21st Century Retro: "Mad Men" and 1960s America in Film and Television 9783839457214

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: Retro
Chapter 2: History in Retros
Part II
Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities in Mad Men
Chapter 4: Mad Men and its Paratexts
Part III
Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network
Conclusion
List of Mad Men Episodes Cited
Works Cited

Citation preview

Debarchana Baruah 21st Century Retro: Mad Men and 1960s America in Film and Television

American Culture Studies  | Volume 32

Debarchana Baruah is a cultural theorist at the American Studies department, University of Tübingen. She completed her doctoral studies at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg University and received her B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in English Literature from the University of Delhi. She is interested in US popular cultures, film and television, memory cultures, food cultures, and immigration histories.

Debarchana Baruah

21st Century Retro: Mad Men and 1960s America in Film and Television

This monograph was submitted as a doctoral dissertation, titled “21st Century Retro: Mad Men and 1960s America,” to the Faculty of Modern Languages, Heidelberg University.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/ photos/UBhpOIHnazM Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5721-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5721-4 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839457214 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements ................................................................ 11 Introduction ........................................................................13 The Irreverent ......................................................................13 Temporal Relationality............................................................... 15 Beginnings.......................................................................... 17 21st Century Retro................................................................... 21 Retro’s critics ...................................................................... 22 Retro’s Proponents ................................................................. 23 Reorienting Retro .................................................................. 24 Mad Men ........................................................................... 26 Layout ............................................................................. 28

Part I Chapter 1: Retro ................................................................... 37 Post-Pinochet Retros............................................................... 37 Identifying Retros ................................................................... 41 Post-Gaullist Rétro ................................................................. 44 Mad Men as 21st Century American Retro ........................................... 47 The Place That Cannot Be .......................................................... 52 A Disregard for Categories ......................................................... 59 Chapter 2: History in Retros ....................................................... 1968 ............................................................................... History as Metaphor ................................................................ Solemn Histories ...................................................................

67 67 73 77

Boomer Memories ................................................................... 81 Generations in Mad Men ............................................................ 86 History of Film and Television in Retros ............................................. 90

Part II Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities in Mad Men .................. 99 Watching Television ................................................................ 99 Television in Mad Men ............................................................. 104 Memories in Serial Television ...................................................... 108 Pleasures of Retro’s Intertextualities................................................ 111 Mood .............................................................................. 116 Counterpoint ....................................................................... 121 Reframing Intertexts .............................................................. 124 Revival............................................................................. 127 Chapter 4: Mad Men and its Paratexts ............................................ “An Unsung Hero” ................................................................. Special Features, Audio Commentaries, Fan-made Paratexts ....................... Mad Men as Complex Retro ........................................................ The Retro Aesthetic ............................................................... Product to the Process ............................................................

133 133 137 144 153 158

Part III Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network ................................................. 165 Mad Men’s Cultural Footprint ....................................................... 165 Tracing Action ..................................................................... 171 Creating Value .....................................................................175 Set as Actor ...................................................................... 183 Conclusion ........................................................................ 197 Recap ............................................................................. 197 Expanding the Frame.............................................................. 201 Futures ........................................................................... 204

List of Mad Men Episodes Cited ................................................... 207 Works Cited ...................................................................... 213

For my beloved grandfathers, Late Dinesh Chandra Baruah and Late Dr. Harendra Nath Sarma

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the discussions with friends and colleagues at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) and the Anglistisches Seminar at the University of Heidelberg, who were my first circle of respondents and who allowed me to bounce my ideas off them. They shared with me their television viewing practices, tastes, and preferences, their perspective on Mad Men, and the place of retro in contemporary culture. Their feedback and criticism have enriched my analyses. I thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Günter Leypoldt, for his astute insights and for always being available. I thank Prof. Dr. Dietmar Schloss, Dr. Martin Thunert, Dr. Wilfried Mausbach for their encouragements, and Dr. Anja Schüler for her tips on writing. Without the help of Dr. Tobias Endler, former Ph.D. coordinator at the HCA, in finding accommodation and an insurance agent, my first days as an international student would have been much harder. Dr. Anne Sommer has been equally supportive as coordinator. I thank Heike Jablonski, Maarten Paulusse, Hannes Nagl, and Agnese Marino for their friendship, and for sharing with me the anxieties of doctoral life. Anya, Pavle, Kath, and Max were my perfect flatmates. I could not have embarked on my doctoral studies without the HCA’s BASF scholarship. I benefited tremendously from the HCA’s open and intellectually stimulating atmosphere, the public lectures and seminar discussions, and from the summer retreats, which facilitated relaxed and lengthy conversations. I thank the HCA staff for ensuring the smooth functioning of projectors, microphones, and computers each time I presented my work; the administrative desk for always helping me with forms and applications. The project developed over the years. Early ideas were published as an essay “Remembering through Retro TV and Cinema: Mad Men as Televisual Memorial to 60s America” in Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, and as a book chapter “Mad Men and Memory: Nostalgia, Intertextuality and

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Seriality in 21st Century Retro Television” in The Past in Visual Culture: Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media. The project has benefited substantially from the feedback of the reviewers on both occasions. Feedback to my conference presentations have helped me sharpen my arguments. I thank Dr. Emily Mieras of Stetson University for pointing me to nostalgia in serialized television. Discussions with colleagues at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien (DGFA), and its Postgraduate Forum (PGF) have always been fruitful. I thank Puja Sen for introducing me to Mad Men in one of our passionate discussions during our M.Phil. years. In Potsdam, I thank Gab Landman and Elly Spijkerman for their friendship, Ulrike Limberg for her affection. I could not do without the unconditional love of my family in Assam, my grandmothers Renuka Baruah and Anu Devi. I thank my mother, Manjumala Devi, for her selfless love and constant company, my sister, Debangana Baruah, for her humor and cheerful spirit, and my father, Prakash Baruah, for sharing his love of history, film, and music. Finally, I thank Bedartha Goswami for being part of this intellectual adventure. He has been with me on my days of despair and has shared with me the joys of being able to write that first paragraph after a block. Without his love and support this book would never have been written. To him I owe the most.

Introduction

The Irreverent The grand has a powerful appeal, yet the irreverent persists. Epic stories of war, romance, and tragedy, and of mythical and fantastical universes appear in televisual mediums with welcome regularity. Panoramic sets, resplendent costumes, encyclopedic narratives, distinguished cast and ensemble, and overtures of spectacle contribute to the awe inspired by these grand renditions. Of the recent past, Dunkirk and Bohemian Rhapsody, popular with audiences and the Academy, are grand for their sheer magnitude and the iconicity of their subjects. Grandness is also expressed in terms of budget, revenue, honors bestowed at award ceremonies, and ranks in lists of greatest productions. For historical productions, grandness is invariably associated with the stature and location of their historical subject and with their own promise of offering a comprehensive account of a historical event or of an entire historical period. The irreverent, in contrast, is not committed to grand narratives of the past. It shares, and is a product of, the postmodern incredulity towards grand narratives (Lyotard). It charts a course of its own, away from the conventional, and addresses aspects beyond that which has been over-represented. It is interested in the imaginative, fragmented, offcenter “little narratives” (60). It continually explores novel ways in which historical topos can be represented creatively and in ways relatable to its contemporary 21st century audience. There is a sharp rise in the number of American televisual and cinematic productions since the turn of the 21st century that engage with the past in exciting and idiosyncratic ways: the works of Coen brothers, Todd Haynes, George Clooney, and Mathew Weiner immediately come to mind. They engage with 20th century pasts; the ’50s and the ’60s appear to be popular choices. Their visual style, narrative focus, and tone are perceptibly distinct from the celebrated Spielbergian period dramas.

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Identifiable features of the irreverent include irony, self-reflexivity, generous intertextual references, juxtapositions, de-centered narratives, moral ambiguities, and exploration of pasts through inter-generational conflicts. The irreverent maintains detachment towards over-arching accounts of revered historical figures and the historical periods that they inhabit. The Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis is loosely based on the memoirs of folk artist Dave Van Ronk, who inspired many younger ’60s artists including Bob Dylan. Dylan went on to be much more popular and Van Ronk got “relegated almost to a footnote in the history of American popular music” (Rohter). At the end of the film, a young Dylan is shown to perform at The Gaslight Cafe, while the protagonist Llewyn Davis, a struggling artist at the end of his tether, is mercilessly beaten up by a stranger in a seedy alley. Davis is the anti-Dylan. The film traces the desolation instead of the cool associated with the ’60s folk music scene; it skirts the iconicity of ’60s music to tell a bleak story of a failed artist. The lack of optimism depicted in the film angered many. Musician Suzanne Vega, who knew Van Ronk at a later stage of his life, responds to the film’s pallid take on early 1960s Greenwich Village folk music scene: “all the despair just drags along with nothing to contrast it to. If the scene had been as brown and sad as all that, why would anybody be drawn to it? Dylan would have gone somewhere else” (Ryzik). Acquaintances of Van Ronk accuse the Coens of distorting history and Van Ronk’s image (Levitt). These are objections to the lack of grandness in the Coens’ treatment of the ’60s folk music scene. The Coens do not feel obligated to recreate MacDougal Street straight out of the pages of Van Ronk’s memoir. Their film does not intend to be a biopic. Van Ronk’s memoirs are used as a historical frame to tell a fictional story of an individual who, like Van Ronk, is an insider to the Greenwich music scene, but an outsider to Dylanesque success. Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan anti-biopic I’m Not There exudes a similar decentering tendency, even when an icon is at its pivot. It takes the icon Dylan, splinters it, and spreads it across time and people. Haynes’s vision was to make “a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative” (Sullivan). Haynes’s Dylan is not one person. Rather, he is interpreted as the confluence of the poetry and folk artists he draws from; he is both a prophet and a fake, a martyr and an outlaw. He is played by young and old men, a woman and a child. Apart from narrative fragmentation, a montage of visual styles is employed; disparate influences from 8 1/2 to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are seamlessly weaved together. I’m Not There is the story of an

Introduction

icon told from fragments, absences, or stand-ins. The boundaries of the persona of Dylan and the pasts he inhabited are stretched to include juxtaposed multitudes. Both Inside Llewyn Davis and I’m Not There revisit the ’60s past in distinct ways: the representation of one is detached and dissonant, and the other partial and cacophonous. For both, the historical signposts that distinguish the decade are uninteresting. Their refusal to be tied down to the momentous, iconic historical events and glorified biographical accounts of historical figures free them to explore unlikely protagonists. The two films are different in terms of visual aesthetic, narrative style and structure, but irreverence runs through them like a rote Faden. These films are not alone in their detachment towards historical grand narratives; they are symptomatic of a coeval culture of film and television that has proliferated since the ’90s alongside the grand historical dramas at the end of the Cold War. They cannot be branded as niche productions anymore;1 they too win awards and are popular with audiences. Spawning reasonable fan followings, they have established themselves to be commercially viable projects. They are postmodern, they make generous use of irony and intertextuality, with traces of both pastiche and parody. Their distinctive quality is their investment in the past, their desire to inventively represent it, and free it of over-deterministic historical frames. Their attitude towards the past is generous and inclusive. These are retros that pull the past closer to the present, stressing the contiguities between the temporalities. They are not the typical historical production, nor are they products of anemic revival cultures or nostalgically recycled pastiche. Retros are an evolving category of their own, whose boundaries are being constantly challenged.

Temporal Relationality On the 6th of March 1999, a 1927 time capsule was opened during the halftime ceremony at a basketball game in Washington. The capsule had made a temporal journey of over seventy years and was expected to inspire awe, but its contents—bits of paper, a student handbook, newspapers, a ten cent coin—were a disappointment to many (Troop). People in the crowd booed (Gardner). Although burials of time capsules are always done with great ceremony and 1

The Coen brothers wryly announce, “We are the Establishment Now” in The New York Times after the release of Inside Llewyn Davis (Dargis and Scott).

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solemn respect, journalist Tom Vanderbilt reports that openings of time capsules are frequently tinged with disappointment. “Time capsules, after all, exude a kind of pathos: They show us that the future was not quite as advanced as we thought it would be, nor did it come as quickly. The past, meanwhile, turns out to not be as radically distinct as we thought.” Both the awe and the pathos around the capsules stem from grand desires of progress and preservation. During their burial ceremonies nostalgia is anticipated, over imagining the temporal and cultural distance between the time of burial and the future in which the capsules are to be opened. Time capsules show how the future is overburdened with projected progress narratives, and how the past, it is hoped, will be survived by little knickknacks in a glass case. But the past, the present, and the future are far more contiguous than their perceived breaks; they exist in each other at all times through palimpsests. Temporal distances between pasts and presents are contingent on our cultural organization of history, memory, and time—conceptual structures whose meanings rely heavily on societal organization (pre-industrial, modern, and postmodern). Retro’s emphasis on the proximity between cultural experiences of historical periods points at the problems of periodization: that historical periods are not as easily divisible and that historical experiences and ideas cannot be possibly contained by bracketing temporalities. Retro is a product of the postwar, postmodern interrogation of historical perception and order. It draws from the fluidity and cross-migration of ideas and identities across textual boundaries and historical periods. It rejects context-independent ‘timeless’ historical ideas (Skinner) as well as modernism’s privileging of the present. Retro is interested in the inter-relations between temporal periods, fragmented and pervious, as they are. Retro fictions focus on the effects of one temporality on the other, the intergenerational transferences—the experiences of grandparents and parents seeping into the memories and everyday lives of grandchildren, albeit mediated. In the context of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch looks at the role of photographs in the “transgenerational transmission” of powerful memories. The later or ‘post’ generations, because of their proximity to the historical event accessed through familial networks, associate with the transferred memories as their own, even when they did not experience the event directly. Many retros that revisit difficult historical periods—coups, occupations, colonial violence—address the cultural preoccupation with these moments and their long term effects. In fact, a common feature of retros is that their creators often belong to a post-

Introduction

generation—one that succeeds the generation who inhabited the represented past. There is a complex play of distance and interrelation in retros. Their proximity to the historical subjects make retros curious, nonjudgemental, and resonant, while maintaining an undeniable element of emotional distance that lends them their objectivity and irreverence. In case of difficult pasts (think of dictatorships for example) the very act of articulation is made possible by an actual temporal gap. Temporal distance accords other advantages—technological advances and new and accumulated perspectives that only emerge over time, both of which are employed to tell retro stories. For retros, the vantage point of the present is, however, at all times circumspect. The present’s advantage, if at all, stem from it being the most relatable to the creators and viewers of retros, and not from a modernist notion of the present as the most evolved point of existence. Retros see temporality as a continuum and stress on a palimpsestic existence of the past, present, and future. The foreshortening of temporal distance checks nostalgia, it minimizes disappointments in the present and loss of faith in futures. Recognizing temporalities as being proximate and human experiences as being ineluctably transferrable liberate retros from the urgency and solemness of preservation projects. Retros are free of the pressures to present an encyclopedic entry on every significant historical event or a lengthy monograph on a selected solemn historical topic, nor are they compelled to indulge in the ephemeral act of stuffing a few representative emblems of humanity in a glass case or a crypt to be sealed and forgotten for all practical purposes. Retros’ engagement with pasts are not yet standardized. They mix and match styles, unapologetically borrowing fragments from earlier texts. They are erratic, sensitive, and creative; they are invested in pasts, and above all in telling stories that have been long deferred or cast off.

Beginnings 21st century retro is intrinsically linked to the accelerated memory cultural practices of the 1990s. The end of the Cold War, the 50th anniversaries of the events of the Second World War, the debates around preservation of Holocaust memories and memorial projects are a few notable historical agents which prompted the memory turn. In addition, the early ’80s debates around the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial and the discourse on how to remember the

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victims of the AIDs epidemic pushed for the opening up of memorial cultures to include lives lost in an inglorious war and to a deadly disease. The Vietnam veterans were also active in registering their wounds and the trauma they carried home.2 At the end of the Cold War, societies and nations formerly under the U.S.S.R. found themselves in a political flux. Many moved towards democracy, picking up the shards of their fragile economies, and made attempts at reconciliation with their difficult past or at mobilizing it to counter the former politics of forgetting imposed upon them. The situation was not much different for many Latin American countries post dictatorships and African nations after violent civil wars. A culture of public apologies and political amnesties accompanied the memorial culture to ease reconciliation and healing. The latest was issued by Belgium on 4th April 2019, “for the kidnapping, segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during its colonial rule of Burundi, Congo and Rwanda” (Schreuer). The investment in memories was spread geographically; and technology, particularly the Internet, played a significant role in the storage and circulation of all kinds of memories—individual, regional, and national. The globalized economy that had made migration a norm rather than an exception contributed to the acceleration of memory practices. The interest in memory had entered people’s everyday lives and was commented upon by academics, artists, and politicians. Andreas Huyssen hopes an offshoot of the accelerated memory culture to be a “global memory … prismatic and heterogenous rather than holistic and universal” (“Present Pasts,” 35). However, he grapples with what he calls the “globalization paradox”—polarizing tendencies of totalizing homogeneity alongside de-centered, localized memory discourses (24). He uses the Holocaust as the original reference point of the memory culture and explains how it is at once used as an universal symbol of the failure of Western Civilization and the project of enlightenment, and how it potentially subsumes other narratives of trauma and violence. At the same time, the Holocaust’s universality allows peripheral discourses of traumatic memories to borrow from it to energize themselves and find a global resonance. The appropriations and the anxieties around the Holocaust characterize the opposing pulls—of the global and the local, of real and imagined resonances, and of remembering and forgetting—within the memory culture at the turn of the century. “The end of the twentieth century does not give us easy access 2

Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth Of July and Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried are such literary examples of Vietnam veterans recounting their war experiences.

Introduction

to the trope of a golden age. Memories of the twentieth century confront us not with a better life, but with a unique history of genocide and mass destruction which, a priori, mars any attempt to glorify the past” (34). 21st century retros emerge within this political climate and with a firm understanding of the past as an impossible sanctuary. In the absence of easy reconciliation and safe havens, retros attempt “to live in extended forms of temporality and to secure a space, however permeable, from which to speak and act” (35). Fleeting as everyday memories are, they are retro’s fundament. Retro is unflinching in its engagement with these fragments, creatively reconfiguring its forms, juggling genres to interact with people’s lived memories, instead of surrendering them to impenetrable caches, fossilized pieces in a museum or in a larger than life nationalistic narrative. Guillermo del Toro’s oblique attempts at revisiting the Spanish Civil War and the early Franco years in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, using the tropes of the gothic and the fantastical, and Wes Anderson’s playful story within a story within a story approach in The Grand Budapest Hotel, using miniatures and stop-motion animations to revisit a fictional East European small town in the throes of the Second World War and later during Soviet-era austerity, speak for retro’s malleability to, above all, tell stories that resonate. 21st century retros embrace the push for diversification, couched in the cultural turn, and attempt representation of local and peripheral memories in narratives that are idiosyncratic and allegorical, and for a global reception. The first retro moment, however, took place not in the ’90s but at the end of the ’60s in France, with the Third Reich and the Holocaust at its heart—events that stood at the pivot of most postmodern thought and intellectual reordering at the second half of the 20th century. The French mode rétro was a product of the ’60s transitionary politics and inherited the rich critical traditions of French post-structuralism, the inquiries in the field of conceptual history, the questioning of historical time, the exploration of language dependent historical ideas, and the probing of the limits of historical representation. The initial impetus was one of irreverence and confrontation, pointed towards the older regimes of political thought and morality. The first blows of the radical energies were directed at the exalted narratives of French Resistance. Moving away from the heavily structured and sanitized official histories of Occupied

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France,3 mode rétro interrogated and explored the discursive possibilities of representing a historical period that was morally ambiguous. It unravelled stories of unspeakable acts—stories of collusions and collaborations, stories of inaction and misappropriation of power, stories of swindlers and war profiteers. Patrick Modiano’s consistent efforts at representing that period, revisiting it again and again since 1968, “like a photographer who tries to capture someone from different angles” (Donadio), encapsulate retro’s investment in the past. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation” (“Patrick Modiano – Facts”). Modiano’s quasiautobiographical novels draw from, and attempt to make sense of, moments of his childhood. His characters are impenetrable and ambiguous, much like his father, Albert Modiano—a Jew who refused to wear the Yellow badge, and who survived the Occupation selling goods on the black market and through his questionable associations with the underworld and the Gestapo. Modiano’s autobiographical fictions, his noir novels, and his collaboration with Louis Malle in Lacombe, Lucien, all add up to a corpus that conveys the mood and impressions of the French retro moment. Mode rétro is culturally and intellectually significant because the pattern repeats itself in places separated in space and time such as post-Pinochet Chile, post-Franco Spain, and post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. 21st century retros imbibe mode rétro’s willingness to confront difficult pasts and embrace the latent nervousness that seeps into the present. The term ‘21st century retro’ is used in this book for all retros situated around the turn of the 21st century, i.e., from 1990 to the present, to mark their difference from the earlier mode rétro, spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet they share a categorical resemblance. Both contemporary and earlier retro narratives are recognizable in their circuitous engagement with not-so-distant pasts (often pasts of living memories) and in their experiences of deafening silence and retaliatory desires, which translate into irreverence. They respond to the glaring gaps in dominant narratives with the intensity of “puncturing an abscess” (Donadio) and the need to represent morally ambiguous characters, exploring

3

The shift in the perception of Vichy France from its earlier associations with passive resistance to being associated with varying shades of collaboration was registered in the works of historians Robert Paxton and Henri Rousso amongst others.

Introduction

why they did what they did. Retros tease out plural histories and arrive at a place in between memory and forgetting.

21st Century Retro Mode rétro was a reaction against the myth of French resistance and a messianic vision of French exceptionalism embodied by Charles de Gaulle to reinstate the nation’s honor and people’s morale. 21st century retros are, however, not tied to a particular historical myth or fixed points of return, and lend themselves more generally to the phenomena of cyclical investment in relatable and not-so-distant pasts. They espouse a free spirit of exploration and welcome the chance encounters and unintentional meanderings into the past. Their relationship to the past is intimate and interactive; there are no gatekeepers to the past, or defined routes that lead to it. Retros trace whimsically fragments of people (not stereotypes) and their presences. Like the excavator digging the same site, retros are aware of the incompleteness and partiality of the pasts that it represents.4 Every retro provokes and anticipates further revisitations. The story of the past can never be told with finality, there will always be little missing pieces held suspended in oblivion. Memory will always have gaps, and the attempts to fill these gaps present themselves as continual human endeavors. Alan Riding writes, “if “memory” and “occupation” are useful tags for [Modiano’s] writing, it is another word—“father”—that provides the real key to his unfinished exploration of the German occupation of France.” ‘Father’ is not simply a deictic reference that points to Modiano’s estranged relationship with his absentee father; the word also suggests an intimacy with the historical subject, a direct implication on present identities, and an urgency to unravel the memory gaps that threaten to diminish selfhoods. 21st century retros adopt this perception of proximity in inter(generational)relations of its earlier moment and invest in rediscovering hidden corners, old jokes, joys of wearing clothes from grandmothers’ closets mixed with new. Contemporary retros take this proximity as a given and not as sacrosanct; they allow themselves the pleasures of hybrids such as the cacophonous 4

Patrick Modiano responds to a telephonic interview with Hélène Hernmarck of Nobel Media: “I always have the impression that I write the same book. Which means it’s already 45 years that I’ve been writing the same book in a discontinuous manner.”

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writing of old romantic ballads against banal and brutal onscreen imagery, and they blend it all together with state-of-the-art technologies. Since its initial appearance in France, retro has been evoked in the chaos of flea markets, in the retrofitted modern houses where sophisticated home appliances are hidden behind old world panelings, and in dance clubs that play updated remix music and invite guests on musical journeys that go back and forth in time. There is hardly anything conservative or backward about retro’s looking back at the past. Retro is confused with nostalgia and a loss of faith for the present and by extension the future on account of this backward glance, which in effect is an inward rather than an outward gesture. The looking back is as much about an investment in the past, as it is about a commitment to the present and arguably the future.

Retro’s critics Retros are at ease with their hybrid identities, blurring the boundaries between the old and the new. The blurring of distinctions have always created great anxieties around retro, provoking accusations of emptying out history and commercializing the past. Retro’s irreverent borrowing and mixing offends its critics. Jean Baudrillard writes, “War, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funeral exaltation, in the same retro fascination” (“History: A Retro Scenario”). His comment recalls the mid-’70s suspicion of the French retro style discussed in Cahiers du Cinema by Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana, who identified mode rétro as a representational phenomenon governed by a “cynical ideology.” They accuse retros of mystifying the past, juxtaposing contesting versions of history (Lacombe, Lucien), imagining bizarre alternative historical scenarios (Chinese in Paris), and indulging in the eroticization of power (The Night Porter). Their aversion to retro’s offer of plurality stem from their belief that the cacophony detract from people’s memory of “popular struggle.” “How to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero,” they ask Michel Foucault, uncomfortable with Louis Malle’s ambiguous anti-hero Lucien Lacombe. Foucault steers them away from the preoccupation with heroes, posing instead the question, “Can you make a film depicting a struggle without making the characters into heroes in the traditional sense?” Foucault expresses interest in a non-heroic, non-epic way of representing history, one that does not stifle “popular memory.” Even though

Introduction

Foucault’s interview is titled “Anti-Retro,” ironically retro comes closest to fulfilling the role—of offering a resistance to the codification of popular memory, and confronting the discourses of desire and power. Much of retro’s criticism stem from a distaste for the televisual mediums with their freight of glossy images. The simulated images of 1970s films and television, Baudrillard feared, were “a little too good, more in tune, better than others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches” of earlier ’50s films and lend themselves to fetishizing and nostalgia. Baudrillard’s fears of mechanizations and perfect images are dated in the 21st century; there is no pure space untouched by technology and images. There is also a stubborn distinction between high and low art in retro’s criticisms. Television and cinema are particularly attacked for imposing themselves on the everyday and undermining tradition: “Nowadays cheap books are no longer enough. There are much more efficient channels in the form of television and cinema” writes Foucault. Baudrillard describes television using discourses of contamination and surveillance: “TV watches you” (“Holocaust”). He posits Luchino Visconti’s period films from the ’50s and the ’60s that revisit Italy of the 1860s as sensual and passionate, against Stanley Kubrick’s perfect simulations of the past, cold and mechanistically manipulated (“History: A Retro Scenario”). The distinction between the two appear, foremost, a matter of taste. Luchino Visconti’s film Senso, where an Italian countess, Livia, betrays her husband and has an illicit affair with an Austrian soldier, a member of the occupying force, in fact, appears to have several elements of retro with its morally ambiguous protagonist and its plot of betrayal. Senso 45, a 2002 remake, maps the same story onto the fascist regime in Italy at the end of the Second World War; in the remake, Livia is the wife of a fascist and her lover an SS officer. Livia’s story of collaboration with the enemy, originally written as a novella in 1882, is ultimately a human story that has found resonance in different historical periods, and lends itself to representations of difficult pasts.

Retro’s Proponents The use of the word retro as an adjective—in terms such as retrochic and retrofit—to suggest a modern borrowing of past styles was already in vogue in the early ’70s. It originated in the Paris avant-garde’s appetite for inversion: anti-authoritarian, anti-tradition, anti-fashion, anti-sentimentality, anti-hierarchy, and anti-grand. The mood of the 1968 student protests and the work-

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ers’ riots are infused into its irreverence. Retro’s dalliance with past styles, indiscriminately reviving music, hairstyles, fashion, objects, and images, and appropriating and arranging them in new and flippant ways, without order, and indifferent to dominant logic offends the patrons of high art and fashion. Raphael Samuel argues retrochic is distinct from earlier revivals, like the late 18th century Gothicists and the neoclassicists, for its absence of deference, “Where the earlier revivals made a point of imitating the grand, retrochic has been more apt to make a fetish of the vernacular and the demotic” (112). Samuel’s claims find corroboration in 21st century retro film and television in their choice of themes that are far from grand and their frequent use of unsophisticated pop music, albeit in creative ways. Amongst 21st century theorists, Elizabeth Guffey extends the retro discourse, documenting mid-20th century revival cultures in Europe and America: the Art Nouveau-inspired graphic designs seen on the posters of ’60s San Francisco countercultures (58); the revival of Art Deco motifs and typefaces in art, architecture, and advertising in the ’70s (91); the late ’60s–early ’70s resurgence of Britain’s Teddy Boy subculture of the ’50s (102); and the revival of ’50s pop music and musicals in ’70s America (106). Both Samuel and Guffey provide rich catalogs of revival cultures. However, their broad encyclopedic analyses tend to forgo specific and extended engagements with any one particular retro cultural production. 21st Century Retro fills this gap. While it expects its findings to be widely applicable, it confines itself to retro film and television and even more specifically, to one retro television series: Mad Men. The specificity allows it the focus to examine retro in detail. How does retro express its ironic stance? How does it interact with nostalgia (a category it is regularly conflated with)? How does retro use and appropriate its intertextualities (the fragments of the past)? What are the pleasures of retro? Which mechanisms support retro in its positioning? How do people (fans) participate in a retro production? How does retro speak for itself? And how does it influence and employ other actors to circulate its selfdescriptions?

Reorienting Retro 21st Century Retro marks a theoretical departure from earlier works in understanding retro’s relationship to the past. Previously, retro’s indifference to formal boundaries of the past and the present was attributed to a loss of his-

Introduction

tory, “only when history has ceased to matter can it be treated as a sport,” (Samuel 95) and to a temporal discontinuity that “implicitly ruptures us from what came before” (Guffey 28). This book, however, finds that retro’s casual exchanges with ‘past’ styles is symptomatic of retro’s understanding of pasts as being simultaneous, of the past’s palimpsestic existence in the present. Retro’s relationship with the past is one defined by contiguity and not by an irreconcilable rupture. This notion of proximity with the past, of seeing it as part of a continuum with the present, concurs with the current stance of the disciplines of history and memory studies, both of which emphasize the relevance of the past, and a need for an intellectual pursuit of the past’s fragments and presences in archives and in postmemories. Proximity is the basis of demystification. If the past is not lost, and always ever here (in the present), it is hard to build an aura around it and to sell the past as an object of nostalgic aspirations. The continuity also emphasizes the present’s need to understand the past, and invest in it because it has direct implication on the present as well as the future. Guffey argues that retro is a product of a loss of faith in the present (19) and in an uncertain future (22). 21st Century Retro, however, posits an opposite scenario: that retro emerges from deep historical affinity and care. Retro is not bereft of history but acutely invested in it. This ideological posturing is closer to mode rétro’s original impulse in post-1968 France, manifested in Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and The Pity and Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien. These works are intensely invested in the past, confronting the myths that make it grand and impenetrable to the present. The pattern recurs, albeit reconfigured, and often using the child’s perspective to navigate difficult pasts and to show their implications on later generations: in Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business, José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly’s Tongue, Pablo Larraín’s No. Using examples of 21st century retro—Weiner’s Mad Men, the films of Haynes and Coen brothers—this book seeks to address the confusion between retro’s critical distance and apathy, and the conflation of retro’s irreverence with a stone cold disinterest in the past. It understands retro’s ‘irreverence’ as a secularizing posture, one which promotes non-hierarchical interactions with the past and claims it from calcifying into frigid monoliths that are nostalgically admired from a distance or spoken of only using the registers of the grand.

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Mad Men Since the days of mode rétro, the category has expanded to include new and diverse points of return that are not necessarily pasts of violent fascist dictatorships. The new points of return stress their significance and relatability to the present and its identity; they carry within themselves the potential to tell untold stories or retell another version of the oft told popular myth. This book uses the 21st century American television series Mad Men, set in the notso-distant past of 1960s America, as its principal case study to address this diversification in the retro discourse. Along with other 21st century examples of retro from America, it refers to retros from Chile, Hungary, Denmark, and Poland. While the difficult past in most European retros continue to be the Third Reich and the Holocaust, examples from Chile demonstrate efforts at grappling with Latin America’s dictator pasts. The 21st century American retros frequently return to the ’50s and ’60s, and occasionally there are returns to the ’70s and the ’80s. In popular representations, the ’50s and the ’60s have been repeatedly juxtaposed as polar opposites: the identity of the ’50s has solidified as the stultifying years of conformity and the ’60s has been celebrated as the well spring of all creative (in advertising, design, modern art, architecture) and progressive movements (the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movements, the environmental movement, and of course the countercultural movement). These one-dimensional narratives draw retro’s attention. Retros interrogate the caricatured versions of the ’50s and the ’60s and challenge the careless bracketing of human experiences. It subverts these narratives by accommodating within their representations aspects that are unremarkable (not all American ’60s advertising agency were Doyle Dane Bernbach, experiencing a creative revolution), aspects that contradict popular assumptions (addressing desire and sexuality of the women in the ’50s), and the concurrences between the two decades (political conservatism in both decades). The 1960s America in Mad Men is largely segregated, anti-semitic, chauvinistic, with exaggerated masculinities and fatalistic feminine ideals. The appeal and cultural memory of the decade, however, frequently latches on to the period’s chic surfaces (fashion, design, architecture) and its countercultural potential (also often expressed through fashion, design, and music). In between the period’s glamor and youthful vitality, the reactionary is handed over to elliptical silences. Mad Men brings to screen this world of white male privileges and causal sexism. While the period genre is quite popular in films, in

Introduction

the case of television it has mostly been confined to nostalgic sitcoms (Happy Days, That ’70s Show) and serious documentary-style narratives (The Holocaust, Band of Brothers). Mad Men is unique in that it deploys features from television narrative formats of the serial and the series to present a complex narrative about the past, and it does so while being playful and with an insouciant disregard for formal categories, borrowing styles and tropes from cinema as well its television precursors. Since Mad Men, productions with a historical backdrop have flourished in American television: Pan Am, The Playboy Club, The Americans, Masters of Sex, Manhattan, Vinyl, and Good Girls Revolt are considered to be inspired by Mad Men. Apart from occasional comparative comments about these contemporary series, the book largely confines itself to discussions on Mad Men. Using one primary example gives 21st Century Retro focus and in addition, Mad Men’s long run, with 92 hour-long episodes, allows substantial interrogation of retro’s nuances. Mad Men follows on the heels of illustrious television series The Sopranos and The Wire, and airs at a time when television is said to have “become the signature American art form of the first decade of the twenty first century, the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, and others had been to the 1970s or the novels of Updike, Roth and Mailer had been to the 1960s” (Martin 11). The book interrogates this supposed cinematic and literary turn in television, tracing Mad Men’s own cinematic and literary allegiances. The early 21st century is also a period of upheaval in television history as television saddles technological advances and introduction of new viewing platforms and screens, which outmode (although not entirely replace) the traditional television set in the living room. Mad Men is used as an example because it is inscribed with retro’s ambivalent categorization: the series enjoys critical acclaim but limited commercial success, and sits uneasily between niche and mainstream. Mad Men points at the need for a new analytical category. The label ‘period drama’ fails to encapsulate its idiosyncrasies, humor, irony, and irreverence. ‘Period’ carries within itself a suggestion of distance between the present representation and its historical subject and confers on the historical reference a sense of fixity and completeness. Encoded in a period production’s representational relationship with its historical subject is a stony finality rather than the fluidity that provokes newer contesting revisitations. There is a mismatch between the expectations from period productions and what Mad Men offers with its generous usage of intertextualities and the renewed contexts of these appropriated fragments. The framework of the period production, often

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big budget endeavors with exalted subjects and over-determined narratives, prove inadequate in capturing the creative negotiations and capricious narrative trajectories of retro productions.

Layout 21st Century Retro is organized into three parts. The first part discusses retro’s relationship with nostalgia (Chapter 1) and history (Chapter 2), and its departures from historical productions. By disentangling retro from nostalgia and historical productions, it moves on to discuss the specificities of 21st century retros such as: who are the makers of retros and how does this contemporary moment arise? The second part explores the pleasures of retro. It deals extensively with the uses of past fragments—the intertextualities—and their appropriation and ironic re-contextualizations (Chapter 3). It looks into the diverse kinds of memories associated with television, and investigates retro’s interactions with television memories and history. It engages with the audience’s pleasures of participating in retro texts, identifying anachronisms, cataloging and commenting on historical references in paratextual spaces (Chapter 4). The final part discusses the ways of charting the influence and success of retros. It examines retro not as a whole but as scattered over a net of actors that work together tirelessly to give retro its form (Chapter 5).5 The examination of 21st century retro could have taken other directions such as retro’s engagement with power, sexuality, whiteness, or it’s interactions with various film and television genre styles—noir, erotic, gothic, and surreal. The strands of inquiry taken up in this book were selected in order to: define the category anew, considering the proposed new direction in the retro discourse; distinguish it from other oft conflated categories, clarifying its differences and relations with nostalgia6 and the epic historical film; understand its functions,

5 6

The sequential layout notwithstanding, the chapters can function independently, and readers can navigate the chapters at random, reading the book in individualistic ways. In spite of the attempted distinctions from nostalgia — deduced primarily from retro’s narrative positioning — the very presence of historical objects in the mise-en-scène can nevertheless facilitate nostalgic consumption. The Mad Men set is sometimes accused of promoting nostalgia for mid-century design and furniture. Chapter 5 examines the sets in terms of its narrative function: How does Mad Men employ its set to tell its story? Is its narrative function distinct from its nostalgia function?

Introduction

and the pleasures of indulging in a retro’s intertextualities, and in its paratextual cultures; and locate it within contemporary culture, with attempts to assess retro’s influence and cultural value. The first chapter, “Retro,” establishes the category, delineating its contours, history, and ubiquity. Between Pablo Larraín’s Pinochet trilogy and Louis Malle’s post-Gaullist film Lacombe, Lucien, the expanse and trajectory of retros are mapped out. The chapter opens with a vignette from Pablo Larraín’s film Post Mortem, set in 1973 during the military coup in Chile, and follows it with brief descriptions of Larraín’s other obsessive and provocative attempts to revisit the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (Tony Manero) and the 1988 plebiscite (No). The discussions on Larraín’s films offer the reader a flavor of the unsentimental and nonjudgmental 21st century retro films, leading to questions about their need, intention, and efficacy of representing pasts after a temporal gap. Larraín’s 21st century need for an engagement with Chile’s Pinochet regime is similar to an earlier moment in history: 1970s France, where a desire to confront inconvenient truths of Occupied France grips the youth of a nation after years of reticence. This is the French mode rétro, an antecedent of 21st century retros. Mode rétro swells up in the ’70s to include a variety of artistic projects, many heading in opposing directions. It gets embroiled in nostalgic fashions and design trends and by the ’80s it falls out of taste, criticized as beautiful sanitized imitations of the past that distract from real history. Meanwhile mode rétro crosses the boundaries of France and penetrates the everyday lexicon of its neighboring countries and those across the Atlantic. It has since been appropriated in newer contexts, as subversive fashion statements, artistic styles such as retrochic, in remixed music cultures, and in architecture and design. The chapter distinguishes retro from nostalgia, emphasizing retro’s ironic distance. Examples from Mad Men (“The Wheel,” “The Strategy”) are used to interrogate ideas of homecoming and dislocation—important concepts in the nostalgia discourse. They demonstrate how retro opts for a decidedly distinct trajectory from that of nostalgia. Svetlana Boym’s concepts of “reflective” and “restorative” nostalgias complicate neat categorizations, pointing at the new developments within the nostalgia discourse (since Johannes Hofer) that accommodate critiques of sentimentality. Reflective nostalgia is an ally of retro in their shared perception of the incompleteness of nostalgia’s promise of return. In the absence of grand narratives of belonging, there can only exist little narratives of diasporic intimacies.

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The chapter “History in Retro” explores the relationship between retro and history, charting the ways in which history is represented in retros. It opens with a few historical highlights from 1968, posited alongside Mad Men’s representation of the year in its sixth season. The history of 1968 is significant for many reasons and not in the least for its contested nature. Retro acknowledges history as plural and partial. It interacts with historical narratives through cultural tropes, metaphors, and allegories. The chapter contrasts Forrest Gump’s representation of the ’60s to Mad Men’s to show the difference between the popular film in awe of historical icons and retro’s distance from them. Retros approach icons tentatively; they are inclined to mediate and subvert their aura. The chapter links the ‘memory boom’ at the end of the Cold War to the rise of both big-budget historical productions (the Spielbergian dramas) as well as retros, although the two are narratively distinct. Retros tell stories of people, and not of heroes and distanced historical stereotypes. These stories are diverse, impressionistic, oblique, peripheral, and personal, and they are narrated nonjudgmentally. The chapter locates the beginnings of 21st century retro in the ’90s, within the climate of energized investment in memories. It observes that majority of the creators of American retros are baby boomers, including Mad Men creator Mathew Weiner. It explores the connection between the boomers’ formative years and the recent pasts that are regularly chosen as backdrops. It uses Jay Winter’s theorizations of the educated and affluent boomer generation’s interest in memories as a manifestation of their will to reinforce their own generational identity. But retros are decidedly cynical of the past, of the boomer childhood that they frequently represent, Gary Ross’s film Pleasantville being a case in point. The chapter includes discussions on the various generations represented in Mad Men, zooming in on Sally Draper, the boomer representative in the series. Mad Men undercuts the popular narrative of a radical counter culture associated with the ’60s in two ways: by populating its universe with flawed characters belonging to different generations, none of whom qualify as the quintessential ’60s representative, and by having its boomer representatives Sally Draper and Glen Bishop just short of adulthood to fully participate in the late ’60s political radicalism. The chapter also discusses retros’ interaction with the histories of the televisual mediums; retros are self-conscious of their own location and reliance on the evolution of film and television. It shows how retros adapt, appropriate, and subvert television and cinematic conventions of the past; retros’ self-reflexivity is noticeable in their own palimpsestic nature.

Introduction

The third chapter, “Television Memories and Intertextualities in Mad Men,” deals extensively with televisual memories: textual, contextual, serial, and intertextual. It stresses that people’s connection with historic telecasts (the televisual texts) are mediated through their own private memories of the environments (the contexts of reception) in which they view public telecasts. The chapter provides an overview of the evolution of the television experience, introduced by the new technologies of reception and delivery. It briefly touches upon postwar television history: viewers’ awkward initial struggles with the medium, its contested entry into people’s domestic spaces, and its gradual acceptance into everyday lives. It shows Mad Men’s ambivalent relationship with television using the contrasting examples of the moon landing and the Burger Chef pitch. It then moves to discussions on serial memories in long running television programs, and investigates mechanisms of recall that serial formats offer. Examples from Mad Men illustrate how serial texts selfconsciously draw upon, and remind viewers of, events that had taken place earlier in the text to create viewer identification with characters and secure viewer investment in character growth. The chapter focusses on the distinctive ways in which retros interact with their intertextualities. Viewers enjoy being able to identify and anticipate a retro’s intertextualities and look forward to their novel appropriations. Intertextualities lend themselves to a retro text: they add period specificity, details to character sketches, and enrich set and scene compositions. A retro text can be viewed without any knowledge of its intertextualities, but being familiar with them definitely adds to the pleasures of watching a retro. Retro uses intertextualities to supplement their narrative, to set the tone, mood, and themes. Peculiar to retro is its use of intertexts as counterpoints to onscreen imagery and narrative take, where subliminal themes emerge from the dissonant juxtapositions. Retro’s mediations of its intertexts include recasting them in new contexts of reception. The mediations are achieved by tampering the frames of the source texts, sometimes expanding them to include aspects that are uncomfortable. Retro also actively comments on the inconsistencies, gaps, and easy resolutions of the source texts. Finally the chapter comments on retro’s potential to revive memories of older texts that it quotes from. Sometimes an obscure intertext finds a renewed interest as retro revitalizes its intertextual fragments, albeit with transformations and modifications. Retro offers them an update, making them relevant to contemporary viewers. The technological innovations such as pause-and-play viewing, and

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the proliferation of vibrant paratextual cultures around television play equally important roles in enabling the revival of a retro’s intertexts. The chapter “Mad Men and its Paratexts” demonstrates that retro’s paratexts facilitate its complex narrative, and contribute to its authenticity and aesthetic appeal. The paratexts support retro in drawing attention to peripheral narratives, and in foregrounding the relevance of recent pasts. Mad Men’s DVD special features situate the series within a historical context. Comparing historical references that appear both in the series’s special features and episodes, the interdependencies of a retro and its paratexts are examined. A brief outline of Gerard Genette’s framework of paratexts along with a few recent updates is offered in the chapter, paving the way for an exploration of contemporary energized paratextual cultures around retro films and television. Examples of two popular commissioned paratexts, DVD special features and audio commentaries, are discussed in detail. They show how creators of retro use these paratextual spaces to communicate with their viewers, to let them in on insider details and behind-the-scenes information, and to convince them of narrative choices and explain them away when some of those choices stir up controversies. Viewers enjoy this intimate connection with the text and its creators, and their engagement with paratextual sources deepen their relationship to the text. Viewers also create their own paratexts, expressing their opinions and evaluations of the series. Fan wiki websites are examples of viewer generated paratexts; they help viewers to insert their own histories into the diegetic universe of a retro. The chapter discusses complexity in Mad Men’s narrative introduced through manipulation of chronology, its hybrid format, historical inflections, and plot twists. It locates Mad Men within the larger landscape of postnetwork television, in which television programs continuously reinvent themselves to deal with the competition. Mad Men confidently follows in the footsteps of The Sopranos and The Wire in delivering complex and dense narratives without offering excessive prompts and explanations within the narrative. The paratexts offer the exposition for them. These complex narratives could not have succeeded in the absence of paratexts and the readily available paratextual spaces that host vibrant participatory paratextual discussions on television. The paratexts also facilitate direct communication between the viewers and the various professionals involved in Mad Men: set decorators, costume designers, music composers, and cinematographers. Through the paratexts the viewers learn of the constraints, creative choices, and technologies that contribute to retro’s hybrid aesthetic. The chapter

Introduction

contends that authenticity is being reinvented, where craft is favored over realism, and the process is as important as the end product. This shift is significant for retros as the suspicion of being a simulation no longer hangs over its head. The retro experience is as much about indulging in cinematic realism as it is about being informed of the practical details, the constant negotiations that bring the retro text to life. The final chapter, “The Mad Men Network,” discusses how value is created, circulated, and attributed to a retro cultural production. It contends that value is created in a network and offers Actor-Network Theory as an approach that enables the tracing of this network. It problematizes the idea of success defined by viewer numbers and shows that they reveal only part of the picture. In spite of low viewer numbers, Mad Men’s cultural legacy percolates to fashion, design, and later television series. Numbers also prove inadequate in explaining the success of the series, in terms of being allowed to go into production for further seasons and in being able to fulfill the expectations of its host channel. The chapter questions expert advice which states that success is guaranteed if a cultural production can consciously position itself within an already established prestigious network. It asks what happens when a production (Mad Men) is unable to insert itself into a prestigious network (HBO)? A few Mad Men ‘actors’ are traced in the chapter to assess their contribution to the success of the series. The Mad Men script, John Cheever, the series’s self-descriptions in high value literary journals and newspapers, and the Mad Men sets are shown to be a part of the Mad Men actor-network that add to its overall value. The chapter picks up a few examples of television professionals associated with Mad Men such as Phil Abraham and Matthew Weiner and explores how each of these actors can be read as an actor-network for their capacity to mobilize other actors to ‘do something’ for them. In this case, it is their ability to enroll their associates to contribute to the sustenance and success of Mad Men. The chapter traces the flow of influence through these networks to arrive at an understanding of television series as a network of distributed actions. This approach allows the chapter to challenge notions of intrinsic value associated with any particular actor. Mad Men’s success is often attributed to its script and its sets; the chapter picks up these two threads to demonstrate their interdependencies on a network of associated actors. The Mad Men–John Cheever association is examined for traces of bidirectional exchange. Traces of Cheever’s short stories and his journals are found in various aspects of Mad Men—in its central conceit, delivery, mood, and reconstruction of every-

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day life in and around New York and its suburbs. Weiner is only too willing to acknowledge these traces and actively enrolls Cheever in the series’s selfdescriptions. The chapter examines this process of enrollment and the actors (human, nonhuman, immediate, and distant) involved in the transference of cultural value from Cheever to Mad Men. Next, the Mad Men sets are examined, charting out their nostalgic and narrative functions. The design of the various Mad Men sets are discussed and their ability to contribute to the drama. The efficacy and appeal of these sets are shown to be distributed amongst a network of actors: props, location, camera, frames, aural cues, costumes, and hairstyle to name a few. For an examination of nostalgia, Pan Am, another period drama set in the ’60s, is brought in for comparison. Pan Am banks on nostalgia for the ’60s, revisiting iconic events of the decade from around the globe. But the series is cancelled after one season, albeit with viewer numbers higher than Mad Men. Arguably, nostalgia appeals far less than it is hyped. The juxtaposition foregrounds the complexity involved in assessing the accumulated cultural value and success of enormous and evolving actor-networks that are television series.

