With the ink drying (and changing) on the bailout, the debates concluding, verb consistency and students wondering what kind of job market they will face in the months and years ahead, thoughts have turned to the presidential election — thoughts betraying a mix of enthusiasm and ambivalence.
A walk through campus 12 days before the election failed to turn up a single unregistered or non-voting voter. Read the full story
Mad Men (the Mad short for Madison Avenue, where advertising agencies are located) begins in 1959, an era visibly different from ours. Pregnant women smoke and drink; strangers strike children across the face for knocking over vases; and divorced women are spoken to with insincere, disapproving smiles.
But to be one of the men of Sterling Cooper, a premier ad agency on the street, seems a good life. Secretaries are fitted for diaphragms in order to sleep with their bosses, the scotch flows freely at desks and meetings, and Roger Sterling, the WWII vet who founded the agency, cheerfully advises the men that life is one long furlough: “God never closes a window without opening a dress.”
For Don Draper, about to be named an agency partner, not all is perfect in this, the best of all possible worlds. Dark and secretive, Draper’s cynicism and discontent strikes an ironic commentary on 1950’s conformity. At heart a polished vagabond, he is ever slipping away from home or the office to visit a beatnik girlfriend in Greenwich Village or a brother he pretends never existed. And Despite his anti-Semitism, Don develops a passion for a superb heiress named Rachel Menken. The affair leaves him on the verge of abandoning his job.
Meanwhile business goes on as usual. Draper allows his young secretary, Peggy Olsen, to try her hand at copy writing. A natural at the job, she is promoted to a full time copy writer, the agency’s first female in the job. Olsen must walk a line between ad men who whisper about her sexual availability and weight, and women secretaries who feel she is no longer one of them. Complicating matters, Olsen too was once fitted for a diaphragm, and serviced a man in the agency (all while dealing with a traditional Catholic family’s disapproval of her career).
Draper’s wife, Betty, a beautiful stay at home mom and Bryn Mawr graduate, is shaken to discover a classmate has become a high priced call girl. Yet it is a reminder of her own simmering frustrations. Married for a decade to an adulterous stranger, Betty only now seems to realize that she resents it. Remembering that no less than Elizabeth Taylor played a call girl, and won an Oscar for it, she shyly gives it a try - with an auto mechanic. She whispers the word “divorce” in the safety of her therapist’s office, even if she thumbs her nose at the Divorced Woman in the neighborhood.
Joan Holloway, the secretary who demanded Olsen get a diaphragm, is engaged (to a doctor!), and hypocritically advising new secretaries to cover their cleavage with sweaters. But in a fluke, she is assigned TV scripts to read to recommend to advertisers. The job is quickly assigned to a male employee. But one can see her getting ideas.
Olsen, asked onto men’s laps and about her underwear, attempts to sell an airline with the tight skirts of its stewardesses. Never called out for drinks with the men, where so much of the business is made, she is told by a female client (seeing Draper on the side) to sleep with him.
Marginalized and sexualized, the women make an attempt to use that sexuality to gain a measure of power. Men like Draper are shocked. He refuses to allow Betty to wear a bikini. Men can cheat on their wives, but only with “whores.” Draper is outraged by ex-paramours who begin to dish about him. TV will not air shows with storylines about abortion. Obese women are openly denigrated. Women (and how much has changed in the era of Clinton-Palin?) are beautiful or ugly, neglected wives or threatening professionals, good girls or bad ones. It is as depressing as it is current.
My criticism - if it is one, since it is more of an observation - is that this show about “Mad Men,” is being powered, curiously enough, by women. The once explicit portrayal of the misadventures of the men in the office has largely devolved to shots of them at tables or desks holding a drink.
But whatever its little ironies, this is truly the most addictive and fascinating show on television. The much acclaimed second season of Mad Men currently airs on Sundays at 10PM Eastern Time, on AMC. It is the recipient of two Golden Globes, and16 Emmy Nomination, including a recent Emmy win for best drama.
Written By Melinda Gonzalez, Scale
