Maddening Men

Mad Men is a bundle of complicated, self-conscious contradictions. What really draws in viewers, more so than the cute clothes, the clever dialogue, the top-notch filming and editing, the sex appeal, or the humor, is this paradoxical representation of the 50’s in our contemporary time. Strauss and Howe say that millennials are a more intelligent, knowledgeable group. We’ve concluded in class that we know how the game works, and therefore appreciate complexity, honesty, irony, and inventiveness. Mad Men brings all this to the table, along with bloody marys.

The pilot’s issue on how to continue marketing cigarettes in the growing fear of cancer perfectly illustrates my point. As millennial viewers, we know the history of the cigarette and tobacco industries, and the truth that smoking is addictive and often fatal. I think the percentage of smokers in our generation has actually decreased since our parents. Watching this episode, I laughed at a lot of the dialogue, like, “I’m not selling guns, I’m selling tobacco!” The characters aren’t trying to be funny; they’re trying to be dramatic. But the lines serve as black humor for the viewers, who know retrospectively just how silly and wrong some of these opinions are. I’m pretty sure tobacco kills more people each year than guns do in the US.

Gender roles also add much to the black humor in the show. The women clearly exist on a lower social rung than the men, who get to make sexual comments and moves on the women who work for them. The business men cheat on their wives and the doctor reprimands the women he gives contraceptives to, for having loose morals. Even the women subject themselves to this sexual harassment within their own gender, judging each other by how thin their ankles are and the sweaters they wear. These sex and gender comments made me laugh to, but more in an “I can’t believe they just said that” way. Here, again, Mad Men grabs the viewer through shocking contradiction, showing us just how bold and sexist their characters behave in such a backwards time.

Then again, I wonder how contemporary men respond to the gender roles – do they see the same complexities I, a millennial girl, does? Or do they just respond, “yeah, man, get some!” After Tyler’s presentation yesterday where he tried to prove that the song “Violate that Bitch” by Lil B pushes gender norms, I’m guessing the latter is more likely.