Part I

Chapter 1: Retro

Post-Pinochet Retros Mario Cornejo (Alfredo Castro), a clerk at the coroner’s office, sits down to eat his dinner of fried eggs and boiled rice in his small dilapidated room when the doorbell rings. It is Nancy Puelma (Antonia Zegers), his neighbor, the cabaret dancer. After a short exchange of pleasantries, he asks her to join him for dinner and fries her an egg. Puelma was fired from her job earlier that day, which is when Cornejo first introduced himself to her, after years of secretly watching her from the windows of his house. In their conversation, she obliquely conveys her insecurities amidst random exchanges about cats and purgatory. As the two sit down to eat, Puelma breaks down and starts weeping. Moments later, Cornejo joins in, and the two cry inconsolably. In the next scene, they have sex followed by an evening out in town. This vignette is from Pablo Larraín’s 2010 Chilean film Post Mortem, set during the 1973 military coup that initiated fifteen years of violence in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. The scenes are layered and deeply unsettling, but the narrative decidedly leaves them unexplained, quite at ease with the ambivalences. The film does not expect the audience to empathize with its voyeuristic protagonist, Mario Cornejo, who progressively embodies detachment, an emotion that lingers over each frame, almost as a backdrop to the story. The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott describes the weeping scene at the dining table as “less a moment of empathy than of bizarre unnerving desperation, observed with a detachment that borders on cruelty.” The film portrays the violence of the military coup through the psychological and symbolic violence in the lives of its protagonists, who suddenly find themselves in the midst of political upheaval. Following the coup, the number of dead bodies pile up at the coroner’s office. Slowly, Cornejo’s occupation takes on perverse proportions as he and his colleagues spend days accounting for the unnatural

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deaths. There are frames filled with corpses, conveying the aftermath of state violence. In one of the scenes, the former President Salvador Allende himself is brought in to the coroner’s center for autopsy, where Cornejo and his colleagues clinically account for Allende’s wounds in the presence of Pinochet’s military officers. Allende’s dead body arranged on the surgical table recalls an era of betrayal, violence, and trauma that would haunt Chile for years to come. Mario Cornejo is not a traditional hero, neither is Post Mortem a traditional historical film. This distinction is important as it reveals two divergent artistic modes and rationales behind revisiting the past. The traditional historical film revisits glorious moments of the past and lives of brave men, who rose in times of crisis to hold a fractured society together. Commemorations through artistic representations are important to the identity and consolidation of a society and a nation. Think of the significance of biopics of exemplary men such as Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for America’s national consciousness. Without doubt there is a need to remember their stories. However, there can be another, more inconvenient engagement with the past, with its non-events or moments of iniquity. These are retros, which tell stories equally important for a nation’s conscience. They are detached representations of the past that accommodate the illustrious along with the stories of societal collusions, of neighbors informing on neighbors for rewards; stories of regular men, who abuse power when they have access to it; stories from the underbelly as it were. Larraín’s retro Post Mortem traces the depravity of the Pinochet regime through the anti-hero protagonist Cornejo, who is identifiable as the nonentity that exists at the margins, and yet he is present in the room with Allende’s dead body, witnessing the post mortem that is of immense consequence to Chile’s national narrative. While his colleagues show clear signs of being coerced into performing the autopsy, Cornejo feels empowered by the turn of events. When a military captain felicitates him, saying Cornejo now serves the Chilean Army, the recognition brings a smile to his lips. The political climate renders him visible after a lifetime of inconsequential existence. Nancy Puelma, who was never aware of Cornejo’s existence, notices him for the first time. She even depends on him for her survival after her left-leaning father and brother disappear without a trace. His job at the coroner’s office, formerly removed from normal society, is placed at the centerstage through the bloodbath. Cornejo adapts to the changes around him and his actions begin to mirror the degeneracy and corruption of moral values during the dictatorship. The narrative is presented largely through his eyes as

Chapter 1: Retro

he clinically observes the events and their effect on the people around him and takes advantage of the political situation, exerting his newfound power over people weaker than him. The stoic and gray tone of the narrative of Post Mortem is consistent with the narrative choice of using Mario Cornejo as its entry point. The film is characteristically retro: neither explanatory nor reparatory. It simply accounts from the margins. It is a story of the chaos left behind by the upheaval, rather than that of the political usurpation itself. It focuses on regular people, whose lives are affected by the coup, and it consciously maintains a reserved distance from the important historical figures instrumental in executing the coup. The drama unfolds symbolically and is kept largely minimalistic. The coup is not directly addressed on screen, but conveyed through the presence of tanks on the streets and through gunshots in the background. Even so, elements of authenticity are inserted into the narrative. It is a historical fact that there was a person named Mario Cornejo present during the autopsy of Allende about whom little is known (Matheou “The Body Politic”). The film builds its fictional protagonist upon these silences, imagining within its frames a private life for Cornejo. It also uses the actual room and the table on which Allende’s autopsy took place; infusing these historical details heighten the discomfort of watching the dismembered body of the former President. Even though Pinochet himself is strategically absent in the film, the narrative and the mise-en-scène make his power and presence easily palpable. The film does not shy away from dissonances, and in fact the wobbling hand-held camera that follows the characters as they navigate chaotic spaces lends to the representation of disorientation. It uses skeletal background sounds, such as the sound of an egg frying, of footsteps in the empty corridors of the morgue, and the clickety-clack of the typewriter on which Cornejo types out the autopsy reports of the dead bodies brought into his office. The eerie silences, the abrupt sounds, and the quiet conversations convey the ruptures in normal life due to the regulations imposed from outside, the curfews, and the self-imposed restrictions for survival. It also paints a picture of isolation and of an exiled universe cramped within four walls. The characters are alienated to the point that they cannot communicate meaningfully, although they emphasize that they express themselves clearly. Fractures such as these are at the heart of retros; they are comfortable in their nonjudgmental revisitations of traumatic pasts without seeking reconciliation. Larraín’s Post Mortem along with his films Tony Manero and No make up a 21st century retro trilogy, which revisits the Pinochet regime. These retros of-

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fer three idiosyncratic ways of representing Chile’s difficult relation with its Pinochet years. Tony Manero, set in the middle of the Pinochet regime, is a dark musical comedy. It takes place in the late ’70s, when the American movie Saturday Night Fever starring John Travolta was a rage in Chilean movie theaters. Tony Manero is about a Chilean middle-aged man Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro) desperately hoping to transform his life by trying to look, dress, and dance like Tony Manero, Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever. There are many parallels between the cinematic strategies of Post Mortem and Tony Manero in terms of their ambitions to confront the past: through detachment, gore, humor, and irony; their expressions through bleak settings, raw and immediate sounds; and their usage of tropes of violence, alienation, and societal breakdown. However, Tony Manero is peculiar in the ways it turns the American popular cultural associations with Saturday Night Fever on its head. The exuberant music of Saturday Night Fever in Tony Manero conveys the uneasy desperation of Raúl Peralta. Peralta’s passion works as an allegory for the dictatorship and takes the menacing form of an aggressive obsession that legitimizes murders and abuse with impunity. The music surrounds the visuals of violence, creating an unsettling experience. The fictional Tony Manero takes on a monstrous life of his own in Pinochet’s Chile, far removed from the romantic Hollywood hero. The glass dance floor, the disco lights, the music, and the dancing reverberates the cruelty, dislocation, and violence in Peralta’s life and the world around him. Tony Manero also speaks to the regime’s cultural violence as it encouraged the expansion of American imperialism and cultural influence on Chile. Peralta’s inability to perform sexually works as a metaphor for the loss of vitality of the Chilean culture under the Pinochet dictatorship. In Larraín’s retros, the cinemas and the cabarets, which were popular escapes during the Pinochet years, are never safe refuges. The grotesqueness of the world outside permeates these spaces. Pinochet’s own disinterest in art and cinema resulted in the brutal suppression of Chile’s then existing vibrant tradition of political cinema, forcing most prominent filmmakers of the time to live as exiles. The consumption of popular culture was confined to a few prescribed escape routes. Unless willfully deluded, the usurpation of culture and memories was evident through the disjointed banalities on screen and on stage. No gives an extensive insight into Chile’s television programming during the dictatorship, with archival television footage constituting one-third of the film. The last film in the trilogy, No tells the story of the 1988 plebiscite that put an end to the dictatorship, marking Chile’s transition to democracy. The film is based on a play written by formerly exiled Chilean novelist Antonio Skármeta.

Chapter 1: Retro

The protagonist Rene Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), the ad man responsible for the ‘No’ campaign in the film, is not an ideologue. He takes the job because he sees it as a challenge. Saavedra is a mediocre ad man, delivering the same practiced lines in pitches for a Cola campaign, a microwave ad, a matinee soap opera, as well as the trite ‘No’ campaign. Like all of his work, he rehashes stock images for the campaign as well. On watching the first version, the supporters of the campaign were quick to point out that it looks more like an ad for Coca Cola. Saavedra argues that for campaigns to be appealing it has to adopt a “language that is universal, familiar, attractive,[and] optimistic.” All the same, the tacky ‘No’ campaign, promising “Chile, Happiness is coming,” delivers the victory. Ironies abound in the film, it almost hurts to watch democracy arrive on an advertising campaign built on shallow abstractions of happiness.

Identifying Retros Retros take care to preserve the ambivalences almost with a penchant for the in-between gray spaces, to accommodate the anti-heroic, the anti-aesthetic, and the distortions inherent to individual memories. That complete moment of glory is always two steps too far. There is a conscious reservation against venerating the moment of victory and the agents behind it. The humor, the irony, the incidental presences and occurrences emphasize the difficulties of representing history. Retros encapsulate a persistent desire to revisit complicated recent pasts in a way that does not shy away from offering inadequate and ambivalent narratives. They are irreverent without being apathetic. There is interest in history without replacing history. They are governed by the belief that the past is invaluable for the present to understand its own course, and the need to have a conversation about past violence, even if without reassurances. Retros are often accused of being negligent towards historical realism. No has been criticized for distorting and oversimplifying the past as the movie does not show the various internal and international factors responsible for the plebiscite. Larraín explains that his stories are above all allegories and metaphors, and that his films are art pieces, not records of history in the strict sense (“Pablo Larraín on History”). This distinction between allegory and history is important, although not impermeable. It would be a mistake to assume an allegory is emptied of history as it contains history in a mutated form, one that makes the historical implication both timeless and immedi-

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ately relevant. Metaphors cannot be charged with obfuscating historical realism; and verisimilitude has its limitations in creating resonance. An excess of realism can contribute to emotional distance, and sometimes a metaphor can convey historical significance better. Allegories and metaphors are powerful because they activate imagination; their interpretive possibilities attract engagement where a veritable and completed analysis cannot compete. When Mario Cornejo or Raúl Peralta are used as representational analogies for the violent dictatorship, it does not shift responsibility from the real political perpetrators, but it distributes accountability. The years of Pinochet are opened up for retrospection, inching beyond accusations against the powerful elites to reflect on immediate and long term schisms suffered by the people who seek acknowledgment. Larraín belongs to what is pejoratively called the generation of Pinochet kids—children born during the regime. Born in 1976, his experience of the period as a child was passive and from a distance. Simón (Pascal Montero), Rene Saavedra’s son in the film No, is representative of the Pinochet kids. At one point, Saavedra says to Simón’s activist mother that, although Simón sees the violence and the chaos around them, he does not fully understand the political situation. Larraín, born to a wealthy Pinochet-supporting family, admits he was removed from direct state violence as his childhood was fairly shielded. He recognizes that for the generations who had to build their life post-dictatorship, the memories will always be present. Many retro representations are adulthood attempts to revisit and understand fragmented childhood memories. In the context of Chile, the retros assert an urgency to confront the ugly past of violence and brutality, of disappeared people and exiles, too traumatic or too early to be addressed during the dictatorship. They face the eventuality of confronting the past in order to move on. Larraín seeks to acknowledge the past, and his films resonate with those who, post-dictatorship, hope to heal and move on with life: “With the dictatorship as well, justice never came. Without that, wounds cannot heal. Pincochet died free, you know? … Acknowledgment changes things. But when it doesn’t happen, they just get worse” (Leigh). Temporal distance is critical to retros. Especially during a violent dictatorship where there is state suppression of negative commentaries, only after its fall can the experiences under the dictatorship be represented outside of the state-controlled propagandist narratives. The effect of temporal distance here is liberating. Larraín observes nevertheless that the subject of the Pinochet regime was considered taboo in Chilean cinema in the years that immedi-

Chapter 1: Retro

ately followed the end of the dictatorship. Chilean cinema sought to provide escapes and was not ready to confront the Pinochet years. “You know, no one has done a film about Pinochet. You have to remember that the Germans took 50 years to make Downfall. But some day we’ll face it: to look at him, close up” (Matheou “The Body Politic”). Acknowledgements of an experience are often mediated by a lag, which does not necessarily discredit the experience, but their belatedness may offer insights incomprehensible at that moment of experience. The significance of an event is more than what is revealed in the moment and includes that which settles behind. Interest in pasts may also evolve over time. At times a certain past recedes to oblivion, and at other times, springs to the forefront of national narratives. In his book on the forces that led to the First World War, Christopher Clark introduces the topic by noting how up until the 1990s the war had seemed very distant, largely imaginable as an “Edwardian costume drama.” However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, “a system of global bipolar stability has made for a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparisons with Europe of 1914” (xxv-xxvi). The shift in interest in the First World War caused by upheavals in contemporary political systems sheds light on the dynamic relationship between a seemingly temporally distant past and the present. The past continues to exist in presents, in cycles of memory and forgetting; its return to historical significance is always hinged on its relatability to the present. It exists as fragments, as layers of experience and expressions that subliminally shape the present. It surfaces when the present juxtaposes and compares itself to the past. The present mediates and organizes pasts into recognizable and meaningful configurations. It is the present that gives shape to the sinewy existence of the past. The past is never completely lost. The present associations aid its resurfacing. French historian André Monglond observed: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly” (Benjamin 482). Even though the signs of the past are immanent, they are not always immediately revealed. The past is revealed in its meaning and significance only as the present envisions its own direction. The resonances are acute when our collective consciousness bears an openness in looking for these signs of the

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past.1 Over imagining the temporal distance with the past and undermining its significance, as Clark shows, can only deprive the present of valuable insights. Temporal distance is a double-edged sword. It can obfuscate or facilitate critical and unsentimental retroactive comprehension of pasts. Retros always seek to use the vantage point of temporal distance to develop upon the signs of the past and interpret historical fragments that are available to the present. Their insights are gained from witnessing the legacies of the pasts unfold and reveal itself. They involve mediative processes that juxtapose in characteristically nonjudgmental ways, a corollary of the temporal distance. Retros are a product of the present, and the present remains the pivot of all revisitations. The present, with its technological and temporal advantage, always manifests itself in retros. The present’s emotional distance equips it to read carefully and vigilantly from the fragments, influences, and signs of the past.

Post-Gaullist Rétro The themes of conflicting relations with an authoritarian past and the uneasy negotiations involved in revisiting the Chilean past resonate with an earlier moment in history—post-Gaullist France, which provided the initial impetus for the infamous mode rétro, the precursor of 21st century retro. During his rule, Charles de Gaulle encouraged a bloated sense of French honor and grandeur, and the glorification of the French Resistance that grew against the German occupation during the Second World War. After the war, the mood was one of reticence, shutting out inconvenient versions of the occupation. But by the end of the ’60s the growing discontentment with the de Gaulle government and the protests of 1968 catalyzed an environment of critical introspection. It provoked numerous young artists, film-makers, and writers to interrogate their past. The interest in the past eventually percolated to various modes of expression—art, literature, cinema, music, fashion, and design—leading to an identifiable retrospective moment in France.

1

Slavoj Žižek contends that similar “fragments of a utopian future that lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential,” but the emancipated future can only be arrived at through a radical break from the catastrophic trajectory of the present (“Signs from the Future”).

Chapter 1: Retro

Marcel Ophüls’s 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity is popularly considered as opening the floodgates to France’s difficult collaborationist past. Ophüls acknowledges the political climate that made his work possible: It was the year following the 1968 upheavals and the student movements, … the older generation was very anxious to justify itself to their kids about something they had been reluctant to talk about before. And they were quite happy to have people with a camera to give them a chance to explain what they had done, or not done, during the war. It was a special moment in contemporary history. (Liebenson) For his film Ophüls collects interviews of several residents of a small town called Clermont-Ferrand, which acts as a microcosm of occupied France. The way Ophüls arranges the interviews together, often stitching them so that one contradicts the other, brings out the various ways in which the same past is remembered differently by people belonging to different classes and political affiliations. A narrative emerges with minimal structures, solely from the juxtapositions and contradictory comments of the interviewees. What becomes clear is that memories are never seamless; projects that deal with memories have to laboriously work their way through contested narratives. The documentary sheds light on the anti-semitism and Anglophobia of the French collaborators, and demystifies the widely circulated idea of a motivated and inspiring Resistance. Ophüls achieves this by accommodating the various voices as he slowly prods the interviewees to address the uncomfortable aspects of their history. He makes it clear that the film maintains a nonjudgmental attitude without compromising perspective: “You don’t need the ‘voice of God’ commentary. Instead, by juxtaposing contradictory or confirmatory witnesses and archive material, your point of view becomes obvious” (Jeffries). Even though Ophüls does not identify as being part of mode rétro, many rétro artistic pieces of the time were inspired by his work, and shared similar intentions and stylistic expressions of striking a delicate balance between criticism and an overtly moral framework, between distance and relation, between official history and popular memory. The past is not meaningful on its own and it constantly evolves as the ways of remembering change over time. These changes are in turn mediated by the age, location, experiences, and temporal distance of the individual who remembers the past. In the case of mode rétro in ’70s France, the younger generations’ emotional separation from the Second World War enabled them to interrogate and revise their national history as they did not have high stakes

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in the colluding institutions that created the sanitized historical versions of French valor and the legacy of the Resistance. Neither did they carry the shame and fear of the collaborationist past. Instead, their lack of strong personal memories motivated them to explore their national past previously conveyed to them through the myths and silences of the older generations. The passing of time was reassuring even for the older generations; they were removed from the immediacy of traumatic events and were willing to talk about the past, thus beginning a conversation between generations. In The Sorrow and the Pity, fathers narrate to children what the war meant to them: one of them, a French bourgeois, talks about food being their main preoccupation during the war and the pleasures of hunting in those difficult days; another father, a former Nazi officer, interviewed on his daughter’s wedding day, wishes that her generation does not have to experience the sorrows of war. The irony is unmistakable. Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien is another example of mode rétro. The film revolves around its eponymous character, played by Pierre Blaise, a young peasant who ends up joining the French associates of the German Gestapo simply by chance. He had first approached the French Resistance, but was rejected for being too young. Later, on account of a flat bicycle tyre, Lacombe finds himself walking into town past curfew. Amidst the darkness that surrounds the rest of the town, his attention is drawn to the animated laughter and music from a hotel, a collaborationist stronghold. Soon after, he becomes an unwitting associate of the collaborators. Lacombe is portrayed as a callous, unsentimental teenager—an anti-heroic figure seduced by his newfound power. He enjoys the impunity granted to the French associates of the German Gestapo. A nobody until he joins the collaborators, Lacombe enjoys the recognition even though he joins at the tail end of the German Occupation, with the arrival of Americans just months away. His infatuation with the young Jewish France Horn (Aurore Clément) clashes with his love for power. But Lacombe remains blasé about any possibility of redemption through love. The narrative of the film is uninterested in a moral shift or character growth in Lacombe. It intends to show the unpredictability of war and the banal reasons that motivate people to take sides,2 exploring in a nonjudgmental way the direct stimulations and the immediate circumstances that mediate excep-

2

Ophüls interviewed a man in The Sorrow and the Pity who joined the Resistance because he was tired of being refused steaks and the Germans eating all the French beef.

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tional experiences of war. The aim was to establish that the Resistance was not sacred. Mode rétro is soon usurped by the cacophony of memories and memoirs that the moment invited. Many artists and writers appropriated the tropes of ambivalence towards the Resistance to legitimize their own positions and choices. Former collaborators wrote memoirs of the war, and their children wrote biographies to justify their parents (Morris 78–80). By the late ’70s, virtually everybody in France had a version of their history under the Nazi regime based on their own memories. The reconstructions were suited to present needs, and were aligned with popular and acceptable versions. The emphasis on individual experience over collective and the movement away from Paris to its rural provinces brought with it further complications for the French mode rétro. Some of these versions distracted from the real politics of power and drew criticisms from scholars such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. Foucault was wary that the negation of the French Resistance weakens the very idea and existence of people’s struggles in France and elsewhere, and Baudrillard expressed his skepticism of aestheticized retros that may enable a fascination for fascism (“History: A retro scenario”). The French mode rétro evinces that the trajectory of representing the ambiguities and arbitrariness of war is a slippery one. Revisitations of past are not without risks as memories are chaotic and fragmented. Each retrospective piece has to withstand the scrutiny based on the merit of its interpretation and aesthetics, and its relationship to power, history, and popular memory. The 21st century has seen its own share of retros that frequently revisit the mid-twentieth century, but these new retros in television and cinema have to bear in mind the legacy of the French mode rétro and devise individual ways to navigate the entanglements of the past and the present.

Mad Men as 21st Century American Retro In telling a story of insiders and outsiders to white upper-class male privileges of 1960s America, Mad Men draws from the immediacy and interest in discussions on race and gender in the present. The 1960s has left a lasting impression on American consciousness and identity because of the iconic victories of the gender and race struggles. Yet Mad Men chooses to tell a story of men on the wrong side of history. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is the anti-hero in Mad Men, a man who makes a journey from the peripheries of society with

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a stolen identity to the economic center of New York City. Draper is alienated and disconnected from the world around him that is changing at lightning speed. The series’s other characters are predominantly privileged male executives—racist, anti-semitic, chauvinistic, each asserting his immense sense of entitlement. Mad Men is the ironic survival story of these privileged men. The series opens to a bar filled with smoke. Draper tries to start a conversation with his African American busboy Sam (Henry Afro-Bradley) to get insights into his smoking habits for their Lucky Strike advertising campaign. Sam is slightly taken aback by Draper’s attempt at making conversation and is, at first, reluctant to engage. Seeing Sam standing around Draper’s table a little longer than required, the manager comes to check if everything is all right. Draper retorts, “No, we’re actually just having a conversation” (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”). The scene establishes the emotional detachment with which the race relation will be portrayed in the series. No compensatory attempt is made as the series confronts America’s racially segregated past. Draper is only interested in his ad campaign and does not really argue with the manager for presuming that Sam was bothering him. The narrative is nonjudgmental and it does not set up lofty expectations for its protagonist: Draper does not indulge in gimmicky heroism. The series does not offer its audience any retroactive reassurances. The scene sets the tone of Mad Men’s take on race, one that acknowledges America’s segregated past and the exploitative relationship between the two races. The African American communities are visible to white America only for their utility—as cheap labor, a market to sell products to, and as an exploitable underclass economy. The minimal and peripheral presence of African Americans in the series is an attempt to represent their discomforting invisibilization. Mad Men’s narrative take on race has been held suspect and criticized for being symptomatic of the omission of African American characters in contemporary American television and cinema. Kent Ono argues that, “Mad Men’s account of the past uses demographic realism: in other words, the show documents the actions of characters through the lens of white society, from a vantage point resonant with contemporary logics of whiteness” (301). Ono identifies Mad Men as a contemporary post-racial exhibit, which camouflages its own racial politics in the guise of its representation of a racial past, and that the series’s white perspective is typical of the ways in which American television represents race. While Mad Men’s representation of race relations is not above criticism, whether the deliberate absence of African Americans in the series emerges from a post-racial imagination is debatable. Acknowledge-

Chapter 1: Retro

ments of an excess of whiteness not only implicate the past, but also motivate self-reflexivity in the present. They urge the evaluation of the trajectory of racial progress and equality. Instead of distancing the past, it pulls it closer so that its reflection is seen in the present. The series defends its omission by pointing to the fact that it is set in a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and that the early 1960s America was still a racially segregated nation. The represented perspective is predominantly of urban white upper middle-class men, their secretaries, and their suburban housewives. The protests and the violence of the civil rights movement find marginal representation, seen only through a white response of determined denial. When the murder of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist, is referenced in “The Fog,” it appears alongside responses of fear, hostility, and anticipation of racial tension. Evers remains virtually disembodied, with snippets of archival television reportage in the background informing the viewers of the tragedy. His absence is ironically supplemented by white people’s misplaced anxiety about their own safety. Sally Draper’s (Kiernan Shipka) kindergarten teacher reassures her parents, “It’s going to be a beautiful summer.” Evers appears briefly in Betty Draper’s (January Jones) dream sequence while she is in labor; his bleeding body signals to her the repercussions of resisting the status quo. The episode challenges the imagination of a united ’60s America that raged together over its murdered African American activists. The series debunks popular ‘feel good’ myths about the ’60s and exhibits a detachment towards historical narratives that seek to smoothen out fractures between communities. Consuming “Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone’s indignant response to Evers’s murder, with ease in the present, it might be tempting to imagine the American ’60s as a time when the whole nation mourned Evers and shared Simone’s rage (What Happened Miss Simone?). These are dangerous appropriations that subsume artists and their politics within popular cultural and taste regimes and project a false feeling of solidarity onto the present. As the series records the developments within the advertising agency following Evers’ murder, it is generous in its use of irony, complementing its detached take. The developments appear to be hilariously disjointed from any national remorse or reconciliatory action. In the wake of the tragedy, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) proposes a commercial with integrationist overtones, motivated by desires to consolidate Admiral television’s base in potential African American markets. He argues that if Admiral integrates their television ads by employing actors from both the races, they can save expenses of creating two different ads and make profit from the African American mar-

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kets where Admiral is already popular. The juxtaposition of the political murder of a civil rights activist to a commercially viable proposal to integrate people on television achieves the series’s ironic stance. Campbell’s proposal, however, finds no takers. The Admiral clients dismiss the conversation as unworthy and perhaps even illegal. Senior colleagues at the agency berate him for offending their clients. Campbell finds some support from their British associate Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) who remarks, “There is money to be made in the negro market.” Nothing comes out of Campbell’s superficial proposal, derived from his shoddy statistics and the harassed answers he forces out of Hollis (La Monde Byrd), the African American elevator operator, on the television-watching habits of African Americans. The narrative does not offer easy redemption and underscores the conflicting and heterogenous ways historical events are experienced by people of different social backgrounds. The men at the agency imagine the cities with African American majorities such as Atlanta, Oakland, and Chicago as homogenous statistical units and areas of potential sales growth, or stereotype them as the “great jazz cities” of entertainment. The imagination of spaces inhabited by African Americans is predominantly mediated by discourses of pleasure and market logic and rarely through any emotional connection. The disconnect is emphasized throughout the episode. Frustrated, Hollis says, “We’ve got bigger problems to worry about than TV, okay?” An oblivious Campbell, however, presses on, “You’re thinking about this in a very wrong way. The idea is that every one is going to have a house, a car, a television—The American Dream.” The title of the episode, “The Fog,” hints at this divide and the inability of the whites to see, or empathize with, the African American community. The split between the two communities and the issues of racial tension in America is of course far from settled, evident from the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in 2013, against the systemic killings of young African American males by the police. This invites reflections on the visions of racial equality coalesced since the ’60s, but unfulfilled even now. Fifty years later, witnessing these projects of integration unravel and flounder, ’60s America continues to be more relatable than a distant past. The current state of affairs in America invites comparisons and interrogation of the ’60s radical enterprises. For both its radical potential and unfulfilled ambitions, the ’60s inserts itself as an important presence in America’s cultural imagination. The cultural proximity in spite of the temporal distance attracts 21st century American retros such as Mad Men to the ’60s. All the while, given retros’ primary allegiance to their own temporal location, these contiguous pasts are organized

Chapter 1: Retro

in themes and perspectives that are of concern to the present. Retros’ interest in historical events is circumscribed by the influence that those events have on the present. This is why retros, in spite of their painfully authentic sets, do not feel like films or television programs from the period they represent. Neither do retros aim to duplicate older programs as the absence of novelty would diminish the viewers’ interest. Retros often give the feeling of watching an old program alongside a contemporary commentary, which points in unsentimental ways at the omissions, the abrupt reconciliations, and the projected innocence of older narratives. Typically a retro does not allow the pleasures of easy reconciliation found in films such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner on issues with complicated and violent histories such as mixed race unions. The film was released in the shadow of the anti-miscegenation statutes in America that were still in place in most states until June 1967 when the Supreme Court declared prohibitions on interracial marriage unconstitutional in the Loving v. Virginia court case.3 In spite of the unanimous Supreme Court decision, some states such as Alabama continued with their anti-miscegenation statutes. In “Hands and Knees,” set in 1965, Mad Men offers an unsentimental counter narrative. Lane Pryce invites his British father for dinner to formally introduce him to Toni Charles (Naturi Naughton), the African American Playboy bunny with whom Pryce has a secret liaison. The meeting results in his father striking Pryce with a walking stick and the middle-aged Pryce lying on the ground crying in humiliation and anger. There is one other temporary and superficial interracial relationship in the series between agency executive Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis) and African American civil rights activist Sheila White (Donielle Artese); but Kinsey’s relationship is not received well by his colleagues. In each of these interracial relationships, the power hierarchy between the couples is immediately apparent and the intentions of the involved white males are held suspect. None of the African American female characters in these relationships are endowed with the same gravitas and almost compensatory success and charm granted to the African American suitor John Prentice (Sidney Poitier) in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. There is no

3

The Loving v. Virginia (1967) was a landmark U.S. supreme Court decision that held unconstitutional the anti-miscegenation statute of the state of Virginia and the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 for violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case was appealed on behalf of Mildred and Richard Loving who were arrested for cohabiting as an interracial couple in Virginia.

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John Prentice equivalent in Mad Men and the series’s treatment of African American characters are symptomatic of retro’s skepticism of hasty reconciliatory narratives; narratives that seek to compensate for the inequalities of difficult pasts. Retros do not set out to correct pasts. Rather, they seek to bring comprehension, clarity, and nuance to their representations based on their understanding of past events, assimilated from the vantage point of temporal distance.

The Place That Cannot Be Retros inevitably find themselves at the crosscurrents of the nostalgia discourse. The relationship is complicated given the tenacity with which nostalgia asserts itself on modes of revisitation. Films such as Post Mortem and Tony Manero, which explore expressions of violence during an era of dictatorship, are less likely to be labeled as nostalgic. While No is different with its playful and irreverent attitude towards history, its decision to stop short of representing the plebiscite as a gritty drama undermines a captivating moment of glory and keeps in check any associations with nostalgia. In the case of The Sorrow and the Pity as well, it is impossible to contend that the documentary seduces anyone to return to the dark years of the Nazi occupation of France. But not every retro revisits unequivocally violent pasts and those that do not are questioned about their nostalgic intent—a welcome interrogation as the distinctions between retro and nostalgia are not always obvious. In the conversation on retro vis-à-vis nostalgia, an additional layer of confusion emerges from the uncertainty about the location of retro, often mislabelling it as vintage or antique—objects that are from the past—with the implication that only nostalgics collect, or invest in, objects from the past. Opposed to vintage or antique, retro is a product of the present; although it may contain fragments in the form of archival footage or intertextualities that are from the past. Retro gives these insertions a renewed context of appreciation, where the retro narrative interacts with, or even alters, the meaning of the historical inserted fragments. The same can be said for vintage and antique as well as it seems unlikely that the people who collect such items imagine a return to their historical location or to their original aura. The moment these objects are placed in the present, their reception and meaning are altered by their surroundings. For both vintage and antique, however, their identities and values are informed by their ‘out of place-ness.’ Be it vintage,

Chapter 1: Retro

antique, or retro, each of these forms conveys, if anything at all, the impossibility of a return to pasts. Still, the expectation of nostalgia is so powerful that most retros incorporate markers that distinguish them from nostalgia. Retro emphasizes its own identity, insisting on an ironic detachment from the past. It is an idiosyncratic mode of telling irreverent stories from immediate pasts. While the plot of all nostalgia discourse is energized by its ‘home’ and ‘return’ poetics, retro is free of formal boundaries and belonging. Nostalgia operates by defamiliarizing the present, allowing nostalgics to distance themselves from the immediacy of the present. Retro, on the other hand, strives to (re-)familiarize the past to the extent that it appears to be contiguous to the present. While nostalgia focusses on the differences between the past and the present, retro is interested in their relations. Retro mobilizes pasts to become part of the immediate, and relevant to the everyday. It postures itself in opposition to the “perception of the present as history” (Jameson 284). Time is not discrete for retro, but seen as a continuum. In this organization of time, longing for an idyllic home, locked away in a bracketed temporality of pastness, is not tenable. Retro’s diverse modes of representations, the intertextualities, and the assistive paratextual cultures that have grown around it expand its scope and horizon much beyond the nostalgia discourse. Retro’s interest in temporal relationality, between the past and the present, is paralleled by its interest in the experiments and innovations in homologous representational modes. Still, in spite of the differences between the discourses of retro and nostalgia, an exposition on their interactions is worthwhile. In the case of Mad Men, this task is even more immediate and difficult because Mad Men looks back at a past etched on popular consciousness as the cradle of many progressive movements in America: the countercultural movement, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the environmental movement, and the gay rights movements can all be traced back to the 1960s. The series, therefore, chooses to make clear its relation with nostalgia from the outset. It interrogates nostalgia’s call for return to pasts, questioning the possibility of such returns, and examines the articulations and negotiations of characters’ desires to revisit pasts. Processes of memory and nostalgia are explored directly in Mad Men’s narrative, where characters’ desires for return are highlighted and often thwarted. In “Babylon,” Draper approaches their Jewish client Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) in an effort to understand what Israel means to Jewish Americans. Draper hopes to find some insight that might be useful for the agency’s ad campaign for Is-

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rael Tourism. Menken is a second generation New York Jew who had hired Draper’s agency to shed her department store’s former Jewish image and to rebrand the store as contemporary and attractive to an elite clientele that extends beyond their Jewish customers. Menken confesses that she feels closer to her American identity than her Jewish heritage, which is also why she wishes to rebrand their traditional Jewish departmental store. She explains reluctantly that Jews have lived in exile for long and that they value the idea of Israel as home. Its existence is important for them. When asked why she does not live in Israel, Menken replies that her life is in New York, adding: “I’ll visit but I don’t have to live there.” She stresses that Israel is more of a metaphysical space for her than a real place and she does not need to travel to Israel to seek refuge within its boundaries. Draper offers the word utopia, and Menken responds by pointing out that for the Greeks “utopia” had two meanings: “Eu-topos, meaning the good place, and ou-topos, meaning the place that cannot be.” Israel is the good place that Menken knows to exist, albeit not exactly as is imagined. The eutopos is contingent on the outopos. Menken’s relationship with Israel functions as a metaphor for Mad Men’s perspective on contemporary America’s relationship to the early-1960s—as an idealized fantasy. An era that, at once, sustains influence over contemporary American consciousness, but is ultimately impossible. Menken’s response suggests that despite the relevance of Israel for Jewish Americans like her, she can reconcile her hyphenated identity and negotiate a space in between longing and belonging. The metaphor extends beyond the sequence described above. Thematically, dislocation lies at the heart of the series, epitomized by the falling man in the show’s title sequence. Characters often struggle to belong. Apart from Menken, these include those more attuned to 1950s’ values and customs, either too old to be absorbed or unwilling to adapt, who find it hard to cope with the rapid changes that mark the new decade. To a great extent, the narrative of Mad Men focuses on the negotiations of its central characters as they react to the disconnect. They are outsiders in their present and they devise ways to navigate a present that appears foreign to them. Nostalgia is fundamentally linked to discomfort in dislocation. Tracing back to the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688, “nostalgia” was used to describe a condition suffered by uprooted Swiss mercenaries fighting in the plains of Europe away from their homeland (Anspach). Hofer derived the term from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain) to suggest the pain of being displaced from one’s place of origin and the desire to return

Chapter 1: Retro

home. In spite of later refinements in definition and perception, nostalgia continued in the following centuries to carry connotations of a sentimental longing for the past and the desire to belong. It had also been associated with malady and mental illness. The discourse around nostalgia, however, evolves in the late 20th century to expand on its initial parochial associations of reactionary desires of return; it begins to address the distinct and particular ways pasts can be revisited. Svetlana Boym distinguishes two kinds of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance” (41). The changing discourse around nostalgia is of obvious interest to retro. Mad Men carries within it markers that immediately distance its narrative from the restoratively nostalgic and align itself to reflective nostalgia. The Kodak pitch in “The Wheel” teases out some of Mad Men’s underlying reservations about restorative nostalgia. Draper begins with a vague definition of nostalgia, calling it “delicate, but potent.” He conjures a fictive friend, Teddy, from whom he ostensibly learns “that in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’” This is a jab at the arbitrary conjuring of the word “nostalgia” à la Hofer, as the Greeks never used the term. Boym remarks on the dexterous neologism, “Nostalgia is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek” (3). But neither Draper’s clients nor his colleagues protest his digression as the nostalgic abstraction might potentially sell their product. Building on Teddy’s definition, Draper describes nostalgia as an emotional connection with ‘home,’ a transhistorical space that is reassuring and unchanging, and where one always belongs. He compares the Kodak projector to a carousel, a carrier that transports us to pasts composed of postcard memories: nostalgia “takes us to a place where we ache to go again … where we know we are loved.” The speech is suffused with restorative nostalgia and is accompanied by a slide show filled with compelling images from his own family moments. Draper pauses, staring at the images from his past; he looks convinced of their potency and perhaps, even temporarily persuaded by his own rhetoric. His narrative finds corroboration when a colleague rushes out of the room in the midst of the pitch, finding it impossible to withhold his tears. The final slide reveals the pitched product, the Kodak carousel. The new technology seamlessly integrated with the images of the past becomes almost one with Draper’s narrative of return. Moved by Draper’s eloquence and artistry, the Kodak clients cancel their meetings with all other competing agencies.

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Draper’s deployment of restoratively nostalgic rhetoric contrasts his reality: he has had numerous affairs of which his wife is aware. The pair has grown distant and Betty Draper has sought psychiatric help. Still, on Draper’s train ride home after the pitch, energized by his nostalgic revisitation of his seemingly happier past, he imagines reaching home just in time to accompany his wife and children to her parents’ home for Thanksgiving. He arrives home to find it empty, undercutting nostalgia’s promise of homecoming. The scene fades and Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” plays as the credits roll. The widely recognizable song is itself nostalgic for viewers, evoking the sentimentality in Draper’s pitch. Yet, if nostalgia is the axis of this episode, the song’s opening line—“It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe / It don’t matter, anyhow”—is a gesture to the irreversibility of past events that must be taken in stride. Dylan’s lingering lyrics, amidst which the camera recedes leaving a defeated Draper alone, acts as a Greek chorus amplifying retro’s intent of incriminating restorative nostalgia. The two contrapuntal scenes carry a precautionary message against restorative nostalgia’s promise of return. Mad Men’s alignment with reflective nostalgia can be understood through their shared interest in dislocation. Reflective nostalgia emerges from narratives of immigrants and exiles and how they negotiate belonging: between the homeland where they are born into and the adopted home that gives them refuge. Boym draws from ex-Soviet immigrant experiences of nostalgia, including her own, and meditates on the negotiations and meanings of longing for home and the “labor of grief” (55). The idea of a reflective negotiation is already a radical shift from nostalgia’s early associations with “immigrant psychosis,” the crippling inability of immigrants to belong (Frost). Boym contends that an exile’s nostalgia for home can never be perfect or complete, interrupted by acknowledgements of the inability to return and the circumstances of expulsion. That is not to say that there will be no memories of home, but they are accompanied by an awareness that perhaps the home that they yearn for has changed, been destroyed, or devolved over time, making a true return impossible. The incompleteness of nostalgia’s promise of return informs Mad Men’s take on nostalgia. Even though there are no exiles or immigrants in Mad Men, each of the main protagonists are acutely dislocated. The reference to the proverbial exiled Jew, to Israel, and the deliberations on hyphenated identities acquire more significance in this context. Mad Men suggests no matter how far one travels back into the past, there is little possibility of finding a sanctuary: no identity is absolute, not now, not in the past. Retros do away with nostalgia’s indexical reference: home. In removing the possibil-

Chapter 1: Retro

ity of “nostos,” retros preclude the “algos” from its purview. The present is ultimately the exile’s imperfect place of belonging. It is in the present that Menken can embrace her multiple identities of being a Jew, an American, and a sophisticated and independent female entrepreneur, all at the same time. According to Boym, the dislocation of reflective nostalgics, who cannot delude themselves to earnest pursuits of restoring pasts, is marginally eased by intermittent moments of ‘diasporic intimacies’ in the present (251-258). Diasporic intimacies are the chance meetings of two dislocated individuals who share a brief moment of empathy in the midst of their everyday alienated lives. Chance moments of affection between two strangers are only to be found in the unexpected nooks and crannies of defamiliarized settings; they are brief, precarious, and liberating. It is opposed to the idea of intimacy found in the warmth of the family hearth that commits people to a narrow circle of friends and family. On the contrary, the connection emerges from acknowledgements of all belonging as transient and of familial spaces as confining. The final scene of “The Strategy” works as a poignant visual metaphor for this diasporic intimacy, and for the reflective enactment of the negotiation between dislocation and the processes of finding a space in between. The scene shows the three central protagonists of Mad Men enjoying a meal at Burger Chef. Draper, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), and Pete Campbell, colleagues at Sterling Cooper, share their awareness of alienation from familial relationships, forming a transient ersatz family at the Burger Chef table. Draper’s second marriage to a young ambitious actress is teetering, Olson is struggling with feelings of inadequacy at being thirty and single (in spite of her success at work), and Campbell is divorced and moving from one unsuccessful relationship to next. At that moment, however, the Burger Chef table offers the three estranged protagonists a sense of a shared connection analogous to diasporic intimacy. Still, the brief moment of intimacy in Mad Men lacks any sentimental association to the idea of “the family table” as the three bite into the burgers, surrounded by bright lights, without privacy, separated only by a glass wall from the street outside. In a previous scene, Olson questions the existence of the familial dining experience: “Does this family exist anymore?” and immediately follows her question with another one, this time posed to Draper: “Did you ever do that with your family?” Had she concerned herself only with questioning the existence of the happy family in the present, there might have been scope for reflective nostalgia for a family table that at least did exist at some point in the past, but her subsequent question exposes the fact that the ideal family and its mealtime togetherness never existed even in

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their recent pasts. Both Draper and Olson never had that familial experience, their dislocation is as much a part of their present existence as their past. This is the critical difference between reflective nostalgia and retro: while reflective nostalgia expresses a longing for a home that the exile suspects to be in ruins or sullied in time, retro questions the very existence of such originary points of return. Draper, Olson, and Campbell have found comfort in their dislocation, and in the conclusion that the ideal family never existed. There is no mourning and melancholia in retro as in reflective nostalgia. Retro distinguishes itself from nostalgia in the freedom it finds in dislocation, in finding meaning in fragments and flexibility in dispersion. For retros, the past is scattered. It is not a monolith with clear boundaries that demarcate and separate itself from the present. The past that interests retros is already in the present; it is spread across a multitude of memory sites, including the subjective and the popular. Retro’s interactions are not motivated by a sense of loss nor are they driven by ambitions of conservation. If at all, there is a denial of boundaries of both the past and the present, a denial that inspires an exchange between the two. Of the retros mentioned thus far, none seek to impose its version as historical truth; they simply draw attention to the heterogeneity in the disparate experiences of the past. Retro embraces the criss-crossing of narratives from the core and the periphery, even preferring chaos over order. There is no perfect past that provides perennial nostalgic reassurances; there are only pasts that are shared and dispersed. This is the past that retro interacts with, a past conceived as splintered and not as a whole. Retro is interested in the eclectic sources of memory as they potentially enable different versions of history, where some of these versions can confound and contradict national narratives and myths. For example, the Kennedy presidency in America is popularly associated with youthful vitality, ambition, and modernity, but from the perspective of media and advertising history, the Kennedy presidency and its campaigns constitute the first instance where the president is marketed as a product. The Kennedy campaign is considered the beginning of contemporary political advertising. Retro collates these versions, layering them one on top of another not to promote consumption of history with ease, but to encourage questions and participation in it. Retro’s democratizing tendencies that call upon amateurs to recollect and recreate pasts have been scorned upon by scholars as being frivolous and lacking in discipline and training. Think for example of Baudrillard’s take on retro as emptied of history in Simulacra. Historians like to assert the distinction between the two and creators of retro are only too willing to concur. It is easy to

Chapter 1: Retro

find interviews of Matthew Weiner (Witchel) and Pablo Larraín (“Pablo Larráin on History”) where they explicitly acknowledge that they did not set about to create history lessons, and that they primarily created fictions set in a historical period. Even so, they draw upon sources that are spread across a spectrum, high to low brow, to create the historical backdrop. The end product is a textured mix. Perhaps cavalier to the purist, it is enriching and compelling precisely because retro does not aim for an ‘authentic’ restoration of the original. Then again, can pasts be ever restored to an ‘authentic’ or ‘original’ form? Is not every iteration mediated by the form, narrative, and medium, and by the contexts of reception? Retros are unapologetic about their mediations of the past—an attitude that distinguishes them from nostalgic representations.

