ricardienne | Mad Critics

Daniel Mendelsohn just wrote an essay on Mad Men for the New York Review of Books.

I confess I haven't seen the show, though I'm reasonably aware of what it is and how and why it's such a big deal. Anyway, Mendelsohn isn't impressed:

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.
...
As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.

Now, I can't really have an opinion here, but I suspect I would agree: I suspect that the show wouldn't be nearly so popular as it is if it actually showed real and deeply-portrayed characters encountering sexism, racism, "unhealthy" lifestyle choices...none of which are nonexistent, albeit in a different form, today.

Anyway, the point is that Dale Peck was not impressed at all by Mendelsohn's critique of this, or of anything. But, obviously, it's not even Daniel Mendelsohn as much as Mendelsohn's icky out-there classics background:

Daniel Mendelsohn—a Princeton-educated classicist who should never be allowed to write about anything more recent than, say, Suetonius. Frankly, I’m not sure he should be allowed to write about the classics either, but I don’t know enough Latin and Greek to say if he’s as wrong about them as he is about modern stuff....all the standards of symmetry and taste that classicists are taught to hold dear, and that Mendelsohn assiduously, with a sharp eye but a tin ear, applies to everything he reviews. If it was good enough for Aristotle, it must be good enough for us, right?

As far as I can tell, Peck really just objects to Daniel Mendelsohn making pronouncements about anything -- so if he is going to criticize Mad Men for not providing any meaningful story or meaningful experience to the viewer, Peck is damn well going to defend the show, even if just as mindless entertainment!

Weirdly, though, Peck's issue is that Mendelsohn is criticizing Mad Men for presenting too straight a story, for not being self-reflective and post-modern enough. I mean, says Peck, it's so hard not to be racist and sexist: sometimes we just want to "bask in the pleasures" of the gloriously decadent past:

Taking responsibility for yourself has always been hard, but taking others’ needs into consideration, particularly when they clash with your own, is exhausting. But it’s also the price we pay to live in a society that genuinely respects individual identity and autonomy.

But like I said: it can be exhausting, and we need to escape it sometimes—not from tolerance per se, multiculturalism, respect, whatever the catch-all name is for post–Social Revolution notions of equality, but moral relativity. Sometimes you just want your place in society to be fixed and secure, even if it lands you on the bottom, the fringe, the outlaw.

I really do think it takes a white man to claim that we all fantasize about being in a "fixed and secure" place in a hierarchical society, "even if it lands [us] on the bottom." I realize that as a classicist, I'm not qualified to comment on anything later than Suetonius (thank heavens Tacitus just slips in by a few years!) but it's also a bizarre way to look at modern America: "here we are, repressing all of our natural urges and treating each other like persons with dignity all for our own collective good; heavens isn't it nice to relax into some nice warm fuzzy fantasy where the gender and economic roles are fixed and the women wear girdles and no one worries if you have a few drinks too many, grope your secretary and then drive home." I mean, yes, we do put ourselves under social pressures to behave in certain ways and to avoid certain socially unacceptable behaviors. I have a hard time believing that we police ourselves more than people policed themselves in the 1960's or in any era, really. Different pressures, maybe but not fewer.