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September 04, 2008

Mad Men

Like many Americans, I find myself in front of my TV on Sunday nights, watching Mad Men. I like the show--certainly enough to watch it at least semi-regularly--but whenver I start to get sucked in, I'm yanked out of that dream state that John Gardner talks about by the show's unflagging insistence on reminding me when it takes place (the fifties; actually, the show takes place in 1960, but the fifties are the cultural and political moment being portrayed). The degree of self-consciousness is so great--it's as if the show itself were an advertisement for an era--that when we see a scene in a doctor's office with the doctor smoking, we feel as if the scene itself were inserted just to show us a smoking doctor. Just to remind us, that is, in case we forgot, that it's 1960 we're talking about and, boy, were things different then.

Now, there's nothing wrong with self-consciousness, but in most other ways Mad Men isn't that kind of show. This is not Being John Malkovich. It's not Adaptation. It is, rather, by most standards fairly traditional on the level of narrative and character, and so the camera's relentless focus on period details feels intrusive in a show that otherwise aims not to be. The same things happens in the movie The Ice Storm--a good movie, it seems to me, but not a great movie, despite some great peformances (Christina Ricci is wonderful, just as she is in the terrific Buffalo 66). For me, at least, one of the reasons the movie is distracting is the way it fetishizes the 70s details. In that sense, the movie is true to the book, though the book, I would argue, is a great book, not merely good.

Now, in the book, too (perhaps even more so), the 70s details are fetishized, but they're fetishized in a way that's much harder to do with a camera--at least when the movie itself is otherwise fairly narratively conventional. The Ice Storm, the book, is narrated in a distant third-person voice (though at the end of the novel we learn that the whole book has been filtered through the sensibility and voice of the older son), and so the wonderful opening chapter that announces the era in which the book takes place is filtered through a particular character and a particular voice and sensibility. In the book, the era becomes a full-fledged character in its own right--which is what the movie may also be trying to do, but it does it much more clumsily.

None of which is to say that movies and TV shows should ignore period details. But the ways in which a book is self-conscious don't always translate seamlessly onto the screen, which is why it's often the case that the truer a movie is to a book, the more trouble it finds itself in. (The Virgin Suicides is another example of a movie that's very true to the book, but because the book is not a filmic book--it's deeply internal--the movie doesn't succeed nearly as well as the book does.)

Posted at 09:18 AM in Guest Bloggers |

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Comments

JMW

Couldn't agree more about Mad Men's fixation on period detail and how it distracts. This goes for verbal detail, too, like when a character watches a woman accomplish something professional and says something like, "It's like watching a dog type." I think it's exceedingly unlikely that someone would actually have to say something like that given the conditions of the time, but the show has to remind you SOMEHOW that those WERE THE CONDITIONS OF THE TIME. OK, OK, we get it.

Posted by: JMW | September 04, 2008 at 10:00 AM

Jack Pendarvis

Yes, I am also angry about how much better MAD MEN is than a book.

Posted by: Jack Pendarvis | September 04, 2008 at 09:55 PM

Nicholas Towasser

Dear Mr. Sarvas,

My firm, Dissident Books, will release its debut title next month: "Notes on Democracy: A New Edition." It has all of the original text by H. L. Mencken, first published in 1926, as well as an introduction and extensive annotations by Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers and an afterword by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis.

"Notes on Democracy" is a funny, cynical and lethal attack on that Holiest of Holies: Democracy. Very Mencken. Very politically incorrect.

Please tell me if you’d like a review copy and where to send it.

Best regards,

Nicholas Towasser
Publisher
Dissident Books
[email protected]

Posted by: Nicholas Towasser | September 30, 2008 at 07:53 PM

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