A Disregard for Categories A general anxiety persists around retros across disciplines and across time; it has often been held suspect for being flippant and devoid of sentimentality or even for an excess of it. Some have derided it for having outlived the short lifetime granted to a mode or sartorial tendency. The New Yorker fashion columnist Kennedy Fraser protests retro’s overstay in the fashion world of 1980: “You’d think that “retro” was a cloud that passed, some five years back” (240). The stress on individual styles independent of latest trends and clothes culled out of grandmothers’ closets and flea markets lose their appeal for the fashion critic. For Fraser, these tendencies threaten to pull fashion towards detachment, cynicism, and obfuscation under the garb of intellectuality and have effectively contributed to the decline of fashion throughout the ’70s (237). Retro fashion envisioned a relationship between the wearer’s vision and the observer, a negotiation of their evolving perceptions. However, Fraser fears that clarity, accountability, and communication between the wearer and the observer gets lost amidst the heterogeneity of individual perspectives. The plethora of retro styles refuse containment in one neat label. She finds the intellectual exploration of fashion to be deliberately confounding, detached, and cautious of belonging and suspicious of societal categories (238). In 1975, however, Fraser had a slightly accommodating take on flea market–inspired fashion and recycled culture, acknowledging that the “affection for the secondhand is the desire to find style, but obliquely, and splendor, but tackily, and so put an ironic distance between the wearers and the fashionableness of their clothes” (125). The disassociation between the wearers and their clothes

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and the ability of clothes to transcend the identities of class and gender—features of retro that Fraser once considered part of the liberal and idealist vision, a certain rejection of haute couture—is held suspect five years later for being nostalgic and dependent on past styles. Fraser’s reservations against retro encapsulate the perplexity surrounding it. The cheap, ill-fitting, secondhand clothes which “belonged in the past to some dead stranger’s life” (238) appealed to many precisely because they were affordable, uninhibited by size constraints, and because they offered the excitement of inhabiting another person’s life through their clothes. For its affordability, retro was promoted as a viable dressing style by magazines such as Essence that catered primarily to African American women. Not only was retro dressing easy on the budget, but also fashionable: “For the woman with style and budget in mind, Retro is a natural” (Fischer 57). Retro fashion becomes one of the more accessible ways to engage with the past on an everyday basis. Fashion, certainly, is a distinct and ubiquitous element of visual culture, but retro fashion in the ’70s and ’80s, in spite of its appeal, regularly finds itself in the familiar conundrum of classification, occupying a place in between fashion and anti-fashion. The problem of classification, however, only brings vibrancy to retro sartorial practices in that they neither have to be strictly old nor trendy; they do not have the urgency of being fashionable or elegant in the heteronormative sense. Rather, retro fashion stimulates the wearers to define for themselves a style that collapses categories, one that is relevant and coherent to them and which does not necessarily subscribe to any hierarchy or trend. Despite the sustained suspicion of retro fashion throughout the ’70s and the ’80s, its end product continues to speak to the transformations rather than careful preservations of past styles. As the retro style spreads from France to America, it carries with it the ironic posturing that secularizes the past for everyone to participate in, borrow from, and play with. The fluidity of retro fashion, according to Kaja Silverman, offers feminists a way to affirm subjectivity and autonomy over their sartorial preferences. She notes that feminists have been reticent over female dress as a site of struggle, and understandably so, as feminists do not constitute a homogenous body that can decide on a uniform dress for women, one that protests against patriarchy irrespective of contexts. The absence of articulation over a political dress for women have narrowed women’s options to imitating men’s clothes as a means of subverting gender hierarchy. Fashion trends invariably relate to dominant symbolic orders and are based on male hegemony. Silverman argues that while the male dress has enjoyed a relative degree of coherence

Chapter 1: Retro

and stability since the latter half of the eighteenth century, the female dress continues to be susceptible to mutations depending on the changing fashion trends that periodically shift focus from women’s breasts to neck to shoulders to girth. She proposes retro as an alternative subcultural fashion for women as it has the potential to provide a way out of the strict and often incomprehensible categories of fashion. Retro transforms and destabilizes traditional gender binaries that constitute styles for men and women and offers a flexible and capacious alternative in its stead. Retro fashion is about re-imagination, an effortless freestyle that can “combine jeans with sawed-off flapper dresses or tuxedo jackets, art deco with ‘pop art’ jewelry, silk underwear from the thirties with a tailored suit from the fifties and a body that has been ‘sculpted’ into androgyny through eighties-style weight lifting” (151). Retro fashion combines past styles in dramatic and ironic ways, which make explicit retro’s participatory approach to history. By borrowing generously from past styles, it frees the wearer from the commandments of this year’s fashion. Retro’s mix and match style is empowering as the process is inevitably at loggerheads with the traditional top-down dissemination of fashion styles. Its popularity is based on its democratizing tendencies, which allow subjectivities to be constructed and visualized through dress irrespective of gender and class. It pressurizes the fashion industry to acknowledge trends that emanate from below. Retro fosters a vibrant autonomous exchange between past and present styles, and it has the creativity to put together impossible concoctions of peripheral street styles and mainstream trends at the catwalks of the fashion capitals. Silverman highlights that retro paves the way for affinities between women belonging to different eras and for a creative space for dialogues between original and contemporary wearers of past styles. It can pick up images from yesteryears that had been assigned a negative value and re-conceive them, giving them a new identity and freedom from earlier labels. Retro clothes and fashion styles become signifiers of historical transferences. They are repositories of expansive representational history and emphasize the pasts’ shared textual form that finds expression through contemporary consciousness and imagination. “[Retro] inserts its wearer into a complex network of cultural and historical references. At the same time, it avoids the pitfalls of a naive referentiality; by putting quotation marks around the garments it revitalizes, it makes clear that the past is available to us only in a textual form and through the mediation of the present” (150-151). The participation of the present in different pasts imbues those pasts with renewed contexts of appreciation and vitality, while the contemporary articulation within which

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the two coexist, albeit with adjusted parentheses, takes a novel and textured form. This weaving in of the old and the new, the prestigious with the idiomatic, creates a layered and mediated narrative that is consistent with, and relevant to, televisual forms of retro as well. Silverman’s views on retro are based on the hypothesis that the past’s existence is simultaneous and its fragments are meaningfully articulated in the present. The retro perspective is hinged on co-articulations of the past and the present and the concomitant influences of one on the other. The past is always present and its presence is given expression by the latter. This is not to be mistaken with assertions of the past displacing or emptying the present, or the present feeding off the past. Many perceive the simultaneous existence of temporalities as a threat to the present. Simon Reynolds, a music journalist, expresses a similar fear, describing contemporary pop music as being gripped by a frenzied retromania: “Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel” (x-xi). He laments a lackluster contemporary music scene bereft of originality, which endlessly recycles music of the past, made readily available by the Internet’s enormous capacity to store and circulate historical material as well as the potential of modern media technologies to remix, update, and reformat them. His arguments take the predictable direction of a diminished present that borders on a distaste for new technologies that enable these hybrid entities. At least, there is self-conscious admission in Retromania of Reynolds’s own nostalgia for the days of punk rock, and while there is projected hope for the future, the discomfort with the present is palpable. The disapproval of remix cultures are accentuated by the metaphors of mania and addiction. Why, the condemnation is not new and arguments of a diminished present would have us believe that originality and creativity ran its course in 1963! Philip Larkin responded to the projected ecstasy of the ’60s with his ironic verse to demystify the compelling and effusive period. He attacked the idea of a discrete time period as the fountainhead of all sexual energy and musical accomplishment, pointing out that progress was never inclusive, nor was it a finality: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban

Chapter 1: Retro

And the Beatles’ first LP.” (“Annus Mirabilis”) The suspicion of revivals is as old as revival cultures itself. Raphael Samuel notes various cultures of revival that precedes the second half of the twentieth century, which is when criticism of consumerist nostalgia intensifies, and argues that revivalism has always been the underside to our consistent search for novelty (111). Samuel lays out a history of revivals from Neoclassicism to revivals of Gothic and Victoriana that originated in the coteries of elites and connoisseurs, but maps out ’20s Dadaist and later ’60s pop art’s usage of bric-à-brac as predecessors of ‘retrochic’ (110). Unlike the top-down affairs of the many prestigious revivals, he argues that retrochic emerged from existing movements that were distinctive as “poor people’s art,” and creative in that they were about “making something out of nothing” (110). Samuel describes retrochic as the odd collectibles and the vestimentary array at flea markets, a minority style that had entered Britain though its borders with France in the ’70s. ‘Retrochic’ originated in the early ’70s Paris avant-garde and was used to denote the growing taste for revival of period styles in French cinema and fashion (85). Samuel catalogs a substantial amount of eccentric tastes that were influenced by the retro aesthetic; the anti-fashion statements of retrochic reflect the rise of a popular taste outside of the purview of the traditional gatekeepers of high art and fashion.“[Retrochic] wanted to be outrageous, shocking the salons by its irreverence towards the pretensions of high art, flouting public decorum by ignoring the conventional boundaries of sex or class” (91). In spite of retro’s radical energies and democratizing effects on art, cinema, literature, and fashion, it continues to be cast off with pejorative labels. As if laden with elements of an ironic tragedy, Samuel comments: “one reason perhaps why [retrochic revival] causes such offense—is the absence of sentimentality about the past” (112). Samuel argues that retro is distinct from earlier forms of revivals, which were steadfast and serious in their pursuits of historic grandeur—such as the neoclassicist’s earnest imitation of Hellenic harmony. While most earlier revivals were attempts at authentic restoration, retro has always been about re-imagination and negotiation with the past from the standpoint of the present. Retro displays a disregard for rigid categories of authenticity and narrow definitions of historical periods. It incorporates diverse styles and arts, some even flaunt an ostentatious period look, but these styles and forms are determinedly modern. Retro is reflexive of the constant play of temporalities, the demands of the present, and the modern

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technologies that facilitate the affect and the appeal of the past. It accepts its entrenchment in cultures of revival, but more than questions of veracity or categories, its interest lies in the question—how are these pasts revived? Nostalgia and technology emerge as distinct signposts to routes of revivals: one relies on sentimentality and the other on method and mechanics. While nostalgia as an emotion is all too common, its expressions have evolved tremendously reflecting the changes in our increasingly representational cultures; think of the trends such as #throwbackthursday on social media and Instagram Polaroid filters that create instantaneous nostalgia, perhaps nostalgia that is bereft of sentimentality, and mechanical even. The Kodak pitch is an excellent exegesis of the dependence of nostalgic fantasies on new technologies. Draper’s eloquence notwithstanding, his proposed nostalgic return to happier pasts rests firmly on the novelty of the Kodak slide projector, which could make one image almost flow into another. In its circular tray, an update on the rectangular trays of earlier models, a string of slides could be supplied to the projector automatically. This was an important innovation as it meant an end to the manual slide-switching and the unexpected jams that interrupted viewing. To submerge in a nostalgic fantasy, the technology has to dissolve into the background. Its proper functioning is absolutely crucial and it should perform without glitches, or else the nostalgic might be abruptly jolted back to reality. Nostalgia is fragile, always drawing our attention away from the hinges and fixtures that enable it. In contrast, retro is comfortable with the creative innovations that render its participation in pasts possible. Perhaps retro’s ease at being less than authentic motivates a certain restraint from masquerading as original. Technology for retro is liberating. It is symptomatic of our contemporary existence that is profoundly dependent and influenced by modern technologies. There are always cues within retro that give away its inventiveness and hybridity, and retro is not shy of them. It is conscious of the crutches that supports its representations without being dismissive or censorious of the desires to indulge in pasts. But the attitude is always ironic and playful, one that acknowledges the presence of pasts as fragments in all forms of art that are regularly apprised and updated. The past is not absolute and the present is not free of the vestiges of the past. There will always be a transfer of ideas, a mix and match of leases and departures. Larraín, Ophüls, Malle, and Weiner all seem aware of the mediations involved in their representations of the past. Yet their work demonstrates that the past is still significant in spite of the transformations brought about by

Chapter 1: Retro

the temporal gap. Even though as a category retro has been subjected to continual undermining—as poor people’s art, as a haphazard stringing together of random oddities, as a flippant engagement with surfaces and motifs, and as being nonchalant towards history—these allegations are untenable. After all, does history not evolve in retrospective? Does it not arise from contested narratives of the traditional and the peripheral? Can there be such a thing as a pure unmediated telling of the past? And what of art and culture? Can they claim to be novel without acknowledging the influence of earlier representational forms? Retros pose more questions then they offer answers, opening up our chaotic existence for examination, inspiring a defiance of easy demarcations of pasts and presents, and distinctions between objects of beauty and those dispossessed of cultural value, and between traditional histories and marginal stories, between truth and fiction.

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1968 The sixth season of Mad Men takes place almost entirely in 1968—a year steeped in conflicts, contestations, and violence. Around the western world it is the year of the students’ movements, and in America it is the year the Republicans rein in the protests. The season premiere “The Doorway” opens at the tail end of 1967, a little before New Year’s Eve, and the finale “In Care Of” closes around Thanksgiving of 1968. In the final scenes of “The Doorway,” Draper heads home in the wee hours of the 1st of January and picks up The New York Times outside his door. The scene cuts briefly to the headline “World Bids Adieu To a Violent Year; City Gets Snowfall” (Schumach). Characteristically routine for a new year piece, the headline is inscribed with hopes of a new beginning, distanced from the violence of 1967. Equally incredulous for viewers was to see Draper only a few moments earlier in bed with Sylvia Rosen, his neighbor’s wife, and tell her that in the new year “I want to stop doing this.” Draper’s incorrigible history with women, however, affirms that 1968 will not be any different. In both cases, the incredulity arises from the sincere expectation that the transition from ’67 to ’68 will offer a miraculous opportunity to start anew, overnight. The Dante references (Draper reads The Inferno) and doorway metaphors (“what’s on the other side of the door?”), if anything at all, hint at the impending violence of the year to come, making the optimism of the headline incongruous. The audience anticipates an escalation of violence in the narrative, reflecting the violent events of the historical backdrop. “The Doorway” opens with a point-of-view shot of a man being resuscitated from a near-death experience. The scene functions as a prologue to the season, foreshadowing the narrative’s preoccupation with death. Other deaths follow shortly: Roger Sterling’s mother’s death, the death of Sterling’s

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shoeshiner, and Draper’s “jumping off point”—all signs that the series has no intention of mitigating the overtones of death. The Times’s insertion in this context is held up as an ironic contrast to the series’s narrative and to the history of 1968. While summarizing New Year’s Eve celebrations from around the world, Schumach skips over the violence in Vietnam, only to briefly mention that “the troops faced one another warily in a short truce while Pope Paul’s plea for peace spread around the world.” He also elides over the tense political climate in the country and the ongoing racial tensions in a rush to normalize the present. The article is replete with mundane details such as the relatively small crowd gathered for the Times Square Ball Drop and that the Paramount Theater was at the time being converted to an office space. Schumach’s desire to dissociate from the chaos of 1967 speaks to an insular white middle-class who wish to carry on with their lives with a sense of normalcy. Richard Nixon christens this demographic the “silent majority.” He taps into their anxieties—their discomfort with racial integration, the Left, the increasingly visible countercultural movement, and the protracted Vietnam War that was drawing out endlessly and violently—and channels them successfully to his benefit in the 1968 presidential election. The term has found resonance in the era of Donald Trump.1 During his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, Trump repeatedly stresses the dispossession of the white majority and seeks to forge an alliance based on suspicions of the rural working class against the urban educated, and suspicions of the rust belt against the coastal cities. Trump’s divisive strategies for the 2016 election are often compared to Nixon’s during the 1968 election campaigns and his political self-fashioning demonstrate Nixon’s influence. The parallel between Trump and Nixon emphasizes a trend wherein contemporary political figures consciously avail themselves of usable pasts and the legacies of earlier presidents.2 More important though, it underscores the renewed significance of the 1968 presidential election and the history of the Republican party since Nixon. Early in 1968, the Tet Offensive launched by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong resulted in the death of many GIs and an increase in the

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Donald Trump has used the phrase on several occasions: “The silent majority is taking our country back” (@realDonaldTrump, 19th Aug, 2015); “Finally, the silent majority is back!” (@realDonaldTrump, Aug 21, 2015); “The silent majority is back” (Fandos). See Daniel Marcus for details on how Reagan invokes F. D. Roosevelt’s rhetorical style and wartime leadership, and how Bill Clinton uses J. F. Kennedy’s political legacy.

Chapter 2: History in Retros

number of American soldiers deployed in Vietnam. The escalation contradicted the promises of the Johnson government to end the war and bring the troops home. There was a sharp decline in the public’s confidence in the Johnson Government and the anti-war movement strengthened among the American youth. Trust in the government eroded further when a few months later Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots erupted in major cities, with Washington D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore being the most affected.3 Months later Robert F. Kennedy, the anti-war Democratic candidate for the 1968 election, was assassinated, plunging the country into political uncertainty and existential despair. The year witnessed several instances of police brutality on anti-war demonstrators and at times they were televised, as was the case during the National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party in Chicago. Members of The Youth International Party led by Abbie Hoffman had arrived at the convention with a pig to run for president. Other groups such as Students for a Democratic Society and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam had gathered as well in spite of being denied permission to assemble. When one of the protesters tried to lower the American flag, the battles lines were drawn (“1968 Democratic Convention”). The police attacked the demonstrators on the streets while the convention carried on inside. Chicago appeared under siege. The protestors chanted “the whole world is watching,” counting on television to show the world the face of police brutality. Many of these exceptional moments have by now become keystones of the history of 1968 and are readily available for revisitation. President Johnson believed that television played a critical role in consolidating public opinion against his government. Michael Mandelbaum refutes this claim. He argues that while the television footage did not directly affect public opinion, television did provide the theatrical dimension to these protests: “The antiwar movement was the equivalent, on the home front, of combat footage in Vietnam itself; it made more good television” (164). Polls show that American opposition to the Vietnam War varied during the initial years up until 1968 when finally, there was a rise in the number of people who considered America’s presence in Vietnam to be a mistake (Saad). Still, the reasons underlying the anti-war sentiments among the people were heterogenous. Students, inspired by democratic principles, criticized American intervention in Vietnam and demanded an end to conscription. The Vietnam 3

Dr King’s assassination and its aftermath is at the heart of the Mad Men episode “The Flood.”

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veterans opposed the war as an expression of their disillusionment. Different still was the middle-class opposition who were upset over their tax money and wanted the withdrawal of American troops. African Americans were against the war as well; they perceived the draft to specifically exploit the poor and the minorities. Nevertheless, for the majority, the chaos resulting from the regular confrontations between antiestablishment agitators and the police was unnerving, and most people were desperate for a return to stability. Nixon’s promise to restore “law and order” resonated, winning him the mandate in the 1968 election. But far from delivering on his campaign promises of “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam” (“1968 Nixon Campaign Commercial”) and the conscription, Nixon plunged the nation further into war: in 1970 America invaded Cambodia, while the draft continued till 1973. Even though the counterculture’s promises of peace and love appear consequential in retrospect, they played a minority role in the 1968 election. The Democratic anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, supported by most left leaning progressive liberals and university educated students,4 failed to even secure the nomination and the election eventually took place between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, who was the vice president incumbent and a man widely perceived as a stand-in for Lyndon Johnson. The popular perception of the ’60s, however, is a different story. 1960s America has been consistently and selectively inscribed in popular memory as a string of youthful protests. Boots Hughston, who wanted to organize the Summer of Love anniversary explains: “The whole thing about the 50th anniversary is that we are marking our generation … We impeached presidents. We started all these movements: the environmental movement, the free speech movement, the feminist movement … the whole generation woke up and realized that there was more to life than just working everyday and spending your whole life sitting at a desk.” (Wong) Hughston’s statement approximates a (self-)perception of an identifiable ’60s generation that is supposedly distinct from its preceding generation—the conformist ’50s. There is an assumption of a clear break, a moment of awakening in the ’60s youth before which the self-effacing ‘organization man’ presumably spent his whole life sitting behind an office desk. Of course, the two 4

In Mad Men, Abe Drexler (Charlie Hofheimer), Olson’s boyfriend, represents the New York left wing liberal who supports Eugene McCarthy.

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images contrast sharply: the dull routine of the middle-aged men with their browline glasses commuting by the locals en masse, posited against the individualistic, sentient, flower-wearing youth of the ’60s. Only that the two images are too constructed and too unidimensional. Their polarity verges on being caricatures. Popular representations find it hard to resist this binary to the extent that the antiestablishment ideals of the 1960s have been proclaimed as the wellspring of contemporary culture, while the 1950s suburban man wearing his unremarkable ‘grey flannel suit’ has been culturally distanced and relinquished to unpardonable depths of conformity. Needless to say, the binary performs the function of a post-racial public exoneration of white privilege in the present, and at the same time it accords the ’60s generation a timeless sense of triumph. In addition, the anniversaries and public celebrations of iconic events allow contemporary youth to temporarily access the cultural idealism and cool associated with Hughston’s generation in popular culture. Mad Men restrains itself from indulging in this binary—of positing one generation against the other. It resists stereotypical portrayals of middleaged conservatives and hesitates from an uncritical admiration of the youthful vitality of ’60s counterculture. It focuses on people who live through the ’60s largely in their 1950s mold, who embody the decadal continuum, challenging the division of historical time into neat discrete periods. Mad Men picks its characters from the unlikely demographic of the Nixon-supporting white upper-class written off in popular culture as ideologically staid. The result is a provocative take on history. Characters take pride in not employing Jews on their watch (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”) and for working for the Nixon campaign free of charge instead of supporting J. F. Kennedy (“Nixon vs. Kennedy”). They appropriate the blackface in country clubhouses (“My Old Kentucky Home”) and openly express discomfort at having an African American secretary at the front desk (“A Day’s Work”). The depiction of the ’60s appears deliberately off-script, as if to preclude the anticipated and include the unpleasant. The iconic events of the ’60s nevertheless creep into the world of Mad Men, but only from the margins: they are mediated, televised, and experienced from a distance. The news of war crimes committed by American GIs enters the diegetic world of Mad Men indirectly, through a joke made on The Tonight Show. The joke made about the dismembering of Viet Cong’s ears taints Peggy Olson’s ad campaign for Koss headphones, and forces her to improvise on her near perfect “Lend me your ears” pitch for the Super Bowl spot (“The Doorway”). Frustrated, she blames The Tonight Show for the damage when a colleague reminds her that the army is the perpetrator. The scene expres-

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sively but nonjudgmentally holds up a mirror to the self-centered responses of the white upper-class towards the violence in Vietnam. Even though the war was broadcasted directly to Americans in their living rooms, the news of war crimes reached them tentatively. The iconic My Lai Massacre, branded in official history as a stand-alone tragedy (which it was not), came to public attention only in 1969, a year after it occurred. In fact, most instances of GI violence were acknowledged ex post facto, but they have become part of popular memory with contributions from cinema and television such as Apocalypse Now, A Rumor of War, and Platoon. A contrasting image to the GI as perpetrator is the image of the American prisoner of war as victim of the Viet Cong, which enters the popular imagination through films such as Deer Hunter and the Reagan-era Rambo films, especially First Blood Part II (Marcus 82). The contradictory popular images substantiate our deeply mediated world and history proves to be no exception. Processes of contestations are not new to history. The past is only partially available and contestations appear natural when the subject of representation escapes easy summaries and precise closures. History involves a careful selection of evidence; it recognizes some events as landmarks over others that it sieves out as ‘non-events.’ It is always open to revisions, balancing an uneasy but practical relation with temporality. It organizes pasts into discrete periods of study—breaking time into decades and centuries—to present a historical narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Retros are informed of these limitations—of history’s problems of periodization and narration. Retro understands history as an interpretation of the past and that different historical threads can be drawn out of the past if substantial evidence corroborates the interpretation. Literary critic M. H. Abrams reassures that each of the plural historical accounts “tells only a part of the truth, but it is a part of the truth” (460). These partial histories acknowledge the existence of other, yet to be told, parts of the truth. Surely, these historical accounts bear prospective openness and pliability, which is why how they are read, interpreted, and asserted reveal more about the present than the historical past in the accounts themselves. Historians have also acknowledged the limits of objective histories: “However faithfully we document a period and steep ourselves in the sources, we cannot rid ourselves of [a subjective] afterthought” (Samuel 430). Hayden White, the proponent of ‘historical pluralism,’ has brought the disciplines of literature and history closer together by comparing historical narratives to literary ones. He argues that historians perform the role of interpreters of determinate events, telling persuasive and coherent stories. In so doing, the historian

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may employ recognizable cultural tropes (much like literary tropes) and just as there are various ways of telling a story, a historian can present an intelligible historical narrative from different perspectives. 1968 stands as an exemplar of a contested history: the year marks both the heights of radical movements as well as the year Nixon was elected to reinstate stability. It was a year of American youths expressing anger against institutions as well as the year the silent majority willed order against the counterculture. The year is inscribed with histrionics as well as apathy. The two are not contradictory and are possibly even concomitant; the validity of one does not necessarily discredit the other. Even though the immediate political consequences of the countercultural movement and the student protests of 1968 are deemed insubstantial, culturally speaking, their anti-authoritarian stance impresses upon, and seeps into, later generations. Arguably, the meaning and the legacy of 1968 will vary depending on who reviews its history and from where. “But there are an indefinite number of revealing perspectives, and each age will no doubt continue to generate new ones that accord with its interests and intellectual climate” (Abrams 460). The present demands plural historical narratives and determines the significance of these versions. After the 2016 American presidential election, the conservative account of 1968 (opposed to its buoyant countercultural history) has gained prominence in political discussions in efforts to understand the political crisis that the Democratic party finds itself in (Karabel). Persisting through cycles of significance and inattention, the past in its diverse and contesting narratives deepen our humanistic endeavors and contribute to our understanding of the present.

History as Metaphor Historical narratives have a performative aspect. They prevail through repeated articulations and their meanings deepen with prolonged cultural resonances. In the case of the American ’60s, the popular will to remember the decade from images of exceptions rather than from images of stasis contributes to the decade’s romanticized radical identity. The legacy of the counterculture, its energy, and its idealism continue to inspire later youth cultures. The ’60s anti-war rhetoric and aesthetic have become standardized antiestablishment expressions till date. The identification of the decade with a romanticized counterculture, the allure of its psychedelic music and hallucinogenic art is so powerful that the decade finds repeated television and cinematic rep-

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resentations. Even for a film such as Forrest Gump, which stirs clear of serious politics, the temptation to cursorily touch upon the counterculture by inserting a hippie female protagonist and her anti-war demonstrator friends is too great to resist. Abbie Hoffman (Richard D’Alessandro) is shown briefly in the movie urging Gump (Tom Hanks) to share his experiences of the Vietnam War in an anti-war protest at the Lincoln Memorial. But as Gump takes the stage to address the large gathering, the mike is unplugged and his voice becomes inaudible to the crowd, evidencing the film’s politics of self-censorship. Forrest Gump contrasts with retro precisely because it reconstructs the ’60s as a string of iconic events. The narrative is so preoccupied by the aura of the events that in spite of the ingenuity of the plot it fails to grant its characters interiority. Consequently, they inhabit the narrative only as stereotypes. Gump’s girlfriend Jenny Curran (Robin Wright) is an apt example of the film’s hasty treatment of the counterculture. She is a self-destructive hippie figure for the most part of the movie who eventually reaches out to Gump to bring up their son as she is infected with a deadly virus (presumably HIV). Apart from the dabbling in the counterculture, the film partakes of many historic moments. Popular songs from the ’60s are used dotingly as unironic compliments to the onscreen images. Forrest Gump indulges the popular desire to participate in the iconic history of the ’60s with the expeditiousness of namedropping. As the movie progresses, Gump meets with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He is present when the University of Alabama is desegregated with National Guards posted to protect the African American students from mob violence. Predictably, Gump fights heroically in the Vietnam War and later, upon his return to America, meets the anti-war demonstrators and the Black Panther Party. Gump is also the inspirations of Elvis Presley’s dance movements, John Lennon’s famous song “Imagine,” and other popular cultural slogans and practices. If Forrest Gump is emblematic of the decade’s dramatic action, Mad Men dispassionately lingers upon the period’s uneasy white upper-class apathy and inertia. Mad Men narrates the Vietnam War from a distance, using metaphors (the Chevy account) and symbols (PFC Dinkins’ lighter) in lieu of stock images of the war. The series figuratively stages the war within the agency (Wickman)—the ad men energetically run around their office lobby after Jim Cutler (Harry Hamlin) orders them to take amphetamine shots to pull through the battle of the coveted Chevrolet account (“The Crash”). They have no clear strategy, they are overworked, their clients are whimsical, and even with no end in sight colleagues order one another to keep up the morale. They pass

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their time playing precarious games; armed with darts, they simulate a firing squad. Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) endures the wild demands of their Chevy clients and survives a brush with death. He battles on with his injured foot, placing the interests of the group above the self while being aware that the others care little about his emotional and physical sacrifices. In a tragicomic moment, Cosgrove gets close to a breakdown under the influence of the drugs and tap dances in a frenzy with his limp, supported by a walking stick. The parallels between the Vietnam War and the minor battles of the agency are not always veiled and confined to rhetorical play. Vietnam is directly referenced when Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson) mourns the death of a cousin in the war. Elsewhere, the narrative explores draft evasion when Draper uses his leverage to help the Rosens’ son from being sent to Vietnam (“Favors”). The narrative consistently challenges ideas of impassioned heroism. Greg Harris (Sam Page), a failed surgeon, volunteers his services to the army, recognizing that only in Vietnam can he realize his dream of being a surgeon (“The Gypsy and the Hobo”). Filled with a sense of importance, he even chooses to forgo a year with his wife and child to return to Vietnam within days of his furlough (“Mystery Date”). And towards the end of the series, Glen Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner) unceremoniously enlists in the army in spite of his earlier opinions against the war because he fails at school (“The Forecast”). The series’s matter-of-fact, detached take on the Vietnam War contrasts Forrest Gump’s inadvertent but nevertheless compelling show of valor. In the sixth season, the spectral presence of PFC Dinkins’s lighter functions as a memento mori. Draper meets PFC Dinkins (Patrick Mapel) in a bar in Hawaii, where Dinkins is on R&R (“The Doorway”). The drunk GI tells Draper that he hopes to be like him one day, “a veteran in paradise.” On his return to New York, Draper finds Dinkins’s Zippo lighter on him (as it got swapped with his own) and is reminded of his encounter with the GI. He tries to get rid of the lighter, possibly because it reminds him of his time in Korea and his own lighter that accidentally hit the ground, igniting the gasoline spilled from an artillery attack. The fire caused the death of the real Lt Donald Draper (Troy Ruptash), and Pvt Richard Whitman (Jon Hamm) took advantage of the situation and assumed the identity of his superior to get out of the war and begin a new life. When Dinkins tells Draper, “you made it” out of Korea, half reassuring himself that he too should make it out of Vietnam, Draper looks uncomfortable. Using flashbacks to the Korean War, the narrative hints that Draper is haunted by the fear that the identity theft will be discovered and the life that he has built in New York would be taken

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away from him. Dinkins’s lighter reminds him of his traumatic past and so he throws it away, but his wife finds it and returns it to him. Few episodes down, in a trip to California, Draper has a vision where he sees an amputated Dinkins (“A Tale of Two Cities”). When Dinkins tells him that he is actually dead, Draper asks, “How come you didn’t get your arm back?” Dinkins responds, “Dying doesn’t make you whole.” This conversation takes place immediately after Draper (in the vision) grants himself a second chance. Dinkins’s comment within the context undercuts this promise of a second chance, emphasizing that Draper cannot escape his past, not in California, not even in death. At the same time, like the anamorphic skull projected in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, PFC Dinkins’s presence is also a reminder of the failure and fatalism associated with Vietnam. In Hawaii, Dinkins tells Draper about GIs killing water buffaloes with machine guns in Vietnam with a kind of fascination and without a shred of guilt. Through his account, the narrative conveys the madness and the meaningless violence that pervaded Vietnam. But the final image of the dismembered (and dead) PFC Dinkins is a reminder of the fate of many GIs. The war sends back broken men who cannot be made whole again, in life or in death. At best, a GI can hope to return as the veteran in paradise “who can’t sleep and talks to strangers” (“The Doorway”). Retro’s metaphors contain condensed historical judgement that it weaves within an evocative narrative for present audiences. This is not to be confused with being judgmental. The reliance on metaphors distances retros from claims to authenticity and teleological explanations of the past. Retros have the freedom to reconstitute the form and narrative in which they offer the inscribed historical judgement gained from its temporal vantage point. The past cannot be literally represented as it happened; it can only be metaphorically conveyed with, and not in spite of, its abstractions. The metaphors demand the audience’s readiness to imagine and extend their affinities to these fictive historical worlds. “History is therefore animated by a will for encounter as much as by a will for explanation” (Ricoeur, 29). The encounter of course is with a human past, which requires that a historian is open to “an extension into another subjectivity which is adopted as a center of perspective” (29). Retros are motivated by a similar will to encounter people, and this is reflected in its nonjudgmental depiction of people and not stereotypes that signal to temporally separated pasts. The pleasures of retros lie in the novelty with which stories unfold within a familiar historical landscape such that the audience can emote with the characters in spite of knowing the history as it happened. Retro’s desire to bring diverse narra-

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tives of people from pasts motivates its pursuit of the unconventional, the contradictory, and the subjective.

Solemn Histories Retro consolidates its identity within the turn of the 21st century investment in memories. Since the late ’80s there is a return to the Holocaust and the Second World War in historical television and cinema. These productions are driven by an anxiety to preserve memories and from an awareness that the survivors of the Holocaust and the Second World War generation were being lost to age. Ken Burns, creator of the recent popular historical docudrama The War, admits that “the overwhelming deciding factor to create The War was the knowledge that we were losing 1,000 veterans each day in the United States – this is a loss of tangible memory that I just couldn’t countenance as a historical filmmaker.” Steven Spielberg, motivated by a similar sentiment, established the Shoah Foundation5 in 1994 to archive filmed testimonies of Holocaust survivors using the profits from his film Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s commitment to memories is also evident from his oeuvre of historical drama—Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers. These productions are distinct for their realism, their educational promise, as well as their reliance on tropes of the epic in terms of cinematography, music, cast, and budget. Spielberg’s big budget historical fictions are immediately acknowledged as icons of the genre. There are other factors that contribute to these iconic revisitations. In addition to the anxieties of preserving the memories of the generation that had witnessed the Second World War and the Holocaust, a new political environment invested in memorializing unfolds following the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the former U.S.S.R. (Huyssen Present Pasts 12). Remembering the past becomes important to the national identities of many countries in transitional states throughout the ’90s, such as the independent nations formerly under the U.S.S.R. This coincides with a deliberate recollection of memories in countries such as Chile that were previously under dictatorial regimes (15–16). Confrontation of unpleasant truths lay at the core of this memory boom. Ideologies of self-deter5

Since 2005, the nonprofit organization has collaborated with, and is run by, the University of Southern California. It is now known as the USC Shoah Foundation: Institute for Visual History and Education.

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mination assumes prominence and paves the way for heterogenous regional and ethnic narratives of self-representation. The 50th anniversaries of various Second World War theaters added to the retrospective climate at the turn of the 21st century and the media contributed to the new memorial culture. The birth of the History Channel in 1995, dedicated entirely to documenting and circulating history amongst its audience, temporally separated from the Second World War by a good 50 years, exemplifies media’s interest in memories. The channel’s subsequent popularity reaffirms that television is the foremost repository of history in contemporary times and “the principal means by which most people learn about history today” (Edgerton 1). Television and cinematic representations of the past are indispensable for the articulation of cultural memories and for the top-down circulation of official histories. Cultural memory is “based on material contact between a remembering mind and a reminding object” and often this contact is sustained by “institutions of learning, transmission and interpretation” (J. Assmann 111). For memories to be widely recognized and have cultural significance, they need external embodiments that a culture can relate to and have invested in. Television and cinema perform this crucial role of a reminding institution which selects, presents, and circulates some memories, making them more recognizable over others. Television and cinema are effective in generating interest in the past as they initiate and educate new generations through audio-visual enactments of historic events. Televising history is also “big business” (Edgerton 2). Production costs reveal that historical non-fiction documentaries are a win-win for the networks as they are often cheaper to make compared to fictional programs and are just as popular. With television regularly initiating its viewers to history, a new and contested equation with professional history emerges. In spite of the distinction between ‘popular history’ (with television as historian) and ‘professional history,’ the two have enjoyed noticeable overlaps and dependencies over time. Television as historian does not threaten professional historians as television histories often rely on their testimonies (9). Most historical documentaries have their point of view validated by professional historians although the entry points of the documentaries are almost always individual memories, giving their narrative intimacy and immediacy. Television representations are obvious sites of entangled-ness: of contestations and consensus between popular and professional histories and between cultural and individual memories. Even though traditionally memory and history have been posited “to be in fundamental opposition” (Nora 8), Marita Sturken argues

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that they exist in a tangled relationship (5). Both vie for representation. The role of television and cinema in mediating history and memories (cultural and individual) have become all the more intricate and indispensable with the rapid technological changes in terms of broadcasting, reception, and (timeshifted) viewing. Ken Burns’s historical documentaries on PBS are examples of successful alliances between history and memory. His docudramas deftly weave (individual) memories upon (professionally recorded) history, seeking to retain intimacy without losing the historical context. The War distinguishes itself from other Second World War documentaries, in that “[their] attempt was to give an overall sense of what happened in the war but to do so intimately from a bottom-up, human perspective. This is not an encyclopedic view of the Second World War … [they] wanted the experience of the Second World War unmediated by experts” (Burns). There is a self-conscious shift in the narrative style: with the professional historian formally absent in this particular documentary, Burns takes on the role of the historian himself (after years of experience of making historical docudramas). He consults historical documents, newsreel footage, photographs, and memoirs to narrate a convincing story. The War’s decision to forgo “the encyclopedic view” for a microcosmic narrative, limiting the story to “four American towns” evidently points at the reorientation of the war-documentary genre to reflect a growing cultural preference for personalized accounts. These accounts arguably respond to contemporary memory cultures’ privileging of individual memories. Amidst the proliferation of ‘solemn histories’—such as docudramas and biographies (à la Ken Burns), the testosterone inducing military histories (Secrets of World War II, Third Reich: The Rise and Fall, World War II in HD), and the Spielbergian epics that commemorate the lives of extraordinary men (Schindler’s List, Bridge of Spies, Lincoln) and women (The Post)—retro television and cinema chart irreverent and individualistic ways of representing the past. Solemn histories always aspire for realism in their representations and advancements in technology make it possible to get closer to this venerated goal. Such productions are often associated with big banners, which have large budgets at their disposal to recreate the past as realistically as possible. Without doubt their realism and epic stature contribute to their success. However, just as the photograph motivated art to look beyond realism at the turn of the 20th century, the ubiquity of realism in historical fictions today prompts newer storytelling mechanisms that look inward rather than project out and that are more reflexive than realistic.

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Retro’s pull towards the chaotic and the equivocal distinguish it from the standardized historical fare of Allied victories on the History Channel. Even when it returns to the Second World War or the Holocaust the treatment is rather unconventional. The Danish-German film Land of Mine is an apt example: its narrative atypically unfolds in the aftermath of the Second World War, after the dramatic action has ceased, to tell a contemplative story of a Danish sergeant in charge of a young group of German prisoners of war, brought to the Danish coast to clear mines that the Germans had planted during the war. The film’s entry point to the postwar past is novel and the depiction of human relations assumes centrality. The film draws sympathy for the young German prisoners of war and the acts of heroism accorded to the Danish sergeant involves him seeking justice for the boys. This challenges the accepted moral frames of reference used while depicting the Second World War. The pace of the narrative is slow and contemplative, avoiding explanatory impulses that govern most militaristic representations. The inward shift is noticeable in other contemporary European cinema as well that revisit these historic moments. These new retrospectives are interested less in generic aerial shots documenting the magnitude of destruction and more in exploring the individual, the ambivalent, the intimate, and the sensory experiences of violence. Ida, set in ’60s Poland, and Son of Saul, set in Auschwitz, are recent examples of European cinema that confront the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust through complex personal dramas as attempts to endow victims with interiority that would otherwise be subsumed within towering historical accounts of the tragedy. Ida narrates the story of the eponymous Polish-Jewish orphan whose parents are killed by their Christian neighbors. Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), who has no knowledge of her Jewish ancestry, grows up in a convent and is about to take her vows as a nun when she is contacted by her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), who informs her of her origins. The knowledge disrupts Ida’s trajectory, as she embarks with her aunt to find the remains of her parents and Wanda’s infant son. Even after burying the remains, Ida and Wanda fail to return to normalcy. Ida returns to the convent but postpones her vows indefinitely. Wanda commits suicide. Temporally separated from the Holocaust by almost two decades, the story presents the horror of the Holocaust without any explicit images. Rather, the film chooses to represent its ramifications as they continue to be felt by those who survived, years after the event. Ida’s take on the Holocaust is personalized and the violence is implicit. Films such as Ida underscore the relevance of these stories in the present, especially as Europe witnesses a rise in right-wing xenophobia

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and anti-Semitism. In spite of being contemplative and inward-looking, their technological and stylistic novelty in narrating the story is at once apparent as is their own location within the larger visual culture history. Son of Saul narrates the story of its Jewish-Hungarian protagonist Saul (Géza Röhrig) who strays from his duties as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz to find a rabbi to give a proper Jewish burial to a young Hungarian boy. The film is exemplary in its use of sophisticated cinematographic techniques. All throughout the film, the camera follows the movements of Saul and uses close-ups to blur the background so that the claustrophobia of the camp is immediately felt. The film is presented in the narrow ‘Academy’ aspect ratio to shrink the field of vision of the viewer even further. The constraints imposed on the depth of field, the portraiture frames, and the aspect ratio create an atmosphere where the audience feels the chaos and incomprehensibility of life inside the concentration camp. The amount of visual information given to the audience is “very limited and very controlled” (Erdely). The Holocaust is effectively reduced to the limited universe that Saul creates around himself to cope with his impending death. And even while the story takes place in Auschwitz, the magnitude of the horror of the Holocaust is mediated through Saul, and conveyed through the blurry goings-on in the background. Retros such as Land of Mine, Ida, and Son of Saul offer an oblique engagement with the past, distinct from the solemn histories that are almost invariably proximate, cohesive, and educational. Retros do not aim to impart history lessons. Rather, they present stories that are subjective and marginal, preferring impressions over historical truths.

