Weekend Face-Off

Mad Men: Golden-Age Nostalgia or a Melodramatic Painting of Days Gone By?

This weekend's face-off features critics  Katie Roiphe and Daniel Mendelsohn to debate what truly drives the narrative of AMC's hit show Mad Men, now filming its fifth season, as well as the particular relationship between its sixties-era characters and a contemporary audience. Below are some highlights from each article; as for the winner, you be the judge!

Many thanks to my good friend Mary for sharing Mendelsohn's article with me!

"On 'Mad Men,' The Allure of Messy Lives" by Katie Roiphe (July 2010)

• "Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the 7-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?" 
• "The large-scale messiness of 'Mad Men' is not for us, the free fall into chaos, into that stranger’s warm and enticing bed; it frightens and enthralls us. What we want, in other words, is to watch four seasons of it through the safe, skewed mirror of the television set." 
• "Perhaps part of what is so appealing, so fascinating about 'Mad Men' is the refusal of bourgeois ordinariness, the struggle against it, in all of its poetic and mundane and tragic forms." 
• "Of course, it’s hard to write in praise of that much drinking in the middle of the day without being perverse; it’s equally hard to advocate purely recreational affairs; . . . . And yet can these messy lives tell us something? Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? . . . Could we use, in other words, in these fine healthy times, just a little of the madness?" 

"The Mad Men Account" by Daniel Mendelsohn (February 2011)

• "With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish." 
• "For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts." 
• "The tension between the luminous ideal and the unhappy reality is, of course, what the show thinks it’s “about”—reminding us, as it so often and so unsubtly does, that, like advertising itself, the decade it depicts was often hypocritical, indulging certain “images” and styles of behavior while knowing them to be false, even unjust." 
• "The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up."