Mad Men and Casual Cruelty

We all have holes in our cultural resume. That movie everyone thinks you’ve seen, but you haven’t. Those television shows your friends know you’d love, but you’ve never gotten around to making the time investment. We live in a golden age of television (and culture in general, in my opinion; you just have to look for it). The problem is how to spend your valuable, carefully allotted free time earmarked for television.

This summer, I decided I’d plug two rather gaping holes in my cultural experience. I was going to watch the entirety of Breaking Bad and Mad Men. I crashed through all five seasons of Breaking Bad, and was left a little limp after the exercise. It truly was a great series; watching Walter White steadily decline from a good guy doing bad stuff for a good reason into an out-and-out villain who needed to lose was a great bit of writing and acting. That show was a little rich to watch in the compressed time frame I spent, but I enjoyed it and now know what the phrase “I AM the one who knocks” means, which is great.

I waited a couple of weeks, just to clear the palette (I rewatched Mr. Robot to get ready for season 2), and then started Mad Men.

And, man, that show has stopped me cold.

I’m not squeamish. I’m sailing through Game of Thrones with ease (even the ending of “The Mountain and the Viper” episode didn’t really phase me). I sat down with The Sopranos season after season with no problem. I made it through the final ultra-violent season of Sons of Anarchy with nary a scratch. I even watched the entire season of Caprica, which was an unadulterated mess, because I felt I owed it to Battlestar Galactica. But man, the first episode of Mad Men got under my skin in way that I was unprepared for.

I’ve made it through three episodes so far, and I want to watch it. I really do. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and it seems like it should be right up my alley. But still, man.

I’ve tried to come up with reasons why it’s bothering me so much, and I think I’ve finally distilled my qualms down to their base. It reflects a time that actually existed, and it doesn’t use the rose-colored glasses most shows and films employ.

In the very first scene of the series, through a haze of crewcuts and cigarette smoke, ad man Don Draper is speaking with an African-American waiter, Sam, trying to get his opinion on why Sam smokes the cigarette brand he does. Before he can answer, the white head waiter comes over to see if Draper is being bothered by the black man. “He can be a little chatty,” the head waiter says, looking pointedly at Sam.

In the first three episodes, blacks, women, Jews, Chinese, children and divorced people are either marginalized, ostracized, used, degraded or otherwise systematically abused. It’s not the abuse I’m reacting so negatively to, though; it’s the casualness of it. White men were the ruling class, and that’s the way it was. I don’t get the sense that these men are cruel; they just know their place in the world and everyone else knows it, as well.

I was born in 1969 and, full disclosure, I’m a white male. This isn’t some far-flung long ago time. This isn’t another culture that I can look at from a distance and say “glad we’re not like them.” No, this is America, and (and I understand it) the show will end in the time period when I was born. It’s not that long ago, and it’s certainly not far away.

When I hear people talk about the “good old days,” and “Making America Great Again,” I have to wonder when they’re talking about, and who you had to be to consider those times “great.” I’d love to live in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, but I’m under no illusion that it actually existed. No offense to Andy Griffith, who seemed like a lovely person, but North Carolina in the late 1950s and early 1960s wasn’t a great place to live, I’d imagine, if you weren’t a white Christian male.

I recently watched O.J. Simpson — Made in America, which was an amazing look into the culture of that time. Having lived through it, it’s easy to forget what made the atmosphere conducive to the events of the Simpson trial, but this documentary provided a time capsule that showed the racial unrest in the 1960s through the Rodney King beating in 1991 and subsequent riots after the police responsible were found not guilty. What struck me most, though, was how things haven’t changed. The recent shootings of black men by white police officers could have been slipped into the documentary and the only difference is the video recording technology has improved. The violence, the response, the defense, the finger pointing, the blame, the protests, the questions… they haven’t changed.

I’m meandering, I know. I don’t pretend to have any answers. I’m not even sure what the correct questions are. All this woolgathering comes from three episodes of a 2007 AMC television show and a healthy dose of news.

I’m going to try to make it through the first season of Mad Men, and see where it goes from there. Maybe things will get better. Things have changed in the culture. Although it can be taken to an extreme, a lot of “political correctness” efforts are just ways to curb the tendency of people to be assholes to each other. And that’s a good thing.

Maybe things will get better.