Cigarette #8: No, Mad Men is better than Gossip Girl

EIGHTH CIGARETTE, 7:23pm
Outside Sterling Memorial Library

The fundamental misunderstanding behind Peter Suderman's review of Mad Men is that he thinks creator Matt Weiner offers up his stylishly repressed 1960's ad men only to show how much better things have gotten since then. Sure, according to Mad Men everyone in 1960 was a racist alcoholic who sexually harrassed everybody else. And Tony Soprano was a sociopathic felon. This doesn't mean that either series can be reduced to one long wag of the finger. Assuming that the only story left to be told about repression is How Awful It Was is like thinking the only moral of The Sopranos is that crime doesn't pay.

Take the show's depiction of birth control. The scene where a doctor puts Elisabeth Moss on the Pill is played for laughs ("I'll warn you now, I will take you off this medicine if you abuse it"), but that doesn't prevent the storyline from making the very conservative point that, once contraception removes the negative consequences, sex becomes essentially inevitable. The message here is not that we are so much more enlightened than they were, but rather that trading sexual liberation for sexual virtue might not have been a good bargain.

When one of the ad men says, "Psychiatry is just this year's candy-pink stove — it's just more happiness," we can't assume that it's meant to be satire. Psychiatry and advertising both understand that happiness is wanting something and then getting it, and they both suppose that it is better for Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver to want something easy like peace of mind or a candy-pink stove than to want something complicated like heroism or virtue. The characters on the show understand this therapeutic philosophy to be hollow and delusory. Can the same be said for modern viewers?

Suderman also calls the show "gorgeous" but "empty." Reviewers like Sacha Zimmerman more willing to stoop to cliché call it "all style, no substance." The truth is that Mad Men, like a good Hitchcock movie, puts so much into its style that the style itself becomes substantial. Paul Schrader in "Notes on Film Noir" (most recently anthologized in Phillip Lopate's American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now) said that classic film noir offered America "a moral vision of life based on style." In noir, that meant adopting German Expressionist lighting becase "no character can speak authoritatively from a space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light." In Mad Men, it means creating a world of financial security, three-martini lunches, and unlimited sexual prospects, a beautiful and glossy world where no one could possibly be unhappy, and somehow everybody is.