Mad Men on AMC begins in 1960 and chronicles the lives of people involved in a specific Madison Avenue Advertisement agency. It is a surprising investigation into the ritzy world of mid 20th century Americana that is often times forgotten in popular histories of the 1960s which almost exclusively deal with the counterculture. In many ways Mad Men is the story of the death of a universe. As we follow the lives of the different social classes related to the Ad agency, we see firsthand the cracks apparent in the system and as the season progresses, the water leaking in.
Save for a few spotty references to the Village and its raunchy liberalism, Mad Men is an enclosed entity. The office is marked by conservative politics and old money construction. There is heavy drinking and smoking during work hours and male chauvinism is not the rule but the law. Any rebellion on the part of a female worker will result in her occupational destruction and probably personal slander. Any particle of the feminist movement is ignored or flatout rejected in the ad agency world which exists just 40 blocks above the heart of the radical social movements of the 1960s. As the show continues to prosper I expect to see an increase in the overlap of the two different universes.
I wonder if the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were inevitable. Do you think that alongside political and economic progress society was bound to follow suit? What would the map of society and culture look like today if the Mad Men of the television show had won out? Would it merely have delayed the movements we know today as civil rights, feminist, and youth? But really, as I think about it more, the Mad Men in the ad agency didn't die out, they merely changed forms. In fact, in today's world brought about by the social change of the 1960s, advertisement probably has even more power. The shift though, is the line separating old money and new money. And what do those distinctions mean?
If there was a certain point in American history where New Money took over, I think it must have been in the 1960s. But what would our world look like if it hadn't gone that way? I don't think America would have been a superpower, or at least such a superpower. I think it must have been an equal tradeoff that we made as a country in order to maintain power. New Money will always win the day. But only for awhile. Because there is always Newer Money.
Mad Men examines what happens when Old Money is threatened and we watch because we like to see things crumble. The glitz and the glamor looks majestic and inspires nostalgia and longing for the time, but we reject the lives depicted in the show because they are as unstable as microscopic black holes, always crashing in on their weaknesses.
