Episode #9 – Moving Up in the World
It’s a very special day here at FOI because we have a guest contributor for the first time ever! Her name is Margarita and she is a huge Mad Men fan, so we invited her to chat with us on our special Mad Men episode on the occasion of the show returning for its fourth season with the the episode called “Public Relations.”
Margarita lives in San Francisco. You may know her from places such as the Fatshionista Livejournal community (where she is a founding moderator) or the premier Mad Men fansite Basket of Kisses, where she is a new contributor. She blogs about fatshion on Tumblr, as well.
Discussed:
-All the ways in which Peggy dominates in the episode
-All the ways in which Don is recumbent in this episode
-Disability gets a feature role, and we get to see the way our characters react in the context of the 1960s kyriarchy
-Call back to Jon Hamm’s second Saturday Night Live appearance and that hilarious “Hamm and Bublé” sketch, at which point Margarita informs us that Michael Bublé once appeared in yellowface in a movie. o_O
-Betty: everyone loves to hate her and some people just want her off the show. We consider that an unacceptable reaction
-Joan as Femme role model; our hopes for our Joanie, which include us wishing for her rapist husband to die a horrible death in Vietnam
-The race issue. Seriously, this show is all about white people, and we can’t rationalize that anymore
-Some tangents on the subect of True Blood (can that show pleeeease stop brutalizing Tara now? Like, right now?) and also Joss Whedon’s apparent reluctance to accept criticism from his fans
Links:
“Dear Drapers: A letter to ‘Mad Men’s’ first family from the Black maid” [TheLoop21.com]
The Michael Bublé movie in question, Totally Blonde (2001) [IMdb.com]
You can make Mad Men avatars just like ours! [MadMenYourself.com]
End music:
“Something’s Gotta Give” from Ella Fitzgerald’s 1964 release The Johnny Mercer Songbook.
Hey! So, long-time listener, first-time writer. I’ve been listening to Fatties on Ice since the first episode, and I appreciate it a lot (even though I totally disagree with you on the quality of Inception). I really liked the last episode on Mad Men, and I hope you don’t mind if I add my two cents (okay, maybe a lot more than two– this got a lot longer than I thought it would be).
I’ve been thinking about the part of the episode where you talk about Don Draper’s fuck you to the swimsuit company, and how it seemed a bit confusing and implausible. I hope you don’t mind if I get all pop culture nerdy on you for a bit. That portion of the Podcast reminded me of a book I read a few months ago about advertising in the 1960s– it’s called The Conquest of Cool, and it’s by Thomas Frank. It’s a bit repetitious, and it sometimes fails to fully examine the identity and social justice implications of its own premises, but it provides some interesting background to the world of Mad Men. It also offers a pretty provocative thesis that I think is important for anyone who works in social justice movements today– namely, that if you look at the history of advertising in the 1960s, you conclude that the corporate world isn’t as rigid and conformist as leftist/progressive activists would like to believe, and that we can’t really contend meaningfully with corporate hegemony until we learn to recognize that the conformist corporate culture/nonconformist counterculture binary is inaccurate.
Anyway.
In The Conquest of Cool, Frank talks about how the mid-1960s, around the time that the fourth season premiere of Mad Men, saw a huge change in the way that Madison Avenue operated. Up to that point, the advertising business was run by large ad agencies (like Sterling Cooper in the first three seasons). But around 1964, the large ad agencies begin their slow fade into obscurity, and a number of smaller ad agencies (like SCDP) begin to dominate the business. SCDP isn’t an exception of any sort– talented ad execs everywhere begin breaking away from the large companies in which they previously worked, dissatisfied by their lack of artistic control, and form smaller companies. In part because they form these companies in the name of artistic agency, many of these ad execs develop a reputation for stubbornness, refusing to alter their ad campaigns for dissatisfied clients, and “firing” these clients when they refuse to accept the ad agency’s ideas. So Don Draper’s attitude here isn’t really all that strange here– he basically embodies the emergence of this new kind of ad exec, running a new kind of ad agency.
One of the things Frank observes in his book is that many of the men who leave the large companies to start their own ad agencies tend to be Italian, Polish, Jewish, or members of other white ethnicities that, for most of U.S. history, have been relatively marginalized. By the time the 1960s roll around, these ethnic groups have moved significantly away from the margins, and are starting to be assimilated wholesale into the mainstream American definition of whiteness. But they are still considered more “ethnic,” and thus slightly more marginal, then white people of Anglo-Saxon descent. Frank suggests that the renegade, “take my ad campaign as is or fuck off” attitude employed by this new class of ad execs is intimately tied to their sense of marginality stemming from their ethnicity– although they have a great deal of white male privilege, they feel that the privilege they have is more tenuous, provisional, or slightly less than that of the business leaders for which they work. Their contentiousness, he argues, becomes a way of gaining more of a foothold in white privilege– in telling business leaders to fuck off, these ad execs could claim a sort of power over a group of men who had more privilege, and a higher pedigree, than they did. And, as you deftly pointed out in the Podcast, Mad Men takes place at a time where pedigree counts for a lot.
Don Draper obviously doesn’t have the same relationship to ethnicity as the real-life ad execs Frank covers. Although his mother could have had any background, his name and his appearance are easily readable as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and the characters around him basically read him as such. But, as I think you pointed out in the Podcast, Draper’s class background gives him an affinity with those real-life ad execs who felt marginalized by their ethnicity. He is obviously immersed in a world of white male privilege that he is socialized to want, but believes that his access to that privilege is tenuous. And one way to try and hold on to that privilege is to assert his artistic and intellectual superiority over the businessmen whose ad campaigns he writes– by claiming the power to tell them to fuck off.
In time, the stubbornness of the ad execs in the small agencies becomes part of their appeal. There is a definite attitude among corporations, starting in the mid-’60s and definitely by the late ’60s, that it is better to have a temperamental artist writing one’s ad campaign than a boring, conformist, corporate yes-man. The small agencies develop a reputation for being run by eccentric artists and renegades who yield innovative and sometimes shocking ideas– ideas guaranteed to bring a company’s products more publicity. The freedom with which ad execs in small agencies tell their clients to fuck off bolsters those agencies’ aura of creativity and artistry. So that final scene represents more than a personal fuck-you, brought on by Don Draper’s frustrations; it’s also indicative of a larger cultural shift– and, really, just another example of the writers of Mad Men doing their homework and striving for historical accuracy.
Very interesting take, Adrienne.
“Their contentiousness, he argues, becomes a way of gaining more of a foothold in white privilege– in telling business leaders to fuck off, these ad execs could claim a sort of power over a group of men who had more privilege, and a higher pedigree, than they did.”
And that could be very appealing to Don, because while he does have a background of being oppressed, he also possesses the attributes he needs to “pass” in the upper classes — whiteness, maleness, physical attractiveness, able body and (most of the) the social skill/charm to navigate. So supremacy is very accessible to him, but not as accessible as it is for his blue-blood clients. I think it’s interesting when people are thisclose to supremacy/privilege, then watching how they react to it. Often they try to close the gap.