbed bunch, and although they are paying attention to what is happening in the world around them, they are looking at it in real time, not from the benefit of decades of discussion and deliberation. Peggy isn't involved in the women's movement because she is too busy trying to excel at her job and compete with the men in the agency. She is living it, and if the show doesn't preach about various things, it is because it is showing what is happening in the real life of these people. Were there people in New York City involved in the Civil Rights Movement? Of course...but I'm betting that they didn't work at a place like Sterling Cooper and Partners.
An interesting read for any fan of the show.
July 8, 2014
A series of scholarly essays analyzing many of the sociopolitical and historical motifs recurrent in Mad Men, complete with research studies and notations. I found most of these essays interesting, some brilliantly insightful, and few of them complete hooey. If you should decide to read the book, I'll leave it up to you to decide which are which; the various analyses are mostly subjective, so your mileage may vary.
After reading Mad Men, Mad World, I went back and rewatched the first several seasons of Mad Men, and I definitely gained a new appreciation of how the subtleties of dress, interior design, and period details in the show actually symbolize much larger historical themes and psychological characteristics.
After reading Mad Men, Mad World, I went back and rewatched the first several seasons of Mad Men, and I definitely gained a new appreciation of how the subtleties of dress, interior design, and period details in the show actually symbolize much larger historical themes and psychological characteristics.
June 3, 2017
A scholarly examination of one of my favorite television series... puts Don Draper and the re-creation of 60's milieu under the academic microscope, examining everything from fashion to the evolving role of women. Unfortunately, it only explores the series through the 4th season... would enjoy reading a scholarly dissection of the final series and the whole Coca-Cola thing.
September 24, 2013
Pretty dry stuff, but some essays--mainly the ones about aesthetics--held my interest. I also appreciated the book's over-all criticism of some of the lazier criticism lobbed at the show.
June 30, 2015
Read the chapterse "Mad Space," "Antonioni and Mad Men," and the interview with Phil Abraham. Excellent.
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July 9, 2016read some
July 21, 2017
An interesting collection of essays examining life in 1960s America.
December 27, 2018
Something that has really begun to bug me as of late—and this book has it in spades—is using academic essays to talk about what you wish a cultural object (movie/TV show/book) would be doing. It’s not dreamcasting, dreamdirecting, or dreamwriting ffs. Address the material in front of you, not “I wish they would have done this, or shown this scene.” So infuriating. Thank goodness the Afterword addressed this somewhat or I may have thrown the book across the room.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews