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• On Shame, Mad Men, and Period Pieces

  The style of the Sixties in Mad Men is so relentless and polished in every detail that it actually deals a death blow to authenticity. It is caricature, not authenticity, and although that, in a David Lynch sort of way, can be thrilling and effective if you subvert the style to darker devices, Mad Men isn’t sure whether it wants to be pastiche or historical realism. It wants it both ways, and for me, it is this indecision, which feels muddy and expedient as opposed to subtle or sly, that is Mad Men’s self-sabotage—“simultaneously contemptuous and pandering,” as Daniel Mendelsohn put it last year in The New York Review of Books.

  -Unfaithful: The False Nostalgia of Mad Men by Jenny Diski (download)

  Criticism of the present’s art - especially of an incomplete work -  amounts to little more than bear-baiting. I don’t disagree with anything above. Much of the article communicates the sheer vapidity of Mad Men’s fourth season, and few have been able to communicate this as plainly as the author does here. What I think the article accomplishes is less a deflation of the Mad Men myth than how the show’s chosen approach to narrative has constrained whatever we desire from it. The article pinpoints Mad Men’s failings as the failings of all period pieces.

  Period pieces work best as exercises in conformity. From painting to sculpture to film, taking on a classical subject in the past’s trappings is best done by following a very simplified set of rules: wear the clothes, look the part, don’t wink. The works that attempt to outwit period piece conventions (Fitzcarraldo and Barry Lyndon are films that come immediately to mind) invariably fail. Mad Men is doing its very best to play it safe, and although that may be frustrating to viewers, the show has no other option.

  The first season was so successful because the period’s rules - its aesthetic, its values, its ambiguities - had not yet been defined for us. Its world seemed entirely unpredictable and filled with endless possibilities for dramatic tension. The DVD sets of each successive season have allowed us to study this world and know it well enough to distinguish the plausible from the implausible. 

  Period pieces are held at gunpoint by plausibility. I believe the Mad Men devotee has no greater hope for the fifth season than to ask the show, “Provide me with simple pleasures of an ever-diminishing value,” and have those expectations met. The show may never again be unpredictable, so hemmed in as it is by its conventions. I will of course watch every episode. I am not attacking Mad Men here; I’m actually praising the film Shame (trailer).
  
  What the Harper’s piece asks of Mad Men, Shame provides. There are moments in Shame when I felt like I was watching Don Draper’s life in present-day New York. The film felt so thieved from Mad Men that I was emboldened to predict what the film was going to do at every scene; to my delight, I failed miserably. Shame is a wildly unpredictable film for all but the last ten minutes, one that successfully unleashes its twists and turns upon those who know Mad Men well (and had read the Harper’s article a few hours before walking into the cinema).

  Let’s start: The main character is a male advertising executive, an upper-echelon employee highly respected by his boss, with his own office - who drinks with his boss but shares no friendship with him, and who has no family aside from one sibling recently arrived from the past without explanation. The sibling turns out to be a great burden to the main character’s mental health; whether or not his past is the cause of his transgressions is unclear. Still, he seduces a secretary at his office and participates in random sexual encounters with prostitutes and strangers in public, in hotel rooms, and in places that will only function as spoilers so I won’t continue. He broods in his apartment and broods in his office and goes for long brooding walks. Does he break down in tears? Does he smoke too many cigarettes?

  Shame has a disappointing ending, not because it isn’t powerful but because its the only ten minutes of the film where you feel like you’re actually capable of predicting what will happen next. The film has all the trappings of the present that Mad Men frees us from; primary among them are its interiors: hotels, office buildings, residential high-rises, restaurants, and lounges - not the interiors you frequent, the ones you despair to frequent. And you live in the main character’s despair as he frequents them. There are laptops, cellphones, buzzers, Skype conversations, porn, key cards, and all of the other kitsch of modernity. You want to flee it, but you know when you run out of the cinema that the same New York is waiting for you outside.

  Shame is far from the best film I’ve seen this year - again, the ending was for me dispiriting - but if you watch Mad Men it is a marvelous reminder of what could have been if the show weren’t so trapped by the past it invokes.

  From the Harper’s article: …what The Apartment knows about its own time is that there’s a problem. And what is missing in Mad Men—even if its subject is the past—is the knowledge that the present is the problem.

  • #Shame
  • #Mad Men
  • #Film
  25 Dec 2011 / 4 notes