Boomer Memories The turn of the 21st century memory cultures have in recent years expanded beyond its original points of return—the Holocaust and the Second World War. The ’50s and the ’60s in particular have found repeated representation in recent American retro television and cinema. Mad Men belongs to this group of retros which also includes, among others, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, A Single Man, and Carol. Not-so-distant pasts such as the ’60s appeal to these retros as they seek to represent pasts that are contiguous with the present and are still accessible from within cultural memory. These retro representations, however, do not arise from anxieties of preserving memories. Rather, they revisit the ’60s because its legacies are continually felt in the present:

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“Here’s the reason it’s 1960. Because every time I would try and find something interesting that I wanted to do, it happened in 1960. It will blow your mind if you look at the year on the almanac” (Weiner 2008). Notwithstanding the increase in the number of retros, they are seldom the big moneymakers of the film and television industries. Box office revenue statistics show that the film industry’s top grossers are predominantly science fiction and fantasy films (“All Time Worldwide Box Office”), while the comedies and the thrillers are the biggest hits of the television industry. Although Mad Men has received considerable success along with critical acclaim, with a record 4.6 million total viewers in its final episode (Kissell), the series does not compare with the contemporaneous CBS’s leading primetime comedy series The Big Bang Theory with its 20.3 million viewers (Maglio) or even AMC’s own thriller production The Walking Dead, which has 17.89 million viewers (Porter). These statistics indicate that makers of retros are not primarily motivated by financial success. Even to compare between films set in the past, retros’ off-center stories appear to be far less profitable than the big budget solemn histories. The box office collection of the Coen brothers’ idiosyncratic stories set in the past, such as Barton Fink and A Serious Man, do not compare to Spielberg’s larger than life historical dramas. If financial success is not an incentive to make retros, what is? An investment in memories (however disparate) is common to both Spielberg and the Coen brothers. While Spielberg is interested in historical events that are of consequence to a larger community, events that are part of cultural memory, such as the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 (The Post), the Coen brothers’ revisitations are often zoomed in accounts of the past that magnify personal experiences to such an extent that they may appear inscrutable for viewers who lack the background historical knowledge. Besides their common interest in history, Spielberg and the Coen brothers share the generational identity of being ‘baby boomers.’6 Jay Winter considers the baby boomers’ interest in memories as an extension of the investment in cultural products by the affluent and the educated in efforts to reinforce their own (generational) identities. Citing British economic historian Alan Milward, he writes: “Affluence has helped turn identity into a commodity, to be consumed by everyone during their leisure time” (379). The postwar economic boom, the mortgage 6

According to the Bureau of Census U.S. Department of Commerce, between the years 1946 and 1964 the US fertility rate increased substantially and approximately 78 million people were born. This huge segment of the population is called as the ‘baby boomers.’

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policies, and the benefits of the GI Bill7 contributed to the expansion of the American (white) middle-class. The prosperity led to a rise in the college educated demographic and triggered consequent cycles of affluence. The boomers are born into this affluent postwar America and are part of the “universitytrained people whose education provided them with access to and a desire for cultural activities of varying kinds” (375). The association of memory with capital is undeniable. That being said, the role of money in memory cultures is at times overemphasized as “egohistory … the image of the self not only marketed but also consumed by the self” (Milward 8). Such over-deterministic arguments fail to account for the shifts and reconfigurations in memory cultures around the world in the latter part of the 20th century. The leaps and bounds of contemporary memory discourses legitimate diverse ways of revisiting the past, most of which forgo the traditional historical objectivity simulated in meta-narratives. Ego-histories and histories based on witness accounts and testimonies—where the recorder or interpreter’s presence and identity can be felt—are no longer considered pejorative. Winter himself acknowledges that revisitations of history in the latter part of the 20th century were motivated by several reasons. At times they were prompted by efforts to preserve memories (individual or cultural), expressions of ethnic identity politics, and demands of legitimacy of marginal histories. At other times though, the desire was simply to indulge, to subvert, or to tell a compelling story of the past. The ‘cultural turn’ that emerges as a resistance to consensus and majoritarian politics contributes to the vibrancy in memory cultures since the ’80s, as does the struggle to retain local memories against intensified globalism. The Internet’s unparalleled capacity to store and disseminate memories have shaped contemporary memory practices and its expressions. The recognition of traumatic memories of war veterans in America plays a crucial role as well. Only since the ’80s, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is accorded the status of a legitimate medical condition with entitlements “to pensions, to medical care, to public sympathy”8 (Winter 386). In addition, the public debates of the early

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The GI Bill is the informal name of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. Under this Act, the federal government guarantees the veterans benefits such as education, home loans, unemployment pay, etc., to resume civilian life. The recognition of traumatic war memories of the Vietnam veterans marks the US government’s commitment to veterans’ memories. Before this, symptoms of PTSD were parochially described as ‘shell shock’ during the First World War and ‘combat fatigue’

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’80s about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the ways of remembering the victims of the AIDS epidemic brings the processes of memories to the centerstage of American social and political life. When Milward reduces the “history of memory” to an extreme “stage of consumption” (8), he denies contemporary memory cultures its complexities and pluralities. The Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, which claimed many young lives, were particularly devastating for the boomers as many of them attained adulthood in the shadows of these two tragedies. Boomers were exposed to public debates around these tragedies and were invested in narrativizing the memories of these events. Ron Kovic’s memoirs Born on the Fourth of July—which traces his boomer childhood, his experiences in the Vietnam War, the betrayal he feels upon his return to America, and finally his negotiations with the meaninglessness of his sacrifice—evidences this desire to directly participate in the representation of memories rather than being a bystander to public debates. The limitations of the idea that boomer investment in memories is a by-product of affluence and leisure time is immediately apparent when applied to Kovic’s memoir, which can also be categorized as ego-history because of its autographical format, but that does not necessarily undermine its historical value. As a matter of fact, the increasing proximity between the discourses of memory and history asserts that the history of the individual is no less important than that of the communal and the national. To assume that boomer engagements with memories are solipsistic would overlook the skepticism found in many boomer works set in the past. The formative years (roughly between ages 11 and 19) of the baby boomers span from the late ’50s to early ’80s. The first boomers, born in 1946, are separated from the last ones, born in 1964, by almost twenty years. The childhood experiences of the early boomers, born between the years 1946 and 1955 and growing up during the Eisenhower years, are surely distinct from those of the late boomers, born between 1956 and 1964 and who grew up in the ’60s and the ’70s. While early boomers stepped into adulthood in the late ’60s and possibly participated in the ’60s counterculture, the experience of late boomers coming of age during the insipid ’80s contrasts the boomer stereotype. Most boomers associated with retros appear to cluster around the later

in the Second World War and without any specific care or entitlements attached to the condition.

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part of their generation:9 Joel Coen (1954), Ethan Coen (1957), Gary Ross (1956), Todd Haynes (1961), Matthew Weiner (1965), John Slattery (1962), Tom Ford (1961), and George Clooney (1961). They belong nominally to the ’60s, but by the time they attain adulthood and assert political autonomy they are already distant from their ’60s heritage. The distance offers them critical perspective. Matthew Weiner comments on his generation’s relationship to the ’60s: one defined by belatedness, but in which critical objectivity compensates for temporal distance. “I’ll admit … growing up in a completely baby boomer dominated, ’60s-worshipping culture, I [felt], ‘Wow, we really missed out.’ And it seemed to me that almost every single thing that these people were nuts about, other than murdered leaders, had probably started in the ’50s” (Interview with Chris Brancato 38). J. M. Tyree compares the portrayal of the ’60s in the retro productions Mad Men and A Serious Man and concludes that they are “remarkable for their skepticism about the liberating potential of social change” (39). The insertion of the 1971 “Hilltop” ad in Mad Men’s final scene in which Coca Cola promises brotherhood with a can of soda echoes the series’s skepticism of corporate America’s appropriation of ’60s youth culture and idealism (“Person to Person”). The skepticism also tangentially comments on the early adult life of the boomers in the wake of national fatigue induced by ’60s political volatility and under the shadow of ’70s economic stagnancy. Exposure to television defines the boomer generation. From the television history perspective the ’50s is the decade when the television industry boomed; already by 1954 half of the American households owned a television set (“Number of TV Households in America”). Television hits such as I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Ed Sullivan Show, and See it Now would have constituted the staple television diet for most boomers. Even for children growing up in the ’70s, watching reruns after school would familiarize them with programs of yesteryears (Kompare ix). Throughout the ’70s, popular programs from the ’50s and the ’60s continue to

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This pattern of boomers making retros may also be due to the vast number of middleaged boomers occupying central positions — artistic and authorial — within the television and cinema industries at the turn of the 21st century. For instance, Chuck Lorre, the creator of successful contemporary television comedies such as The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men, is also a boomer. Even if the influential location of the boomers at this historical point were to be offered as a reason for their involvement in retros, it would fail to explain the skepticism and irreverence of their retros without the specific historical experiences of the boomer generation.

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be recirculated as repeats that fill up the ever expanding television hours. Reruns are reliable and lucrative. They provide a connection to television’s past and at that time, offer the rather new medium a sense of history (103). The continual recirculation of television’s early programs etches those shows onto American cultural memory, making them a shorthand for American popular history, and they invariably become part of the boomer television heritage. However, boomer Gary Ross uses his film Pleasantville as a cautionary tale, dwelling on the dangers of uncritical consumption of seemingly innocent television programs of the past. David (Tobey Maguire), a fan of the fictive ’50s sitcom “Pleasantville,” is suddenly transported along with his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) from their ’90s living room to the sitcom’s suburban universe, where they live with their new parents as residents of Pleasantville. The film retains the black-and-white palette of ’50s sitcoms and the Pleasantville scenes deliberately function as visual metaphors of the period. Scenes such as the smiling mother putting fresh pancakes topped with syrup and butter at the breakfast table rely heavily on ’50s-era stereotypical ads. Aunt Jemima Pancakes television commercial featured in Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet immediately come to mind (“Ozzie and Harriet promotes Aunt Jemima pancakes”). Except that in Ross’s film the reaction of Jennifer, the ’90s teenager, contrasts with the children of the original ’50s ads: she is repulsed by the greasy breakfast laid in front of her. The film consistently attempts to undermine nostalgia despite introducing elements that are recognizable from earlier ’50s representations. It recasts them with an ironic contextualization. The plot of Pleasantville involves the gradual transformation of the initially black-and-white eponymous town into color. The film plays on the word “colored” to subvert it: the “colored” people in the film are the minority, open to new experiences, and later they confront the black-and-white conservatives of Pleasantville. The film ends with David’s return to his ’90s suburban home with a layered assessment of the controlled environment of his favorite ’50sera television show. David’s disillusionment is central to the film. It highlights Ross’s views on his boomer childhood and on nostalgic revisitations of the ’50s past in television.

Generations in Mad Men Mad Men employs the child’s perspective to undercut sentimental remembrance of the ’60s. The trope of seeing the world through a child, typically

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used to evoke innocence, is used in the series deliberately to achieve its opposite. Weiner admits: “From the beginning, I said, This show is seen through the eyes of a child—because I was a child. You’re looking behind your parents’ bedroom door” (Galanes). The series presents the most scathing indictment of the ’60s through its child protagonist Sally Draper. Born in 1954, she is the representative boomer in the series. She is the oldest of the Draper children and her character gains considerable depth and intensity as the series progresses into the late ’60s. In spite of her young age, Sally has a complex relationship with her suburban mother and her absentee father. Over the years, her feelings toward her parents range from trust to aversion and finally to acceptance. Among the protagonists of the series, Sally comes closest to representing Weiner’s own generational location and attitude. In the late 60s, Sally is still in school and is too young to participate in the counterculture of university campuses. She is cynical of the lifestyle and the façades that the adults maintain around her as well as the radicalism of the reforms promised by youthful counterculture, which is very soon co-opted by consumer cultures. Sally’s relationship to the grown-ups in Mad Men functions as a metaphor for the series’s own relationship with the ’60s past. In the episode “At the Codfish Ball” Sally is happy to be included among the adults as she plays pretend-date to Roger Sterling (John Slattery), but the evening soon turns sour when she sees Marie Calvet (Julia Ormond) performing fellatio on Sterling. The evening fails to live up to her expectations and her experience of the ballroom glitter is tinged by feelings of isolation and the depravity of the adults around her. At the end of the episode, when her friend Glen Bishop asks her how she liked the city, she sums it up in a single word, “Dirty.” The feeling of disgust left behind by the world of grown-ups mirrors the residual feeling of disillusionment towards the ’60s radical moment amongst late boomers. There is a lingering disappointment in every interaction Sally has with the adults in Mad Men and the series takes its time to explores the relationship between Sally and her parents, with whom she has a difficult relationship. Their relationship offers a commentary on the continuities in intergenerational relationships. Sally is a product of her environment: she watches the adults and learns from her mother how to cope with Draper, who repeatedly and consistently disappoints them. The only parental figure in Sally’s life is her mother Betty, who is not emotionally stable herself, while her absentee father often takes off on his own without any care for his family. The narrative cues the viewer to spot similarities between Betty and Sally, in their postures and in the mechanisms that they deploy to deal with Draper’s incorrigible behavior.

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At one point, Sally tells Draper: “it’s more embarrassing for me to catch you in a lie than it is for you to be lying,” to which Draper retorts angrily, “So you just laid in wait like your mother?” (“A Day’s Work”). His comment manifests the narrative intention to show the continuities between Betty and Sally. This is not the only instance when the narrative overtly comments on the continuities between Sally and her parents. When Sally tells her father that her dream is to “get on a bus and get away from you and Mom and hopefully be a different person than you two,” Draper responds, “you may not want to listen to this, but you are like your mother and me. You’re gonna find that out” (“The Forecast”). The narrative affirms these anticipated continuities when towards the end of the series Betty is suddenly diagnosed with lung cancer and the possibility of Sally getting away from her family is taken away from her. Despite her earlier conflicts with her mother, Sally abandons her plans of going to Madrid to stay at home with her mother and to take care of her siblings (“Person to Person”). This choice mirrors Betty’s decision early on in the series to take in her ailing father, Gene (Ryan Cutrona), in spite of her emotional distance from him. The series builds up to Sally’s growing acceptance of her parents: she tells Draper she loves him in spite of all the lies (“A Day’s Work”), and she accepts her mother’s decision to forgo cancer treatment (“The Milk and Honey Route”). Sally’s acceptance, however, does not imply that she condones her parents’ life choices, it merely suggests that she has to build upon the continuities from within the familiar and not outside of it. Mad Men restrains from stereotypical generational clashes often used in television for humor such as in the ’70s sitcom All in the Family. It emphasizes the continuities with our parental past and the tenacity of experiences and memories, even those secondhand and inherited, in shaping our own identities. Assumptions of distinct historical identities, such as the ’50s generation, the ’60s generation, or the Boomer generation arise from history’s bracketing of the past into discrete periods, as if with a cohesive narrative thread. Periodization is necessary to organize our knowledge of the past, but it is ultimately axiomatic and not literal. History’s struggle with periodization is an upshot of its reliance on such abstract temporal enclosures. Mad Men although informed of these categories avoids reproducing them. Different generations inhabit, share, and navigate the ’60s in Mad Men; their diverse backgrounds and differing footholds mediate their experiences of the decade. While Sally Draper and Glen Bishop are the boomer representatives, the majority of younger executives at the ad agency such as Pete Campbell, Ken Cosgrove, Harry Crane (Rich Sommer), Paul Kinsey, and Peggy Olson are from the

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generation preceding the baby boomers. The older members of the agency, including Draper, belong to still earlier generations. Flashbacks to Draper’s poverty stricken childhood inform the audience that he was a Depression-era child, who later enlists to fight in the Korean War. Roger Sterling is a Second World War veteran and a member of the ‘greatest generation,’ and Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse), the oldest member of the agency, was born in the late 19th century. This motley mix of characters, spread across a multitude of generations, coexist and influence each other’s lives, and all of them experience the ’60s through their own generational lens. The ’60s mean different things to the different characters in the series. For Olson the decade symbolizes fight for equal pay and equal recognition at work, for Draper the period necessitates bequeathing (in small ways) his male privileges. Olson is aware of this disparity between her life and Draper: “You have everything and you have so much of it” (“The Fog”). The younger generation is shown to adapt better to the ’60s changes, but progress in Mad Men is never linear. After Trudy Campbell (Alison Brie) learns of her husband’s infidelities, the young suburban housewife sets the terms of their separation. This contrasts the humiliation of Betty Draper, the series’s representative ’50s styled suburban housewife, who continues for a long time to live with her cheating husband. Betty, however, eventually separates from Draper, remarries, and even plans to attend school by the time the series reaches its end. Meanwhile, Trudy’s trajectory takes a conservative turn: she gives in to Campbell’s proposal to have a wealthy life together and even agrees to move with him and their daughter to Wichita, Kansas. By drawing attention to the decade’s heterogenous and cross-generational experiences, Mad Men subverts the idea of a uniform generational experience of the ’60s. Every character experiences the ’60s differently corresponding to their own location. The series suggests that the diversity in identities demand sundry accounts of a particular period. Mad Men also foregrounds the fact that, in spite of the decade shaping the character’s lives in significant ways, none of them would qualify as true representatives of the culturally celebrated ’60s generation. Relationships between generations, their overlaps and contestations are important to Mad Men. Even though Sally’s voice comes close to a narratorial voice, the Mad Men universe spreads much beyond Sally’s experience of the ’60s. The depiction of Sally’s childhood is not an exercise unto itself, it is a prism to the adult world around her. It is not a series by a boomer, for a boomer (such as The Wonder Years). In terms of viewership as well, Mad Men’s

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audience far exceeds the boomer market. The final episode aired in 2015 was viewed by 2 million people between ages 18 and 49, constituting 48% of the total viewership (Kissell). By 2015, the youngest boomer is at least 50 years old and is clearly not part of this viewer segment. In addition, AMC President Charlie Collier is hopeful that the series will continue to resonate with audiences long after its initial run, perhaps expecting it to gain cult status and popularity among still younger audiences in the future (Pallotta).

History of Film and Television in Retros Retro’s self-reflexivity and critical stance are regularly pointed at the medium’s own past. The histories of television and cinema are inevitably entangled with the political and economic histories of their time and provide a familiar terrain for retro revisitations. Using this familiar ground, retro offers glimpses of the larger social and political backdrop. Looking back at the formative years of television and cinema, retro draws from the rich historical archives to create playful satires and modern adaptations. It employs the ironic function “of subversion, of undermining from within” to acknowledge the complicated and difficult histories of the medium (Hutcheon 226). The Mad Men episode “The Benefactor” refers to the eponymous episode of the ’60s CBS television drama series The Defenders, in which a father-son attorney duo defends a doctor who illegally performs abortions for desperate women seeking his help. The original Defenders episode that aired in 1962 had stirred a controversy because it dealt with abortion, a taboo subject in television. Brown & Williamson, Lever Brothers, and Kimberly-Clark, regular sponsors of The Defenders, refused to associate with the episode and CBS had a hard time finding a sponsor. Mad Men incorporates this historical incident into its narrative. A frustrated Harry Crane, after finding out that his colleague Ken Cosgrove earns 100 dollars more than him, reaches out to a CBS executive with hopes of finding a position there. The CBS executive informs him that things are tight at his end and that he just lost “Lever Brothers and KimberlyClark from one of my biggest shows.” The show he refers to is The Defenders. Crane offers to help him out by looking for sponsors from amongst the Sterling Cooper clients. They ultimately pitch the show to their client Belle Jolie. But they too refuse to sponsor it, stating that they are a family company. A clip from the original Defenders episode is played in the conference room filled with the ad executives, the potential sponsor, and Peggy Olson, who

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sits stiffly when watching the scene where a father strikes his daughter for committing the moral sin of abortion. From the previous episode the audience knows that Olson’s relationship with her family and her Catholic faith is deeply strained because of her unwanted pregnancy. The series drives home the emotional impact of the Defenders episode by showing Olson quietly relive the ignominy. Weiner comments,“The drama of an unwanted pregnancy was such a part of American popular culture at that time. I just loved it as a resonant story for Peggy, having to sit through it” (Cruz et al.). The reference gives Mad Men a chance to comment upon early television’s taboo subjects and the conservatism on the part of ’60s advertisers and network television to show a procedure that many women had to perform in secret (the original “The Benefactor” refers to some 1500 abortions performed by Dr. Ernest Montgomery alone). However, the insertion had an unintended consequence. Weiner’s desire to comment on the conservatism of early network television landed him in a difficult spot with his own network. He recounts, “I put [the Benefactor reference] into our script and sent it to the network. And they said ‘I know you’re making a point, but you don’t need to say abortion 47 times, … Can you tone it down a little bit …’ And I said, ‘[The Defenders] is a real TV show and it won the Emmy in 1962, I can’t believe we can’t do this in 2008.’” Mad Men’s interaction with that earlier moment of television history finds emotional resonance within its contemporary audience, highlighting contiguities with the ’60s in that women still do not have autonomy over their bodies and reproductive rights. The golden years of Hollywood (1917–1960) is a popular point of return for many retros for similar reasons. Retros that deal with these years depict the oppression of the censor board, production codes,10 and the hierarchies of the studio system. They engage with past cinematic styles and techniques to extract new meanings and associations. The Coen brothers’ recent comedy Hail, Caesar! and their earlier noir film Barton Fink are examples of irreverent 10

The Motion Picture Production Code was a set of conservative guidelines with Catholic undertones that was enforced upon US film productions from 1930 to as late as 1968, prohibiting the depiction of subjects that could stir controversy or corrupt the viewers. Interracial relationships, relationships outside of marriage, nudity, prostitution, and homosexuality were some of the taboo subjects listed in the Code. By 1951 television had its own set of codes — The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters — based on the Radio Code and Motion Picture Code and it was finally dissolved in 1983. Commercials that appeared on television were included in the purview of the Television Code.

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retros that evoke classic Hollywood conventions but through modern techniques. The rapid-fire ‘shot reverse shot’ technique employed in their films is for instance an adaptation of a classic convention to shoot conversations. Another example is the Coen brothers’ signature ‘push in shot’ achieved on a dolly, but with a wide angle lens that exaggerate facial features to humorous effect (“Joel & Ethan Coen - Shot | Reverse Shot”). Barton Fink, set in 1941, tells the story of the eponymous New York playwright who moves to Hollywood to work for Capitol Pictures (the fictional Hollywood studio evoked again in their later film Hail,Caesar!). While in Los Angeles, Fink (John Turturro), the self-proclaimed playwright of the ‘common man,’ maintains his distance from the glamour of Hollywood and settles in the seedy old Hotel Earle located downtown. He is asked to write the script for a formulaic wrestler film but he struggles with a writer’s block and from his unfamiliarity with the conventions of the wrestling film (as he seldom watches popular films). The rest of the dark comedy emerges from the clash between Fink’s perception of himself as the voice of the common man and his high-handed treatment of Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), Fink’s next door neighbor, whom he deems as the quintessential common man. While Meadows keeps insisting that he could tell Fink a few stories of his own, Fink interrupts him patronizingly to expound on his own theories of how the theater needs to voice the stories of the common man and how he and his fellow leftist New York playwrights were focussed on “the creation of a new, living theater, of and about and for the common man.” Barton Fink points at the theater’s condescension of the common man’s art through its protagonist’s bloated sense of self-importance and comments at the vulgarity of uninspired big banner Hollywood films through its portrayal of the vacuous atmosphere of Hollywood studio systems. The film draws heavily from cinema of the past to frame its own story and it uses tropes of the noir thriller and psychological horror films. Barton Fink evokes the Gothic use of a place as an emoting character as was done by film makers Roman Polanski (Repulsion) and Stanley Kubrick (The Shining). Polanski and Kubrick were infamous for their use of their setting to either reflect the psychological landscape of the character or assert the set’s own disposition onto the characters. Hotel Earle, oozing with puss in the Los Angeles summer heat, is an exteriorization of Charlie Meadows’ ear infection. Later the burning flames that engulf its long corridors is a projection of the hell that is the life of Karl ‘Madman’ Mundt, “a res” (resident) at the Earle unlike Fink who is “just a tourist with a typewriter.” Barton Fink is a mannered portrayal of Hollywood’s past. The film recomposes Hollywood’s history from

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allusions to the real (the migration of many Group Theater artists from New York to Los Angeles), anecdotal information (the Capitol boss Jack Lipnick’s donning a colonel’s uniform is an imitation of Warner Bros. Jack L. Warner’s wearing military uniform after the attack on Pearl Harbor), and a mishmash of cinematic traditions (styles inspired from Polanski and Kubrick), while the mainstream (national) history of America’s involvement in the Second World War is suggested obliquely through the presence of soldiers in a club scene. The Coen brothers’ interest in the history of the medium takes center stage once again in their film Hail, Caesar! Set in the 1950s, the Golden Age of Hollywood, the film mocks the regimented routines of production houses as the industry continues to deliver dream-like on-screen spectacles for its audience and offers a humorous glimpse to the sordid underside of the Golden Age glitter. It explores Capitol Studio’s dexterous ‘management’ of difficult situations such as religious conflicts, premarital pregnancies, and writer’s discontent. Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is the complicated protagonist of the film, a Hollywood fixer who, within a day’s work, manages ransoms for kidnapped stars, sets straight actor-director conflicts, jostles with gossip columnists, and negotiates impossible terms with religious leaders for the studio’s upcoming epic drama “Hail Caesar! A Tale of the Christ.” The Coen brothers playfully evoke the seduction and grandeur of the mythical and biblical epics in Cinemascope. The sincerity and heroism of Autolycus’s eulogy, standing in front of Christ crucified, grips even those working behind the scenes and suggests the affective appeal of epic films. The background music to Autolycus’s speech builds up to a crescendo, priming the audience for the final moment when faith in Christ was to be declared. Only that Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who plays Autolycus in the fictional epic, forgets his line; the director cuts the scene and the build-up comes to nought. The Coens parody other film genres as well in Hail, Caesar! The sailor-centric musicals have suggestive homoerotic language coded into the dance movements, distinguishing them from their former formulaic selves; meanwhile a protégé of the Western film struggles with his pronunciation on the sets of a high society melodrama production. The experimentation with genre format is a routine feature of the Coens’ films. They have adapted past styles such as that of the Western in True Grit, black-comedy and noir thriller in Fargo, the folksy Depression-era bluegrass inspirations in O Brother, Where Art Thou? to create heady concoctions of their own that are both tributes as well as parodies of older forms. At the other end of the spectrum are the retros of Todd Haynes, frequently set in the ’50s, which also creatively use past cinematic language and visual

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grammar. While adapting earlier plots, Haynes reworks them into new narratives and presents them to newer contexts. His films challenge the all too conspicuous conformity associated with the ’50s decade using mid-century melodramatic cinematographic styles. The portrayals in his retros are of people and not of stereotypical receptacles of conformity. His films are sensitive, exploring characters against oppressive environments, and they forge a connection between their present audience and people from the past. Haynes’s retro cinema is different from that of the Coen brothers’, both in style and emotional pitch. Women are often at the center of Haynes’s retros, and he consistently revisits the ’50s melodrama aesthetics of the ‘woman’s film,’ a genre perfected by Douglas Sirk. In Far from Heaven, Haynes adapts Sirk’s film All that Heaven Allows to tell a provocative story of racial and sexual transgression. Douglas Sirk is an interesting reference point in American cinema history. Like many European emigre artists who fled Europe during the Nazi era, Detlef Sierck arrived in America in 1937, leaving behind an illustrious stage career in Germany. He changed his name to Douglas Sirk and within a few years began making melodramas in Hollywood. His melodramas were hugely popular during the ’50s but were labeled as low brow. They belonged to the genre of the woman’s film—films that center around women—often working within the confines of domestic spaces and with excessive use of sentimentality. At the time, cinema critics suspected that to assimilate in Hollywood Sirk pragmatically distanced himself from his European intellectual traditions. But this verdict was soon re-evaluated with appreciation of Sirk’s work pouring in from Cahiers du Cinéma critics such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Godard wrote about being enchanted by Sirk’s “delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety” (96) and after Andrew Sarris’s 1968 book The American Cinema, which placed Sirk amongst the pantheon of great directors, the anointment of Douglas Sirk was complete, elevating him to a cult auteur figure. Sirk was rediscovered, as it were, after his retirement from Hollywood, first in France and soon after in America as a filmmaker par excellence. It is now acknowledged that Sirk was a keen observer of American culture and he consistently and wickedly satirized bourgeois conformity through his sentimental films. He adapted American genre conventions and used them as façades that allowed him to critique postwar reactionary politics and oppression of women’s sexuality and their confinement to domestic spaces. His visually extravagant films have contributed to

Chapter 2: History in Retros

cinema and to the genre of melodrama in particular, adding to it sophistication and complexity. Haynes pays homage to Sirk for his control over the formal boundaries of the genre and his ability to deliver subversive and sympathetic portrayals of women and peripheral figures amidst Eisenhower era middle-class moralisms. In Far From Heaven, Haynes stresses that he emulates Sirk’s use of artifice, color schemes, and the materiality of the mise-en-scène to convey a troubled interior world hidden away from the artfully composed picture windows of suburban homes. At the core of Far from Heaven is Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore). She is surrounded by neighbors and friends who celebrate her perfect housewife image but Cathy has no means to express her inner conflicts. Her claustrophobia is compounded by her husband’s “problems” (homosexual desires), which the doctor is unable to fix, and her socially frowned upon friendship with her African American gardener Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). Whitaker values her friendship with Deagan as in his company she finds an escape from her immediate anxieties. The film explores the idea in melodrama that “you could enter people’s emotion through artifice” (Lachman, “Anatomy of a Scene”). The film intentionally creates semblances with old Hollywood film-sets instead of attempts at realism, emphasizing that the artificiality and the materiality of surfaces reflect characters’ troubled emotional landscapes. German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted the plot of All that Heaven Allows to tell the story of an older woman’s relationship with a Moroccan Gastarbeiter in his film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. In each of these representations—Sirk’s original and the later Fassbinder and Haynes adaptations—alienation is the central theme, although the circumstances of estrangement vary. Still, it is the female protagonist who, in spite of her vulnerabilities and social isolation, reaches out to forbidden worlds and becomes the (un)likely agent of change. Andrew Sarris describes Sirkian irony to be “neither condescending nor dialectical” (2005). Arguably, some retros are drawn to explore this technique developed by Sirk where irony manifests amidst its almost lyrical and visual poesy and without caricatures of the individual. The sentimentality is exaggerated by an ingenuity in set design, camera movement, and use of light and color. Sirk merits revisitation because of his artistry (as is largely established by now) and the potential of his art to counterbalance notions of naïveté and simplicity assumed of ’50s cinema. Sirk’s changing reception foregrounds the dynamic culture of cinema criticism: what was once indicted as reactionary

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is eventually revived as part of a progressive cinematic tradition. Haynes’s retro Far from Heaven, in more ways than one, becomes a palimpsest—carrying traces of earlier artistic works and visions—of Sirk and of Fassbinder. Considering the rich history of adaptations and interpretations accumulated by Sirkian cinema over time, Haynes’s acknowledgement is a testimony to the movement that Sirkian cinema makes along the culture axis. Be it in Haynes’s persistent engagement with the woman’s film (also seen in Carol and Mildred Pierce) or in the Coens’ playful innovations with disparate genres, retros recast traditional genre frameworks into newer and dynamic forms that affect contemporary audience. Retro’s investment in the history of its medium—the ebbs and flows, the contestations and the revisionisms that take place within the televisual and cinematic traditions—informs its conscious self-fashioning and dissuades it from articulating in absolutes. These uncertainties and contingencies become retro’s subjects of irony and at the same time they emphasize the imperfection of our knowledge of the past. The past, even as modern as the mid-century, continues to invite interpretations, revealing itself partially as metaphors.

Part II

Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities in Mad Men

Watching Television People’s memories of watching television are invariably linked to the memories of the surroundings in which they watched the event. The television experience expands beyond the broadcasted program, ‘the text,’ and assimilates into its experience the environment, ‘the context,’ in which it is viewed. The context contributes to the deepening of viewers’ connection to the text; historically the living room was the point of origin of most viewers’ televisual memories.1 While the visuals stay the same in every living room, the stories lie in the different contexts. The text and the context are entangled, and each has the power to affect the other. The context encourages emotional connection and identification with the text. Viewers’ investment in a televisual text creates memories of textual details and the contextual memories anchor them. The context supplements the television experience with other personal, spatial, and temporal references such as the place and time of viewing, the people with whom the text was viewed, first reactions to the text, and other relevant information that contribute to the uniqueness and memorability of the experience. Everyday memories of the context in which a televisual text is received constitute a viewer’s ‘contextual memory’—it functions as a reservoir that aids in the storage and recall of the text. The textual details—plot lines, camera work, background scores, sets, and styles—available to everyone who

1

Television reception is, of course, no longer tied to the bulky traditional television set fixed to a physical space such as the living room. Television, today, can be accessed anywhere, and anytime, with its availability on a number of portable devices such as the mobile phone and the tablet PC.

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receives the broadcast constitute the viewer’s ‘textual memory.’ Textual details appear more or less consistent in spite of significant differences in the contextual experience from one living room to the next. Contextual memory mediates viewers’ experience and perception of a text.2 It is the pivot of televisual memories, recording the totality of the television experience. It belongs to the realm of the private and includes viewers’ unique responses to a public text. The diversification of “delivery technologies”—the receivers through which we access television content—have aided in the evolution of television as a medium (Jenkins 13). These technologies also have the capacity to affect textual details. The differences in sound and image resolutions between a network broadcast and the DVD or Blu-ray versions of the same television program may affect viewers’ aesthetic appreciation of the text. High definition images may allow viewers to see color schemes and patterns as they were filmed and perceive even the faintest background sounds that may be lost to regular network versions. These variations contribute to contextual memories. Watching a television program on HDTV with a home theater surround sound system evokes the cinematic experience and the satisfaction of watching something singular and distinct. Recorded television without interruptions liberates the viewer from television’s coercive flow. The ‘flow’ of traditional television programming, as defined by Raymond Williams in 1974, enables the indivisible experience of “watching television” by determining the arrangement of television programs, insertion of commercials, and sequencing of shows putting interesting ones earlier in the evening to hook viewers in for the rest of the evening (94). Contextual memories absorb the entire sequence and accumulate much beyond the boundaries of discrete televisual texts as the traditional experience of ‘watching television’ is often not limited to the consumption of a specific program. Rather, watching television includes consuming the odd ads, trailers, and flashes of news headlines inserted into a seamless flow of one program

2

The recent Marvel film Black Panther highlights this point. African American viewers shared their contextual experiences of watching the film in theaters: “This was a great movie made magical by being with other Black folks who got it, who knew when to laugh and cry, and cheer.” The film constituted as much of the movie experience as did the viewers’ collective response to the film, the dressing up in Wakanda attires for the screenings, the after-parties, and the discussions in the lobbies of cinema theaters, recalls a viewer. (“After Seeing Black Panther”).

Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities

into another. Even the content design of television programs are attuned to the flow: the opening scenes always appear exciting and are designed to generate enough interest to keep the viewer tuned in to the program in spite of the commercial breaks. The viewers are not the only party coerced into flow and afflicted by the intrusion of commercials on television. Creators of television programs too have to negotiate intrusions into their scripts such as that of product placements or forced breaks in the narrative. The clashes between Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and AMC were notorious for being long and drawn out and they received wide publicity in the media. In 2011, to extend its contract with Mad Men into its fifth season, AMC demanded that the series integrate more product placement and that it cut down two minutes from the run time of each episode to accommodate more commercials in addition to eliminating two regular cast members to save money. “Two years ago [in 2009], during [Weiner’s] last contract negotiation, AMC similarly tried to add two minutes of commercial time to ‘Mad Men;’ the channel eventually decided to lengthen the show by two minutes to accommodate the added commercials” (Stelter). However, in subscription-based ad-free premium channels such as HBO these external intrusions are brought to a minimum, providing high quality uninterrupted programming for its viewers. Current features such as time shift3 and random access4 allow viewers to enjoy their favorite programs without interruptions, skipping over ads to constitute a whole new experience. Contextual memory is no longer defined by the ‘rhythms of reception’—the chaotic mixture of leisure and work that allowed women to utilize the endless commercial breaks to complete little chores around the house while watching television (Modleski). Textually too these changes in viewing practices are reflected in terms of complex narratives that demand rapt attention and that no longer rely on telegraphing techniques5 aimed at the distracted viewer or the busy housewife. Serialized television that traditionally relied on the temporal gaps between episodes and developed devices such as cliff hangers no longer depend on such crutches in 3 4 5

‘Time shift’ involves recording of a television program to be watched later. Originally these recording of live broadcasts were made with VHS and Betamax tapes. ‘Random access’ is the capacity to override sequential access to content and arrive at any random point. Telegraphing is the practice of revealing copious details that direct the viewers to the important elements of the plot. It lacks the subtlety of foreshadowing, and is considered to take away from the audiences’ pleasures of arriving at a conclusion on their own.

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the age of binge consumption. The new model is based on active consumption of texts available as discrete collectibles such as a Blu-ray season box set of a television series. These models offer television sans flow. They alter the television experience from a passive to an active one. That being said, flow has not disappeared in the age of recorded television nor has the television industry’s obsession with sequencing and control over viewer’s consumption. It has simply evolved to take on more sophisticated forms. The workings of present-day online streaming platforms reveal the mutated newer forms of organization which borrow from the older principles of flow, except that these arrangements are far more nuanced and customized to suit individual tastes and even language preferences. For example, Netflix showcases a selection of their available programs based on individual viewing histories and their upvotes or downvotes. It is equipped with features such as auto-start that immediately play the next installment of a serial television program or film series, nudging the viewer towards binge consumption. Notwithstanding the inroads made by television technology, freeing viewers from network controls and commercial interruptions, the television experience is incomplete without a community to share textual and contextual memories. In times of television disassociated from traditional flow, viewers may not be watching the exact same program at the exact same time as their neighbors or colleagues. The discussion around television today has moved to the World Wide Web and crossed geographical and temporal boundaries. Viewers discuss televisual texts, its plot details and reactions, with people from all around the globe and even long after the program was originally broadcast. Consequently, television experiences and by extension its memories transform and adapt. 21st century cultures of public discussions around television has only become more energized6 with the diversification of television channels, programs, formats, and delivery technologies and has contributed to the rise of television as a cultural institution. The imagination of the televisual medium as an undeniable part of our cultural life was not always the case, and it begins to take shape only in the late ’50s. Up until the Second World War, television is commonly used for public services as the receivers are too expensive to be privately owned (Williams 23). After the war, however, television sets become more affordable and investment in content specifically designed for the medium grows, expanding 6

See Chapter 4, “Mad Men and its Paratexts,” for a detailed discussion on 21st century paratextual cultures around film and television.

Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities

the prospects of the new technology and its potential as an entertainment industry. Since then, the new broadcast technology ‘television’ and its receiver ‘the television set’ make their way into American households with unparalleled rapidity. Television eventually becomes a definitive reference point of the everyday, inching from social spaces to private ones. Even then, there is evidence of the uneasy admission of the medium into people’s lives, a fact often overshadowed by its ubiquity from the ’60s on. Conversations around television frequently point towards a demarcation between those who watch television and those who do not, and anxieties abound over television’s presence as a disruptive influence. Horace Newcomb argues that even in the nascent stages of counterculture, during the early ’60s, television is labelled as the “bad object” and the marker of conventionality (111). Television belonged to the suburbs along with the many neat bourgeois gadgets fitted to the suburban homes and not in the Village. Mad Men showcases this binary: while television is often heard in the background in Draper’s suburban residence, modeled after ’50s lifestyle, Draper considers its presence in the apartment of his artsy beatnik mistress Midge Daniels (Rosemarie DeWitt) an oddity (“Ladies Room”). Daniel’s experience with television is shown to be no different from the experience of the stock ’50s “TV-addict housewife” (Spigel 87); she mentions that with the television at home she loses track of time. The postwar suburbanites had their fair share of reservations against the medium. During the ’50s, popular magazines such as The New Yorker and House Beautiful carried commentaries that expressed concern over the increasing popularity of television among suburban housewives and its influence on women. Television was accused of distracting women from their household chores and from their families, and the commentaries attempted to rescue women from this predicament by suggesting spatial reorganization of their living space (Spigel 87–88). The entry of this new technology into people’s domestic lives was soon followed by the introduction of a “TV room” or a “TV zone” within the living room and the television set gradually replaced the living room piano, irrevocably changing how people spent their leisure hours (38). Television was also argued to alter family ideals by challenging parental authority, especially that of the father (62). Since the ’50s, television becomes a permanent fixture in representations of everyday life and it begins to appear regularly in family programs and situation comedies, where the drama primarily unfolds in people’s living rooms. Sometimes, the television set is not just a prop in the background, but becomes a part of the plot. There are several instances where the humor arises from the awkward struggles with

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the new technology. It causes domestic disputes in The Honeymooners’ episode “TV or not TV” (88) and in the I Love Lucy episode “Ricky and Fred Are TV Fans,” it stokes jealousy in wives as their husbands spend evenings in front of the television sets (120). The episode “Parental Guidance” of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet revolves around a sleep deprived Ozzie Nelson who stays up every night watching television with his teenage son. Television shows in the ’50s self-consciously explore the uses and abuses of the new technology in people’s living rooms, but these anxieties gradually subside over time and the device is fully integrated into people’s daily lives and everyday memories.

Television in Mad Men Mad Men is set in a time when television’s ubiquity is felt everywhere: in bedrooms, living rooms, hotel rooms, office cubicles, and hospital lobbies. “By 1960, almost 90 percent of American households had at least one receiver, with the average person watching approximately five hours of television each day” (Spigel 1). In many households the television set is left switched on, only to offer background noise—an experience that Mad Men recreates in many of its episodes such as “Ladies Room,” “Marriage of Figaro,” and “New Amsterdam.” Often, the television is more than the mise-en-scène and the context in which it is inserted encodes the series’s equivocal relationship with it. The Draper children regularly park themselves in front of the television set, often unsupervised and unattended; their emotionally unavailable parents use the television set in the living room as a convenient babysitter (“A Night to Remember”). At the agency, the television department has a rather comic beginning with Roger Sterling’s mock christening of Harry Crane as its head and sole member (“The Benefactor”). But as the years progress, television commercials gain prominence and become an integral part of the agency’s campaigns. Mad Men also accommodates the notions of excess associated with watching television. When Draper is given paid leave to keep out of the agency, he spends his days sitting at home watching television. He wakes up late, watches television, munches Ritz crackers, and whiles away his time (“A Day’s Work”). But when his former secretary Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris) comes to visit him in the evening, he puts on a suit and quickly switches off the television to keep up appearances. Immediately after Chambers leaves however, he turns the television back on and loosens his tie, giving the impression that he will go back to watching television for the rest of the evening. Draper has been living

Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities

alone in his New York apartment since his wife Megan (Jessica Paré) shifted to California. On a visit to Megan’s Laurel Canyon bungalow, Draper surprises her with a large and expensive color television set, which sticks out in her small living room. Megan points out that it does not fit in with her bohemian lifestyle but resigns to Draper’s wishes to avoid a fight. Mad Men uses these instances to show the diverse cultural perceptions of television within the ’60s decade: from its uncritical acceptance as a constant companion to everyday life to its association with addiction and inertia; from an underestimation of its potential as a mass medium to counterculture’s identification of the television set with the establishment and as an instrument of control. Mad Men’s interest in the televisual medium is illustrated by its complex treatment of the 1969 moon landing, the most historic television event of the ’60s. It was an unprecedented event as footage from outer space was broadcasted with minimal delay and to a global audience. The collective memory of the event is inevitably linked to the archival footage. Mad Men engages with the historicity of the televised events, but in a characteristic retro manner contains within its narrative foils that counter its potential to unite a nation together. It devotes a sizable amount of its screen time in “Waterloo” to the events of 20th July 1969. The CBS telecast is used to frame scenes of families gathered together in their living rooms glued to their television screens. Betty and her children get together with the family of an old college friend at the Francis residence; Roger Sterling is joined by his ex-wife, son-in-law, and grandchild; Draper is with his colleagues Peggy Olson, Harry Crane, and Pete Campbell in a crammed hotel room in Indianapolis; Bertram Cooper is at home with his caretaker beside him. For Cooper, born in the 19th century, the moon landing is a triumphant moment of human and technological endeavor. “Bravo!” he exclaims. He dies the same night, marking a turning point of sorts for the series as well, his death suggesting the end of an era. The moon landing is one of the few iconic events of the ’60s that evokes responses from the main characters in Mad Men. All dramatic action nearly come to a standstill as the camera moves from one living room to the next, showing the unison Americans experienced that evening while watching the television footage. The narrative take is informed by the scores of testimonies that came forth in the subsequent years, all of which confirm the almost universal awe and inspiration felt by those who gathered together on the 20th of July 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon. In public places such as New York’s Central Park, thousands congregated in front of giant screens (“NYC crowd watches”). In living rooms all over, neighbors and

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friends gathered together in front of their television sets. Parents propped up babies—their memories still to form—in front of television sets just in case (“1969: ‘One small step for man’”), while some took photographs to emboss their memories of watching the event with their families (“#Apollo45 | Stephen Colbert”). The moon landing amplifies the collective experience of watching television. Repositories of television memories such as the hashtag #Apollo45 show the tangled processes of memory that weaves personal details of the viewers with the moon landing footage seen on television. Responding to Buzz Aldrin’s #Apollo45 initiative7 on the 45th anniversary of the moon landing, people talked about the grainy visuals on their black-and-white television sets, and many ended their testimonies with the declaration that it was their most memorable experience. Some stressed upon the shared nature of the event—the experience of watching it together as a nation. Peggy Olson’s pitch for Burger Chef, delivered the day after the moon landing, offers an immediate counterpoint to the cohesive moment brought about by television the night before. She uses the moon landing, a turning point in American history, to remind her clients of another, more sinister turn in American family history—the presence of the television set at the dinner table. Her pitch is an indictment of the television set, of how it distracts families from enjoying a meal together; she holds its intrusive presence responsible for breaking the connection between people. She argues that people were starved for the human connection that they ironically experienced the night before while watching the moon landing telecast together as a nation. Olson offers the clean well lit Burger Chef joint as an alternative. She suggests that people head for the television-free burger joint and leave behind the chaos at home, escaping the distressing news from Vietnam that television relays every night into their homes. The irony compounds as Olson proposes a movement from the private to the more commercial space of the Burger Chef joint in search of a safe haven, while the violence of the public sphere wholly infiltrates domestic spaces through the television set. The television set broad7

In 2014, Buzz Aldrin appeals to people who witnessed the moon landing to share their memories on social media platforms with the hashtag #Apollo45. The YouTube channel “Apollo45,” a part of Aldrin’s initiative, is a place where people share their memories of “where they were the day he and Armstrong walked on the moon” (“#Apollo45 Where were you”). The channel features short clips of celebrities, scientists, reporters, and politicians sharing their memories of 20 July 1969, and congratulating the Apollo 11 crew. Newspapers and magazines ran similar commemorative stories about their own coverage of Apollo 11 and carried readers’ accounts of the historic moment.

Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities

casts conflicts from the outside world right into private spaces, turning the dinner table into a battlefield of opinions, where the sanctity of the family meal is no longer preserved. The family meal is losing the war against television, exclaims Olson. Her pitch unwittingly touches upon the radical potential of television to puncture the insularity of American homes and confront viewers with unpleasant truths such as the havoc wrecked by America in Vietnam. It also drums up the old anxiety of television as a corrupting influence that disrupts family ideals and turns people away from traditions. The juxtaposition of the awe-inspiring moon landing broadcast followed by the Burger Chef pitch, proposing a television-free intimate experience, reveals the series’s ambivalent perspective on television. It is often through television, however, that historic events enter the diegetic world of a retro. The television set serves a pivotal role in the establishment of a retro series’s textual details. Mad Men weaves in period televisual texts and archival footage to its narrative and delivers it to its 21st century audience who watches retros with anticipation, expecting historic events to unfold once again in their living rooms. It is a reminder of the fact that “some of [America]’s most prominent collective memories of the last 50 years have centered on television” (Kompare, 106). Mad Men’s timeline is peppered with historic events that are frequently conveyed through archival footage or audio commentary. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy (“The Grown Ups”), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (“The Flood”), and Robert Kennedy (“Man With a Plan”) are all inserted into the series through their television news coverage. But these insertions are almost always framed in a way that inverts the anticipated solemness. The cultural significance of the historic events are questioned by refracting it through personal experiences. President Kennedy is assassinated on the wedding day of Sterling’s daughter, Margaret (Elizabeth Rice). But the national tragedy appears small compared to her overwhelming self-pity. Her wedding is a disaster. During the celebration people huddle together in the banquet hall kitchen eager to follow the news. Betty Draper is distraught. The Drapers have been emotionally distanced over the years but the uncertainty brought about by the assassination triggers their separation. Olson seeks refuge in the quiet of her office, away from her mother, who was “crying and praying so hard. There wasn’t room for anyone else to feel anything.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is dealt with a similar cynicism: Olson’s real estate agent tells her to swoop in on the Upper East Side apartment, taking advantage of the unrest following Dr King’s assassination. Crane worries that the television prime time schedule

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will be affected and the slotted television commercials cancelled. Campbell chastises Crane, calling him a racist while assuming moral high ground and repeating his wife’s words: “It’s shameful.” Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) awkwardly hugs Dawn Chambers to comfort her, completely oblivious of what Chambers feels. Draper is intently following television news about riots erupting in the streets of Washington, D.C. solely because his mistress Sylvia Rosen (Linda Cardellini) is visiting the city. The series dexterously subverts these iconic insertions by projecting them on atomized narratives of personal anxieties and not recirculating them as grand national turning points.

Memories in Serial Television Over the seasons, Mad Men’s textual memory grows along with its expanding diegetic past. Its complex narration, serial format, and long run, featuring seven seasons and ninety-two episodes in total, encourage in its viewers a sustained engagement in its narrative and an intimate connection to its characters. As the narrative progresses, the series contains increasing references to its earlier episodes to harness its ‘serial memory.’ Using mnemonic devices common to serialized television, Mad Men seeks to achieve narrative depth and character identification. Serial memory is a subcategory of textual memory particular to serialized fiction, which builds its text on details already established on previous installments. Meaning in serials rely on viewer’s textual memories accumulated over time. If textual memory is the viewer’s memory of textual details, serial memory is the text’s memory of itself. In season four’s “Waldorf Stories,” Draper returns to the office on a high after celebrating the win of a Clio Award and offers a drunk and unprepared pitch for Life cereal. In the sequence, he delivers fragments of his earlier Kodak pitch (“The Wheel”), evidently trying to recreate its spell: “Look, there are sweeter cereals than this, but I kept thinking about, you know, nostalgia. How you remember something in the past, and it feels good, but it’s a little bit painful, like when you were a kid.” The clients are not impressed this time with Draper’s appeals to nostalgia and in a desperate attempt to maintain the client he lifts ideas from the work of a mediocre copywriter who he earlier regarded with contempt. The clients settle on the copywriter’s “Life. The cure for the common breakfast.” By alluding to Draper’s successful Kodak pitch, the series calls on its serial memory to highlight Draper’s debasement. Increasingly, memories

Chapter 3: Television Memories and Intertextualities

of characters’ pasts inform Mad Men’s depictions of their present situations. The Life cereal–Kodak pitch parallel elucidates the series’s posture towards nostalgia; there is correspondence between the relationship of the series to the ’60s and the relationship that it has with its own diegetic past. In addition, the audience’s memory is refreshed from time to time by mirror storylines which subtly pay homage to earlier episodes. Duck Phillips (Mark Moses) informs Pete Campbell that Bob Benson (James Wolk) is a fraud and that Benson’s entire past “might as well be written in steam” (“The Quality of Mercy”). Philips adds, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Campbell responds, “I have.” His response immediately reminds viewers of Campbell’s discovery of Draper’s identity theft in “Nixon vs. Kennedy.” Campbell confronts Benson about the identity theft, but Benson is shocked to find that Campbell was not going to report him and let him continue to work for the agency. But viewers comprehend Campbell’s decision to let Benson get off scot-free. The last time he reported an identity theft, Cooper had admonished Campbell instead of Draper. Now Campbell has “learned not to tangle with [their] kind of animal” (“The Quality of Mercy”). In another instance, Draper repeats his modus operandi for revenge: of getting his opponents drunk to humiliate them. Draper walks in forty minutes late to a meeting called by Ted Chaough (Kevin Rahm) in “Man with a Plan.” Chaough calls the meeting off on Draper’s arrival and admonishes Draper for wasting everyone’s time. Later, Draper walks in Chaough’s office, offering him a drink: “an olive branch” of reconciliation. He pushes Chaough to follow him drink after drink, provoking him into a drinking contest: “If you don’t want to drink, you don’t have to drink.” Chaough ends up reasonably drunk, goes out to the creative lounge, and embarrasses himself. Chaough collapses in a chair and this time Draper calls the day off, establishing that he is the real authority. Viewers know that Draper had used the same ploy on Roger Sterling, after Sterling sexually harassed Betty Draper in “Red in the Face.” Draper had paid the elevator operator to have an “out of service” sign in front of the elevator, when Draper and Sterling return from their martini and oyster lunch at the Grand Central oyster bar. The two had to then take the flights of stairs, twenty three in total, to the agency where they were awaited by Bertram Cooper and the Nixon campaigners. When they finally made it to their floor, Sterling threw up in front of the clients and a faint but vindictive smile appeared on Draper’s face. However, unlike Sterling who either does not suspect Draper or does not plot revenge on him, in “Man with a Plan,” Chaough gets back at Draper, flies him out on a plane on a stormy day to meet clients and establishes to a relatively shaken

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Draper that at that moment up in the sky Chaough is in control of Draper’s life. Comparing the past and the present is a device central to the function of memorizing. Serial memory thrives on episodes which share thematic similarities or make indirect allusions to previous episodes. Mad Men enables this process by introducing episodes that recall earlier ones in theme and composition, provoking viewers to take stock of events within its diegetic universe. These become more frequent and explicit in the final season of the series. They include repeated patterns: a coup in season seven’s “Waterloo” alludes to a similar coup in season three’s “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.” Other season seven episodes recall previous episodes thematically: “The Strategy,” for example, pays homage to season four’s “The Suitcase.” Both are organized around a similar temporal marker, Peggy Olson’s birthday, which calls for an occasion to compare and review her growth and her relationship to Draper. “The Strategy” acts as a point of culmination, reflecting on the repercussions of Olson’s earlier choice in “The Suitcase” of work over family. Viewers who have witnessed her growth as a professional in the time since can participate in validating this choice despite her own anxieties about it. By offering audiences comparable episodes in which events repeat (birthdays, coups), and in which earlier decisions made by the characters are validated, Mad Men encourages audience’s immersion and identification with its characters. These occasions particularly draw attention to the passage of diegetic time, the growth of characters, and the deepening of their interpersonal relationships. Matthew Weiner discloses the extent to which this engagement with the mechanics of memorizing was contemplated in Mad Men’s production: “part of my intention when I pitched the show … was wouldn’t it be amazing to do ten or 12 years of these people’s lives, have the actors age … you see Peggy and you have nostalgia for her first day at work because you knew her then – there’s just that process of the human mind, just because it’s in the past.” (Poniewozik) He recognizes that the passage of time is crucial for serial television and that it enables mediated intimacy and even nostalgia for the characters. This nostalgia is reinforced by viewers’ emotional connection and identification with characters of a serial television program that they watch in an intimate setting (their living room) and on a prolonged routine basis (in the case of Mad Men from 2007 to 2015). Processes of long running serial television encourage the overlap of its own textual memories and viewers’ contextual memo-

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ries; over the years the two accumulate simultaneously. These multiplicities of remembrances point to the porous and assimilative nature of televisual memory, which integrates divergent strands, textual and contextual, immediate and cultural. Because of its breadth, serialized television provides the opportunity for a retro production to rework its own representation of the past. In addition to Mad Men’s long run, the time frame of the narrative is spread over a decade (March 1960–November 1970), and this temporal stretch allows character engagement to be both intense and expansive. A particular event or personal crisis can be concentrated upon in one or more consecutive episodes and repercussions of actions and choices can be explored over an entire decade.

Pleasures of Retro’s Intertextualities Mad Men avails itself of the heterogenous and entangled processes of memories accorded to it by the medium, genre, and format to create and revive memories of its own text and its intertextual references. In addition to the textual, contextual, and serial memories, ‘intertextual memories’ also constitute a retro’s televisual memories. These are the cultural memories contained in the fragments of other texts inserted in a retro, such as the Walter Cronkite CBS news segments in Mad Men, and those that the viewers are reminded of while watching a retro.8 Intertextual memories resonate with viewers’ own textual memories, and correspond to their television viewing histories. Intertextual connections is an inevitable aspect to any text. Every text “is constructed as a mosaic of quotations,” influenced, interrelated, and built upon by others (Kristeva 66, Moi 37). Knowledge itself emerges from connections between texts, and can only be known through its textual remains. Intertextuality9 is the constant dialogue that texts enter with other texts (both contem8

9

For clarity, the term ‘intertextual reference’ is used here to denote the older text; and the term ‘intertextual citation,’ or simply ‘intertext,’ denotes the parenthetical fragment of the original source text inserted in the contemporary retro text. Julia Kristeva defines “intertextuality” as the interrelation of texts and develops the idea based on her readings of Mikhail Bakhtin. She reads “Bakhtinian ‘dialogism’ as an open ended play between the text of the subject and the text of the addressee” (Moi 34). For a discussion on the differences between Bakhtin’s “dialogism” and Kristeva’s “intertextuality,” see “Behind Bakhtin” (Lesic-Thomas). For an overview on intertextuality and its evolution, see: Intertextuality (Allen).

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porary and precursory), such that texts are products of history and society. Just as history and society find their way into texts, texts too with their subject, characters, and readers insert themselves into history and society. Intertextualities enable the subversive potential of a text to bring heterogenous voices together into a dialogue, which can undermine the authority of dominant monological systems (Bakhtin). An intertextual text has the capacity to integrate older utterances, not simply as repetitions, but as interpretations. The moment an intertext is inserted into a new text, the insertion gives it a new context and a new interpretation. The pleasures of retro lie in interacting with its intertextualities: in recognizing texts as open and unfinished, and which continually evolve with new interpretations of older fragments and quotations in it. Particularly in retros, intertextual insertions are abundant, obvious, and necessary. They give credibility to its period identity, add to its historic specificity, and compose its everyday reality. Intertextualities in retros are everywhere, in the mise-en-scène, the music, the frames, the themes, the mood, the jokes, and in its ironies. Their abundance is second only to their diversity. Mad Men’s intertextualities are temporally diverse as well: some date appropriately back to the ’60s, others go further back, and a few are anachronistically from more recent times. The insertion of television news in an episode is one of the obvious time appropriate anchoring devices that date the episode: “the background appearance of a speech by Richard Nixon dates one scene [in “Severance”] precisely, at April 30, 1970, around 9 p.m. Eastern, when Nixon addressed the nation” (Rothman). Characters often refer to ads, songs, and television programs from their pasts that date further back than 1960, such as Henry Francis’s (Christopher Stanley) reference to the old RCA ad “His Master’s Voice” (“Seven Twenty Three”); Joan Holloway’s performance of “C’est Magnifique,” an early ’50s hit song (“My Old Kentucky Home”); or Pete Campbell’s reference to Molly Goldberg, of the classic comedy show The Goldbergs, while talking about Rachel Menken (“Marriage of Figaro”). The anachronistic insertions are sometimes an error in referencing: Joan Holloway quotes Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” in 1960 (“Babylon”) while the phrase becomes popular only after 1964 with the publication of McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Matthew Weiner regrets the admission of this particular anachronistic phrase into the series (Zimmer). In the case of diegetic intertextual insertions he takes more care to be period appropriate. Despite his strong preference for the 1969 Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is?” Weiner patiently waits until the final season, when Mad

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Men enters 1970, and when the song becomes ubiquitous enough to have “it turn into the muzak, basically, in the diner. I can only use a song that’s period correct if the characters are hearing it” (Rich). But with intertexts used as non-diegetic background music, Weiner is not as rigid. The Bob Dylan song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” released in 1963, is used in the first season finale anachronistically as a closing credit song. Uncertain if the series will be picked up for another season, Weiner decides to use it just the same as the song sums up the main theme of the series: of change and people’s responses to change (Kaplan). There are other instances still when Weiner takes liberty to select contemporary songs for simply being mood appropriate, such as The Decemberists’ 2005 song “The Infanta” (“Maidenform”). Retros use intertexts to define their characters. When the French Canadian Megan Draper plans to perform a song for Draper on his birthday (“A Little Kiss: Part 1”), she selects a lively ’60s French song “Zou Bisou Bisou” that reflects her tastes and identity (Hills). The song is contemporary, youthful, and sexy; it is about an open declaration of love and Megan’s performance exudes the same vibrancy. There is a hint that Megan might have been exposed to the song when she was back home in Montreal in 1960 (Miller). Her performance is impressive, but the audience, consisting mostly of Draper’s colleagues, are awkward at having witnessed something private and sexy. Draper too is embarrassed by her performance; his discomfort points at the generational gap between him and his young wife. “Zou Bisou Bisou,” which loosely translates as “Oh You Kiss, Kiss,” resonates with the changing times and the changing social and sexual mores. Megan is attuned to these changes, while the WASPy executives at the agency are still to adapt to them. The differences in attitude also highlight Megan’s identity as a foreigner; she is still an outsider to the group and to Draper’s generation. Other diegetic songs such as Helms’s “My Special Angel” is used for bringing with it the “late 1950s and early 1960s radio aesthetic of AM top forty radio” (Anderson 74). Weiner insists that periods coexist, and leave their traces in later ones. It is likely that ’50s hit numbers regularly played on the radio well into the early 1960s. People’s tastes also adapt only gradually to the changes in music trends. Helms’s song, played in Betty Draper’s kitchen, foregrounds her own association with the ’50s in terms of taste and morality. Retros interact with intertextualities in set design as well. Mad Men’s initial office set adapts The Apartment’s set design: “The most striking element of Mad Men’s large, elaborate Sterling Cooper set is its ceiling—an oppressive grid of fluorescent lights. Billy Wilder recognized this lighting fixtures’s

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oppressiveness when he conceived the visual design of The Apartment” (Butler 60–61). The Wilder inspired cool-toned white lights on the ceiling adds to the impersonal, exposed, and competitive atmosphere of the work space in the series. In the later seasons, the decor and the arrangement of the office change in accordance to the more exuberant ’60s styles; the introduction of the creative lounge marks this change. The corner offices remain predominantly occupied by male executives and the decor of these offices is used to express the occupant’s personality. Bertram Cooper’s office is the most playfully decorated, complete with Katsushika Hokusai’s woodcut The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, and later an abstract-expressionist study in orange by Mark Rothko is added to his eclectic collection. These intertextual citations to art add texture to the mise-en-scène and detail to the character—the Hokusai woodcut in Cooper’s office emphasizes his fetish for Japanese culture. In terms of scene composition, the comparisons between the shots that frame the solitary figure of Betty Draper trapped within the four walls of her suburban home and the paintings of Edward Hopper add an element of timelessness to her loneliness (@TabloidArtHist). These shots, framed like paintings, dramatize her isolation. The parallels to Hopper’s paintings expand Betty Draper’s feelings of loneliness much beyond her own to conjure an impression of a shared alienation. Similarly, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita finds a citation in a sequence composition when Sterling emerges from his office riding one of the twins who come to the agency for casting (“Long Weekend”). The director of the episode, Tim Hunter, draws attention to this subtle, easy-tomiss intertextuality in the DVD commentary accompanying the episode. He suggests that Fellini’s La Dolce Vita ran in eminent theaters in New York at the time, and perhaps Sterling saw the movie and got the idea from it. Thematically too, literary and television influences and allusions abound in Mad Men. Themes explored in the series are drawn from shared cultural repositories. Its primary theme of the self-made man is common to many American fictional works, each of which has built upon or commented on the theme, adding to its textual history. Mad Men contributes to this theme with its protagonist, Draper. Comparisons are made between Jay Gatsby and Draper even though the text does not directly allude to The Great Gatsby. The influence of Gatsby on the series is nevertheless palpable: “Weiner imagined the Draper character as a Gatsby figure, the American archetype of the self-made hero with the tragic flaw” (Adams). The creators consciously turn to earlier literary and cultural works for inspiration. Weiner would bring to the writ-

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ers’ room literature that he intends to emulate.10 Semi Chellas, a screenwriter for the series, recalls the time when Weiner brought in an audio recording of Sylvia Plath reading her poems, but “rarely was there a direct point, it was more a mood or a tone that he wanted to explore” (Alter). Anticipating intertextualities is arguably a pleasure and a defining practice particular to retros, and it becomes even more pronounced in Mad Men with its long running format, allowing ample time to accommodate a wide variety of past references—iconic and ordinary, momentous and everyday. Viewers anticipate intertextual references as the series inches towards a historical point when that particular reference becomes significant. They debate the inclusion or exclusion of an intertextual references within the diegetic universe of a retro television series. Prior to the release of the Mad Men episode “The Monolith,” which references Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey, Indiewire’s Sam Adams and Slate magazine’s Forrest Wickman have a Twitter exchange anticipating 2001’s inclusion as Mad Men enters 1968, the year 2001 was released (@SamuelAAdams; Wickman). Anticipated intertextualities offer viewers a way to energize and assert their cultural memories. Mad Men enters into a playful relationship with its audience’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, at times leaving cues to events that later find their way into its diegesis. The announcement in season three’s second episode that Margaret Sterling’s wedding would be held on 23rd November 1963—the day President J.F. Kennedy is assassinated—already builds up viewers’ expectations (“Love among the Ruins”). The tragedy is finally dealt with towards the end of the season in its twelfth episode (“The Grown Ups”). At other times though, anticipated events are completely elided over, such as the iconic Woodstock Festival. Intertextual connections can also be inserted as teasers without necessarily delivering on the promise. The Sharon Tate inspired T-shirt worn by Megan Draper triggers speculations over a possible connection between the two (“The Better Half”). Viewers discussed the similarities between the two women and wondered if Megan would die tragically like Tate (“Is Megan Draper Sharon Tate?” and Rowles). However, Megan does not die, and the divergence between their trajectories suggests that that particular intertextuality meant nothing beyond the instance of insertion. Intertextual connections can also be mapped by viewers, which pushes the boundaries of a text much beyond authorial intention and control, chal10

See Chapter 5, section “Creating Value in the Network” for John Cheever’s influences on Mad Men.

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lenging the conception of a text as self-contained. Viewers of Mad Men regularly discuss such intertextual connections with other fans and seek corroboration from the creators. Lisa Rothstein expresses her surprise on finding out that The Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance,” where a man travels back in time to his childhood, was not the inspiration for the Kodak pitch in “The Wheel” (Benson). To her, the intertextuality seemed obvious and immediate. Arguably, such intertextualities can surface when creators of texts inhabit similar cultural terrains or when they explore moods, emotions, and expectations of characters of a certain age group and gender. Themes such as work-life balance, familial obligation, mid-life regret, and male escape fantasies that are regularly explored in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone also preoccupy Weiner. Similarly, on being repeatedly asked about the continuities in themes and mood between Mad Men and Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, Weiner clarifies that he had never heard of the book and that it was brought to his attention three years after he had written his pilot. He stresses that had he read the book he “wouldn’t have had the nerve to write the show: “Yates was there. This is what he was writing about”” (Kaplan). The pleasures associated with identification and anticipation are common to all texts set in the past, but for a retro the excitement lies in the ways in which it mediates its intertexts. Retro establishes its irreverence towards its intertexts, complicating their original meaning with dissonant juxtapositions or deglamorizing them by lingering on their margins, inconsistencies, and blind spots. It tampers with their original boundaries, stretching and contracting them, sometimes to disproportionate effects, until their symbolic meaning is altered. Sometimes it reframes them with new commentaries that are less than kind and at other times it lets its intertextualities a subterranean existence that informs its own mood and meaning. Retro’s mediations become its distinct features, and they encapsulate its playful balance of distance and relation. The mediations illustrate retro’s capacity to refract and revitalize its intertexts and through them relate to obscure and iconic pasts.

Mood Mad Men frequently employs older televisual and cinematic texts to set the mood, develop themes, and to structure episode plots. These intertexts find the most extended and layered treatment in the series, and offer viewers the enjoyment of thematic comparisons. Weiner acknowledges the influence of

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Rod Serling on his writing. He credits Serling’s teleplay Patterns as a source for the series’s representations of executive-secretary relationships and boardroom power struggles. At the 2014 Austin Film Festival, while collecting the Outstanding Television Writer award, Weiner honors Serling for his influence and selects two episodes of The Twilight Zone for screening: “It’s A Good Life” and “A Stop at Willoughby” (Agresta). The influence of The Twilight Zone is less direct in terms of plot and is perceptible rather through mood, especially in episodes that explore the uncanny (Benson). By Weiner’s own admittance the episode “Severance,” framed by the haunting Peggy Lee single “Is That All There Is?” has undoubtedly “a little Twilight Zone-ness to it” (Rich). The presence of Rachel Menken Katz, with whom Draper had lost touch over the years, haunts him throughout the episode. He spots Rachel’s doppelgänger Diana Baur (Elizabeth Reaser) working at a diner and has a dream about Rachel later that night where she tells Draper, “I’m supposed to tell you that you missed your flight.” Next morning, Draper is shaken to find out that Rachel had passed away the week before. He is not the only one to experience the uncanny in “Severance.” At Sterling Cooper & Partners (SC&P), Ken Cosgrove is fired under pressure from McCann Erickson with the eponymous severance package. Eerily the night before, his wife suggests he quit his job to pursue his dream of writing—a suggestion he immediately declines as he expects a promotion at work. Cosgrove rationalizes the “spooky” coincidence as a call to “the life not lived,” but he cannot resist the temptation to avenge himself when the SC&P client Dow Chemical offers to hire him. As the new head of advertising at Dow, he informs Campbell and Sterling that even though Dow will remain their client, he is going to be “very hard to please.” Cosgrove’s desire for revenge swallows the fleeting chance that had presented itself to live the life not lived. Much like Serling, “Severance” explores how the lives of people are shaped by events outside of their control and how people negotiate with the unknown. In “The Quality of Mercy,” Mad Men uses Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby to explore themes of disorientation and violation. While at the theater11 with his wife to watch Rosemary, Draper meets Ted Chaough and Peggy Olson. Chaough and Olson had both seen the film before and were rewatching it as they planned to use the film’s final scenes, where Rosemary is surrounded by 11

Cinematic references find a convenient entry into the diegesis as Draper is shown to frequently visit movie theaters (“The Good News,” “The Flood,” “The Phantom”), reflective of the series’s interest in the larger world of cinema.

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the Satanists, in their ad campaign for St. Joseph aspirin for children. Olson’s idea is to recreate the film’s scene with a group of elderly neighbors crowding around a young mother and her crying baby. Each of them offer advice on how to comfort the baby, and the coda would show her holding up the aspirin pill, asserting her own judgement over that of her intrusive neighbors. They enact the scene at the agency and ask Draper to play the role of the crying baby. Draper does not approve of their plan as it would require many people to shoot the ad, making it far more expensive than St. Joseph’s budget allows. But Olson tells him that the crowd is necessary to “feel the conspiracy.” He accedes on the surface and even compliments the idea, but Chaough finds out later that Draper had sent over a new budget to the clients informing them about the surge. Chaough confronts Draper, who says he only meant to help them. Next day, when the St. Joseph clients arrive to discuss the budget, Draper humiliates Chaough, insinuating that his support for Olson’s idea stems from his infatuation with her. As a final blow, Draper tells the clients the ad is important for Chaough as it was their late partner Frank Gleason’s (Craig Anton) last idea, thus taking credit away from Olson. The episode ends with Olson calling Draper a “monster” and him recoiling into a fetal position, once again alluding to Rosemary’s newborn who is Satan incarnate. The reference functions at several levels in the episode: it is inserted into the plot and literally alluded to by characters. The series uses this literal insertion to build upon the imaginative analogy between Draper and Rosemary’s child through the composition of scenes. Twice in the episode Draper is shot in a fetal position. The meaning of these scenes function in conjunction with the literal reference in the plot, priming viewers to take cognizance of other possible references to the film in the episode through aural and visual composition of frames. The episode also uses the occasion to playfully offer a meta-commentary on intertextual resonances. Draper comments on Olson’s idea to adapt scenes from Rosemary’s Baby for the aspirin ad: “Usually with things like this, it depends on you knowing the movie. But I think this works on its own.” For Mad Men too, the narrative can function well without any previous knowledge of each of those source texts, but indulging in its intertextualities substantially adds to its pleasures. Although Rosemary’s Baby specifically addresses women’s struggle for autonomy over their reproductive rights, the reference in Mad Men is inflected with anxieties of self-determination and fear of losing control. Draper’s reasons for “killing” the ad include his rivalry with Ted Chaough. He cannot stand Olson’s allegiance to Chaough over himself. He considers Olson his protégé,

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and would rather impede her success than lose control over her. Viewers have also found parallels between Megan Draper and Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), noting that the Drapers live in an old apartment in New York just like the Woodhouses (Creamer). In addition, Rosemary’s ignorance of the pact made by her husband Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) with their Satan worshipping neighbors is compared to Megan Draper’s unawareness of her husband’s affair with their neighbor Sylvia Rosen with whom she shares intimate details of her miscarriage (“Collaborators”). The book Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (which Polanski adapts into his film) is cited a few episodes earlier in “The Crash” as well. Sally Draper reads the book when she is home alone at night with her young brothers. There is a break-in at the Drapers’ apartment, and Sally finds an old African American woman in their lobby who introduces herself as their Grandma Ida (Davenia McFadden). The intruder fabricates a story about Draper’s childhood, and even though Sally is not convinced, she has no way to refute Ida’s claims as she knew little about her father’s past. She is forced to comply and even give Ida a polite hug. “Grandma Ida’s manipulation of Sally is also comparable to Rosemary’s relationship with Mrs. Castevet [Ruth Gordon]” her tyrannical neighbor, who is part of the Satanic coven and who takes charge of Rosemary during her pregnancy (Haverman). Finally, Draper’s own breakdown mirrors Rosemary’s, losing control over his body and sense of time under the influence of the drugs injected in him in “The Crash.” During the episode his memory races back to his childhood in the whorehouse when he had a fever and a prostitute nursed him to health only to rape him. The rape, the loss of control over his body (both during the flashback to his childhood and at present under drugs), and the intrusion into his home are inflected with the violations of Rosemary Woodhouse. The echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (both the novel and the film) can be traced in a number of episodes in the sixth season. They enhance the series’s depiction of the general mood of disorientation and loss of control experienced in America in 1968. Megan, Sally, and Draper each exhibit partially the symptoms that manifests in Rosemary Woodhouse. Mad Men channels viewers’ identification with Rosemary into its own text, it harnesses her fears and projects them onto scenes in the series, where characters are helpless and vulnerable, such as the hours Sally Draper and her brothers spend under Ida’s supervision. Like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Rosemary’s Baby adds to the disquietude in Mad Men. The most indulgent cinematic reference in Mad Men is to Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The homage to the 1968 science-fiction film outlasts the episode “The Monolith,” which directly alludes to the film through its ti-

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tle, and continues into the next episode “The Runaways.” In “The Monolith,” Harry Crane and Jim Cutler (Harry Hamlin) proudly announce the agency’s acquisition of the new IBM computer, which they intend to install in the creative lounge—a space described by the creatives as unique about SC&P. At that moment, Draper arrives at the office to find it empty. He has no idea about the computer or the gathering upstairs. The visuals of the empty office, and the phone bouncing against the desk as if left in a hurry evoke the uncanny and recall cinematic clichés of apocalyptic moments (“The Monolith” DVD commentary). Following his absenteeism and unproductiveness, Draper is no longer included in the decision making process. Upstairs, he finds out that the decision has already been made to replace the creative lounge with the computer room. Draper sees this as a direct blow to the creative department. In fact, in the previous episode, “Field Trip,” the partners, and especially Cutler, directly compare Draper’s productivity and creative genius to that of a computer. Cutler reminds the partners that computers are the future and not “creative hijinks” and also that Draper costs more than a computer. In “The Monolith,” this comparison is further dramatized and the fear of the computer replacing human thought and creativity becomes visceral. The exchange between Draper and Lloyd Hawley (Robert Baker), the man in charge of the IBM installation, underscore the episode’s theme of man versus machine. Hawley tells Draper that, “This machine is intimidating because it contains infinite quantities of information, and that’s threatening, because human existence is finite.” Hawley’s observation is ominous and foreshadows Michael Ginsberg’s (Ben Feldman) breakdown in “The Runaways.” The placement of the IBM computer right in the middle of the office emitting its continuous hum immediately recalls the monolith found on the lunar surface in 2001. Hawley’s faith in the machine and its infinite computing prowess echoes Dr. Heywood Floyd’s (William Sylvester) awe of the incomprehensible. Both the 2001 monolith and Mad Men’s IBM invoke the veneration and terror of the romantic “sublime.”12 In the following episode, Ginsberg, who was vehemently opposed to the computer, begins to feel its hold over him. He repeatedly complains of the continuous sound waves sent by the IBM. He rapidly loses control over his life and becomes suspicious of his surroundings. He believes that the “machine makes people do unnatural things” such as turning them into homosexuals 12

See Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise: “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.”

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(“The Runaways”). He watches Lou Avery (Allan Havey) and Jim Cutler discuss in the air-conditioned computer-room and suspects them of conspiracy. The computer’s hum drowns out their speech and Ginsberg attempts to read their lips. This is an obvious nod to the memorable 2001 scene where Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) go to the EVA (extravehicular activity) pod to discuss terminating the computer, HAL 9000 (voice by Douglas Rain). Unfortunately for Bowman and Poole, HAL decodes their plan by reading their lips. However, Ginsberg is not HAL; he possesses none of the computer’s mechanical competence and ends up concluding irrationally that Avery and Cutler are homosexuals. Eventually, Ginsberg has a breakdown and in an attempt to rid himself of the sinister waves of the computer he cuts off his nipple, which he assumes is the valve that relays the sinister signals from the IBM. With the passage clear, he insists that the “waves of data” can move right through him. He believes he has finally freed himself of the computer’s menacing powers. Ginsberg exits the show strapped to a stretcher. Metaphorically, in the battle against the machine, man’s resistance to the monolith has been eliminated. Familiarity with the plot of 2001 and particularly with the menacing powers of the monolith and the intelligence of HAL 9000 adds to the horror and viewers’ comprehension of Ginsberg’s fear of the IBM. Viewers subliminally read into the IBM the notorious artificial intelligence of HAL and the infusion enables viewers’ identification with Ginsberg, even if temporarily. The familiarity with 2001 brings an element of credibility to, and empathy for, Ginsberg’s paranoia. Once again, as with Rosemary’s Baby, the knowledge of 2001, although not necessary to the comprehension of “The Monolith” and “The Runaways,” considerably enhances the viewing experience.

Counterpoint Alberto Iglesias’s score for the 2001 Spanish film Sex and Lucía “Me Voy a Morir de Tanto Amor” is used as a background to Betty Draper’s surreal dream sequence in “The Fog,” where she floats through green suburban lanes and hospital corridors. She sinks in a delirium induced by the pain of labor and the cocktail of drugs given to her before her third delivery. The insertion of the score is anachronistic but its dreamy, timeless tonal quality makes it suitable as a background score to a dream sequence. The usage of the song, however, whose title loosely translates to “I’m Going to Die From So Much Love,”

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mocks the idea of unconditional motherly affection and the inexhaustible energy needed to maintain it when juxtaposed to an image of an incapacitated Betty, vulnerable and completely stripped of autonomy over her body. The cries of the newborn wake Betty up in the middle of the night: she gets up from the bed and pauses for a moment as if tired at the thought of nursing yet another baby, but then proceeds in a daze towards the nursery to attend to it as “Me Voy a Morir de Tanto Amor” is reprised in the background and the end credits start rolling. Mad Men often uses songs as counterpoints to on-screen narratives. Ella Fitzgerald’s 1956 rendition of the classic song “Manhattan” used in “New Amsterdam” highlights how money mediates the pleasures of the city. The song is about a poor couple who has nothing besides “true love” and is eager to “settle down right here in town.” They look forward to be seduced by the glamour of the city and to make the most of their visits to the free and public spaces that the city has to offer: Central Park, the zoo, the subway, and the streets of Manhattan. The episode, however, presents a contrasting image. It centers around the newlywed Campbells’ move to a new apartment. Trudy Campbell finds a fifteen hundred square feet two-bedroom apartment on “83rd and Park” for thirty thousand dollars, and in spite of her husband reminding her that he only earns seventy five dollars a week which, he explains, is only thirty-five hundred dollars a year and is short of the down payment even, she assures him that they could have the apartment with a little financial help from their parents. Campbell visits his own parents to ask for money but they refuse him. Desperate, Trudy asks her father for the down payment without even consulting Campbell, who reluctantly accepts her father’s “investment” in their lives. To make matters worse, Campbell is about to be fired from his job for pitching his own ideas to a client. A colleague rubs it in: “You picked the wrong time to buy an apartment.” Campbell is devastated. Bertram Cooper, however, revokes Campbell’s dismissal, reminding Draper and Sterling of Campbell’s Dykeman heritage. Cooper tells them: “The Dykemans owned pretty much everything north of 125th Street” of the island of Manhattan, but his maternal grandfather eventually lost most of it during the Great Depression. Cooper did not want to upset Campbell’s mother, Dorothy Dykeman Campbell (Channing Chase), as she was still part of New York City’s influential elite. The final scenes of the episode take place at the Campbells’ new apartment, where Trudy, accompanied by her parents, excitedly narrates the story of the Dykemans to their new neighbor. Their neighbor is equally thrilled to have a Dykeman living in their building. But

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Campbell is framed isolated from the group as he looks out the window to the city with its glittery lights against the night sky. Despite his illustrious heritage, Campbell appears to be outside of the city’s pleasures and unable to share Trudy’s enthusiasm. The end credits song “Manhattan” at once emphasizes the city as the central theme of the episode, but the tenor of the love ballad heightens Campbell’s frustrations at being unable to belong to the city and finding a place of his own. The song is an ode to the “isle of joy,” a romance for the city, and it depicts the city as carefree and welcoming of the poor. It is selected as the credit song precisely because of the dissonance it brings to the image of the city in “New Amsterdam.” It contrasts sharply to Cooper’s view of New York City as a “marvelous machine filled with a mesh of levers and gears and springs, like a fine watch wound tight. Always ticking.” Fitzgerald’s “Manhattan” resonates with Trudy, but the song belies the strings that she had to pull and the people she had to manipulate to acquire her “cozy little flat in what is known as old Manhattan.” The song’s innocence intensifies the precarious materialism of the city. Songs are often selected for their potential to offset onscreen imagery and to heighten the dissonance in the narratives, encouraging a criticism of easy closures. The Bobby Helms 1957 rendition of “My Special Angel” is used to frame two disparate scenes in “Shoot”: once the song plays faintly in the background, perhaps on the radio, as the Drapers gather in their kitchen for breakfast, and later the song figures more prominently as Betty Draper shoots her neighbor’s pigeons. The episode underscores Betty’s struggles between the identity that she wants to assert, as a woman capable of financial independence—“I did do some modeling, you know”— and the traditional feminine expectations imposed on her—to be “beautiful, and kind, and filled with love like an angel.” While the song complements the image of Betty surrounded by her family at breakfast, it achieves the opposite effect when played as a background to Betty sitting alone in her kitchen. She casts the image of a woman desperate to reclaim her identity and distraught at its only possibility taken away from her. Jim Hobart (H. Richard Greene) of McCann Erickson offers Betty a modeling assignment solely to use her as leverage to get Draper to join his agency. When Draper declines the offer, Betty is told that her services are no longer required. She is unaware of the reason for her dismissal but the shame of rejection crushes all her ambitions of independence and puts her back inside the house again. Later that evening, she tells Draper that she has reconciled with her identity and is happy at home but Draper immediately realizes what

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might have transpired at McCann Erickson. Still, he withholds the fact that she was used as a pawn. Betty’s reconciliation is, of course, only a part of the truth. She vents out her anger and humiliation by shooting her neighbor’s pigeons. Tim Anderson argues that Mad Men’s closing songs bring “a tone that provides one final critical dimension to the episode: Punctus contra punctum: the structure to shake out nascent meanings and allowing them to come to fruition” (80–81). The dissonance between the visual and the aural stimuli draws the audience’s attention to the composition of the scene, emphasizing the theme of Betty’s conflicted existence.

Reframing Intertexts The use of “My Special Angel,” a song now largely forgotten, exhibits retro’s ability to reframe intertexts within a new setting. The new context in which the Helms song is inserted re-appropriates it to convey the self-effacing services expected of women. It lays bare the hypocrisy of extolling a woman as an angel while denying her dignity and autonomy. Mad Men recasts the romantic ballad and adds to the song a new layer of interpretive possibility. There are other instances when ’60s popular cultural productions are evoked in Mad Men and reframed with commentaries that question the original premise of the intertexts. When the CBS drama As The World Turns is referenced, it is presented alongside a discussion between Joan Holloway and her doctor fiancé, Greg Harris (“A Night to Remember”). Holloway asks Harris about a plot twist in As The World Turns, where a character wakes up from a coma with no recollection of the past and with a new accent. Harris, of course, dismisses the premise as nonsense. Holloway finds it hard to believe and asks in earnest, “Well, it must have happened to somebody. I mean, they wouldn’t make it up completely, right?” The discussion is framed as Holloway’s genuine attempt to understand television tropes and clichés. Their dinner table conversation takes the form of the accompanying commentary that draws the attention of contemporary viewers to the inconsistencies within the As the World Turns universe and affects its new reception. With cinema too, Mad Men draws from and explores genre conventions of the 1960s while simultaneously commenting on the gaps and silences in the narratives. The series complicates easy resolutions offered at the end of the cited ’60s films, affecting contemporary viewers’ reception of the older texts. Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is invoked in the “Long Weekend” to comment on

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the anxieties felt by single working women in the 1960s. Joan Holloway talks about The Apartment with her boss and lover Roger Sterling, noting the similarities between her own life and that of Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the film’s female protagonist. Like Holloway, Kubelik is also in a relationship with a married older man Jeff D. Sheldrake (FredMacMurray). Kubelik attempts to commit suicide after discovering that her relationship with Sheldrake is but one among his many casual affairs and that he does not intend to divorce his wife. Holloway tells Sterling that the men drove Fran Kubelik to suicide: “handing her around like a tray of canapés.” Sterling complains that the film was “crude” and ridicules its premise of a white female elevator operator. He makes light of Holloway’s concern, remarking that Hollywood prefers to dabble in extremes. Even though Wilder’s film deals with the pressures faced by single working women, it ultimately opts for a romantic resolution, making their difficulties appear surmountable. At the end of the film, Fran Kubelik settles down with the young insurance agent C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) who had let his boss Sheldrake use his Upper West Side apartment to meet Kubelik. Baxter takes care of her after she tries to commit suicide in his apartment. Mad Men, in comparison, frequently stresses the everyday humiliation faced by single working women. Towards the end of the “Long Weekend,” Sterling has a heart attack and Cooper calls Holloway to the office late at night to send telegrams to clients. While leaving the office Cooper tells Holloway not to “waste [her] youth on age;” they get into the elevator and he asks her to operate it. In that moment, Holloway becomes Kubelik. A few episodes later, Holloway ends her affair with Sterling and attempts to settle down with a young medical student, Greg Harris. Except, Holloway’s marriage is far from ideal. Soon after their engagement, Harris presumes that at work Holloway “just walked around with people staring at [her]” (“A Night to Remember”). He visits her at work once, and rapes her in Draper’s office (“The Mountain King”). Holloway marries him nevertheless. She had already announced her engagement and plans of marriage at work. She even quits her job of almost a decade for their marriage. Meanwhile, Harris fails to become a surgeon and registers his services to the army without consulting her (“The Gypsy and the Hobo”). Despite all her efforts, the marriage fails and eventually he serves her divorce papers (“Christmas Waltz”). She returns to work, but at the agency as well, she constantly struggles against casual sexism: a colleague comments, “What do you do besides walking around wanting to get raped?” (“The Summer Man”). She is practically coerced into prostituting herself by

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Pete Campbell to secure the Jaguar account (“The Other Woman”), for which she manages to at least negotiate a 5% partnership at the agency. She continues to work and raise her child with the help of her mother. But her daily struggles and routine humiliation are suggested to be part of her life as a single working mother. Harry Crane attacks her in front of the entire board: “I’m sorry my accomplishments happened in broad daylight and I can’t be given the same rewards” (“To Have and to Hold”). Joan Holloway’s trajectory is far arduous, and the effects of her constant negotiations at work far more pernicious than the anxieties and sexism depicted in The Apartment. Holloway’s struggles question The Apartment’s easy resolution. It induces a mistrust towards the imagination of a stable and settled life for Kubelik, hinted at the end of the film, and retroactively comments on the precarious existence of working women in gendered environments. Retro’s intertextualities redirect attention to older source texts and consequently to narrative gaps and silences in them, affecting their contemporary reception. Mad Men can afford circular structures, a byproduct of its hybrid format (a mix of the series and the serial form); it combines episodic closures with continuous plot development and facilitates returns to previous events while denying absolute closures. Furthermore, commonplace day-to-day experiences often constitute the basis of serialized narratives and, as such, Mad Men naturally moves beyond depictions of historical events and popular cultural memories towards an exploration of the everyday. The series’s structure both suits and enables its irreverent posture towards its intertextual references. Joan Holloway’s story is mapped upon Fran Kubelik’s, but in the series Holloway’s trajectory continues beyond the apparent closure of marriage to open up again to the possibility of other struggles. Mad Men’s seriality keeps the process of negotiation with history and cultural memories open and dynamic, and in so doing it implies that revisiting historic periods always involves a process of meaning-making that shifts in accordance with present needs. The Apartment is referenced, but its reception is mediated when presented alongside the diegetic commentary, which challenges its premise of happily-ever-after endings for single working women of the ’60s; Bobby Helms’ “My Special Angel” is revived, but the dissonance that emerges from its insertion alongside violent imagery demystifies its premise, of the woman as ‘the angel.’13 13

“The Angel in the House” (1854) is the first of a four part poem series by Coventry Patmore illustrating the qualities of his wife, Emily Augusta Andrews, whom he believed

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Revival “Zou Bisou Bisou” is an obscure music intertext that is inserted into the diegesis as a live performance. Jessica Paré recorded it herself in a studio prior to the shoot and lip-synced it during filming. Subsequently, her version of the song was released on iTunes, and Lionsgate Television Music also produced vinyl editions of the song (“‘Zou Bisou Bisou’: ‘Mad Men’ attempts”). The song enjoyed enormous popularity; it was a trending topic on Twitter and was on the music charts as well. Paré says it was more successful than she ever anticipated (Kaptik). In fact, online searches for the song immediately take viewers to the Paré version on YouTube, substantiating the revivalistic potential of a retro rendition of a ’60s song (“Mad Men - Zou Bisou Bisou (720p)”). There is also a practical reason for using old and almost forgotten songs such as “My Special Angel” or “Zou Bisou Bisou” as intertexts because their copyrights are far cheaper compared to iconic chartbusters (“‘Mad Men’ Paid $250K”). These songs lend themselves more easily to retro’s transformations compared to cultural heavyweights such as Bob Dylan, Beatles, and Frank Sinatra songs that belong as much to the present as they do to the past. Revival is an offshoot of retro’s interaction with the past. Retro revitalizes memories of older texts that it carries within itself as quotations. The term “revive,” however, fails to convey the transformations and the modifications brought about by a retro. Retro is in constant dialogic relationships with older texts. These intertextual relationships are ironic, playful, and irreverent, and seldom insist on exact reproduction. Retro recalls intertextual memories, always commenting and transforming them. It builds upon the contiguities with the preceding corpus, adapting the intertexts to suit the moods and meanings of its own text. Mad Men cinematographer Phil Abraham points out, “Movies [of the 60s] were an influence, but we didn’t say, ‘Let’s make The Apartment.’” (Feld et al.). The intention of retros such as Mad Men is to acknowledge influence but not to the effect of imitating the original. The emphasis is on the continuities but never on returning to an originary point in televisual history. Contemporary retros enter into a transformational relationship to the original; it revives certain audio-visual stylistic traditions but appropriates and transforms them

to be the feminine ideal. The poem contributes to Victorian era myths about women who find contentment within the domestic space.

