DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE.
criticism. decorum. innards. bric-a-brac. nostalgia. nausea. polemics. diatribes. litanies. symphonies. polaroids.
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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.
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