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Mad Men, the 1960s, and “Free” Love
I’ve looked at the 1960s from both sides now — through my own eyes and through the vision of Matthew Weiner’s epic drama of that decade, Mad Men, which returns for its final episodes on Easter Sunday, April 5. In Mad Men time, it is 1969. The massive publicity campaign has the perfect tag line, of course: “the end of an era.”
Previously on Mad Men, man walked on the moon and agency founder Bert Cooper (played by Robert Morse, he of the 1960s Broadway smash How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) uttered a “bravo” to Neil Armstrong’s own timeless tag line and passed away. Then Cooper, an Ayn Rand afficionado, returned in a season-ending fantasy sequence with a final bit of wisdom for Don Draper: the best things in life are free.
Donald Draper never believed that. He’s self-made — self-reinvented, really — and he’s as aggressive in pursuit of business opportunities as he is in pursuit of romantic conquests. And conquests, they are. In the series premiere, set in 1960, Draper memorably told his then girlfriend Rachel Menkin:
“The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons. You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”
By 1969 Draper had been through two unsuccessful marriages and many affairs of all types, from passionate to casual, risky to just frisky, with everyone from pioneering professional women to women working in the oldest of professions. Many of his dalliances — and many of Mad Men‘s other sexual relationships — are of the type that came to be know during that decade as “free love.”
Free love meant consensual sex free from the responsibilities of marriage, family, and its toils, tolls, and troubles. It always existed, but was greatly facilitated by the arrival of the birth control pill in 1959.
Mad Men has the good sense to show the growth of the free love culture in the 1960s without talking about it directly. We see it in glances and attitudes, with consequences intact. Love-starved careerist Peggy Olson is willfully blind to her own pregnancy in the first season. Draper discharges sexually charged imagery into the culture, then prevents his young daughter from wearing make-up and go-go boots to a party (though he can’t prevent what she sees there). Don’s business partner, Roger Sterling, and his ex-wife Mona struggle (so far in vain) to retrieve their own daughter, a young mom, from a commune.
Entering the final seven episodes, there’s much uncertainty as to which Mad Men characters will find redemption, particularly in the domain of romantic and sexual relationships. The female characters are certainly awakening, as was the case in 1969, to the oppressive nature of the old sexual order. Some made bold choices.
Joan Holloway, an unmarried beauty, backed away from an abortion at the last minute. Stuck at home with a child and a hovering mother, she traded a sexual favor for a lucrative partnership and troubles to be named latter: a compromised relationship with mammon, and the jealous, condescending glances from colleagues who know what she did.
Peggy Olson ascended the corporate ladder, and passed a morose 30th birthday. Don Draper reassured her that, while he worried about a lot of things, he didn’t worry about her. Peggy was doing just fine. Peggy wept briefly, then had a creative breakthrough. We love Peggy. We see much good in Don for finally pushing her into finding her own way as a creative leader. But we wonder if she’ll do better than he has in romance.
All the answers shouldn’t be expected in the final episodes. The ramifications of the sexual revolution and the other 1960s changes raised in Mad Men haven’t even been answered now, 45 years later. Or have they?
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Jim,
You know that Finch is very smart. I wouldn’t believe he was dead if I read his obituary.
Did you ever think that there is a dirty little secret to Mad Men. The obvious take on the show is that it lets you in on the truth about corporate america and its shallow values. The real truth is that in our metro-sexual, enviro-obsessed, overregulated lame economy of today everyone secretly wants to go back to 1960s.
Regards,
Jim
Every decade gets its celebration by folks who were not there. I gave up on mad men about the same place the 60s stopped being fun ,somewhere around 1966.
The acting was superb, but I felt the joy had gone out of the writing.
Then again, the same was true of the decade. We started with the Jetsons and ended with the Mansons.
Great clip, Jim. Last night, at the big Mad Men party in Los Angeles, Mr. Morse received a prolonged ovation. From Finch to Cooper, his career nicely bookends the industry has had with advertising.
There were little black cocktail napkins at the event with inscriptions of memorable quotes from the series. The cynical line about love and nylons was one of them.
While the series has had plenty of self-deprecating fun with advertising and ad men, deeper more nuanced meanings weren’t very far from the surface.