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along the way. Retros intertextualities generate interest in the past by pointing at continuities and their relevance, and by rebranding and repackaging the past in exciting and challenging new forms and narratives. Mad Men’s title sequence is a case in point. The minimalist falling man animation used in its opening credits is a nod to legendary graphic designer Saul Bass. It evokes memories of his works such as the opening sequence of Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest and the falling man poster of Vertigo. But Steve Fuller explains that Mad Men’s title sequence is “a kind of an update of Saul Bass” (Landekic). The word “update” is significant: technological advances in cinematography, styling, and graphics play an important role in the series’s transformations. In the case of the title sequence, its After Effects 3D graphics at once echo Bass’s work, evoking memories of ’60s cinema, but render the intertext novel and contemporary. By technologically updating its intertextual references, Mad Men highlights both continuities with ’60s popular culture and re-imagines contemporary contexts for its reception. Present day delivery technologies facilitate a culture of pause-and-play viewing, which in turn assists in detailed readings of texts, and creators too on their part increasingly layer their work with finer, more obscure intertexts. The high-resolution technologies have their benefits and allow for peripheral objects to be zoomed in on and scrutinized. The interest in locating these citations also change the relationship of the viewers to the retro text, where viewers not only follow the plot but they are equally attentive to as many aural and visual intertextual cues as is possible in one viewing. Naturally, the demand for undivided attention, the careful arrangement of the mise-en-scène, each object on the set enticing with its own material history, and the complex plots on television motivate repeated viewings of the text. These citations enrich the textuality of contemporary retros. But it is not simply that the contemporary text benefits from the traces of older texts, the older texts too are affected by these intertextual insertions. They are invigorated within the culturescape and their memories recalled. Especially for the obscure and the low brow references, these insertions entail a revival. In addition, the screenings of films and television that propose to supplement textual comprehension and background aid in memorializing the older references. The creators are aware of the revivalist potential of retros, and they actively acknowledge and support the interest in the older texts to enhance the pleasures of their own texts. The Mad Men exhibition held by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York screened ten films that influenced the show, evidencing the extent to which the Mad Men viewing experience is intertwined with classic cin-

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ematic conventions and memories. The screening series, entitled “Required Viewing: Mad Men’s Movie Influences,” was curated by Weiner himself and he wrote descriptions for each of the films on the museum’s website (“Exhibition: Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men”). Curated lists like Weiner’s have the capacity to create new networks for the circulation of memories of 1960s cinema. For example, a Mad Men viewer writes of The Apartment on the AMC Mad Men talk forum: “If it wasn’t for Mad Men, and the people who write on this Forum, I wouldn’t have watched [The Apartment]. It has now become one of my favorite early ’60s flicks” (60’schild). The viewer’s comment reveals how Mad Men’s citations do more than provide additional layers of textual meaning. It encourages its viewers to familiarize themselves with the entire source text rather than just the parenthetical intertext that appears in the series. Many contemporary viewers who are active on online forums confess to researching intertextual references and watching old television and cinema to fully decode the episodes’ conveyed messages. Retros’ intertextualities are often not self-evident. They rely on a strong network of fans, critics, and commentators for their identification and interpretation. Intertextual information is made readily available online with weekly recaps and review articles published after each episode. Most of them include lists of references, such as those found in The Guardian’s “Mad Men: Notes from the Break Room” (W. Dean). Often, these articles provide links to short YouTube clips. The online activity suggests that both critics and fans consider a model Mad Men viewer to be one who can recognize, or is at least willing to invest in, its cultural and historical references. Online platforms invite and enable participatory viewing practices and are characteristic ancillaries of contemporary television. In these online discussions, episodes in which significant events occur often take on certain qualities of factual televised events, encouraging viewers to ask one another what they did after watching the episode or where they were when they watched it, amongst other questions specifying the experience of viewing television. For Mad Men, these shared contextual memories mediate the textual memories of the episode and the intertextual memories of its ’60s references. They are no longer limited to the viewer’s living room and discussions with people directly known to the viewer, but are expanded to include online discussions with strangers with a shared interest in Mad Men. This is particularly notable after the death of Bertram Cooper in season seven, which triggered the publication of several online articles, blogs, and fan-produced videos commemorating the character on YouTube. In the pro-

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cess, memories of the character become intertwined with memories of the actor Robert Morse whose presence in the series is itself an intertextual citation. Morse’s performance as J. Pierrepont Finch in both stage and film productions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying inextricably ties him to cultural memories of the ’60s. The episode “Waterloo,” in which Cooper dies, features an imagined song and dance sequence in which Morse performs “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson). The performance is self-conscious in that it draws on viewers’ memories of Morse’s ’60s musical comedy fame. But it is ironic that Cooper’s apparition iterates such idealism as: “The sunbeams that shine / They’re yours, they’re mine.” Viewers know Cooper to be an ardent Ayn Rand fan and that he lived a life marked by business acuity and shrewdness. He is the man who bought a Rothko for ten thousand dollars not for its aesthetic appeal but because he estimates that “that thing should double in value by next Christmas” (“The Gold Violin”). Nevertheless, Cooper’s exhilarating performance motivates viewers to share not just their memories of viewing the episode but also of Morse’s ’60s performances. The Moderate Voice editor-in-chief Joe Gandelman calls attention to Morse’s former fame and several fans upload clips from previous Morse films to YouTube as a tribute to the fictional character Cooper (Gandelman). Morse’s final song-and-dance sequence reminds viewers of the continued exchanges between the ’60s and contemporary popular culture. Retro does not trivialize its heterogeneous intertextualities, which are derived from both high and low brow cultures. The historical significances of these intertextual references are acknowledged, and they are incorporated into the contemporary retro text in intelligent and creative ways. The value of retro’s intertextualities is never located in their potential to return to a point of origin in cultural history. Instead, it is located in the opportunities that it affords to appropriate, adapt, and repackage the past in exciting and challenging ways. The emphasis is on the capacity of the contemporary text to transform the cultural memories that it reintroduces to present-day consciousness. Retro encourages its viewers to invest in the appropriated fragments of past popular culture, and to participate and derive pleasure from the discussions around them. Mad Men’s intertextualities stir the desire to revisit the past by pointing to its continuities and relevance to the present. It is invested in contemplating the past, albeit with new perspectives or through novel appropriations of the old. While its authenticity rests on the mise-en-scène, its goal is adaptation. Retro’s emphasis is always on the present, forming a continuum between the different networks of memory: memories of the past’s

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cultural artifacts and the new memories of the text and the contexts that are created daily. Instead of approaching the American ’60s as a monolith to be preserved, Mad Men engages with the era interactively. It provides a space for multiple registers of language, form, and cinematic vocabulary to co-exist, equalizing and subsuming in its flow its various centers of cultural influence. By revisiting the 1960s in a way that is intertextual, idiosyncratic, and partial, Mad Men highlights contradictions in notions of historical authenticity and offers up the ’60s in a way that is suited to its contemporary audience.

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“An Unsung Hero” Mad Men’s third season DVD set carries a two-part special feature “Medgar Evers: An Unsung Hero” on the life and legacy of NAACP1 activist Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963 by a member of the White Citizen’s Council. The documentary contains extensive interviews with his widow Myrlie Evers-Williams, daughter Reena Evers-Everette, and brother Charles Evers, each stressing the significance of Evers’s political activism to the racial struggle in postwar Mississippi. Through the interviews, viewers get a glimpse of the racially segregated Mississippi in which Evers grew up and later returned to at the end of his military service in the Second World War. His wife talks about his disappointment at not being treated as a “first class citizen” even after having served in the US Army. Charles Evers, who had also joined the army, confirms that the humiliation the two brothers felt upon their return was a turning point in their political lives. Medgar Evers became an active participant in the civil rights movement. He joined the NAACP and made efforts to mobilize the African American communities of the Mississippi delta to register as voters. During this period, Evers and his family received several death threats, and Reena Evers-Everette narrates how her father taught the children through simple survival games how and where to hide if their house came under attack. The images of Evers’s life presented in the documentary as a bold political activist, an idealistic husband, and a protective father contrasts with the fleeting reference to his assassination in the Mad Men episode “The Fog.” In the diegetic world of Mad Men, Evers is relegated to the margins; his assassination is presented as a minor disruption to the lives of its white

1

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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protagonists. Consistent with the white upper-class perspective that the series represents, no screen time is devoted to explain the significance of the tragedy to American political life and for the African American community in particular. “An Unsung Hero” compensates for this elision, zooming in on the Evers reference. It provides an insight into his life and vision which, while being enriching in itself, also heightens the ironic stance of the episode’s narrative. The reference to Medgar Evers in “The Fog” is a historical intertext within Mad Men, and the documentary “An Unsung Hero,” appended as a DVD special feature, is a related but partially independent entity situated outside of the main narrative. “An Unsung Hero” functions as a ‘paratext’ to Mad Men, offering additional information about the series’s historical setting and specifically on the Medgar Evers intertext. “The Fog” and “An Unsung Hero” work as foils, framed by similar background scores,2 font styles and colors, and which, when juxtaposed, add layers and depths of understanding to one another. The title “An Unsung Hero” implicates a divided America that is yet to fully recognize the sacrifices made by Evers; the interviews in the documentary present Evers within a familial context and show the cost of his sacrifices borne by each one of his family members. While “The Fog” brings to us white upper-class America’s self-centric responses to Evers’s assassination, “An Unsung Hero” functions as its antithesis and shows the viewers the momentous influence of his death on the African American community leading to boycotts, marches, voter registrations, and the eventual election of Charles Evers as the mayor of Fayette, the first ever African American mayor elected in the state of Mississippi. Paratexts such as “An Unsung Hero” underscore ironies, enhance dissonances, and magnify notes that are marginal to the series’s narrative. The term ‘paratext’ was coined by Gérard Genette, drawing from the ambiguous meanings of the French prefix ‘para,’ which imply positions both adjacent to and beyond. Even though the etymological account gives the impression that paratexts are secondary to or an accompaniment to the text, Genette clarifies that, “a text without a paratext does not exist and never has existed” (3). A text, according to Genette, is a materialization of an artistic idea with meaning and significance, either transcribed or transmitted orally, and whose materiality is a reminder of the narrator or transcriber and therefore it immediately generates paratextual effects. He argues that paratexts surround 2

The same background score is used in the Mad Men episode “Three Sundays.”

Chapter 4: Mad Men and its Paratexts

and prolong a text and present it to the world, functioning as a “threshold” between the inside and the outside of a text. His terminology often includes a spatial aspect: a paratext to him is a “vestibule” (borrowing Jorge Luis Borges’ term for the preface of a book) installed at the entrance of the world of the text, proposing to the readers “the possibility either of entering or of turning back” (Genette and Maclean 261). He develops an exhaustive structure of poetics of the various literary (trans)textual relationships, the most relevant of which are the concepts of ‘peritext’ and ‘epitext’: “paratext = peritext + epitext” (Genette 5). All paratextual elements included along with the publication of the text are termed peritexts while all others situated at a “distance” are the epitexts. The location of the peritext is adjacent to the text and the epitext is located outside and beyond the text. The DVD cover is a manifest example of a peritext, carrying significant information on the genre, style and, content. It typically contains essential orienting information such as promotional blurbs, short reviews, information about the creators, and publication details. It is in a sense a gateway to the text. Other peritextual examples include the title of the work, contents menu, chapter titles, and special features. The epitext, on the other hand, is any information related to the text that might add to the textual meaning and interpretation. Often, viewers’ interest in a text expand to include interviews, commentaries, press conferences, online reviews, and biographical information on the cast and crew, all of which are epitextual sources independent of the text and which deepen viewers’ connections to the text. Epitexts are free of the boundaries of the text, making the epitextual corpus potentially endless. In Genette’s framework, “An Unsung Hero” is an epitext of Mad Men, as it is spatially detached from the series’s television broadcast. However, as a Lionsgate commissioned production, created as an additional feature to be included with the series in its DVD release, it is also a peritext. The duality arises from the availability of the series in more than one format. Depending on the version and the format considered, the boundaries of the series expand and contract. Genette notes a similar fluidity of the paratextual categories for books: “nothing precludes [an epitext’s] later admission to the peritext. Such admission is always possible … see the original interviews appended to posthumous scholarly editions” (344). Additionally, Medgar Evers: An Unsung Hero is an independent entity—a ‘text’ with its own genre, format, narrative, and creators. It even has its own trailer available on the YouTube channel of the Journey Film Group, the “innovative production company,” hired by Lionsgate to make the special features for Mad Men’s third season. The documentary

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has found independent significance and circulation, continuing a life beyond the ambit of Mad Men. In 2013, Medgar Evers: An Unsung Hero was included as part of the Reel Civil Rights Film Fest organized by the Little Rock Film Festival and screened at the Arkansas Museum to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Evers’s death (“LR Film Fest”). Still, being a commissioned feature for Mad Men, the copyright to the documentary is shared jointly by Lionsgate and Journey Film Group, making apparent its transtextual relation to Mad Men. While the documentary does not refer to Mad Men in its narrative, the most likely way to watch An Unsung Hero is to obtain the Mad Men DVD set; its trailer recommends that its viewers go and “check it on the DVD special features” of Mad Men (“Medgar Evers An UnSung Hero”). Extending Genette’s framework to media studies, Jonathan Gray argues that in our highly mediatized environment, paratexts have found new intensity, connectivity, and longevity. 21st century paratextual cultures continue to expand across mediums and formats to include newer and innovative forms. The television and film industries pump in vast amounts of money into promotional paratexts that are increasingly compatible with multiple platforms to keep their productions in circulation and in a viewer’s memory far beyond the initial run of the text. For instance, a viewer might encounter a billboard promoting Star Wars: Rogue One outside the office, listen to a podcast discussing George Lucas’s career on the way home, later watch The Return of the Jedi on a Smart TV while drinking out of a Hans Solo soda glass placed right next to a Star Wars figurine collection. Sequels, promotional merchandize, podcasts, and video essays prolong a text, allowing viewers to remain with a text for much longer than the traditional boundaries ascribed to a film or television program. These new forms extend the life and memory of a text and diversify the ways in which viewers can participate in a text, be it within its narrative universe or linger outside of it in the ever expanding epitextual spaces. Henry Jenkins points out that not just paratextual boundaries, but the boundaries of the text itself has been opened up in the present times as meaning is now created across mediums through transmedia storytelling and created collectively (by creators, fans, critics, and commentators) through participatory paratextual cultures. Considering these developments in televisual cultures, Gray argues that paratexts can no longer be considered peripheral to the text, but as constituting the text. The convergence of the two conforms to Kristeva’s conception of a text as a continuous production of meaning (Kristeva 36; Gray 7). These developments in the paratextual discourse and transmedia storytelling shift the focus from the spatial relationship between a text

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and its paratext—whether the paratext is adjacent to or beyond the text—to a functional relationship between two texts—what function does one text perform for the other. Within the functional framework, An Unsung Hero continues to fulfill the motives of the retro text Mad Men, its paratextual relation to the series being defined predominantly by its capacity to regenerate interest in the ’60s rather than its contested inside-outside location in relation to the series’s textual boundaries.

Special Features, Audio Commentaries, Fan-made Paratexts Paratexts serve two essential functions for the viewer: initiation and illustration. Billboards and trailers are examples of ‘initiatory’ paratexts that viewers encounter before they step into the textual universe. They influence and orient their audience’s trajectory into the text, cueing them to the possibilities of what the text might be like and how it may fulfill their expectations. Sometimes, viewers speculatively consume these initiatory paratexts without any real intention of following through.3 While initiatory paratexts are specifically created to offer the ‘first look’ at an upcoming film or television program, in most cases it is not easily determinable what exactly initiates or convinces a viewer to consume one televisual text over another. Paratexts that perform the function of initiation might be different for different viewers. ‘Illustrative’ paratexts come into play once the viewer steps into the world of the text. They supplement the comprehension of the text and are activated after a viewer has made the decision to engage with the text. Illustrative paratexts elaborate and orient viewers, aiding in-depth information to interpret the text. The consumption of illustrative paratexts is deliberate rather than speculative. While we encounter initiatory paratexts—trailers, promos, ads, and posters—regularly and often involuntarily, we seek out illustrative paratexts—DVD featurettes, commentaries on TV channel websites, and fan-made web entries. Paratexts such as newspaper and magazine reviews are both initiatory and illustrative: they invite as well as augment the text. In the context of retros, illustrative paratexts are of particular interest as they are central to participatory viewing cultures. 3

Amid abundant choices, viewers are compelled to engage in ‘speculative consumption,’ where they tentatively assess the pleasures that a text may offer in comparison to other available texts (Gray 24).

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For viewers of a long format series such as Mad Men, the decision to consume paratexts in addition to its 92 hour-long episodes indicates their investment in, and commitment to, the series. Creators acknowledge this interest and actively facilitate the consumption by commissioning special features for the DVD release. The video montage “Earth Day 1970” included in Mad Men’s seventh season DVD set is such an example. It showcases an event that is not even directly referenced in the series’s narrative. Solely composed of archival photographs related to the Earth Day held on 22nd April 1970, the paratext provides a historical context for the episode “Time Zones,” which opens in April 1970. By inserting “Earth Day 1970” as a paratext, Mad Men, in characteristic retro way, pulls this event closer to the present. The two and a half minute video montage frames ’70s America as the beginning of environmental consciousness and teases viewers to dig deeper about the Earth Day to find its relevance to the present. The Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency are but a few of the immediate consequences of the Earth Day event that are significant to the present. “Earth Day 1970” also contributes towards narrative validation: it justifies the authenticity of the Draper family picnic scene shown in an early episode “The Gold Violin,” set in 1962. The scene is remembered for making viewers uncomfortable while watching the Draper family carelessly leave the park littered after their picnic. The lack of environmental concern was used as a theme throughout “The Gold Violin:” at one point the agency strategizes an ad campaign for Pampers’s cheap diapers, emphasizing its easy disposability as the prime selling point. The theme is reminiscent of the famous 1955 Life magazine photo of a family breaking away from tedious chores of cleaning and washing to embrace and celebrate “Throwaway Living.” “The Gold Violin” recreates an era that is yet to become environmentally aware. “Earth Day 1970” legitimizes the series’s take by pegging environmental consciousness to ’70s America. The inclusion of “Earth Day 1970” adds another layer of meaning to the seventh season as it hints at the impending infiltration of ’60s countercultural impulses and progressive movements by the advertising world. The paratext is a reminder of the implicit association of the event to advertising maestro Julian Koenig, the man “who sold Americans on Beatles and Earth Day” (Yardley). He came up with the instantly appealing name ‘Earth Day’ for the event that was originally conceived as ‘Environmental Teach-In.’ Koenig was already famous for his minimal but expressive ideas, such as the Volkswagen Beatle “Think Small” campaign, and the name ‘Earth Day’ stayed true to his style. Simple and evoca-

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tive, it resonated and stuck around since the ’70s. Mad Men’s last episode, “Person to Person,” read in conjunction with “Earth Day 1970” reminds viewers of this historical linkage between counterculture and advertising. The audio commentary track is another modern promotional paratextual form that is particular to audio-visual mediums. The narrative is overlaid by audio tracks where members of the cast and crew explain a scene or divulge insider details while the visuals continue to play on screen. At any point, the audio can be switched back to the diegetic narration, instantly transporting the audience back to the narrative universe from an intimate paratextual space shared with its creators. Although audio commentaries existed before the arrival of DVDs—such as the Ronald Haver commentary for the 1984 Criterion Collection LaserDisc release of King Kong—they were expensive and few and far between. With the advent of DVD technology and the space that the new format could offer, extra features became more common and affordable. On average, the Mad Men DVD releases contain around five audio commentary tracks per season. In the audio commentary on “The Gold Violin,” Weiner lists the themes that run through the episode: materialism, wasteful consumerism, and “co-option in advertising.” According to him the student movement against materialism kicked off with the 1962 Port Huron statement, environmental consciousness began with Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, and “the Crying Indian [ad] isn’t until 1970,” establishing a chronology for the environmental movement in America. Through such a commentary viewers get an impression of Weiner’s sense of the ’60s, and the cultural signposts that signal the direction of the narrative trajectory. The commentaries enable viewers to understand the meaning and value of historical references to the narrative universe and to anticipate important thematic arcs such as materialism and self-conscious ’60s youth culture. Weiner sometimes shares less consequential details such as gestures that were not written in the script but were spontaneous contributions of the actors in a particular scene. Glimpses into these intimate details strengthen the viewer’s relationship to the series. In the commentary on “Tea Leaves,” audiences learn that Betty Francis was shown to put on weight in the fifth season premier because January Jones was pregnant. But within the narrative universe, Betty’s weight gain is explained as her reaction to Draper’s marriage to a woman much younger than her. She visits a doctor to get a prescription for some diet pills, but during her checkup the doctor finds a tumor in her thyroid. She fears it might be cancerous, but eventually tests reveal that the tumor was benign, and she accepts that she is

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“just fat.” She goes through a gamut of emotions throughout the episode and it ends with her resigned acceptance of her new body. Alone in her kitchen, she relishes some leftover ice cream as the youthful end credit song “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” plays, emphasizing the painful irony. In the audio commentary, Weiner points out the themes of the episode: the older generation’s fear of being replaced, their coming to terms with bodily changes, changes in society and in their personal and professional lives, and the ascendency of the younger generation. Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson rise through the ranks, Roger Sterling is miserable at being made to feel almost unnecessary to the firm, Draper’s second wife, young and confident, belongs to the new generation of self-conscious women and her presence and persona signals Draper’s outdated generational location. Once again, these are themes that recur and are relevant to the entire series. A small controversy was stirred up by a scene in “Tea Leaves,” in which Betty’s husband, Henry Francis, a republican advisor to New York City mayor John Lindsay, calls Michigan Governor George Romney “a clown.” Tagg Romney immediately responded on Twitter, calling the series “lib media mocking my dead grandpa” (@tromney). Mad Men’s reputation for foregrounding parallels between the ’60s and the present convinced some pundits to see the swipe at George Romney as the series “weighing in on Election 2012 from the year 1966” (Carruth). In the audio commentary Weiner gets a chance to respond to the allegations: “This line got some attention. It’s not just some random swipe at Mitt Romney. This was actually ... just a reminder of the fact that George Romney was running for office and that of course Henry being in Lindsay’s office would be a rival of his. And guess what Republicans and Democrats talked that way about their rivals.” Weiner uses the paratextual space to push his agenda of convincing his viewers that every historical reference in Mad Men is deliberated upon, and the DVD audio commentary becomes a medium through which he responds to audience reactions, enabling a feedback loop. Audio commentaries also enable cast and crew to speak about the filming process, shoot locations, the sequence in which the scenes were shot, explain ideas behind scenes, and to convince the audience of the successful translation of ideas from the script to the shoot. In “Tea Leaves” the production team transforms their Los Angeles studio’s parking lot into the backstage of Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, where Draper and Harry Crane go to a Rolling

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Stones concert to meet with the band. But the series creatively avoid showing the band by having Crane mistakenly meet with an obscure ’60s pop band The Trade Winds instead. Minutes later, the audience sees some camera flashes at the end of a corridor and The Stones fans rush to greet them. Draper and Crane never get a chance to meet with the band and give up their idea of signing them to do the Heinz jingle. The paratextual space of the audio commentary allows the production team of a retro to share with their audience the little triumphs in recreating an ephemeral experience of the past such as a concert and at the same time to draw attention to their creative achievements. On the part of the viewers, it justifies their own investment in the series, rewarding them with a semblance of familiarity and easy rapport with the cast and crew. Other commissioned paratextual practices include box sets with promotional giveaways, games and spin-offs, television and film-related merchandize, tie-in comic versions and book releases, and collaborations with fashion designers to promote collections inspired by the styles presented in a film or television. In addition, production houses like AMC host YouTube channels that serve as a fountainhead of paratextual material for its programs. A cursory search on AMC’s YouTube channel reveals a playlist titled “Mad Men” that contains 140 videos, including several thematic video series such as “Janie Bryant on Costumes,” “Mad Men Tributes,” and “Inside Mad Men.” Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant also authored the paratextual book The Fashion File to showcase her inspirations, present an overview of historical fashion, and give a behind-the-scenes look at the intricate assembling of the costumes for the series. Her book enables the reader to develop their own sense of style à la Mad Men. If retros wish to start a conversation about the past, then their paratexts offer the space where this conversation occurs. Mediums such as the Internet, DVDs, magazines, and newspapers offer infinite possibilities for a retro text to creatively use to its advantage. Mad Men uses the AMC website to showcase curiosities from the ’60s which, well extending beyond its narrative, serves to create a renewed interest in ’60s style, fashion, curated oddities and collectibles. “Mad Men: The Complete Fan Companion,” a collection of animated slide shows viewable only on the official webpage dedicated to the series, allows the visitor to choose from options such as “Fashion,” “Hair,” and “Props.” Each section displays a series of stylistic slides, depicting how the retro text adapts the ’60s through its design, decor, dress, and props. On a different part of the website, in the forum “Talk,” during the years when Mad Men was on air AMC intermittently released a series of short blogposts under the

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title “1960s Handbook,” carrying paratextual information on historical subjects—the Tet Offensive, Chicago student nurse murders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, 1968 Democratic Convention and riots, and the film The Graduate—that can supplement viewers’ knowledge of the period. The “1960s Handbook” provides a broader sense of the ’60s to the interested viewer, not limiting itself to political turning points or even to topics referenced by the series’s narrative. Each entry contains hyperlinks to exhaustive archival sources suggesting further reading. Retros interact, in this sense, with digitized historical archives and documentation and seek to mediate viewers’ interests in the past via their paratexts. Not all paratexts are commissioned. There are many that fans create to discuss and pay homage to their favorite films and television programs. Viewers often create and share paratexts attuned to their own tastes and needs. Some are designed to provide shortcuts that aid in comprehending a densely populated long format serial television. For instance, if a viewer wishes to engage with a text in the middle of its television run, there are “orienting paratexts” that provide a quick overview of important events and characters (Mittell 261–291). Online news and magazine websites frequently carry weekly recaps of popular shows where they distill into the written form half-hour or hour-long televisual episodes, creating illustrative paratexts that take the reader through important scenes and that provide episode analysis. “The Evolution of Peggy Olson (Mad Men Supercut)” is a video paratext, originally featured on New York Magazine’s “The Cut” and shared on YouTube which, in its two minute twenty second run, takes its viewers through Peggy Olson’s journey from being Draper’s secretary to becoming a copy chief and his equal. The video culls out Olson’s story, disentangling it from other office subplots and emphasizing the preeminence of that particular story arc. It inscribes a version of Mad Men with Olson at its center. Paratexts can expand and contract the original dimensions of the text, zooming in and zooming out, taking different forms—written, visual, and aural (podcasts) to give its opinion, to reorganize, and to extend a text. The Web is rife with paratexts on television series organized in the forms of catalogs and listicles, with some that follow the hierarchies of seasons and episodes, others arranged in order of the appearance of cast, still others that collate popular scenes, and in the case of Mad Men lists that catalog advertising pitches and historical intertexts. Fan wiki websites, such as the 2004 founded Wikia (now called Fandom), also generate an exhaustive amount of entries. They add information about a series, some of which can be traced to the information shared on the TV se-

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ries’ host network websites, and at other times the information is a result of laborious hours of watching and rewatching a series and intensive research carried out by the fans. The wikis carry hyperlinks to additional reading material, encouraging readers to continue onto other webpages to make their own journey of discovering new information and interpretations. The wiki software enables complete strangers to work together to create wiki pages and collaboratively modify their content. Wikis are quickly absorbed into fan cultures as the model allows them to participate and shape texts around topics that interest them, and the software has dramatically expanded the idea of fan groups and fan activities. These online practices indicate a shift towards a culture of television viewing that is participatory and that can sustain multiple interpretations. Television today is open to be watched in various ways, with layers that can be unravelled with varying degrees of interpretations. Televisual texts conform to Barthes’s idea of a text, expanding beyond authorial intention and control, and opening itself up to the multiple meanings and interpretations brought by the diverse experiences and exposures of its viewers (Barthes, 1977, 1981). Paratexts are convenient promotional tools for the industry but they also constitute the canvas where fans express themselves. Fans today are not embarrassed of their engagement with televisual texts; they are invested in selfrepresentation and readily share their opinions as individuals and as a collective. Paratexts allow fans to speak to creators, offer loyalties or rebuttals, hold discussions that are free of time or space constraints. They are of special interest to retros because they offer the space where creators as well as fans express their own historical perspectives. If a retro series functions as a metaphor—a link between historical reality and a fictional narrative universe—fans affirm the metaphorical function through the consumption of the text and their paratextual offerings of personal details and snippets of family histories. A fan writes, speculating the pleasures of a retro: “I think a lot of viewers of a certain age do get a kick out of seeing an item they have in their collection or remember from that time. I have the red Thermaster cooler they used in the picnic scene (when they left their litter on the ground)” (Uncle Atom). Another adds, “If you have wondered about the blue ashtray on Don Draper’s coffee table and/or desk-it’s blue with bubbles in it. It is Erickson ware made from 1943–1961 in my hometown of Bremen, Ohio 43017 Population 2,000! What a thrill to see that sitting on DD’s coffee table” (Barnes). The posts inscribe the fan’s own personal histories into that of the retro series, and vice versa. Because of their limitless nature, paratexts can accommodate

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and magnify all the little artifacts such as the blue ashtray that make up the retro universe. Paratexts expand a retro’s diegetic universe, which subsumes within itself the personal histories of viewers and the political histories of the ’60s, making itself more credible and convincing.

Mad Men as Complex Retro Manipulations of chronology is one of the ways a narrative acquires complexity. Mad Men uses the flashback technique to insert events that chronologically precede the diegetic time, events that took place prior to its 1960s time frame. The flashbacks offer glimpses into Draper’s past: his childhood at the whorehouse (“The Crash,” “Collaborators”), his time in the Korean War (“Nixon vs. Kennedy”), his meeting with Anna M. Draper (Melinda Page Hamilton) (“The Gold Violin”), and his first meeting with Roger Sterling at the fur company (“Waldorf Stories”). The audience pieces together Draper’s story and his secret identity from these flashbacks. There are also illustrative paratexts such as “The Dick Whitman Chronicles v1.1” that stitch together the story of Draper’s life as Dick Whitman, arranging chronologically the flashback scenes peppered throughout the narrative. The Dick Whitman story is a sine qua non to the plot as it holds the key to understanding Draper’s personality and the choices he makes. Jason Mittell4 calls these events “narrative enigmas” (24)—events inserted to intrigue the audience, arouse their curiosity, and account for the causality within the narrative. Narrative enigmas are a regular feature of complex narratives; they direct the audience to “what previously happened to lead to these events and raise mysteries concerning the details of the present narrative situation” (25). Another way to interrupt the narrative chronology is to insert scenes from a character’s dream. For instance, in the scene at the Draper residence after the Kodak pitch, Draper imagines an alternate unfolding of events in which Betty and the children wait for him to join them on their Thanksgiving trip (“The Wheel”). The dream sequence immediately cuts to a repeat of Draper entering through the front door and calling out “Hello?” This time however he

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Mittell provides an exhaustive commentary on complex narratives in television, discussing a wide range of television programs from the late ’90s to the present, conclusively establishing the heterogeneity of ways in which complex stories are told on television in the present.

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is met with an empty silence. Weiner had an argument with AMC over the scene as the network insisted that the scene was not easily decipherable as a dream sequence. He negotiated this by inserting markers to differentiate the dream from reality—Draper places his hat on the banister post in the dream sequence but keeps it in his hand in the second sequence as he sits down on the stairs of the empty house (Weiner, Interview with A. Faillace). Weiner points out that such props and gestures allow the audience to unambiguously identify the dream sequence within the chronology of the diegesis. In “The Other Woman,” the diegetic chronology is narrated in a nonlinear fashion and the audience learns of the real sequence of events only as the episode unfolds. Draper pitches to the Jaguar clients and Joan Harris (née Holloway) is made to prostitute herself for the account. The Head of the Dealers Association, Herb Rennet (Gary Basaraba), suggests that Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove arrange for him to have an evening with Harris if they want him to influence the Jaguar selection committee. Campbell presents the idea to Harris and to the partners, who offer Harris money for her service. But Harris ultimately negotiates a 5% partnership in the agency. Draper disapproves of this deal and visits Harris at her apartment to dissuade her. He tells her that the creative department already has a great idea and that her sacrifice is not worth it. Next day, Draper pitches to the Jaguar clients and the visuals of his pitch are intermittently cut to insert scenes from a hotel room with Harris and Rennet. The audience sees Rennet make advances at Harris while hearing Draper talk about man’s desire for unattainable beauty. Although the two events appear visually simultaneous, after the pitch, the scene where Draper visits Harris at her apartment is repeated once again, pointing to the fact that when Draper went to Harris’s house the night before, she had already met with Rennet. This time, the audience is given more details to anchor the diegetic chronology of events: they see that when Draper visits Harris, she had just arrived home, still wearing the same dress and the pendent necklace that Rennet gave her in the hotel room. Narrative techniques such as flashbacks, dream sequences, and nonlinear narration add complexity to a text. When a retro text opts for a complex narrative, it poses an additional challenge for its viewers who have to pay attention to these manipulations in narration and chronology in addition to its numerous historical intertextualities and parallels between its historical setting and contemporary times. These layers of complexity add to the viewing experience, often demanding more than one viewing or discussions after.

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Complexity of plot is facilitated to a large extent by the availability of paratextual platforms where viewers collaborate to decode complex narratives, and often the creators and television experts join the conversation to verify or repudiate their assertions. Paratexts liberate television narratives from simplifications and overt prompts that give away important themes and plot twists. In fact, 21st century television narratives are designed with the presumption that there exist multiple paratextual sources that would later fill in the plot details for a deeper comprehension. There exists an implicit contract between the creators of complex television and the viewers which guarantees that the viewers will seek out paratextual sources and assimilate information relevant to the plot, its characters, historical background, and chronology. The creators of complex television series therefore need not explicate all the details within the narration time allocated for an episode. When Mad Men takes irregular temporal leaps as its seasons progress, it often leaves nothing more to viewers than oblique intertextual references that peg the narrative down to a particular date. After almost a year off-air, when the series returns to television in 2015 with “Severance,” the narrative picks up the story from April 1970. The temporal signal is marked by a reference to Nixon’s televised speech announcing the incursion on Cambodia (“Address to the Nation”). The Nixon reference informs the viewers that the series had jumped nine months since the last episode, “Waterloo,” set around the Apollo 11 moon landing. For those who recognize the Nixon speech, the jump from July 1969 to April 1970 is immediately clear. Others are expected to consult paratextual sources that brief them on the historical details of the episode. Richard Nixon is an important reference for Mad Men as Draper identifies with him (Weiner, Interview with A. M. Homes). The series establishes this connection early in season one when Draper observes that “Nixon is from nothing. Abe Lincoln of California, a self-made man. Kennedy, I see a silver spoon. Nixon, I see myself” (“Long Weekend”). The last season, situated during the Nixon presidentship, returns to the Nixon-Draper connection, emphasizing the ability of the two men to reinvent themselves in the face of personal and professional setbacks. Following up on the parallel between the two men, Nixon’s resurgence in national politics coincides with Draper’s return to the advertising world after his recuperation in a Californian retreat center. In its final moments, the series cuts to the iconic 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” television commercial, its insertion suggesting that Draper conceived the idea behind it. The Hilltop commercial was an instant success and for the diegetic universe of Mad Men the ad insinuates Draper’s successful return to the advertising

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world (just like Nixon’s return to national politics). While the Draper-Nixon connection is not necessary to comprehend the plot, the parallel (that Weiner reveals to be intentional) works at a subliminal level, and its recognition adds an extra dimension of meaning. The idea of an active television viewer and the lively paratextual culture that surrounds television bolster the confidence of retro texts to simply allude to historical figures and events that might be significant to a deeper comprehension of the plot. Complex narratives are also often fast paced, frustratingly dense, extremely localized, and sometimes even borders on the esoteric. David Simon, creator of The Wire, famously declares, “Fuck the exposition … If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called Google” (Nussbaum). He prioritizes the telling of complex stories over the telling of an accessible one. Certainly, the emphasis on an engaging story is neither new nor sustainable on its own. This supposed singular focus of television creators is enabled by the developments in the technological industry and televisual cultures making the availability of paratexts easy and affordable. In the ’80s and the ’90s, access to paratextual content was limited to subscriptions of specialized magazines and journals which catered to film and television professionals and enthusiasts or the purchase of the highly valued Criterion Collections. Most paratexts today are widely circulated via the Internet for free and are accessible to a large public (although to access commissioned paratexts such as “Medgar Evers: An Unsung Hero,” viewers still have to invest in a Mad Men DVD set). Part of the new storytelling culture is the ability to tell stories that are culturally specific and painstakingly detailed, stories that might have been earlier presumed to appeal to only a niche audience. But the presence of program specific paratexts offer cultural and linguistic literacy to the viewers and liberate creators to explore beyond the generic conventions and archetypal characters. The Wire is lauded for its clinical precision in the portrayal of the different institutions of the city of Baltimore. The Baltimore police department, the shipping industry, the education system, and real estate industry feature heavily in the series. Simon recreates them from his own experience as a former journalist at The Baltimore Sun and from the experiences of his writing partner Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective. But the rigor in reproducing the specificity of these different institutions and aspects of Baltimore has also attracted criticism for being obstinately defiant and excessively demanding. According to The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot:

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Viewers of “The Wire” must master a whole argot, though it can take a while, because the words are never defined … To have “suction” is to have pull with your higher-ups on the police force or in City Hall; a “redball” is a high-profile case with political consequences; to “re-up” is to get more drugs to sell. Drugs are branded with names taken from the latest news cycle: Pandemic, W.M.D., Greenhouse Gas. “The game” is the drug trade … [and] in one memorable neologism, a penis is referred to as a “Charles Dickens.” If The Wire, set in contemporary times,5 appears to be noticeably recherché, the retro series Mad Men could be even more alienating in the absence of paratexts. A retro televisual text is inescapably complex as its fundamental feature—with its ironic posturing towards people and events from the recent past—adds texture to its narrative. Its main goal is to deliver a complex narrative that draws the viewers in and which subsequently makes them curious enough to unravel the historical connections, engage with it outside of the narration time, and identify the ways in which the series adapts and comments on the intertexts. Historical specificity is often built around a plot later, while the plot itself might have germinated as an idea free of historical context. According to director Louis Malle: “Lacombe Lucien actually grew out of three abandoned projects. One was taking place in Algeria, at the end of the Algerian War, the next in America, at the time of the Vietnam War; and last one in Mexico, recently. I was interested in describing a character like Lucien Lacombe, but I wasn’t to sure in which historical context to place it” (Malle, “FILM FESTIVAL PREVIEW”). Malle wanted to explore “the banality of evil” through his film using an archetypal protagonist whose behavior is at once contemptible and complex (French 90). Weiner speaks of a similar trajectory when interviewed at the Museum of the Moving Image, stating that Mad Men too was developed from an abandoned movie project Horseshoe which was loosely set in the 20th century. The film was to follow the life of Peter Whitman who reinvents his identity during the war—an intrigue that is carried over to Mad Men. After his initial meeting with AMC executives, in which they inquired about the particulars of the plot, Weiner realized that the Mad Men pilot did not have any specific temporal and geographical details. Looking through his notes from earlier sketches and plots, he came across an old script, where on the last page the main character

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The Wire opens in post-9/11 Baltimore, more or less concurrent with real time as its first episode premiered in 2002.

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Dick Whitman drops off a man’s body, and the scene fades to the moment when Whitman gets off the train at Ossining. The year was 1960. Reading the sketch, it was immediately clear to Weiner: “This is the same character. This is the same story” (Sepinwall). These glimpses into the internal mechanics of story construction and script development can deeply affect viewers’ perception of a text. Knowing that Malle or Weiner built the historical background around an initial abstract story idea immediately changes the viewer’s expectations of historical accuracy from the retro texts. Yet, more often than not, once the historical setting has been decided upon, a complex retro begins to weave in historical details with its thematic arcs, creating a layered product that can be consumed both as a complex text and as a retro text. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the popularity and the pleasures of retros in the absence of illustrative paratexts that provide the historical and cultural context—the exposition, in Simon’s terms—as well as the platforms in which viewers discuss and debate over the details that make the final cut. Weiner himself concedes that the success of Mad Men is contingent on the changes in television, Internet, and social media since the show premiered in 2007 (Miller). Retros exist in an ever expanding paratextual universe with numerous epitextual content orbiting them. It is easy to find paratexts for a retro that provide historical literacy, expounding on a series’s historical setting and explaining the meaning of its many historical intertexts. Complexity in narration is not a necessary feature of retros. That the creators of Mad Men choose a complex narrative style reflects broader shifts in television production and viewing cultures since the beginning of the ’90s. TV was not always complex. The rise of complex storytelling result from the confluence of multiple vectors—competition in the industry due to the proliferation of new channels, availability of mature and tailored content on subscription-based premium channels, migration of film artists to television, developments in production and distribution processes, and developments in viewing technologies. Since the ’80s, American television was already headed towards diversification. New cable channels continuously strategized to brand themselves as unique and distinct from network television and strove to challenge the monopoly of the three network giants: NBC, CBS, and ABC. The competition pushed both the networks and the channels to create content that was distinct and to experiment with storytelling practices. The Sopranos, which aired on the premium cable channel HBO, is a pioneer of the “post-network”

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era;6 it demonstrated that television content need not have mass appeal to be successful. In spite of being subscription-based, the series enjoyed considerable popularity and its success was an example of a television program that delivered a complex story to dedicated viewers and that survived with little reliance on advertisers. It experimented with the gangster genre, toned down the dramatic action associated with the mafia film, and portrayed familial relations in a way that was darker and more subliminal. In terms of format, it integrated the unitary structure of the episodic series with the thematic preeminence of the long form serial. The success of The Sopranos was followed by The Wire, Mad Men, and similar high production value serialized dramas, sharing identifiable features such as complexity of plot, cinematic diegetic worlds, deferral of easy resolutions, and an unwillingness to pander to popular tastes. The Wire too mixes the episodic and serial forms, but it clearly prioritizes a season’s thematic arc over episodic handouts. In comparison, The Sopranos appear considerably more episodic than The Wire, where the dramatic action is slowed down to such an extent that narrative events often appear inconsequential to the larger narrative sequence. Jeffrey Sconce writes, “In the ‘postnetwork’ era of increased competition for viewing audiences, ‘cumulative’ narration provides distinct programming and demographic advantages. By combining the strengths of both the episodic and serial formats, this narrative mode allows new and sporadic viewers to enjoy the standalone story of a particular episode while also rewarding more dedicated, long-term viewers for their sustained interest in the overall series.” (98) If “unconventionality” is a defining characteristic of complex television (Mittell 18), the hybrid format combining the episodic and the serial forms aids in delivering this unconventionality. It is impossible to conclusively pinpoint the origins or the first appearance of a complex television series. Some of its distinct features can be traced to early network innovators such as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which foreshadowed narrative techniques that became common in later complex television series on premium and basic cable channels. The aspiration to be cinematic is an easily identifiable feature of complex television. In fact, gauging from the 6

Amanda Lotz uses the term “post-network” era to discuss the shifts in the television production and distributing processes, and the viewing technologies that have redefined and revolutionized television.

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slow narrative pace and the preference for open-endedness as well as the embracing of that which is morally ambiguous make complex television series rather cinema-like. The likeness to cinema sometimes finds an over emphasis because “many of the innovative television programs of the past 20 years have come from creators who launched their careers in film, a medium with more traditional cultural cachet” (Mittell 31). Lynch, who straddled careers in both film and television, exemplifies the movement of artists between the two industries. Twin Peaks was also a pioneer in diegetic extension with the publication of a tie-in book while the series was still on air. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch is an early example of transmedia storytelling in serial television (Mittell 298). In spite of these narrative innovations, Twin Peaks was cancelled after two seasons due to a drop in ratings, although since then the series has enjoyed a steady cult following that has only grown over the years. In 1992, Lynch made the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me on the last days of Laura Palmer, extending the Twin Peaks story to yet another medium. Towards the end of the original series the mystery around Laura Palmer’s murder was solved but the final scenes held a quiet promise of return, which was ultimately fulfilled in 2017 when the series did return after more than 25 years on the premium television channel Showtime. ABC had cancelled Twin Peaks in 1991 for not playing by the book (“G3. Why was TP canceled?”). It was a murder mystery that was less interested in solving a murder and more interested in a slow psychological exploration of the members of a small town. It combined the elements of the psychological thriller, the supernatural drama, the daytime spoof, and the detective series to create something truly unconventional. Perhaps Twin Peaks might have had a longer run on a subscription-based premium channel. The critical and commercial success of The Sopranos on HBO opened the floodgates to television programs with complex plots, morally ambiguous characters, cinematic style, and a vehement resistance to the formulaic conventions of genre and format. Television critics identify this moment in television history as a new Golden Age7 (Martin 9). In addition to complex content on television, the high definition quality of the television viewing devices and production accoutrements (better cameras, recorders, sound

7

Martin identifies two earlier Golden Ages: the first coincides with “the earliest days of the medium, the second a brief period of unusual network excellence during the 1980s” (9).

