The Last Gasp of White Male Privilege

Right in the middle of this scorching summer heat wave, on Sunday, July 25th, AMC network appropriately returns one of TV’s hottest dramas, kicking off Season 4 with Don Draper and the rest of the Mad Men (and women) of Sterling/Cooper.  To kick off the show’s launch, AMC has been playing “best of” episode compilations from the past three seasons, with commentary by acclaimed series creator and producer Matthew Weiner.

Reflecting on the show’s iconic time and setting, Weiner once said in a print interview that one of the things that attracted him to that era was that it was the “last gasp of white male privilege.”  That’s true, but that PC one-liner hardly does the show’s often perverse perspective justice.  For one, Mad Men celebrates an almost unthinkable level of “conspicuous consumption” and “upward mobility,” in a way that has rarely been seen in recent films or TV, except as a self-conscious, Pleasantville-style joke.  Not the in-your-face excess of Studio 54 or Joan Collins on Dynasty – the ”haves” gleefully flaunting their wealth against the ”have nots” — but of an era when “bigger, faster, better” was the password for everybody.

As no less an expert than Gong Show guru Chuck Barris recalled in his memoir, The Game Show King, it was a time when eggs and bacon were a healthy breakfast, steak and shrimp were a gourmet dinner, and a nice slice of chocolate cake was just the thing to calm down your munchies after a relaxing marijuana cigarette.  People were starting to know about smoking and cholesterol and those three-martini Happy Hours, “but nobody cared.”  The idea that within two decades, a humiliating oil crisis would force the Big Three automakers to downsize their gas-guzzling land yachts and hot rods would have been almost as unthinkable as a working or middle class household requiring two incomes just to get by!

There were even ”recessions” in 1957-58 and in 1971, but the punishing, unprecedented-since-World-War-II cutbacks of the ’70s, and the downsizing and outsourcing of the last 20 years, makes even dignifying those blip-like downturns as a “recession” seem as campy as a rerun of Lawrence Welk or Ed Sullivan.  And the fact that even a sheltered, somewhat prudish young woman like Peggy Olsen, whose only education was a community college secretarial degree, could be whipping up ad copy next to the old boys by age 25, speaks of a time when an Ivy League and prep-school background was merely a function of upbringing, instead of a near-necessity in getting past a status-conscious employment screener at a studio, network, newspaper, or ad agency.

Also worth noting is that during the era when Mad Men is set, the most popular kind of story in popular culture was the Western. TV shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza were so highly rated that their timeslots were known as the “Kamikaze Hours,” noting the grim fates of almost all shows that dared to oppose them.  John Wayne was still king of the box office, even as newer Hollywood stars like Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood churned out one six-shooter and cowboy caper after another, while Louis L’Amour never failed to make the bestseller list.  Even after the hippie era took hold, from McCloud fighting crime in the big city to Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck turning tricks on those same Manhattan streets, the Western myth kept packing ‘em in

And it strikes me today that in some ways, Mad Men is our 21st century reverse-Western, with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit having replaced the Man With No Name.  Above all, the Western celebrated the mythos of man against machine, the individual cowboy, farmer, homesteader, sheriff against the world, just before the big change from a world of little houses on the prairie to a post-industrial new world order.  In stark contrast, in our cultural narrative, the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy eras in whose shadow the Mad Men live have become almost synonymous with conformity and repression.

A grasping, sweaty young exec like Pete, straining to establish his voice amidst the groupthink, or a burning-out male menopauser like Roger Sterling, might have collapsed into his Barcalounger with an Ayn Rand treatise on his lap and watched Bonanza, thinking to himself, ”Sure, they didn’t have Xerox machines and TV sets and air conditioning back then, but look at all the freedom they had… Every man for himself, survival of the fittest, the best and the brightest win out…. a sharpie could really work the angles in those days… Wasn’t it all so much simpler then?”

(If he were really enlightened, he might think to add, “Shame that blacks and Indians couldn’t own property and that women couldn’t vote, or that they thought Jews and Catholics were suspect.  Good thing we’re much more sophisticated now — after all, this is 1964!”)   Indeed, the old-school mentality is echoed by the reminiscences of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’s own Roger Morse as Bert Cooper — the eat-or-be-eaten, World War I veteran, lion in winter who founded the company during the Roaring ’20s.  On the other hand, an amoral individualist like Don Draper could have been not just well-off, but obscenely wealthy, had he been born a generation later, in the era of Donald Trump, Bill Gates, and Bret Easton Ellis novels.

Of course, Mad Men is also a cozy mystery and a soap opera at heart. No wonder its scheduled on Sunday nights, where the two highest-rated (and by far the best written and acted) network audience grabbers were ABC’s Desperate Housewives and CBS’s soon-to-close Cold Case.  Like those two unofficial lead-ins, Mad Men is at its heart, about the pleasures and perils of keeping secrets (not to mention being a scripted, retro version of that other Sunday warhorse, NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice.) When will closet-case ad director Sal get “caught?”  When will Don and Betty’s marriage completely blow up, when will the tensions finally boil over?  (Never mind when eldest daughter Sally grows up to her inevitable hippie rebellion against her repressed and repressive parents, a la Robin Wright in Forrest Gump.)

In his typically overwrought book What’s the Matter with Kansas, author Thomas Frank takes conservative pundit Gary Aldrich to task for his satirization of the modern workplace as an unprofessional mess of instant-messaging, casual dressed, all-night pizzaing frat boys and shoe-shopping yuppie girls.  Frank doesn’t deny this, but says that where Aldrich got it wrong was that it ”wasn’t because hippies had taken over the business world” that people like him felt out of place.  It was because turbocharged, automated, Internet-era business had no place for hyper-orderly, necktie-wearing, country-clubbing nine-to-fivers like Aldrich anymore.

And there is the irony of Mad Men. The show does nothing if not prove that the late ’50s and early ’60s were anything but the Thorazine plastic paradise that old sitcoms and magazines might suggest, and perhaps modern audiences get a thrill from seeing that even in the most seemingly-secure times, people could (and did) lose it all.  And they were certainly on the brink of the most notable societal changes in modern history — racial equality, sexual liberation, and the rest.

But that ground was already covered by movies like Revolutionary Road and Mad Men’s most obvious big-screen ancestor, the excellent Far From Heaven. Where it goes one step further is the fact that it also glamorizes the plush trappings and orderly, surface-politeness of its time, allowing us a weekly escape from the tightwire-without-a-net improv and whirlwind uncertainty that define our modern, post-meltdown, post-bailout Great Recession present.  The days of employer-provided healthcare, inflation-adjusted pensions, and Asian-style “lifetime” jobs in school districts, civil service, or “sound as a dollar” companies — like, say, General Motors or Lehman Brothers or Pacific Gas & Electric – are starting to seem almost as removed and remote from our 21st century paradigm as Marshal Dillon and Miss Kitty’s saloon.

And somewhere out there, a viewer is no doubt sitting down in front of his HD plasma flatscreen and thinking, “Sure, they didn’t have Skype and iPads and cell phones back then…. And gay people had to keep it to themselves and blacks and women might have to work harder to get their feet in the door…. But look at all the orderliness, the seeming-politeness, the safe streets, the predictability, the easy money they had….  Wasn’t it all so much simpler then?”