The “nylons” line itself was part of a sales pitch. Don was selling Rachel, who came from a conservative Jewish family, on a harsh rationale for their relationship.
Draper, born Dick Whitman, was a very poor boy who made good thanks to advertising. He went from deciphering the eerie iconography of “the hobo code” to being richly paid for quips and slogans.
Many of the scenes cut both ways. When Don and Roger pitched Dow Chemical during the height of the Viet Nam protests, the scene might be construed by liberals as a revealing “greed is good” moment. I saw it as Don capturing back his own commanding presence as an exponent of the animal spirits of capitalism.
You’re right that those of us old enough to remember want to re-live elements of the 1960s, when men were men, and the economy thrived. Mad Men also reminds us what creeps some men were in the era before women’s liberation.
Plus, it celebrates the women who — sometimes at a price — lived out their new freedom earning financial independence in the workplace, and enjoying new kinds of pre-marital and non-marital sexual relationships.
You have to keep in mind that Don warned Joanie not to do that sexual favor to secure a partnership, and she got furious at him. Don is a tragic hero in a lot of ways. He is severely flawed when it comes to matters of family, but he is severely sincere and protective when it comes to matters of his colleagues. In the end, the persona of “Don Draper” is what Don is married to and that includes the profession Don got himself into, which is why he seems to have more affection for Peggy or Joan than he does his wives (there is little doubt that he loves his kids, if not in an awkward way).
As for longing for the 60s again, I think what is meant by that is that we long for a time when all aspects of life weren’t political and it was made that way by the radicals of the 60s and now their kids. Yes, “men were men” and all that but more importantly being a man wasn’t a counter-cultural political statement like it is today, ditto with being a strong woman who loves and protects her family. I am only 36, so I don’t have the memories of actually living in a time when the country was in harmony with itself–granted not all sectors of society were, but the grand majority of it was. The closest I get to this is what I recall of the 80s, but even that had cracks in it.
In longing for the 60s, what we are longing for is not being judged when you hold the door open for your lady friend, or going to a dance and not seeing people simulate pornographic sex on the dance floor, or being a kid and taking for granted that your mom and dad will remain married to each other till the day they die. Basically what we are longing for is the removal of politics out of every aspect of our lives.
Although Matthew Weiner was only “there” for the final few years of the 1960’s, his years of research and thousands of conversations with those who lived through it made his opus utterly convincing to me.
I did fear that he would be waylaid but the politics of the counterculture years, but instead the opposite kept popping up. Peggy’s critical, left-wing, fiercely anti-capitalist boyfriend got the dramatic equivalent of a stake through his heart. Stoners, goof-offs, cultists, and crazies all got their due. So, alas, did some of our heroes who regularly succumbed to the temptations of a wildly freed-up social structure.
Some of the later seasons did start slow and downbeat, but the humor always found its way in and by the final episodes of each season, the peaks got higher because of where things had started. Here’s a little crowdsourced data to support that contention. So maybe give it another chance, TKC1101?
Before resuming with the new episodes on April 5, I especially recommend catching up withSeason 7 Episode 6 (The Strategy) and definitely Season 7, Episode 7, Waterloo, which got tremendous reviews.
Jim,
I don’t think you have my point completely. I am talking about the younger generation, women and everybody else. The assumption that current so-called values have anything to do with being a human being is vastly overrated.
I am not condoning any particular behavior, however, “Fifty Shades of Grey” seems to contradict all political correctness. I think Mad Men’s depiction of 1960s sexuality has a certain appeal that has nothing to do with learning about men being creeps in the era before women’s liberation. That’s the cover story. The real story just isn’t politically correct.
Regards,
Jim
As an aside, or tangent if you will, Rob Long needs to contemplate doing a Mad Men style show centered around the early days of National Review. Anyone who has read any of WFB’s biographies (John Judis’ is actually a good one even though Judis is a Pinko) will tell you that those days were ever bit as exciting as what Mad Men depicts from the other view. It doesn’t have to be overtly about NR and WFB, but the characters could reflect all of the major roles and events that led to NR being the earliest voice for Conservative change in America. What say you Rob?
