Mad Men Have Made the United States Grow Old

The “Mad Men” phenomenon is such that several years have been necessary to fully comprehend its scope, to assess its impact and all its relevance. Long considered an ode to nostalgia, a revival of a passion for vintage, an homage to the generation that built the “American way of life” after World War II, Matthew Weiner’s show has spread its influence far beyond our taste for a not-so-distant past still present in memories. Beyond a fad, the best television show in recent years has become prescriptive among the American audio-visual industry. It has imposed a trend, but above all it has changed opinions, it has modified perceptions, it has made the United States grow old.

It is all happening as though the time had come, as though Americans finally possessed the necessary hindsight and distance to tackle their history serenely without presenting it in a laudatory manner disconnected from the facts, as has been the case with westerns, or in a pathological manner, with too many films and television shows about war, particularly the Vietnam war and, more recently, the Iraq war.

There are countless recent televised fiction pieces making this plunge into the past, visiting or revisiting it with more or less earnestness and nerve. We can name, in no particular order, “Boardwalk Empire,” “Pan Am,” “Playboy Club,” “Hell on Wheels” or, coming this week, “Magic City.” Long before “Mad Men,” HBO had launched this process some 10 years ago with several major productions which obviously contributed to this shift in direction, but which in themselves did not manage to make it catch on beyond cable channels. Those were “Carnivàle,” “Rome” and “Deadwood,” each in its own way laying the first stones of this new edifice.

“Carnivàle” was the story of a traveling circus in California during the Great Depression, with strong accents reminiscent of the stories of John Steinbeck and the films of Tod Browning. In a dream-like atmosphere, Daniel Kaupf extended a metaphor on the eternal struggle between Good and Evil.

“Rome” could be considered the first great “historical” television show, drawing on sources and recent archaeological discoveries in order to reconstruct daily life in a far-off era, often a blur in the minds of the audience. Bruno Heller was looking at the crucial period at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire, in order to observe a pre-Judeo-Christian world where the conquest of power and the manipulation of public opinion were already central issues. The screenwriters ushered us into history thanks to the combined perspectives of ordinary individuals (Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo) placed, thanks to the magic of fiction, in the immediate vicinity of the “great men.” Ancient Rome was shown as dirty, dusty and therefore “believable,” a thousand miles from the pasteboard sets of Hollywood and Italian peplums.

Similarly, “Deadwood” was light-years away from spaghetti westerns, and even from John Ford’s epic frescoes. The town under construction in the middle of Indian territory, as well as its inhabitants, possessed a perfectly believable ugliness. “Deadwood” really was a town in the American West, where Al Swearengen, Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock crossed paths. But beyond these “historical” elements, the show’s creator David Milch was developing with this western of a new kind a reflection on the concept of community and on fundamental American values: the need for the establishment of a political power and the emergence of Wild West capitalism and small businesses through individual enterprise. These major themes were of a general, even universal, scope, and could have been applied to other eras. History served first and foremost as an “exotic” background conducive to reflection, as is the case with fantasy shows.

The White Man’s Crisis

There have also been all the television shows and films dedicated to war, with heavy trends evolving over the decades. We went from a sense of shame in the ‘70s to the restoration of national pride under the Reagan era. Worthy of mention is “Tour of Duty,” of course, but also the less obvious “Magnum, P.I.” and even “The A-Team,” in which the wounds of Vietnam served as a background setting.

Eventually there was “Quantum Leap,” with Dr. Samuel Beckett, but the structure of the series by Donald P. Bellisario (a former Marine fascinated by war, particularly the Vietnam war) did not lend itself to a lengthy reflection on a particular moment and presented a kind of gallery of memories, inspired more by popular culture than by the historical reality of the United States’ recent past.

With the arrival of “Mad Men,” it is the way of watching that has changed radically. It is no longer about expurgating the past, making it acceptable to a contemporary viewer. It is merely about identifying it and accepting it for what it is. In this sense, “Mad Men” borrows a lot from “Rome.” We have gone from ancient history, geographically and temporally removed, to recent American history, almost tangible.

For the first time in a fictional television show, the characters are overtaken by the events of their time. They are no longer ahead and they no longer judge those events with hindsight, as they do for instance in “Cold Case,” where the future always proves the victim right. The protagonists do not take on the part of the good guys. They are immersed in their time and do not have the necessary distance to allow them to gauge it. Unlike the viewer, they only have their own past for comparison, just like the character of Roger Sterling, flamboyant aging playboy, racist and misogynist slacker, less and less adapted to his time, whose “mal de vivre”* becomes increasingly heart-rending.

The magic of Mad Men lies in the fact that it tackles the “white man’s crisis,” a recurring theme in cable television fictions of the last decade, but applies it the United States’ history. In the same way that the white heterosexual man of the Don Draper type no longer dominates his environment, women, visible minorities, gays, etc., the United States no longer dominates the world. It wonders about its place after having been the defender of the free world against the Communist threat in the entire world. If there is one thing that was brought to light by 9/11 and the subsequent wars, it is the loss of an understanding of the world by the Americans, already obvious in Vietnam, but of which they had not yet become fully aware.

With the end of the bipolar world, Americans have been forced to rethink their universe and themselves, to review the place they occupy. After 10 years, they have identified two principal threats, Islamist terrorism and the economic power of China, who will sooner or later overtake them. The Chinese have become the first creditors of the United States, ahead of the historical lenders that had so far been the Saudis. The awakening, and most likely the decline, promise to be difficult and to come with a major hangover. The upheavals of the last 20 years have paradoxically brought gray hair and wisdom to Americans. They have given them the maturity they were lacking to tell their own story the way Old Europe has for a long time. America, a nation who thought of itself as eternally young, has grown old. Such is the uncompromising assessment that “Mad Men” reflects right back in its face.

*Editor’s note: This phrase, meaning roughly “ill living,” is used here in opposition to the more common “joie de vivre.”