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mixers) have also improved greatly over the last two decades. The DVR8 and more significantly the DVD technologies, followed by the increasing popularity of internet-based television in the 21st century such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have changed the landscape of television viewing. Martin writes, “DVDs were barely in use when The Sopranos debuted. By the time it ended, not only had DVDs represented a significant extra revenue stream for HBO, but—along with TiVo and other digital video recorders, online streaming, on-demand cable, Netflix, file sharing, YouTube, Hulu, and more—they had introduced a new mode of television viewing” (14). In addition, consumption of complex dramas often manifests itself in cultures of rewatching television and collecting television on DVD or in viewers’ digital libraries. Occasionally, these versions available as collectibles do not conform to the manner in which the series was originally aired, either in form or content, as they are free of the formal boundaries imposed by the television run of the text. The version of the late 1960s sci-fi TV series Star Trek currently available on Netflix reinserts the original pilot episode “The Cage” as the first episode, even though it had been rejected by NBC and was not part of the show’s original run on the network in the US. Similarly, the 2007 DVD release Apocalypse Now Redux of the famous 1982 film by Francis Ford Coppola contains an additional 49 minutes of footage that had been edited out in the original cut. Whether it be DVD releases, websites such as YouTube, or web-based television sites such as Netflix or Hulu, these spaces create the possibility of multiple versions of a text and open up multiple points of access to it. Complex retros—with their intertextualities, open-endedness, moral ambiguities, manipulations of chronology, unconventional plot twists and narrative enigmas, and cinematic styles and hybrid formats—act symbiotically with their paratexts to deliver an immersive experience. Contemporary viewers are willing to commit intellectually with their time and resources to collect, rewatch, decode, compare and comment, and to take control of a complex retro text. The pleasures of a complex retro text is often derived as much from the experience of watching (and rewatching) the text as from indulging in paratextual conversations where viewers draw out the various narrative and historical threads as a community. The success of the complex–retro dyad undoubtably rests upon 21st century paratextual cultures. Without paratexts, creators of complex retros would have had the formidable task of explaining 8

Digital Video Recorder

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within the text both the historical context and the narrative intricacies, and even if achieved, the viewing experience would possibly be dull and tiresome.

The Retro Aesthetic Time and budget compete with creative goals as Mad Men prop master Scott Buckwald goes out hunting for props. He receives the script of an upcoming episode a week before the shoot, and during this short span he finds and prepares the props. He researches the period-appropriateness of objects he intends to use, then hunts for the selected props, and finally prepares each object by either painting it or chemically ‘de-aging’ it—a process common to retros where a vintage piece is treated to look brand new, just as it would have been in the year the story takes place. Occasionally, Buckwald takes liberty to reproduce objects himself to save time, especially props made of paper such as book covers, newspapers, and magazines that can easily be printed: “I’ve remade Volkswagen ads on my computer, and I remade ‘Advertising Age’ magazine” (Keane and Lewis). It is easier for him to reproduce newspapers and magazines than to search for period-appropriate copies that look new. He relies extensively on decal technology to prepare his props, like the time when he prepped a peanut jar with a metal top and cardboard sides with a self-made decal to make it look like a metal Coke can from the ’60s. Part of the task is identifying objects such as the peanut jar, which already bears a resemblance to the shape and size of the period Coke can, thereby minimizing the costs and time of producing the prop from scratch. Creativity is fundamental to this process of transforming everyday objects to period artifacts: “It’s always turning one thing into another.” Buckwald’s creative process reveals that Mad Men’s retro aesthetic is a composition—a “combination of vintage and reproduction items,” and of creativity and technology. The ingenuity involved in Buckwald’s job shares a lot in common with the improvised patch-work art demanded of other production members. All of them constantly appropriate vintage and modern products to fit in the retro diegetic world. Through epitextual sources, the audience knows and appreciates these compositions and it considers the job of these professionals “fun, hard, and rewarding” (Rowan). The production team relies heavily on the Web for period sources, research, and in the hunt for props. Set decorator Claudette Didul mentions her dependence on websites such as Ebay, Etsy, and Craigslist to find props and furniture pieces, which are easily one of the

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most conspicuous building blocks of the series’s mise-en-scène (Silberman). Antique markets provide additional invaluable repertoires for Mad Men’s set decorators and costume designers. In her YouTube video series, costume designer Janie Bryant goes into the details of how she creates the costumes for the series, mixing and matching old fabric with modern ones to achieve a result that suits the palette and styles of ’60s America. She explains that the dress Megan wears for Draper’s 40th birthday, during her Zou Bisou Bisou act (“A Little Kiss, Part 1”), was a vintage black dress that had been partially destroyed and to which she added a new pair of accordion pleated sleeves (“Janie Bryant on Costumes”). Megan’s dress, as does other such reworked costumes in the series, illustrate the textured nature of retros that incorporates, adapts, and alters older intertexts to suit the aesthetic and design of the new text. The final product on screen is always part vintage, part reproduction, melded together with contemporary technology and creative vision to give an impression of the ’60s. Music composer David Carbonara’s score helps to understand how retros actively weave in pasts into presents. What Carbonara eventually creates is, in his own words, “the sound of the show” and not the sound of the ’60s, and he talks about his reliance on computers, collaborations with sound engineer James T. Hill, editor Jenny Barak, and orchestrator Geoff Stradling in achieving this sound. All of them bring their individual exposures and the music they grew up with into their new creation. Geoff Stradling acknowledges “taking colors, … taking things for our palette from Nelson Riddle, from Henry Mancini, from the music of the Era” (“Scoring Mad Men: Inside a Session”). James T. Hill explains that even within the text, there are two kinds of sounds: the underscores that are played underneath the dialogue and the music of live bands played within the series’s diegetic world. The latter demands greater consistency with the records of the ’60s. Carbonara, Stradling, and Hill use in their retro creations alto and bass flutes—instruments not commonly used in the present—to be consistent with the music of television and films of the ’60s. They also maintain the music aesthetic of the era by partly using ’60s recording techniques, the same microphones, and similar orchestra arrangements. They mix latest technologies with old techniques to create the sound of the retro series. Mad Men appropriates classic cinematographic conventions in its scene compositions, camera angles, and frames. Once the props and the mise-enscène are staged, the camera directs how the audience sees the retro aesthetic. Camera angles work as invisible frames that structure viewers’ entry

Chapter 4: Mad Men and its Paratexts

into scenes and guide their perception of characters. The central conceit of the series—Draper’s secret identity—is conveyed visually with the camera framing the back of Draper’s head. Director Alan Taylor uses this cinematographic device in the opening scene of the series to evoke curiosity about the man on screen (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”). The back of the head frame established in the pilot has since been used repeatedly in scenes that emphasize Draper’s secretiveness, his reluctance to reveal himself, and his out of place-ness. It has become known as one of Mad Men’s signature shots, seen even in the title sequence. Phil Abraham, the Director of Photography (DOP) of the initial episodes, explains that these frames aid in carrying the story forward visually: “I was always looking for opportunities to suggest [Draper’s] air of mystery ... I often shot from behind him or framed him so he was a bit obscured” (Feld et al.). This camera technique is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Notorious, where the protagonist T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) is first introduced to the audience in a party scene with the back of his head to the camera. He is the stranger in the room. The shot immediately draws the viewers’ interest to Grant’s character and establishes that his motives (which cannot yet be gauged as his face remains inaccessible) would be significant to the plot. Weiner acknowledges the films of Hitchcock (North by Northwest, Vertigo) as inspirations. It is easy to spot Hitchcockian narrative triggers such as identity thefts and ‘ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances’ in Mad Men. In addition, Weiner draws from Hitchcock’s cinematographic techniques: the low angles and the representations of New York City in the ’60s (Lumenick). The low camera angles in Mad Men evoke classic cinema: the films of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford. As an added benefit, they also help to incorporate into the frames the agency’s ceiling, which was especially designed keeping in mind the oppressive ceiling in the office space shown in The Apartment. According to cinematographer Christopher Manley, its inclusion within the camera frames contributes to the scenes graphically and to the depth of vision (Manley, Interview with Witmer). He adds that incorporating the ceiling into the frames is unusual in television, as many television programs use the ceiling to light the sets. The camera itself is used by Mad Men’s creators to evoke the atmospheric feeling of ’60s cinema that the series seeks to emulate. The question, “what would they do in the 1960’s,” define the strategies of the DOP and motivate many self-imposed “artificial boundaries” on the cinematography (Manley, Interview with Sound & Picture). For the tracking shots, Phil Abraham chooses to have the camera mounted on a dolly instead of the Steadicam as Steadicams

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were not introduced until 1975: “Steadicam and handheld work didn’t feel appropriate to the visual grammar of that time” (Feld et al.). Similarly, the lens is contained within the moderate range of 25mm to 75mm, and the frames are standard with a preference for medium shots and low angles, which correspond to ’60s cinematic studio style. Cuts are minimal. The scenes are tightly staged and take their time to play out; the composition is attentive to a single camera approach although a second camera is also present. As with the elevated diction and the dramatic pauses peppered through the speech, character’s movements are scripted and stylized. Most Mad Men frames could easily pass for beautifully composed photographs or paintings. The still from “The Phantom” with the five partners standing equidistant from one another, their backs to the camera, looking out the window of the empty floor that would be their new office, convey a new beginning and emphasize the presence of the new partner Joan Harris (Ehrlich). The perfect symmetry of the shot—Joan in her red dress at the center, with two men in black suits on either side—is reminiscent of the tightly structured visual compositions of classical cinema. The artifice is intentional and it instantly establishes a connection with the visual grammar of classical cinema, and at the same time the artifice, albeit carefully constructed, aids the storytelling process. In the audio commentary on “Long Weekend,” director Tim Hunter explains the mapping of narrow spaces like corridors, the placement of cameras, and the meticulous planning of the entries and exits of characters for continuous shots. The importance of shot composition in Mad Men for a seamless narration of a scene evokes Hollywood classical cinema practice in which the shot—the “material stylistic unit”—often approximated the scene—the “dramaturgical” unit (Bordwell 162). These stylistic overtures lends Mad Men its classic cinematic feel. The visual style that Phil Abraham develops in the early episodes of the series is continued by Christopher Manley who works as the DOP for 70 episodes on Mad Men. The initial style he inherits from Abraham was closer to the ’50s and early ’60s Hollywood studio style with strong backlights, but gradually he tones it down to a natural style that uses more window and bounce lights. The transition in Mad Men’s cinematography from Abraham’s initial studio style to Manley’s natural style mirrors the changes in cinematographic conventions during the ’60s (Manley, Interview with Arri News). At the time, rapid technological changes in film technology were taking place: sensitivity to light and color balance in film stock was improved and there was an increase in film speed. With the availability of faster film stocks, the films of the later ’60s did

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not need to use hard lights any longer; they could work with softer lights and still respond to colors. After the fourth season, on the insistence of Lionsgate, the series shifted to the Arri Alexa digital camera system in spite of Weiner’s professed love for film. The Alexa system dramatically improved clarity and prevented chromatic aberrations—the whites were no longer contaminated and the blues and the greens of fabrics did not shift color (ibid). Even though Weiner initially resisted the idea, he eventually conceded, thus paving the way for Mad Men’s hybrid identity in terms of its medium of recording. Weiner candidly reveals that switching to digital photography helped them “create backdrops that are more believable, especially if you put the sets on platforms to shoot. Don and Megan Draper’s entire apartment got raised 3 feet off the ground, which makes the background look like the real thing” (Weiner, Interview with C. Allen). In addition to creating believable backdrops, Mad Men editor Tom Wilson explains that the digital medium allowed for easy manipulation of footage and was cost effective (A_Ron_Hubbard). The wizardry in postproduction was crucial in replicating the visceral experience of film and in allowing a seamless transition into digital recording. The digital technology was much more sensitive to light and required lighting adjustments, but it also eliminated the grains present on film. To maintain consistency though, Technicolor made a custom filter for Mad Men to simulate the grain effect in post, making it look like the 5219 film stock that they had previously used (Manley, Interview with Sound & Picture). The retro aesthetic comprises the fashion, music, decor, set design, recording, where each part is a ‘created’ product—an imagined, periodaccurate artifact—that came into existence primarily because of what was available at hand and what could creatively be appropriated by the makers of the retro. Such negotiations necessarily result in a hybrid—a chimeric entity attuned to the sensibilities of the present, involving a plethora of newly created simulations of past images and inevitably containing a splatter of vintage products that survived the years. The hybrid retro aesthetic can manifest in the sets, where vintage mid-century sofas can be placed alongside CGI simulated backdrops or props where newspapers printed at the prop master’s office masquerade alongside duplicates of famous postwar paintings, and the mix asserts itself on the visual grammar and the background scores and diegetic sounds. The paratextual interviews invite the viewers to participate in the seemingly chaotic mix and match cultures of retros. Paratexts accentuate retro’s incorporation of intertexts and reveal its inspirations that

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result in new artistic creations. Be it Scott Buckwald, Claudette Didul, David Carbonara, or Janie Bryant, members of the Mad Men production team are conscious of retro’s creative mix and match culture and forthcoming in their discussions about its creative hybridity.

Product to the Process Creators of retro strive to minimize anachronisms in their representations to avoid distracting their audience. The 8 mm camera that Draper uses to film moments at Sally’s birthday party (“Marriage of Figaro”) was chosen by Weiner keeping in mind that it was the most popular mass produced camera model of the early ’60s and that people who grew up in the ’60s would be able to relate to it immediately (“Mad Men: The Complete Fan Companion”). Weiner’s prosaic reasoning for the choice of the camera also exposes the limitations imposed on a retro filmmaker. The choice is not sentimental but practical, one that is dependent on the availability of that camera model in the present. Negotiations like this are not only common but also constitutive of retro’s aesthetic and its cinematic realism. The Carousel scene in “The Wheel,” lauded as a tribute to the iconic Kodak Carousel, is a product of such a negotiation over digital and analog technologies. Jon Hamm recalls the “crazy noisy” slide projector that was initially replaced with a digital one, which, however, required substantial post production fixes. Ultimately, they “ended up just running the slide projector in the room” (Itzkoff). It is safe to say that the noise of the analog slide projector, far from being a distraction, adds to the composition of the scene and its sensorial depth. From screen grabs the model appears to be the Kodak Carousel 550 that was in circulation during 1961–66. The decision to switch to the analog technology was aesthetic and not based on any pedantic need for authenticity as is evident from the production team’s willingness to use a digital projector at first. Often, these behind-the-scenes negotiations are inconspicuous and do not distract from the storytelling. At times, however, they stir up controversy as in the series’s first episode—with “the typewriters [that] became a sore spot” (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Audio Commentary). It is Peggy Olson’s first day at work. Office manager Joan Holloway walks her to her desk, giving her pointers on how to prepare for the job. The sequence establishes the office space as the audience follows the two women walking past rows of other secretaries seated in front of their typewriters.

Chapter 4: Mad Men and its Paratexts

Holloway’s entire monologue is accompanied by a steady clickety-clack of the typewriters that surround them and eventually, she introduces Olson to the typewriter allocated to Draper’s secretary: “Now, try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology. It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use” (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”). In spite of the humor, audience attention is immediately drawn to the typewriter model—the IBM Selectric, released in July 1961, more than a year into the future from the standpoint of the episode, set in March 1960. Soon after the episode aired, online discussion forums responded to the obvious anachronism. Paratexts reveal that the decision was neither easy nor unanimous. The production team was divided over the use of the Selectric. Scott Buckwald made his displeasure apparent: “The secretaries at that advertising firm would have still been using vintage-style typewriters, but they used IBM Selectrics simply because the producer liked the way they looked and they made less noise on set. So we got many letters about how they were wrong, but, again, that’s [Weiner’s] call” (Keane and Lewis). A fraction of fans were sympathetic and offered that, had the production used an older model for the episodes set in 1960, they would have had to replace all the typewriters on set within a year when the series entered 1961 (Jackie). This reasoning, although kind, was unconvincing, especially since members of Mad Men’s art department have stressed repeatedly that their sets are attuned to changes as it takes place in real life, that is, in a slow and irregular manner. So the agency may or may not have had switched to the latest technology when the narrative moved to 1961. Weiner too has repeatedly maintained that history does not change overnight and that people wear and surround themselves with things that belong to different time periods. Still, the decision to use the Selectric became a sore spot and generated many explanations. The now discontinued Selectric was a popular model and could easily be procured by the production team as compared to other vintage models. Set decorator Amy Wells managed to forage 18 of them and had them painted over to look new and uniform, five or six of which were actually in working condition (Schwartz). Older models, in contrast, were not functioning or had carriage that moved. If they used dysfunctional typewriters on screen then the sound editors would have had to replicate their manual carriage return and insert it seamlessly. In either case, the vintage models were impractical or inefficient for the filming process, which is why Weiner decided to stick to the Selectric as it solved their “sound

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problem,” even if it meant negotiating historical authenticity (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Audio Commentary). Over the years, however, Mad Men develops a reputation for historical accuracy and Weiner for his obsessive nitpicking. Fans respond with equal zeal as they play the nitpicking game along with the creators. Spotting anachronisms takes the form of a playful easter egg hunt. There are, for instance, Mad Men paratexts that solely focus on the typeface and the language used in the series. They explain the origins and meanings of fonts and terms and preoccupy themselves with identifying anachronistic usages. Mark Simonson’s close scrutiny of typefaces used in Mad Men exposes the anachronisms that may elude most viewers at first glance; small details such as the inappropriate use of the Gill Sans typeface for the agency’s signage. Even though the Gill Sans existed since the 1930s, it was a British typeface that became popular in America only in the ’70s. Similarly, The New York Times language columnist Ben Zimmer provides a list of linguistic anachronisms. One of them is from “The Benefactor” set in early 1962, when Draper says, “The window for this apology is closing.” Zimmer points out that, “this type of figurative window is an extension from the aeronautical term launch window. Though launch window dates to the mid-’60s, the first known use of window as in window of opportunity or vulnerability comes from a 1979 congressional hearing.” Simonson and Zimmer bring their professional expertise to extend paratextual literacy around Mad Men and press for artistic rigor. However, a retro creator’s commitment to realism is not the sole measure of artistic rigor. Inventiveness and individualism in style equally contribute to a text’s aesthetic value. In fact, a retro’s artifice does not dissuade the audience. The desire to be informed about the seams and stitches that hold the retro artifact together becomes an essential part of the viewing process. The creators of retros are willing to discuss in public forums the constraints within which they work towards creating the onscreen cinematic realism, which is not history itself but only an artistic approximation. The reproduction involves several mechanistic manipulations and stratagems that give retro its shape. The simulations within retros are no longer viewed with suspicion as Jean Baudrillard anticipates in the ’80s. Rather, paratextual discussions have facilitated a supportive environment where professionals break down the processes of production for the audience and make the viewers conversant in their craft. Assisted by paratexts, fans chronicle the evolution of the series, its cinematographic styles, and the sophisticated technological manipulations. The interviews of Phil Abraham and Christopher Manley with the American Cinematographers

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Association offer ways of entering a retro text specifically from the cinematographers’ point of view. Similar paratexts abound that illuminate other facets of production and introduce fans to the works of the corresponding professionals concerned. The visibility of these professionals associated with the production of a series introduces viewers to their working styles as well as the limits and goals of their profession. Each emphasizes an emerging working class ethic defined by professionalism, collaboration, rigorous but rewarding work, and allegiance to the creator’s vision. The availability and financial viability of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ or ‘making of’ videos also indicate that viewers are interested in content beyond the primary text and that there is a tangible shift in the ways in which people watch and appreciate film and television at present. Paratexts shift the emphasis from the product to the process. They foreground the concessions and deviations that a creator’s ‘vision’ undergoes to find a network, a studio, and to finally appear on screen. Television programs are composite identities, and they evolve from numerous negotiations within an industrial complex that is constituted of agents such as financiers, advertisers, distributors, and technological innovations. Paratextual exposure to the filmmaking process shifts the conversation from intent to implementation, from one on authenticity to one on negotiation. The conversation is no longer at loggerheads with Jean Baudrillard’s simulations, and it can appreciate the resourcefulness and ability of creators to broker profitable deals for the production team and for the final product. Authenticity increasingly carries connotations of meticulousness, method, clarity, and obsession—qualities of artistry that creators of television habitually put on display like the past auteurs of film. Viewers today are familiar with the struggles of the writerdirectors of the television industry: doing second-rate jobs under successful and traditional show-runners, accumulating rejections by networks, and ultimately having their script come to life on screen. Unsurprisingly, each of these famous ‘writer turn show-runners’ of television programs is marketed as eccentric, be it Weiner’s secretive persona, David Simon’s journalistic precision, or David Chase’s reluctance to be the model television auteur. Their personality traits invariably contribute to their brand identity vis-à-vis the authenticity of the products they create. Brett Martin argues that these men have drawn the television writer into the limelight and Martin’s own book Difficult Men is as much a tribute to these cult writer-directors as is it about the cult anti-heroes that they created. Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) troubled relationship with his mother springs from the familial tensions David

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Chase grew up with. The Sopranos is both fiction and an exaggerated version of Chase’s own Italian-American upbringing. Weiner is exponentially more brazen and proclaims the authenticity of his series himself, contending that his story draws from universal and unchanging relationships between generational cycles, “I’ve always assumed that people have the same feelings as me. And I’m usually right. They just won’t admit it” (263). Authenticity is being reinvented as a measurement of how well a story is told or an argument made. It is resistance towards the formulaic, it is the ferocity with which creators protect their vision. Authenticity is increasingly perceived as a marker of creativity and craft as much as a marker of control and management. Television appreciation has correspondingly expanded to being informed of the creative processes, creator histories, writers’ room politics, and battles with networks and studios over finances, management of advertisers, and other external pressures that seek to constrain artistic freedom. The knowledge of these processes constitute the experience of the product, in addition to consumption of the product itself. These processes are creative and collaborative, but also combative. There is increasing awareness that these programs are as much about the story arcs as they are about the creators’ many triumphs over constraints. Weiner is famous for his protracted battles with AMC and Lionsgate over budget and for negotiating a deal that extended the series into the fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons without compromising on the 47 minute running time and without cutting down the cast—although he did agree to product placements that could be introduced organically within the show (Andreeva). The drama arguably unfolds both within and outside of the primary text, both on and off screen. Negotiations are common to any televisual production where the creator’s vision is constantly challenged by availability of resources. For a retro, or any other period piece for that matter, the challenge is twofold as the vision is to artistically simulate the past. The paratextual space dispels the stylistic and potentially nostalgic allure of a retro by laying bare the nuts and bolts that hold it together. Paratexts allow creators to explicate mundane and pragmatic choices that deliver the best possible non-anachronistic end product. Viewers engage with the ‘making of’ processes that emphasize retro’s creative constituents over its archival capacities. Authenticity of the retro product and its aesthetic appeal are in its creative mix. A retro is the sum total of negotiations between a desire for cinematic realism, artistic vision, and the heterogeneity of available resources and technologies that give it its final form.

Part III

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

Mad Men’s Cultural Footprint Mad Men’s cultural legacy has been variously described as the period topos, the slim suits, the skinny ties, the Sinatra songs, the coolness of mid-century modern furniture, the nostalgic appeal of sepia tones, “an alluring historical fantasy” (Mendelsohn), the misogynistic indulgence of the middle-aged white male, and the quiet comfort in “now we know better” (Greif) smugness. Even though the size of Mad Men’s viewership compared to similar high budget television dramas remained rather small throughout its run (Steinberg), the series had a consequential cultural impact and legacy. Its cultural footprint continues to grow much after its television run as a significant number of its viewers access the series through its subsequent DVD versions, through its international distributors, or binge watch its episodes on Netflix. Mad Men inspired fashion styles, which initially seemed popular only amongst fans and appropriate within the context of a Mad Men theme party, quickly found its way into the contemporary fashion world. Banana Republic’s Mad Men inspired collection and the Brooks Brothers–Janie Bryant collaboration evince this phenomena. These examples are only the tip of the iceberg: “The show’s visual impact was so intense, it went viral and seemed to recode designers’ creative DNA” (Friedman). On its website, AMC ran its own clever ‘MadMenYourself’ marketing gimmick, encouraging fans to self-fashion themselves after Mad Men characters. Elsewhere, numerous professional and personal fashion blogs advised fans on how to dress like a Mad Men character, breaking down the essentials of the Mad Men style and making it accessible to a larger public. Slim-suits and skinny ties of the early ’60s, popularized by the series, made a come back in men’s fashion in the early 21st century. Contemporary fashion industry considers the slim suit analogous to the iPhone for its minimalism and iconicity (Stewart). Ironically the suit, which

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was considered a symbol of conservatism amongst ’60s youth, finds itself in a generational conflict once again. This time it appears to be on the side of the “cash-poor 25-year-old” freelancer blogging from home about the not-sosubtle art of dandyism and rallying against boomer dads who spend all their waking hours in an uninspired pair of jeans (Colman). Guardian’s Jonathan Heaf thanks Don Draper for helping “a generation of aging hipsters grow up gracefully” (Heaf and Cochrane). Mad Men’s cultural influence has also been mapped onto the rise in popularity of mid-century modern furniture,1 used conspicuously to create its interiors. Herman Miller reports a 60 percent increase in the sales of its classic products designed by Isamu Noguchi, George Nelson, and Charles and Ray Eames during the years Mad Men was on air. The “sales of the Eames Time-Life chair, which is prominently featured in the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP) conference room, have doubled over the same period” (Romano). Mid-century modern, however, had already experienced a revival since the late ’90s, with Herman Miller and Knoll reissuing their iconic designs, sometimes at affordable and within reach prices (Fenton). In addition, the culturally influential Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), which actively promoted the ‘good design’ movement by regularly holding design competitions in postwar America, put together a retrospective exhibition: What Was Good Design? MoMA’s Message, 1944–56 from mid-2009 to early 2011. The retrospective exhibition showcased MOMA’s own role as a pioneer and promoter of modern designs (Smith). Around the same time in 2012 a west coast exhibition showcased the specifics of the California mid-century modern design (California Design). While these events suggest that Mad Men may only be one of the many contributors of the revival of mid-century modern furniture, the fact that people attribute this revival to the series speaks to its cultural influence. In television, Pan Am (2011–2012), The Playboy Club (2011), The Hour (2011–2012), The Americans (2013–2018), Masters of Sex (2013–2016), Manhattan (2014–2015), Vinyl (2016), and Good Girls Revolt (2016) often make it to lists of Mad Men inspired productions (McHenry). According to New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley, “Any series that sets itself in the early 1960s is going to have to slink around the reflection of ‘Mad Men.’” The steady supply of television productions set in recent pasts, with plot concerns and aesthetic 1

Cian O’Driscoll writes, “The meticulously well researched and presented 1960s interiors [of Mad Men] were responsible for a global resurgence in the Mid-Century Modern interior aesthetic.”

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

expectations that noticeably draw from Mad Men, validate its cultural influence. In spite of its niche appeal and limited commercial success, Mad Men was renewed at the end of each season (albeit with some friction), and the series managed to stay afloat till the culmination of the story. Its popularity emboldened successive television productions to explore the commercial viability of the period genre. Unfortunately, few made it beyond their initial seasons. AMC, on its part, sought to recreate Mad Men’s legacy along a different axis: it capitalized on audience interest in the advertising world with a reality show Pitch (2016). Declaring Pitch a product of “the network that brings you Mad Men,” AMC attempted to establish a continuum, however tenuous (“Trailer: The Pitch”). Each of these inheritors purportedly draws on one or the other aspect of Mad Men’s legacy. Still, they are often unceremoniously dismissed by television critics: “Playboy can’t copy the lyricism or narrative potency that make Mad Men” (Lyons); “‘Good Girls Revolt’ is going to pale in comparison to [Mad Men,] one of the best shows of the last decade” (Tallerico). The incorporation of the period topos, the drinking and the smoking, the use of traditional pop numbers (Pan Am uses the Frank Sinatra superhit “Come Fly with Me”), the low angle shots (The Playboy Club), or the office drama against a politically charged backdrop (Good Girls Revolt) fail to replicate Mad Men’s success. Mad Men’s own success was precarious. According to Weiner: “Some of it’s timing, some of it’s luck” (Christian). The Mad Men viewership was meagre in terms of television ratings. On average around 2 million viewers joined every episode, and at its peak around 3.5 million viewers watched the season five premier (“Sunday Cable Ratings”). A fan puts the numbers in context: “kinda nuts to think that the peak of the Mad Men viewership was significantly lower than season 9 of The Office, which sat at around 4M [million] per episode” (“Is it true”). There are several instances within the television industry where productions get cancelled for similar numbers. ABC cancelled Pan Am at the end of the first season when its viewership dropped since its premier from around 11 million (“Sunday Final Ratings”) to 3.7 million in the last episode (Bibel). Even for a cable network, Mad Men viewership lags far behind AMC’s own The Walking Dead, which on average attracts more than 10 million viewers every season (O’Connell). But AMC continued its investment in Mad Men, because what Mad Men lacked in commercial success it made up for in prestige. It was “the first show on an ad-supported cable network to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama. It won each of its first four seasons (and was nominated for all seven seasons)” (Adgate). Mad Men’s cultural influence and

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renown cannot be expressed in an easy financial equation. A legatee of The Sopranos brand, Mad Men brought to AMC “distinction.”2 Even with the recommendations from David Chase (the creator of The Sopranos), Mad Men was rejected by HBO and Showtime before AMC picked it up. AMC on its part took a chance with Weiner’s long castoff project as it was looking for something novel for its first scripted drama series. AMC executives have repeatedly stressed that their decision paid off. The final validation arrived when HBO Chairperson and CEO Richard Plepler3 expressed regret on turning down the series: “Hubris and complacency are the reason that Mad Men did not land at HBO” (Tartaglione). On a reddit thread that asks respondents to specify their age and the reason they like the series, themes that repeatedly come up are: the complex characters, production quality, attention to detail, the fact that while watching Mad Men the audience has to pay complete attention, and that unlike the regular fare on network channel Mad Men does not “assume their audience is dumb” (“Why do you like Mad Men”). One respondent confesses she watches the series for her love of “mid-century design and advertising.” The age of the respondents varied from around 18 to 55 and more or less corroborates Mad Men’s audience age group as reported by Nielsen (Baron). The comments on the thread also reflect a certain television literacy, gauging from the way respondents discussed its visual elements and narrative tropes: the cinematography, character development, the deployment of “antihero as a protagonist,” the “morally grey” tones, and the storytelling strategies. This is not surprising as the Mad Men audience is one of the most educated and the wealthiest: “53 percent of ‘Mad Men’ viewers ages 25 to 54 are from households with incomes that exceed $100,000” (Pallotta). The size of its audience may be tiny but they are an influential demographic—a demographic that advertisers covet, one that is socially connected and who “won’t stop talking” about their favorite television program (Scocca). For AMC, part of the payoff was that Mad Men paved their way “to reach and connect with very difficult-to-reach audiences including the most upscale influencers and tastemakers across the worlds of media, music, fashion, design, politics and more” (Pallotta). The New York Times

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AMC Networks President Ed Carroll says: “The network was looking for distinction in launching its first original series, and we took a bet that quality would win out over formulaic mass appeal. In our view, there’s no doubt it paid off” (Witchel). In early 2019, Plepler stepped down as HBO chairperson after AT&T’s acquisition of Warner Media, the parent company of Home Box Office, Inc.

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is named repeatedly as one amongst these upscale influencer fans of Mad Men (Scocca). Apart from The New York Times’s regular reportage on the series, it also informed its readers about the lateral trends set by the series such as the revival of the Old Fashioned cocktail (R. Simonson), the psychedelic chiffons and the skinny suits, and Mad Men’s influence on Broadway’s ’60s-inspired fare (Brantley). The Times’s fondness for the series is definitely not an exception, more the norm. Mad Men has been discussed with similar enthusiasm in other newspapers and magazines, both domestic and international. Another influential fan of the series has been the academia. The number of academic books, essays, and university dissertations on Mad Men published so far substantiates academic interest in the series.4 Anne Helen Petersen who offered a course on Mad Men at Whitman College posted an article about her course on Slate.com and appended a link to the syllabus for those who are not in college but might seek to “experience this intense, deep engagement with a show.” The proximity and constant exchange between these two influential spheres—the journalistic and the academic worlds—explain to an extent Mad Men’s sizable cultural influence in spite of its low viewership. The creation and distribution of influence and cultural worth has always been a vexing puzzle, one that is impossible to satisfactorily resolve with a single explanation. Is it the clothes, the art design, the cinematography, the mise-en-scène, the prime time slot, the number of viewers, the class distribution of viewers, the channel on which a series is broadcasted, the historical setting, the time of its release, the ad campaigns, or the distribution strategies that contribute to the acclaim received by a cultural production? The answer is often a combination of all of these ostensible factors and perhaps many others that are not readily perceptible. Plagued by similar questions regarding the art world, gallerist Magnus Resch sets about tracing “the factors that lead some [artists and galleries] to success and others to failure.” Together with 45 of his employees, he gathered exhaustive data on the careers of half a million artists across the globe and around 10 million artworks exhibited in 20,000 4

Mad Men: Dream Come True TV (Edgerton); Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series (Stoddart), Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Goodlad et al.) are a few anthologies of academic essays on the series. In addition, a quick search on Google Scholar or JSTOR furnishes several journal articles and dissertations on Mad Men. Some examples are: “Don, Betty and Jackie Kennedy: On Mad Men and Periodisation” (Black and Driscoll); “Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism” (Tudor); and “Casting the men in the gray flannel suits : Mad men and the practices of authoring TV history” (Gilke).

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galleries. He then got data scientists, including star network theorist AlbertLászló Barabási, to look at the material. They used network science to evaluate the ‘centrality’ of the galleries and plotted the information onto a densely populated map of art institutions. Each gallery is represented as a colorful disc,5 its size proportionate to the institution’s sphere of influence. They found that two institutions were most central: the MOMA and The Guggenheim. Located less than 4 kms from each other, they show up as two large red discs on the map and establish themselves as the art world giants. Resch writes, “An exhibition at one of these is a guaranteed ascent to fame and headline prices. It is the definition of artistic validation.” Big data speaks through beautiful maps and in succinct terms: “value in art is in the network” (ibid). The value of a product is determined by the network around it or the network it exists in. Resch’s first advice to career artists is to “be in a network” and the second is to avoid the world “of the losers” and aim for the “small circle of winners” (“Become an Art Market Insider”). In the television industry of the late 20th and early 21st century, this would translate into getting a television drama released by HBO. Many television critics have already commented on HBO’s ad-free subscription-based model and the list of ground-breaking HBO productions such as OZ, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. It is safe to say, however, that these productions lend as much to HBO as the channel offers them. The traffic is two-way. But what happens when a production fails to get into the prestigious HBO network? How does it create value in its own network and how does it harness value from the network around it? Once again, the way out of or into a network is never through a well marked path that is stable and permanent. The answer involves navigating messy structures, a labyrinth of small nodes, spread across space and time. The pathways are many, and to trace them takes time and patience, entangling one knot after another. To draw from the visual metaphor of a thicket, the paths are always dependent on movement: they are a product of movement. They are dependent on their connections to other paths and are meaningful or significant in the long run only as a part of a larger network of pathways. Through the act of choosing a certain pathway over another, the tracer inevitably emphasizes one path and participates in shaping its contours.

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The color of the disc signals to their geographical location, for example art institutions in Germany were in Cyan and those in Italy were represented in green.

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To return to the question of Mad Men’s cultural value: the answer is probably a mix of several factors. The most significant factor, pointed out by the series itself, is its writing. When the viewers say they enjoy not being treated as idiots, or when they say they enjoy Mad Men’s complex characters, they are responding to the writing. When Weiner says he was inspired by TV writers such as Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky of Network fame (Benson), he is implicitly pointing at the yardstick by which he measures the writing of Mad Men. Mad Men’s emphasis on writing is repeatedly pointed out by the creators, the television critics, and the audience as its marker of distinction. Writing, however, cannot be a stand-alone guarantor of critical acclaim or commercial success. A good script will always depend on execution to see light of the day. To consider writing as self-contained is not without impediments. A series of questions spring forth about factors that influence the writing itself: the medium, the genre, the composition, the basic structure of the plot, its elementary pattern—the encoded myth upon which the historical story is written. Questions emerge about the identity and background of the writers, the historical context of its publication, the influences that the creators draw from, the imagined legacy of the series, and so on. Even this one thread, writing, when zoomed in, emerges as a braid of multiple threads. There is no isolated answer. The tracer must simply begin from one node, perhaps with the one most familiar, and with due acknowledgement of this random act of choosing a starting point to avoid bias and assumptions of predetermined value.

Tracing Action The Berlin-based Argentinian artist Tómas Saraceno draws from the multiple disciplines of art, architecture, philosophy, and astrophysics to construct intricate spiderweb inspired three-dimensional installations made of elastic filaments that sit atop museums and art centers in Europe and the Americas. The installations, sometimes in the form of perched nets and sometimes saclike inflatable structures, explore connections between their different nodes. They facilitate the observation of reverberations across their surfaces, caused by movements of visitors—walking and crawling along the structures. The pressure generated by the body weights of the visitors, the bounces and the jitters introduced by one visitor to the next, and their combined weight against the air pressure in the enormous rooms where these installations are set up,

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work together to create something spontaneous and dynamic. They create a sensorial experience of being connected to the environment and to one another. Bruno Latour compliments Saraceno in offering a “metaphor for social theory” (“Some Experiments”), and it may be argued that Saraceno’s exposed webs and filaments provide a fitting visual metaphor for Latour’s own ActorNetwork theory. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) emerges in the mid-’80s from the works of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, and it proposes a new imagination of the social as “a trail of associations between heterogenous elements,” moving away from the idea of the social as a homogenous entity in and of itself (Latour, Reassembling 5). The principal difference between classical social theories and ANT is that while the former begin with “the social to be always already there at their disposal,” the latter ends up with the social by following the trail of associations made by elements that themselves may not be social (8). Inherent to ANT is the idea of studying structures as action redistributed, accounting for even invisible actors that function as distant triggers for a specific action. ANT traces the co-dependencies of actors and prioritizes the processes of assembling rather than the finished product. The focus is always on actions. The actors are relevant as long as they forge connections. ANT welcomes chaos and constant movement in a system. It recognizes movement as essential to tracing the network. The experience of walking along one of Saraceno’s giant installations reiterates ANT’s emphasis on movement in order to trace connections. The movement of the visitors along these nets play a vital role in Saraceno’s demonstration of interdependency of actors and in mapping the network of actors involved. In the absence of movement, that is in a stable system, with no visitor treading the nets or with everyone standing still at assigned places, it would be impossible to demonstrate, at least in a tactile way, the various co-dependencies of visitor movement. ANT redefines what it means to be an actor, expanding the idea of agency from the restricted domain of the intentional to include causal ones: “anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor—or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant” (Latour, Reassembling 71). This shift is at the core of ANT. It flattens out the social by impartially listing actors both human and non-human that associate together to form the social. In spite of being consecrated as a theory, Latour, Callon, and Law have maintained that their initial vision of ANT was quite the opposite. Far from being a rigid theoretical framework, their intentions were to develop a mode of inquiry that is free of structuralist generalizations and which helps its practitioners to learn

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about the social from the actors that maintain it (Latour, “Networks, Societies, Spheres”). At the outset, two things need to be clarified about the ‘network’ in ANT: first, used as a hyphenated term ‘actor-network’ immediately points at the uncertain origins of action—that actions are continually distributed and can seldom be traced to one actor (Latour, Reassembling 46); and second, a network in ANT is an abstraction—it is a point-to-point tracing of consequential associations (112). Latour illustrates the concept with the example of the 2002 explosion of NASA’s Columbia space shuttle, an event that revealed the network of actors involved in maintaining the shuttle, which prior to its malfunction seemed to be a self-sufficient unitary object. “The action of flying a technical object has been redistributed throughout a highly composite network where bureaucratic routines are just as important as equations and material resistance” (“Networks, Societies, Spheres”). The network in ANT is not a stable and permanent entity; it exists through the continual performance of actors that sustains its associations. The Columbia space shuttle actor-network ceased to exist when one or more of its actors stopped working towards making the whole durable. Just as the event of a malfunction, occasions of innovation have often been referred to by ANT practitioners as one of the “first privileged places where objects can be maintained longer as visible, distributed, accounted mediators” (Latour, Reassembling 80). These are sites of controversies, moments where the old order is destabilized. ANT promotes an unconstrained approach, in which the practitioners are dynamic and free to go anywhere the traces of these new connections take them. The approach is especially beneficial in studying systems that are nodular, spread-out, and complex, with multiple connections that constantly redefine the system. The study of the film and television industries, complex systems with numerous actors and nodes, requires an approach that is responsive to chaotic structures and frequent innovations. Competition and technological advances motivate these industries to constantly update and adapt themselves, transforming their identities in the process.6 New associations are regularly formed, and they challenge established orders: the entry of over-the-top (OTT) media services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Sky Go that use broadband connection instead of the cable or satellite system puts tremendous pressure on traditional, geographically-bound content broadcasters and distributors to evaluate their business strategies. The partnership of Comcast, the telecommuni6

See Chapter 4, section “Mad Men as Complex Retro.”

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cation and broadcasting giant, with Amazon to launch Amazon Prime Video on Comcast Xfinity X1 is a manifestation of these pressures (“Comcast, Amazon Partner”). The dependence of film and television on technological transformations makes ANT, which accommodates both human and non-human actors, a suitable approach to study their success. Take another example: the recent controversy over Netflix’s claim that 45 million ‘accounts’ watched its original film Bird Box within a week of its release. Critics were quick to point out that the claim was unverifiable as Netflix keeps the actual data to themselves (Alexander). Part of the problem was that the practice of OTT services distributing an original film is relatively new, and the parameters of assessing their consumption are yet to be standardized. As of now, Netflix considers a view that lasts 70% of the total run time to constitute as ‘having watched’ the film. Analysts still have no access to where and how Netflix collects this data as opposed to traditional box-office tracking methods. A corollary of the Netflix controversy was, however, the focus on box-office tracking firms Rentrak and Nielsen EDI (Snyder), actors in the traditional system that assesses how much business a film does. The focus makes these otherwise inconspicuous actors visible, albeit temporarily. An ANT study aids in tracking even those actors, which in spite of being consequential are rendered unremarkable due to over- or under-exposure. Sometimes an overemphasis on a select few overarching causes, repeated often enough, has the power to create an illusion in which an event begins to appear inevitable. This diminishes the significance of the decisions and actions of each of the parties involved in the event. One way of determining an actor in an ANT study is by removing it from the network to see if the action can still take place without it or if it makes a difference (Latour, Reassembling 71). Consider Netflix’s claim that it contributed to Mad Men viewership by bringing in a million new viewers for its fifth season premier (Kafka “Zou Bisou!”). Bernstein Research, which tracks TV viewing habits for Netflix streaming subscribers, confirms this claim with data collected from TiVo users and verifies that, following the release of network programs such as AMC’s Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Walking Dead on Netflix, each one of them experienced an increase in viewership (Kafka “You Really Can”). The net effect will not be the same if Netflix is removed from the Mad Men network. Every film and television production is an actor-network; when zoomed in, a consolidated entity emerges as a network of actors. To maintain its actor-network, retro enrolls numerous human and non-human actors, which add to its emotional resonance, atmospheric quality, and even commercial

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success. While the act of signing an amateur Pierre Blaise to play the eponymous character in Lacombe, Lucien lends to the narrative credibility, signing George Clooney in Hail, Caesar! to play the dimwitted Baird Whitlock, a fictional Hollywood matinee idol, achieves narrative incredibility. Watching the handsome Clooney decked up as a Roman Centurion and falter as he delivers his lines, then getting kidnapped by communists, and later being slapped back to his senses from his temporary Stockholm syndrome amplifies the humor and lighthearted mockery. Each of these choices does something perceptible for the retro in question. Sometimes a non-human actor—a certain camera, a pair of lens, or a frame aspect ratio can tremendously affect the tonal depth and the viewing experience of a retro and how it connects its audience to the past. Larraín uses a 1983 U-matic video camera to shoot No, a film that extensively relies on archival footage (Matheou “‘No’”). The choice is significant as it allows a seamless weaving in of new and archival content. Similarly, the ’60s anamorphic Lomo lenses imported from Russia to shoot Post Mortem heightens the achromatic gloominess in the film. Larraín informs that the choice was effective: they got the pale image that contributed to the period appeal of Post Mortem and with little time spent on post-production (Matheou “The body politic”). Likewise, the contribution of the close-up shots and the narrow frames of Son of Saul are indispensable to its narration. By creatively mediating the information received by the audience, these cinematographic strategies intensify the viewing experience. The variety in retros, in terms of mood, method, and the diverse mechanisms that they enroll to distinguish themselves from historical films as well as from one another, makes them suitable subjects of ANT analyses.