That is brilliant, Jim!! I have never thought of it that way really. The depiction of the 60s in Mad Men isn’t to display for the younger country how “misogynistic” life was then, but to display how the male/female relationship prior to the radical take over of the US was not a political arrangement, or at least that is how I am reading it anyway. It’s like I said above, we long for a time when everything that we, the American People, do in society is not a political act, from smoking in public to going to church. Mad Men (and if you are interested in another such show Magic City) allows all of us to disappear into that world.
Robert,
Who knows. If enough ‘dreamers’ go to the ballot box and vote for their dream then it might not be just a fantasy.
Just dreaming.
Regards,
Jim
I stopped watching MM after the first season.
It is Hollywood at its worst- exaggerated, one-dimensional interpretations of a time and place with which none of the show’s twenty-something writers were the least bit familiar.
Robert – The politics between Republicans and Democrats in the 1960’s was certainly different from now. In Mad Men, the Nelson Rockefeller / John Lindsay strain is sympathetically portrayed through Betty’s remarkably patient second husband Henry Francis.
Democrats wish that type of Republican were around today. Some of us wish Democrats like JFK were still in that party’s leadership. No such luck.
While everyday life, especially the education system, was not as politicized as today, the loud, revolutionary wing of the radical left fought hard to make it so. That first generation raised in relative comfort without the need to “succeed in business” diverted into academics, law, and government and began their long march. (A show set in those precincts would be more likely to reveal the origins of the crimes of those marchers.)
Social arrangements can be reasonably interpreted as political, of course. There was a social contract that men would earn and that women would breed. In Mad Men, Peggy’s mother Katherine (played to perfection by Myra Turley) represents that world view. The toll which those arrangements took on men is evident in the bar cars, the sex nests, and the long lonely looks with drink in hand.
I contend that the ugliness of male chauvinism in the workplace is fairly depicted in Mad Men and well-deserved. Among other things, it’s bad for business. We also see the manipulative wiles of some women working the old status quo to their own advantage — Roger Sterling’s wife #2 comes to mind.
To me, Mad Men is a broadly human masterwork encompassing themes basic to human nature itself. It’s not the traditional shallow left-wing portrait of the 1960s as a time of justified rebellion against repression, but it brings history alive in complex dimensions.
So, for instance, Don’s former secretary Dawn reacts to the Harlem riots in a human, non-political way, because even in a small role the writers treat her as a person, rather than as a symbol.
Likewise the men can be loutish one moment, and supportive the next because interesting, complex people can be like that. Mad Men appeals to so many today partly because it avoids easy cliches. We’re now in the second half of 1969, and I don’t think we’ve even heard the expression “male chauvinist pig” yet.
The primary writer, who approved every word in all episodes, will exit the 18-49 demographic the month after the series comes to a close on May 17.
I usually agree with your posts. Maybe we had different experiences in the 1960’s. I was in New York, and my dad worked in advertising.
I assure you that most of the advertising and factual material presented is well-researched, meticulously authenticated, or even inspired by on actual events. In terms of the character and relationship material, it also rings true to me. Advertising people were a little bit ahead of trends seen elsewhere later on.
Since the brilliant season one finale The Wheel didn’t bring you back, I can’t promise that you’d enjoy the six years of the series which you haven’t seen.
Yes, Mad Men goes much deeper, dealing with basic aspects of male and female attraction, and with the full arcs of certain types of relationships.
Drama is, of course, selective. Successful marriages don’t often make for successful drama. Although the classic “did you get pears?” scene may be an exception.
I completely agree with how you are reading Mad Men, but what I am saying is that there isn’t an overt, in your face “I’m doing this because Gloria Stienham is correct” attitude. Yes the chauvinism is there and the women are bucking it, but it isn’t shrill or exaggerated like the supposed “chauvinism” of today is. (Rape culture on college campus?) The episode where the civil rights movement was touched on is a prime example. Yes, you could see the empathy among the characters as they reacted to what they were watching on TV, but that is because you, as a viewer who did not grow up then, could also empathize with what it must have been like to be a Black individual living in Jim Crow’s South. It wasn’t an episode where the writers took the opportunity to say “and America still sucks.”
