Ian Scuffling
Well-known member
As you all may have guessed from my avi, I was going to do this eventually. Mad Men is unfortunately the best work of television and the end of the medium, an American Ulysses to Twin Peaks: The Return's Finnegan's Wake. I'm on my 3rd time watching now and am halfway through season 4, just before the show comes to collect on every character's mortgaging of their soul to capital, so I won't be doing a full thread on my favorite episodes nor will I write a more all-encompassing essay, but I do want to jot down the threads that have stuck with me each time I watch it. There appears to not already be a thread on it on here because you all are still strung out on Peaky Blinders and Utopia.
1. Don Draper as simultaneously the heart of darkness of a Horatio Alger, a man who could only exist in his time, and as is evident by now the soul of every hustler from time immemorial. A drifter, a grifter, a sigma, the ultimate male manipulator. Mulvey's gaze personified (his only redeeming quality is his love of the movies, possibly more so than his children). The man who sells America on a life-image he nakedly avoids or destroys in his own world and commodifies every woman he seduces, let alone anyone looking for happiness.
2. WASPs as demons "the middle management of the Fourth Reich." Weber was right and then it happened as farce. Even the women who carve out a space for themselves still must sacrifice every part of themselves to engage in sacrosanct private ownership.
3. The sixties as the apocalypse of a conflict long since over. Citations of Brown Brothers Harriman and the lightning speed integration of countercultural aesthetics signifying their impotence as revolutionary in the first place. Don, the eye of Sauron, was born in the twenties, not when he was hired at Sterling Cooper.
Really I'd like to know if you all find the show as morbidly fascinating as I do, because it seems to me very few critics and scholars pick up on how truly sinister the show and most of its characters are, ironically distracted by the costumes and furniture.
1. Don Draper as simultaneously the heart of darkness of a Horatio Alger, a man who could only exist in his time, and as is evident by now the soul of every hustler from time immemorial. A drifter, a grifter, a sigma, the ultimate male manipulator. Mulvey's gaze personified (his only redeeming quality is his love of the movies, possibly more so than his children). The man who sells America on a life-image he nakedly avoids or destroys in his own world and commodifies every woman he seduces, let alone anyone looking for happiness.
2. WASPs as demons "the middle management of the Fourth Reich." Weber was right and then it happened as farce. Even the women who carve out a space for themselves still must sacrifice every part of themselves to engage in sacrosanct private ownership.
3. The sixties as the apocalypse of a conflict long since over. Citations of Brown Brothers Harriman and the lightning speed integration of countercultural aesthetics signifying their impotence as revolutionary in the first place. Don, the eye of Sauron, was born in the twenties, not when he was hired at Sterling Cooper.
Really I'd like to know if you all find the show as morbidly fascinating as I do, because it seems to me very few critics and scholars pick up on how truly sinister the show and most of its characters are, ironically distracted by the costumes and furniture.