I don’t know, but when I watch Mad Men–and as mentioned above Magic City–I don’t get the sense that the writers are trying to tell the viewer that America sucked back then and it sucks now unless we go full on socialist. I get a sense that they are trying to tell a story about a small segment of society living in a time when things were not politicized to the extent that they are now. I guess this is what is meant by saying “a time when things were simpler.” Is Don Draper’s life “simple”? Not by any stretch of the imagination. But is it filled with political statement after political statement? I don’t think so, and I think that is indicative of the times in which the show is set more so than the writers just trying to tell a good story. Had they made MM dripping with politics, it would not have been as successful. they were true to the era and that is what people crave in this day and age. A time when sending your kids to school with a turkey sandwich and a chocolate bar wasn’t a political statement.
Absolutely correct, Mad Men does not drip with the awkward flop sweat of political statements.
Unlike well-acted, well-appointed dramas such as The West Wing and recently, The Good Wife, and so much else on screen, there’s no feverish political agenda here. Matthew Weiner is an artist, not a polemicist.
There’s an old Hollywood and theater adage, “if you want to send a message, try Western Union.” I guess it’s in need of an update, but the idea still applies.
Sorry, but the reasoning of crowds is an amusing irony, best left on the coffee table like any good coffee table tome.
Like any good art, my reaction was personal. There were several characters I wanted to follow , but they became so detestable that it was like watching a good friend or family member under addiction withdrawal That too is a deep experience, but hardly one you want to see voluntarily. One character, yes, but all of them? Like I said, the writing lost it’s joy. You have to balance pathos.
The acting was incredible, despite the story arcs. There is, unfortunately just too much promising content out there these days to spend time to revisit something, especially since I would enter with an aversion to overcome.
Thank you for your reply and I am glad you enjoyed the series. On it’s worst day it beat the drivel like “The Good Wife” and other Democratic Party crossover shows.
Nothing in life can possibly be so one-dimensional. All men in advertising were boozers, adulterers, negligent husbands and mediocre talents?
ET,
I agree with you that Mad Men is full of one-dimensional stereotypes. What my comments are about is why the attraction of the viewers. They can imagine all they want that their fascination is to affirm their liberated point of view. I am suggesting that it is just the reverse. They can’t stop watching it because they long for the time when marriage and family mattered. They can hide behind the smug shallow conclusions about society in the 1960s but if that was all it was then they wouldn’t be recording and watching every episode. They are desperate for a connection to real values not the PC banality of 2015 that masquerades as values.
Regards,
Jim
Jim; I had the exact opposite reaction. I thought the show worked very hard to present marriage/family values as false entities. The main character of the show is an appalling creature!
Doesn’t matter though as long as I have my Seinfeld and Frasier re-runs. :))
Funniest scene was a conference room fight between Lane and Pete Campbell. Don, Roger, and Bert looked on.
From what I recall, Roger, as he closed curtains in the conference room, “Am I the only one who wants to see this?”
Bert responded, “This is medieval.”
ET,
You still aren’t getting the drift. Yes exactly, the show is PC propaganda to the max. Look at the ratings for MSNBC. If all that was happening was PC propaganda the show would have failed in the first season. The only reason its survives is that people can’t take their eyes off it. Why? Because deep down they are rooting for Don Draper and every maudlin misguided attempt at a normal life. They identify with Draper. There isn’t any other explanation. Draper is struggling to obtain something he knows nothing about and failing. That describes the left perfectly. People would rather watch Draper fail at real values then watch the metro-sexuals succeed at perversity.
Young woman reduced to serial hookups in college instead of committed relationships because of left wing valuelessness. Left wing first solution => defer marriage or maybe skip it entirely. Left wing second solution => false accusation of a felony and raw extortion as a substitute for values. The left sort of gets that something is terribly wrong it just has no idea what to do about it. Just like Don Draper.
By the way, I have never watched a single full episode. Socialism isn’t a value. It’s the admission that you don’t have any values and are searching for a drug to anesthetize your conscience. Blaming 1960s free enterprise society for all the non-solutions is phony from the get go. If you don’t have any values the problem is you don’t have any values not free enterprise.
Regards,
Jim
I was hooked on Mad Men from the first scene. I was somewhere between Sally’s and Bobby’s age during the show’s run. Like the Drapers (but without the money) my family life was quite dysfunctional, complete with boozing dad and passive aggressive mother. The six o’clock news was always terrifying to me as a school aged kid with its constant coverage from Vietnam Nam, race riots, and anti-war demonstrations and basically protesting. For the heck of it. The kids in my husband’s Donna Reed type family have no such stories of evenin news terror. Later, in my first real job during the early 1980s, I worked for a large marketing research company” and worked with ad agencies ( even Don’s nemesis, McCann Erickson) and some Fortune 500 companies. So, I got all the advertising an1d marketing stuff, and it was fun seeing it played out.
I disagree that the characters are one dimensional. At first glance they are playing a type, but everyone has so many layers, the type is the tip of an iceberg.
I had not thought about it not being overly political, but you are so right. This upheaval is all around them, and they are living life just as the rest of the world. I think if The scripts were preachy or overtly political, I would not havre stuck with it ( except for maybe the costumes and set).
I would love to see a Mad Men thread during this upcoming short season.
I apologize for typing mistakes. It’s not easy to edit on an iPad.
Does anyone have a favorite prop from the show? Mine is his coffee table cigarette holder. Can’t figure how you link it. http://blog.modernica.net/mad-mens-mcm-set-design/
Ah, so we agree completely on comedy!
Don Draper has been awful at times, but he’s also had some decent moments, especially recently when mentoring Peggy. No smart woman should want to be with a man like that, but part of the truth of the show is when a man looks like that, many women break their own rules.
Re family values, the divorce rate was very high in advertising in the 1960s, and it shot up in the rest of the country during the 1970’s. The impact of poor parenting and divorce are depicted not to say that family values should die but to explore the impact of the era — the post-Pill dawn of the Media Age — on family life.
I very much like they way they use books. You see period-accurate trade annuals, of course, and there’s Bert’s Ayn Rand thing, McLuhan on Draper’s night table, all kinds of meaningful paperbacks in the pockets of all kinds of people, and a middle brow magazine like Wisdom in the old Ossining house. These people still read.
Also like the way they simulate interference on the old inside antenna black & white television sets.
There was also a back flip date desk calendar with a globe pattern which one of the industry trade groups gave out, I believe. My father, an advertising man himself, once had an identical one. I have no idea how they found a shiny new one, but there it was on one of the desks in the old office. Oh and Sterling, a Republican, had a copy of the New York Herald Tribune on his desk. Back in the day, the Trib was the serious newspaper in town read by Republicans.
Yes, the detail with which the producers of that show go to get every single prop correct for the time and the individual characters is superb. The clothes, language, sets, all of it, tells me that the people putting that show together are going beyond the expectations of the viewer.
Yes, the books help tell the story!
And that just was Lane’s third most violent scene. His father beating him with a cane was truly barbaric, and of course Lane also came to a horribly violent end at his own hand.
He also had some wonderful scenes, like when he was persuaded to bolt his British masters to found SCDP, the scenes with his wife who couldn’t stand New York, begging Don for forgiveness for breaking trust on company finances, and a wonderfully surprising moment of black comedy, the failed suicide attempt in the gifted Jaguar which wouldn’t start.
For a show about middle class people, Mad Men has had plenty of violence. The runaway tractor; Ken Cosgrove’s accidental shooting; Don’s father’s violent death in flashback; and a personal favorite, Peggy accidentally sticking it to her left-wing boyfriend Abe with a makeshift lance.
It started out great but now it’s more like Meh Men. None of the characters are likable and the long stretches between seasons has made me lose nearly all interest. I’ll watch because they’ve promised this is the end.
Peggy has come back around. She’s been a strong rooting interest for us, in terms of her career. Peggy worked her way up from secretary to copy chief and has gradually won the respect of everyone around her. Her love life has been problematic, but those are the trade-offs.
I always liked Roger Sterling for the quips, and enjoyed seeing him assert leadership and save the firm in the most recent episode. People who claim that the show is anti-business just don’t get that every year the rooting interest has been the survival of the firm, and the fight to win and keep clients. What makes Roger less sympathetic is his tendency to dabble in the counterculture. Lose the hippies, man, and stick with airport reservation clerks or better yet your first wife!
With Don, I just root for him to overcome his demons, solve creative problems, mentor Peggy, and keep his dark side from sabotaging the duty he sometimes feels to his team. I’d like to see him stick with a career woman, not an actress or house frau. But with a guy like that a more reasonable hope is for him to remain free of liver failure, lung afflictions, and venereal disease.