Creating Value Tracing each actor of the Mad Men network and their contribution is beyond the scope of any one singular study. Even so, the act of mapping out the Mad Men actor-network has already been initiated in the previous chapters, albeit without formal ANT labels. For example, in Chapter 4 the pursuit of an anachronistic insertion—the IBM Selectric—pointed towards obvious actors with maximum nodal connections such as Mathew Weiner, but also revealed slightly remote actors with fewer connections such as set decorator Amy Wells who agreed with Weiner’s choice and prop master Scott Buckwald who opposed the decision. Furthermore, the Selectric controversy reveals other as-

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pects of the network: the paratextual platforms Variety and Basket of Kisses where the controversies were registered. These websites mobilized opinions into different camps: the ’60s ad executive George Packer camp of Mad Men denouncers (Learmonth) and the Mad Men defense camp led by the Lipp sisters. The thread of inquiry soon reveals different kinds of television viewers: those who recognize the anachronisms because they lived through the ’60s, the television critics who make a practice of watching television with professional care to notice the smallest details, and the fans who follow online debates and controversies around their favorite television program for pleasure. Each audience group contributes in distinct ways to the series’s reception. Similarly, on following the intertextual traces in Chapter 3 various actors were made visible. Broadway star Robert Morse, playing the role of Bertram Cooper and dancing to “The Best Things in Life Are Free” in “Waterloo,” reminds viewers of his ’60s stardom and accords to the series a certain historical appeal associated with him. Inspired by the Morse rendition, Mad Men fans traced other versions of the song on YouTube. One fan comments on an earlier Frank Sinatra version: “thank you mad men for showing me this standard,” another writes “urged to hear this ... reason was Madmen,” a third simply adds, “Bert Cooper” (“The Best Things In Life Are Free”). Robert Morse, the website Basket of Kisses, Weiner, the IBM Selectric are examples of actors in the Mad Men network, each of which contributes to the series’s cultural footprint and sphere of influence. Just as any other action within the ANT framework, the action of accrediting cultural value to the series is continually redistributed within its actor-network. Several strands of the Mad Men network relate to its literary cultural value and to John Cheever, the 20th century postwar American writer. Although situated at a temporal distance, Cheever emerges as an actor with a high density of connections, especially in the context of the Mad Men script. Cheever’s presence in the Mad Men network is hinted at in the very first episode of the series. At the end of the pilot, Draper takes a train home from New York City to its suburb Ossining, where viewers are introduced to his family, cozy in their suburban home (“Smoke gets in your Eyes”). To most viewers, the Ossining reference immediately signals to John Cheever who lived in Ossining and about which he wrote consistently since the ’60s. In 1964, Time magazine declared Cheever the “Ovid of Ossining” for his numerous literary representations of the suburb. As the Mad Men episodes unfold, the Cheever connections become more perceptible.

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Conscious tracing of the pedigree of Mad Men to John Cheever was a consistent performance. Especially in the high value literary journals, Weiner narrated with enthusiasm the dramatic rituals he and his staff indulged in to invoke Cheever. Semi Chellas, one of Mad Men’s staff writers, notes in an interview that she conducts for The Paris Review: Weiner begins every season by rereading John Cheever’s preface to his Collected Stories. Weiner confirms, “with John Cheever, I recognized myself in the voice of the narrator. His voice sounds like the voice in my head—or what I wish it sounded like” (Interview with Semi Chellas). In another interview with the New York Times, Weiner reiterates, “The fiction of John Cheever has a voice filled with irony and comedy and pain that, on some level, I’m always seeking to emulate” (By the Book). In yet another interview with the writer A.M. Homes, Weiner professes his love for Cheever’s short stories: “I wish I could have as much story as John Cheever has in his stories ... where you can tell the whole backstory and like flash back to somebody being a kid and hear about their parents and everything and then they walk in the door and the story starts, I wish I could do that.” These interviews repeatedly foreground continuities with Cheever’s short stories in terms of conscious appropriation of the suburban landscape of Ossining, the historical time period of the postwar years marked by paranoia and change, and the series’s deliberation on the psychological landscape of conflicted individuals. “[Cheever] is in every aspect of Mad Men, starting with the fact that Don lives in Ossining on Bullet Park Road7 —the children are ignored, people have talents they cannot capitalize on, everyone is selfish to some degree or in some kind of delusion” (Weiner, Interview with Semi Chellas). In addition, compared to Cheever’s novels, Mad Men’s serial format with its episodic breaks makes his short stories especially suitable to model upon. The framing of the Mad Men narrative into unitary episodes that work almost like hour-long independent pieces resemble the structure of the short story. Each episode presents itself with the promise of something new, just like starting a new story. The interest in Cheever’s fiction is part of Mad Men’s larger investment in the literary. The appeal of the literary is often foregrounded in the series, with episode titles referencing literary texts. Packed within these references are thematic messages that reveal episodic organization and meaning. Frank O’ Hara’s book of poems Meditations in an Emergency, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Dean Stiff’s The Milk and Honey Route are a few examples 7

Bullet Park is also the name of John Cheever’s 1969 novel.

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of literary works that appear as episode titles. The numerous allusions to Meditations throughout season two presage the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. An atmosphere of impending doom is conveyed as Draper devours the poems. His identification is expressed through a voice-over of O’Hara’s lines: “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again” (“For Those Who Think Young”). Furthermore, the practice of reading is shown to be integral to characters’ everyday lives. The books that the characters pick to read are deliberated upon by the creators to convey characters’ mood, taste, and personalities. Bertram Cooper draws from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged the individualist catechisms that he uses to run his agency (“The Hobo Code”); Bob Benson puts to immediate practice what he learns from Frank Bettger’s How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling and to visible benefits (“A Tale of Two Cities”); and young Sally Draper reading Rosemary’s Baby conveys the lack of adult supervision in her life (“The Crash,” Miller). Fans recognize the series’s interest in the literary and invest in the cited books to gain insights into the episodes and the characters. There are exhaustive lists of Mad Men’s literary references on the Internet: one such painstaking list was curated by Billy Parrott of the New York Public Library to direct attention to these books and to promote reading: “Dipping into these classics is also a great way to help with withdrawals while waiting for new episodes to air.” Mad Men’s literary ambitions go far beyond an exhibition of cultural literacy. It intends to comment on the compelling literary tropes such as the self-made man and participate in the American cultural mythopoeia. Critics have responded to these ambitions, declaring it “the most literary show on TV” (Walton). The ways in which a series defines itself and the comparisons that it chooses to draw actively contribute to the perception of the series. Frank Kelleter uses the term ‘self-descriptions’ for these performances; they “suggest how the series wants to be watched” (6). The series itself is an actor and has agency to participate in its reading practices. For example, a direct consequence of invoking Cheever’s vast repertoire confers on the series a sense of single-handed authorial control and craft, whereas in reality serials are multi-authored products, conceived and performed by an expansive network of people, technologies, and formats, held precariously in a creative balance.8 Yet, there is a strong urge within its creators “to obscure its evolving

8

See Chapter 4 on the creative negotiations involved in the production of (retro) serial television.

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

structures and simulate an intricate consistency” (26).9 Weiner effectively enrolls Cheever to form Mad Men’s self-descriptions when he claims that Cheever is in every aspect of Mad Men. His claims emphasize the coherence of his own vision and consistency in terms of themes and tonality within the Mad Men universe. The claims gloss over the chaotic and collaborative processes of writing a serial program, involving a room full of writers likely to pitch their own, sometimes conflicting, visions of the future installments of the series. To circulate these self-descriptions, the series enrolls other actors who corroborate these descriptions and in effect contribute to them. A television series exists as an actor-network and is expressed through its network; its “action is borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated” by many others who work towards a common objective or aggregate (Latour, Reassembling 46). The objective is arrived at by means of a negotiation, an arrangement, or a compromise, and the process presupposes some amount of uncertainty in the outcome of the meaning that is transported. This process is known as ‘translation:’ it is any connection that can transform a network and lead to a traceable association. Translations are integral to ANT, so much so that ANT is often referred to as ‘sociology of translation.’ Latour declares: “Nothing is, by itself, either knowable or unknowable, sayable or unsayable, near or far. Everything is translated” (Latour, Pasteurization 167). Meaning is transported through translations at every step of the way; these translations point towards the mediators and the traces of movements within the network. Actors in a network influence the message as they pass it around. Would Mad Men’s self-descriptions be as persuasive without the series’s promotion by The New York Times? In ANT terminology, The Times is a mediator as it has agency to do something and to transform the state of affairs in which it enters. Mediators have the capacity to “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning” that they carry (Latour, Reassembling 39). The Times contributes not only to Mad Men’s literariness, but also to the series’s authenticity and historicity (Egner). Its fondness for the series has been explained as a give and take between the two, as with Draper “announcing his withdrawal from cigarette advertising in the same venerable pages that had just proclaimed Mad Men a 9

Weiner comments in an interview, “I do not feel any guilt about saying that the show comes from my mind and that I’m a control freak”(Witchel). Such comments project the series as primarily a one-man show.

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“cultural phenomena” (Goodlad et al. 1–2). These instances of actors in a network promoting each other or forming allegiances based on common tastes and cultural predispositions point at the capacities of heterogenous actors to enroll one another and translate individual actions to perform a collective goal. The more connected an actor is, the more its weight. The persuasiveness of Mad Men paratexts are enhanced when they carry links to either the series’s self-descriptions or other articles that make the same point. An actor’s capacity to influence grows substantially when situated within a network as other connected actors support and validate it. The self-descriptions are the net-product composed of interconnected actions and performed by different actors. There are interlinkages between the journalistic pieces on Mad Men’s literariness and the series’s self-descriptions promoted by its creators. Salon’s Rebecca Makkai suggests the stories of John Cheever to Mad Men viewers as an antidote for “the pangs of Mad Men withdrawal.” The implicit message conveyed is that Mad Men episodes are not just influenced by Cheever’s short stories, they are on par with Cheever’s stories. The article carries a link to Weiner’s New York Times interview for validation. The Times interview was also quoted in an Uproxx article on Weiner’s literary influences (Dykes) and was recommended by Elisabeth Donnelly to her Flavorwire readers in an article that provides a summary of Weiner’s Paris Review interview. These interlinkages expose the connections and circuits through which information is circulated. These descriptions, repeated over and over again, create an impression that they are facts rather than opinions that a series wishes to promote. Kelleter points at the dangers of the increased synchronicity between the self-descriptions of a text and the reviews by evaluating actors (1). The continual spread of a single description of a text across various media spheres give the interpretation currency. In the case of television criticism, demands on review articles to be produced immediately after the release of an episode encourage unmediated transmissions of self-descriptions. Academics associated with television studies face a similar pressure to deliver journal articles and critical essays for anthologies while the series is still on air. The network is not a unidirectional channel of communication from the creators of a production to the audience via the various media platforms. For example: Pan Am’s creator Jack Orman speaks about the “brush with history as an element to this show,”and its female lead Christina Ricci expresses her excitement at “the idea that we could go back and revisit certain really big historical moments of this era” (BG). But their views find little reinforcement

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

from majority of the television review platforms. The Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley labels Pan Am as a poor imitation of Mad Men with the difference “that ‘Pan Am’ romanticizes the past, whereas ‘Mad Men,’ on AMC, takes pleasure in slyly mocking antiquated mores.” In addition, creators of television series wrestle with audience feedback and enter into compromises with their network, advertisers, and other influential actors that influence their creative choices: think of the splitting of Mad Men’s season seven forced by AMC irrespective of audience’s desire to have the series return as soon as possible. Feedback loops that carry audience opinion to the industry are today extensively represented. It is not surprising that the creators of television closely follow the feedback, and even comment on their interactions with audience feedback in opinion pieces and public interviews. Phil Abraham confirms that Mathew Weiner “stays very tuned in to what is being written about the show ...[and] that he really invests himself in that” (363). The viewers too are interested in how the creators respond to their opinions. They are keen to assert themselves as active actors and convey their expectations and criticisms. Social media platforms immediately inform the creators of audience’s appreciation or rejection. There are times when audience’s interests are in conflict with the composition of the plot. Weiner describes his complicated relationship with the audience: “you want to be responsive to the audience, but you really want to be true to the characters, … you want to fool the audience in the sense that you want to surprise and delight them, you don’t want to like say, ‘I gotcha’ (Interview with A.M. Homes). There are instances where Weiner acquiesces to fan service, the most notable amongst them being when Peggy Olson and Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson) are brought together in the series finale “Person to Person.” The romantic closure was a huge hit, evident from the fan responses to their love story on Twitter (Romano). Their relationship had been used as bait throughout the series, but by the end of the series it seemed almost certain that the creators had no intention of delivering the audience on this promise. Arguably, the overwhelming response to their union stems from the fact that it was unexpected. Considering the scene in the previous episode “Lost Horizon” where a resilient Olson walks down the alleys of McCann Erikson, bold and strong on her own (without any romantic support), the union appears inconsistent with the plot progression. A romantic ending for Olson does not necessarily undermine her independence, but the closure seems forced and designed simply to satisfy viewers. In another instance from the final season, Dawn Chambers talks to Shirley (no surname given), the other colored secretary in the office, about their racial identities and point at their

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interchangeability for their white executive bosses (“A Day’s Work”). Mad Men had received a lot of flak for the marginal treatment of its colored characters throughout its run and inserting these scenes in the final episodes seem slightly conceited, although fulfilling. Audience’s feedback also has financial implications, their disapproval or disinterest can plummet the show’s ratings and drive potential advertisers away from a series. The Mad Men–John Cheever association is also an example of a bidirectional relationship between two interconnected actors, bolstering one another. Mad Men gains in terms of historicity and literary value, and Cheever finds renewed interest and resonance in the 21st century Mad Men viewership. Mad Men contributes to Cheever’s iconicity and memorability by integrating Cheever in its narrative and by redirecting its viewers to him. In their discussion on iconic photographs, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites claim that the reproduction of an image across a range of mediums and genres contribute to memorability and recognizability of an icon. Iconicity rests upon sustained reproductions and re-presentations over a network of mediums. As it appropriates Cheever, Mad Men grants him relevance. Its interest in Cheever pulls him closer to the present and gives him a new lease on life. Conversely, icons activate strong identification because they correspond to a significant moment in history. They are inscribed with “documentary value” and an “aura of history” (1–2). Cheever’s iconic status and popularity stems from his precise and continuous interrogation of postwar suburban sprawl. By claiming Cheever’s legacy, Mad Men benefits in terms of authenticity. The Mad Men–John Cheever association is an interdependent relation between two bodies of work situated at different historical points as they translate one another’s appeals. The Mad Men audience, the media platforms, Cheever fans, and people like Norman MacDonald—the president of the Ossining Historical Society, who helped Mad Men writers to accurately represent Cheever’s Ossining (Applebome)—are important actors in maintaining this association. Cheever’s invocation functions as the series’s historical anchor. His journal entries, especially those that relate to the ’60s, are invaluable in recreating the everyday life of the Draper family in and around New York. Weiner corroborates, “[The] New York Times is a reference for all of us but you cannot re-create human experience with a newspaper, but journals really help” (Interview with A.M. Homes). Mad Men’s depiction of historical events is circumscribed by the characters’ responses to the events or their nonresponse. When a historic moment is entered through an individual’s everyday activity, an over-emphasis of the event is automatically checked. Two days after J. F.

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

Kennedy’s assassination, Cheever’s journal entries carry no mention of the tragedy—the humdrum of the everyday already subdues the intensity of the tragedy. Details of Cheever’s sexual guilt and self-loathing from his journals are used to construct Draper’s psychological makeup. In conceiving Draper’s character, the series draws from the duality of Cheever’s life, his secretive persona, the apathy, and the distance that Cheever imposes between his inner life and his family members. Many parallels between Cheever and Draper are established in the Mad Men narrative. Draper is secretive about his origins. When asked about his childhood, he evades: “I can’t tell you about my childhood, it’ll ruin the first half of my novel” (“Ladies Room”). His subordinates at work feed into the mystery surrounding his origins, filling in for his absent history from superhero legends (“Marriage of Figaro”). Draper’s identity fraud, his preoccupation with guilt, and the constant fear of being exposed appear to be cinematic dramatization of the anxieties that Cheever registers in his journal: “And thinking how our origins catch up with us I wonder what I will have to pay on this account. I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more interesting and sometimes more significant. … I have improvised a background for myself—genteel, traditional—and it is generally accepted.” (Cheever 156) Cheever was acutely interested in the possibilities of tweaking various aspects of the self—adopting a certain accent, residing in a certain locality, dressing in a certain style, putting up performances in gentility—that could contribute to an upper-class WASPy identity and image. He decidedly plots a course away from his humble Massachusetts beginnings to becoming a brand name himself (xxi). Cheever’s journals and his stories repeatedly explore the sins of expecting “more from life, and this expectation leads them into bafflement and transgression” (Illingworth)—a theme Mad Men audiences are only too familiar with.

Set as Actor Don and Betty Draper’s choice of the colonial-style suburban house in Ossining and its staid decor, which appears outdated compared to the ’60s contemporary architect-designed interiors showcased in the pages of House Beau-

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tiful and Ladies’ Home Journal, have been discussed as a careful articulation of identity. According to Dianne Harris, Draper’s white-trash roots and the absence of a solid white identity mark him “as decidedly off-white, more like the Jewish Rachel Menken than like his WASP coworkers at Sterling Cooper” (67). Much like Cheever, Draper compensates for his background, or the lack thereof, by opting for a conservatively styled house in a very white and respectable neighborhood. Compared to the ’60s contemporary individualistic modernist houses with clean lines and chic interiors, which signal to educated upper-classes (of indeterminate origins, can also be Jewish), Draper selects a house that unambiguously symbolizes white upper-class tastes. The Drapers’ attempt to blend in, opting for old-fashioned restrained interiors that almost veer towards the gloomy. The Ossining set initially appears to be the “denotative set” in Charles and Mirella Jona Affron’s schema of Hollywood sets10 (37)—the undistinguished two-storied, heavily wallpapered set that has been a part of every televisual representation of suburbia since the ’40s. As the series progresses, however, the set decor registers a shift along the axis of design intensity. Unlike a two-hour film, the long run of a serial television makes it possible for television sets to gradually evolve and to intensify its engagement with the narrative. The Ossining set takes on “punctuative” functions, expressing a character’s interiority: think of the Victorian fainting couch that Betty Draper installs in their living room, completely out of place with the rest of the decor (“Seven Twenty Three”). Her decorator openly disapproves of the chaise, saying it has ruined the harmony of the room. Propped there in front of the hearth of the Draper household, the chaise calls attention to itself. The insertion functions as a punctuation; it is a reminder of Betty Draper’s autonomy or the lack thereof. For her, the chaise is a memento of stolen moments with Henry Francis. The set also establishes itself as an essential constituent of the series’s narrative by positing itself as a counterpoint. Production designer Dan Bishop cites a favorite example: the scene where Betty Draper casually steps out of her kitchen in a pink nightgown, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth; she shoots at the neighbors pigeons with a BB gun (“Shoot”). He explains, “the pattern of the wallpaper, the costume she’s wearing, the actress herself, her hairdo, the cigarette smoke” contributed as much to the success 10

Charles and Mirella Jona Affron discuss five types of Hollywood sets, varying in design intensity: set as denotation, set as punctuation, set as embellishment, set as artifice, and set as narrative.

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

of the scene as the script; and they work together with “the position of the camera and the framing” (Wappler). Betty Draper in her traditionally feminine, flowing pink nightgown sitting in the kitchen conveys a certain degree of normalcy. The low angle shots that follow her inform the audience that she has stepped outside, but the audience only sees her face and that she is looking intently at the pigeons flying above her garden. The audience is caught off guard by the reveal: the BB gun in her hand.11 Each of the elements—the set, the costume, the props, the Bobby Helm end-credits song, the camera, and the script—layered on top of one another, delivers the full punch of the counterpoint. The sets of Mad Men have received a level of attention comparable, if not equal, to its writing. Mad Men’s nostalgic appeal has often been pinned onto its sets. To understand how the sets negotiates its narrative and nostalgic functions the different sets have to be taken into account. The Mad Men production design, discussed variously as the look of the show or the Mad Men aesthetic, is an actor in the Mad Men network that has substantially contributed to the series’s popularity and is credited, perhaps more than all else, for its legacy. The production design is responsible for creating the sets, giving them a certain tone and texture, and populating them with unique objects—often personalized items that signal to a certain character, distinguishing say one office cubicle from the next. The urban Manhattan apartment Draper moves in with his second wife, Megan, in season five contrasts with his earlier suburban house in Ossining. The interiors of the two residences tell very different stories. While one is stubbornly self-effacing, the other is an outlandish indulgence in individuality and modernity. Weiner comments that the Manhattan apartment is “right out of the pages of a magazine! The white carpeting Megan wanted is not something you can really live with, which again tells a story about her character” (“Welcome to 1969”) He says, the apartment screams sexy and smart; it is a place the owners can be smug about. By the point Draper moves to this second apartment, he has (somewhat) come to terms with his identity. This coming to terms, suggested by the movement away from his attempts at integration in suburbia to flaunting his affluence through the high rise Upper East Side condo, is also been endorsed by the narrative. His second wife knows about his past, and at work he has moved 11

She starts shooting the pigeons to Bobby Helm’s “My Special Angel;” the auditory impact of the background score contrasted to the shoot has already been discussed in the section “Counterpoint” in Chapter 3.

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up to become a partner at the agency. Most senior colleagues are aware of his dubious identity, but are too invested in him to question it. As with the change in Draper’s residence, the Mad Men office set too undergoes an overhaul. In fact, an entirely new office set is built for season four, after Draper and his colleagues pull off a coup against their British shareholders Putnam, Powell, and Lowe. For the series, these new spaces unambiguously signal the end of the ’50s, and mark its movement into the ’60s high modernism. The sets are graphic, with bold colors. More light is allowed into the office through the clerestory windows installed in the new set, and at Draper’s Park Avenue apartment, huge French windows separate the spacious living room from an equally spacious balcony overlooking the city. The change in the sets and decor reflect narrative shifts but also function as ostensive temporal markers. Mad Men has arrived into the mid-’60s and David Carbonara’s composition “The Arrival” frames the introduction to the new set and its concomitants: the young staff, the vibrant costumes, and the relaxed attitudes (“Public Relations”). It is in these new sets that Mad Men’s association with mid-century modern fittings and furniture coalesces. Although production design for the most part is “an exercise in self-effacement, in self denial, in disappearance” (Affron 45), the exact role or the scope of influence of the Mad Men set is not that straightforward. Notwithstanding Dan Bishop’s constant refrain that the sets are designed to support and not to distract from the narrative,12 the intensity of Mad Men’s design certainly cushions Mad Men’s popularity and contributes to the appreciation of the series, even if from a purely design and architectural point of view. But does the set have value independent of the narrative? Apparently, “people who have never watched an episode are aware that Mad Men looked good” (O’Driscoll). There exist 3D virtual tours of the Draper’s Park Avenue apartment (Kalunder and Kedrova), platforms which detail the prices of set pieces such as Draper’s $35 vintage standing brass ashtray (Ocean), and locations both online and real where vintage pieces can be scouted from (Didul). The Mad Men look is advertised as easily reproducible, or at least that elements of its aesthetic can be appropriated. Set decorator Claudette Didul offers some tips: color schemes signal time periods, fans seeking to appropriate the Mad

12

Dan Bishop comments on being recognized outside of television realms for the Mad Men sets: “It makes me feel that people see it as a realistic environment as well as a compelling one — but that it doesn’t fully take folks out of the drama and that it’s recognized not just as scenery.”

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

Men look can use a pop of bold color, a geometric patterned wallpaper, or opt for the comforting avocado greens and burnt oranges used generously in the Mad Men sets. “Just put ‘midcentury’ or Mad Men into the [Etsy] search box” she says, to find appropriate period pieces, even something as small or arbitrary as “the brass standing ashtray… or a coat tree [that] can add that vintage flair” (Ocean). The preoccupation with the sets, the attraction towards mid-century Knoll and Herman Miller furniture, the warm glow of the avocados, the mustards, and the burnt oranges sometimes take the focus away from the narrative and invite charges of fetishization or of evoking nostalgia. “Mad Men … creates a nostalgic surface that equates mid-century fashion and furniture with midcentury mores” (Tudor 11). The series’s dalliance with modernist formalism have solicited similar unease. Robert Harriman speculates, “the retro chic and post-feminist nostalgia of Mad Men has changed the way we think about mid-century modernism, but the show is more likely to be a symptom than a cause” (“Modernism”). Comments on the Mad Men aesthetic, however, regularly ricochet back to an appreciation of the visual elements in relation to the narrative. To what end does the series deploy the “postwar ‘harvest’ colors”? (Kelleter) How is the rectangular flatness maneuvered into an exploration of interiority? (Small 186) How does the color scheme (including those of costume designs) relate to the mood or theme of the episode? (“Mad Style”) Perhaps, the surface level fixation with the sets stops short of that extra mile, which the narrative adds. The mid-century modern sets are actors in the Mad Men network; they depend on the narrative, as is the narrative dependent on every other visual element that make the series. The Mad Men sets are almost never passive backgrounds, they actively participate in the storytelling. The sets create spaces where characters meet and stories converge. The spatial arrangement of the first Mad Men office set (seen until season three) is denotative. It deploys a typical mid-century gender normative division of office space, an impersonal “open floor” surrounded by “closed door” rooms, where power rests and where important decisions are taken (Spain). The open floor, which hosts the steno pool in its middle, structurally supports the sexism directed at the women, who work there without privacy. Once in a while, the drama is amped up by narratively incorporating this space: when the open floor hosts the collective television viewing of historic events such as elections (“Nixon vs. Kennedy”); when office parties turn spiteful and coercive (“Christmas Comes But Once a Year”); or better still, when a secretary runs over a man’s leg with a lawn mower, splattering blood all over, and breaking down one of the office doors

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(“Guys Walks Into an Advertising Agency”). Even those who occupy the offices are not immune to anxieties. They are undermined by alcohol induced urinary incontinence (“Six Month Leave”), by a pillar in the middle of their office (“The Rejected”), or an office that has to be shared with a copy machine (“The Mountain King”). The worth of the occupant is never secure, and the promise of power always a step too far. Mad Men is infamous for its use of the spaces in-between to dramatic effect. Many episodes end with characters exiting the scene through elevators (“Waldorf Stories,” “The Beautiful Girls,” “The Other Woman”), walking down the hallway (“Christmas Comes But Once a Year,” “Lady Lazarus”), or sitting down on the staircase (“The Wheel”). Elevators, staircases, and hallways are used to punctuate the narrative or to stage drama, sparked off from chance meetings of characters. Think of Pete Campbell’s awkward elevator conversation with Draper the day he got punched by Lane Pryce at work. In the privacy of the elevator, Pete lets his guard down and admits his disappointment: “This is an office, we’re supposed to be friends” (“Signal 30”). Wall Street Journal’s John Jurgensen stitches together several of the series’s elevator scenes and discusses Mathew Weiner’s preference for these shots (“The Secrets of Mad Men’s Many Elevator Scenes”). Weiner explains that from the production point of view, elevator scenes are inexpensive to shoot, and from the creative perspective, they are confined spaces with a “public element to it,” offering potential for heightened drama. The dramatic allure of hallways is somewhat similar. They connote constant movement and anticipate encounter. For instance, Campbell running into his father-in-law, Tom Vogel (Joe O’Connor), at a brothel hallway cascades an unfortunate chain of events for him (“For Immediate Release”). Vogel pulls the Vicks account from SCDP, an account which was significant for Campbell’s career and for SCDP’s financial stability. At home, the Campbells fight. When he tells Trudy that he saw her father with a “200-pound Negro prostitute,” she asks him to collect his things and leave. In the same episode, an outraged Campbell tumbles down the office staircase, which has since been added to the long list of GIFs inspired by the many outraged Campbell moments. Weiner jokes, “That was one of the payoffs to spending all that money building that staircase. We knew [Campbell] would just be apoplectic” (Yuan). These are instances of drama enabled by the set. Weiner cites an instance where the production team sets off a narrative trajectory: “it was Dan [Bishop] who thought of putting the character Joan Harris’s office in the center, with doors on both sides. I said, ‘People are go-

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

ing to be cutting through all the time.’ So we made that a part of the story. The doors are also glass, so she has no privacy at all. The story becomes a physical space” (Interview with Interior Design). The spatial history of Harris’s movement within the office contribute to the telling of her story. She moves from a secretarial desk outside an executive’s office to having an office of her own (although with little privacy), and eventually to an upstairs accounts executive office next to the senior partners. Her interactions with these spaces—her authority over the steno pool and her composure through audits in the conference room—add important details to her character. The spatial interactions of characters also expose their vulnerabilities and the limits of their power. A lot of the humiliation directed at Harris is exacerbated by her lack of privacy and by people using her office as a thoroughfare. Members of the creative department use the glass panes of her office to moon at her and to stick pornographic sketches to insult her. Peggy Olson eventually fires Joey Baird (Matt Long) for his disrespect towards Harris, only emphasizing Harris’s inability to do the same (“The Summer Man”). The worth of the characters in the agency is expressly linked to the physical space that they inhabit, but nevertheless the terms of their occupation remain negotiable and precarious. In season seven, Draper is moved to the office where Lane Pryce committed suicide, signaling Draper’s obsolescence to the new agency as envisioned by Jim Cutler (“The Monolith”). Although the office hierarchy is encoded within the spatial arrangement of the agency, the set brings in its own narrative. The value of the physical space changes depending on the occupant’s expectations and entitlements. While the thoroughfare office was humiliating for Harris, who had given more than a decade of her life to the agency, viewers cheer when Dawn Chambers is assigned as the new office manager and given Harris’s old office (Williams). Chambers embraces her new title and appreciates the privacy that Harris’s old office grants her (“A Day’s Work”). Just as characters age and the narrative registers passage of time, so do the sets incorporate signs of decay and marks of places lived. Weiner says,“Everything is story” in Mad Men (Interview with Interior Design): the clutter on the sets, the chewing gum stuck under a desk (“A Mad Dash”), the chipping of the wood, or the fly trapped in the ceiling (“Smoke gets in your eyes”). Certain scenes are structured to pay homage to old sets that the series has to abandon or dismantle because of the demands of the narrative. These occasions also function as commentaries on nostalgia. At the end of “Tomorrowland,” Betty Francis arranges for a brief intimate moment with Draper at their Ossining home, before they part ways. She waits for Draper in their empty kitchen,

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dressed up and with a carton close at hand. She pretends their meeting was an accident. Viewers get shots of her and Draper bathed in a soft warm light; their familiarity is stressed as they share a drink from the same cup. The scene holds the promise of a tender nostalgic moment. She initiates, “Remember this place?” But the spell breaks when Draper announces his engagement to his secretary Megan Calvet. Their abandoned suburban house is denied a moving requiem and laid bare for what it is—the remains of a failed marriage. The engagement with nostalgia becomes more layered as the series progresses. While the undercutting of nostalgia continues at the narrative level, a certain acceptance of nostalgia settles in for the time passed on the sets and for the lives of the characters.13 Towards the end of the series, Mad Men readies itself for yet another new office set, suggesting the ultimate co-option of the independent firm SC&P by the advertising giant McCann–Erickson. The camera lingers over the wreckage of the SC&P set, and Sterling persuades Olson to drink with him and give him company just a little longer (“Lost Horizon”). Sterling rues, “What the hell happened?”—seeking to attribute his own actions to an abstraction of fate. Olson immediately rejects his emotional appeal: “You’re acting like you had nothing to do with this. … but you actually sold it.” Her comments cut through Sterling’s attempt at sentimentality and places the blame squarely on his shoulders. Few shots of vermouth down, Sterling begins to play a funeral dirge version of “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” on an outof-place organ, and Olson skates around the hallways of the torn-down office. The eerie scene obtains from the abandoned set a final word: Sterling as the captain of a sinking ship, awaiting the final push to throw himself into the sea, and Olson’s readiness to take off to new frontiers, except that the new frontier (McCann–Erickson) has been established as a cavernous sexist haven. Weiner explains the pragmatic production decision behind the scene: “the meta part of it was us dealing with the experience of dismantling that set. … and the feeling that we would have walking around this thing when it was taken down. And I was like: It’s just going to be like a big open space—how do I show that? Why doesn’t Peggy just roller skate around it?” (Miller) This is an instance where the circumstances of a set solicits a narrative. The set receives a send-off similar to other long term associates of the series. Like its characters, Mad Men sets have always played an integral role in its storytelling, their design intensity defined by their capacity to contribute to the narrative.

13

See Chapter 3, the section on “Memories in Serial Television.”

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

The story of Mad Men largely takes place in New York, but the series is almost entirely shot in Los Angeles. A lot of scenes are shot inside simply because it is easier to recreate interiors rather than recreating outdoor New York scenes in LA. Mad Men’s saturated sets, filled with material details, compensate for the absence of outdoor shoots. The details aid in the projection of the past onto the audience (Butler 59). The investment in details also lends the series a sense of interiority that cues the viewers to respond to the psychological exploration of characters. As a result, the sets end up with greater symbolic meaning and preeminence. A lot of the story in the series is communicated visually (“Mad Men: The Final Season”), through the physicality of characters’ presence and their non-verbal interactions. Think of Don and Sally Draper’s exchange of glances at the end of the episode “In Care Of.” On Thanksgiving, Draper picks up the children and takes them to the whorehouse he grew up in—a first attempt to let them in on his past. A few episodes earlier, Sally had commented that she does not know anything about her father (“The Crash”). When their car stops in a poor neighborhood, the children get visibly uncomfortable. They look curiously at the dilapidated, abandoned house and then at Draper in disbelief. “Both Sides Now” begins to play (Collins), cuing the viewers to consider Draper’s journey from a childhood of abject poverty. Sally looks at him, skeptical. But Draper looks back at her in earnest. The camera cuts to Sally once again, as she turns her head to look back at the house. The entire scene consists of seven sentences, but only one is narratively significant, when Draper says: “This is where I grew up.” The rest of the communication is done non-verbally, through things that can be seen on screen: the dilapidated whorehouse set, the position of the house on a raised platform towering over the characters, the poor African American boy eating ice-cream on the porch, and the characters’ physical responses to the new information. The frames, the camera, the cuts, and the edits mediate how the audience sees the things on screen. And finally the aural cue, the end credits song, informs the viewers how to receive the scene. Phil Abraham offers, when a scene ends “on a shot on someone’s face, it can serve as a commentary like punctuation can” (Interview with Goodlad and Varon 370). In such scenes, the staging of characters, the sets, the costumes, and the props become the narrative, voicing that which is left unsaid. Mad Men’s engagement with its sets is decidedly different from other contemporary shows set in the same past. For instance, Pan Am uses similar midcentury interiors, albeit mostly interiors of Pan Am flights. But unlike Mad Men’s defined localized drama, Pan Am extracts from the allure of ’60s historic

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events from around the globe. The central protagonists, a group of young Pan Am pilots and stewardesses, are on a rescue mission in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion (“Pilot”); they are also in Berlin when Kennedy gives his iconic “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech (“Ich Bin Ein Berliner”); they are in the thick of Cold War espionage, one of the stewardesses even works for the CIA (“Pilot”); the series invokes the German occupation of France through a French stewardess whose parents were killed by the Nazis (“Ich Bin Ein Berliner”), and so on. Clearly the ambitions of the series are spatially expansive; their design principle is an antithesis to the spatially circumscribed Mad Men sets. While the camera lingers over every Mad Men set, familiarizing the viewers with the objects that saturate the sets and prompting attention and contemplation, Pan Am’s engagement with its sets is fleeting. Nothing in Pan Am is designed to last longer than a single episode; no locale holds the interest of the series, inviting a revisitation. The series, true to its Jet Age characterization, is in a mad rush to be at all historic events, all at once. Pan Am has been accused of nostalgia (Mora, Rosenberg, Gilbert), specifically of capitalizing “a rekindled appreciation for Mid-Century Modern style by lovingly recreating the accoutrements of the Jet Age” (Spano). However, most indictments of the series came in immediately after its pilot; all the references cited above were written within a week from the release of its first episode. It was clear that the lure of the mid-century fittings, the shiny Cadillac convertibles, and the glamor of the blue uniforms could not mitigate the dismissal. Nostalgia had failed to deliver on its promise of commercial and cultural bankability. Pan Am did not have the approval of the taste makers like Mad Men did: no nods from Presidents,14 no indulgent coverage by The New Yorker or The New York Times, no exhibitions at the Museum of the Moving Image (“Exhibition: Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men”) or the Smithsonian (“National Museum of American History”). Pan Am suffered from constantly being labelled as a derivative of Mad Men. Although television critics went to lengths to point at the differences between the two: “‘Pan Am’ is truly nostalgia - a selective look back at the past in its idealized form. The reality of the time was, of course, a lot grayer, which is what ‘Mad Men’ is all about” (Gilbert). Unlike Mad Men, the resurgence of mid-century is never ascribed to Pan Am. Rather, the series is blamed for opportunistically feeding off the mid-century revival. To be fair, the series’s engagement with 14

During the 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama refers to the series Mad Men: “It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a Mad Men episode.” (“President Obama Mad Men Reference”)

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

mid-century was short-lived, as it was cancelled after the first season, and confined largely to airport lounges and hotel rooms. Still, the series’s desire to pay sincere tributes to the 20th century icon Pan American airways is undeniable, also stressed by the interviews of Pan Am stewardesses included in the DVD release. The stewardesses, who worked for the airlines through the ’60s, express overwhelming gratitude towards the airline for the career opportunities and the sheer pleasure of serving on Pan Am flights (“The Real Life of a Pan Am Stewardess”). The women, awash with nostalgia, talk about a different era, a different sensibility that does not compare with contemporary airline services (“Becoming a Pan Am Stewardess”). During their interviews, there is no mention of casual sexism, glass ceilings at their jobs, or other gender-biased workplace policies such as unequal pay. They supervise and approve the sets of Pan Am (“The Plane Set”), and they are indeed the series’s inspiration. Pan Am distinguishes itself from a retro by its unaffected reverence towards its eponymous icon and a definitive absence of irony. The sets of any retro invite the default charge of nostalgia, but it is through the sets’ interactions with the script, the juxtapositions with the narrative discordances, the wavering from conventionalities, the audience’s knowledge of characters’ peculiar traits and their modi operandi gained from sustained engagement with their past actions that a retro builds its defense against nostalgia. Mad Men deploys the play of flatness and depth; the clean lines and sleek surfaces of the sets contrast with the slow push-in shots that accord several scenes an internal quality. It regularly inserts comic moments that interrupt serious immersion,15 think of Olson’s head buoy up to the glass upper part of the partition between her and Draper’s office, after he gets attacked by his secretary with a cigarette dispenser (“The Rejected”). Mad Men also has an astonishing number of scenes involving gore and horror16 that rupture the nostalgic appeal of the set and the narrative, think of Ginsberg’s nipple presented to Olson in a gift box (“The Runaways”); Cosgrove being shot in his eye by the General Motors executives (“The Quality of Mercy”); or the lawnmower misadventure in the office party (“Guy Walks Into an Advertising agency”). The diversions account for the ironic transfers from the narrative to the set.

15 16

The reddit thread “Funniest scenes in Mad Men?”gives an overview of the abundance and frequency of comic scenes that appear in the series. It is easy to find online listicles on Mad Men’s crazy or bizarre scenes such as “9 MOST BIZARRE MAD MEN MOMENTS” (Kenny), and “Top 10 Insane Mad Men Moments.”

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These overly dramatic devices draw attention to the series’s own “fiction effect,” distancing itself from claims of instigating the “reality effect” (Affron “Irony and Affect”). They draw attention to the performance, to the staged fiction, no matter how realist the set is. The aesthetic appeal of the Mad Men sets—its period specificity, the carefully curated decorative embellishments, the allure of the mid-century modern furnishings—is self-reflexively diminished by sharp juxtapositions with the narrative events that take place in these beautiful spaces: Joan Holloway’s rape by her fiancé in Draper’s mid-century office (“The Mountain King”); her insulting assignation with the sleazy Herb Rennet (Gary Basaraba) in an ornate hotel room (“The Other Woman”); and Draper’s murderous delirium in which he strangles a woman in the bedroom of his swanky Upper East Side apartment (“Mystery Date”). Written into the elegance of the set is its subversive potential invoked by the narrative. The drama is harnessed from the tension: the narrative counterpoint to the nostalgic appeal of the beautiful sets. Mad Men revels in the dissonance of turning something inviting into something offensive, of extending an offering (of vicarious pleasures of mid-century vices) and then puncturing it and turning it belly up. The effect is collaboratively achieved: the script works in conjunction with the set design, the musical underscores, the camera work, the costumes, the lighting, the frames and the staging of characters, the pace of edits, the pace of speech, to name a few of the actors involved. To not consider their collaborative association would run the risk of overstating the value of any one of these actors, worse still of essentializing the value of the Mad Men script or its sets. The underlying assumption in any ANT study is that no single actor alone contributes to the value of the entire network. Value is the combined work of all actors and the associations between them. However, picking up on a few prominent actors in the network—such as the script or the set—and identifying the ways in which they ‘do something’ to contribute to Mad Men’s overall success help in exploring the question: how is value created in a network? If Mad Men is Latour’s space shuttle, its success is what keeps the system in operation and ensures its existence. Success17 here is a way of discussing the aggregate value of the associations in the Mad Men network, or in Latour’s terms, the work-net that “allow one to see the labor that goes on in laying

17

As discussed earlier, success is always relative, and seldom can it be expressed in numbers alone.

Chapter 5: The Mad Men Network

down the net-works” (Reassembling 132). For instance, The Sopranos’s association with Mad Men is on the surface a sharing of its brand identity, but more tangibly, it is the sharing of the crew—their experience and their ease at collaborating with each other after working together for an extended period of time. When Phil Abraham, cinematographer of The Sopranos, was asked to shoot the Mad Men pilot, he brought along with him “a crew that included many Sopranos veterans … Frequent Sopranos director Alan Taylor helmed the pilot and first episode of Mad Men, and that continuity helped, according to the cinematographer” (Feld et al.). Production designer Bob Shaw, art director Henry Dunn, assistant director Karen Radzikowski, and production manager Scott Hornbacher were amongst The Sopranos’s crew who made that transition to Mad Men. This transference of value within a network challenges notions of intrinsic value of any one actor. Phil Abraham is not one single actor, when zoomed in he emerges as an actor-network; his aggregate action is affected by the net value of the combined action of his crew. Mathew Weiner can be seen as an actor-network as well. In 2018, he began his next television project The Romanoffs, bringing along with him his network, which includes several of his Mad Men cast and crew. Actors John Slattery and Christina Hendricks; producers Semi Chellas, André and Maria Jacquemetton; music composer David Carbonara; cinematographer Chris Manley; production designer Christopher Brown; costume designer Janie Bryant are a few names that are immediately noticeable. The special features of actor-networks such as Abraham and Weiner are their capacities to mobilize and enroll other actors to make the new systems that they enter sustainable and durable. Academia, The New York Times, Netflix can all be examined as actor-networks, and as actors in the Mad Men network. This study is aware of its own insertion too into the Mad Men network.

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Conclusion

Recap Two decades into the 21st century, the abundance of cultural productions invested in memories confirm that the past is secure in contemporary popular cultures of representation. Two distinct strands exist side by side within this representational culture: the solemn histories in their pursuit of preservation and retro, the anti-grand other, content with fragments of the past in people’s chaotic memories and their apocryphal stories. This book tried to tell the story of the latter. Retro’s irreverence is not symptomatic of a disinterest in the past; rather, it emerges from an anxiety over serious and rigid narratives that give the impression that the past exists solely through them and in their image. Its detachment towards formalism and realism is characterized by a casual disregard for categories, flouting the boundaries of genres and formats towards the appreciation of little narratives that are idiosyncratic and inward-looking. It interacts with the past in versatile combinations, borrowing a feature from one genre, a technique from a second, and presentation from a third, and layering them all to create asymmetrical textures. Its mix and match approach is a byproduct of the 21st century’s intensely connected and participatory memory cultures that are at once specific and global. Retros are made by people of different ages, from different geographical locations, and with different political and cultural histories, who exchange ideas, collaborate, and influence each other. All the while, the connections with the past remain intimate, with an emphasis on individual stories, presented from a nonjudgmental perspective. Hybridity in retro representational styles is a starting point, and each retro text distinguishes itself from another by the ways in which it postures its irreverence. Some express their detachment through deferral of absolute closures, tracing the shadowy remnants of the Second World War into

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decades that followed the catastrophic events (Ida). Others attempt to subvert the established moral order, negating absolute heroes and villains (Land of Mines). Still others unleash upon their audience ghosts and specters that remind of the past’s sinewy presence (The Devil’s Backbone), or let their stories speak trough absences and juxtapositions, reserving an ironic distance (Tony Manero). Retro’s future is predicated on the diversity of retro makers and the unique ways in which they redefine retro’s irreverence in different contexts. Since the 1990s, there has been active celebrations of anniversaries of historic events of the 20th century as various cultural identities stake claim to their unique histories and their representation in public spaces. 2020 marked 75 years since the Second World War, and 2019 commemorated 25 years since the Rwandan genocide, 100 years of the Bauhaus style, 50th anniversary of Woodstock Music festival, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests. 2018 saw the 50th anniversaries of the Tet Offensive, My Lai Massacre, the student protests of 1968, Prague Spring, and the 50th death anniversaries of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Within such an energized climate of memorializing, retro performs a distinct cultural role, always ready with the anti-grand narrative. Retro’s potential to surprise its viewers with the unexpected constitute its pleasures; it does so by pointing at something new in terms of content or presentation within a historical terrain that is well marked and mapped. Son of Saul is exemplary in this aspect, as it revisits an inviolable past (which has left an indelible mark on human history and is known to people around the world), offering new representational possibilities that amplify the sensorial experience, without contending any new historical insight to the Holocaust. Other retros have attempted to pick up stories from the edges, revisiting non-eventful moments that quietly carry within themselves the remains of the preceding eventful moments. Most do without any educational promise. Retros are, at the end of the day, entertainment pieces, scribbly graffiti versions of history, but never its substitute. Retro can be an entry point to history with its capacity to engage its viewers through its humor, irony, juxtaposition, and dissonance; and it can entertain those who are familiar with the history of the represented past through its refractions, digressions, non sequiturs, and emotional extensions. Either way, retro exists at history’s margins. A recent debate, however, sparked off by a Guardian article written by Simon Jenkins, disparaging productions that “play fast and loose with historical facts,” point that the arguments on the issue of revisiting historical pasts are far from resolved. Jenkins disapproves the impunity with which filmmakers

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pander to historical inaccuracies for profit and excuse the historical errors as artistic license. He asks: “What is a history student to make of that?” or an accountable journalist such as himself who “rightly call facts sacred.” Several Guardian readers responded to Jenkins: one tweeted, “How about [the history students] conduct actual historical research, rather than watch a film” (@GavinWhenman); another helpfully offers, “Don’t watch something ‘based’ on a real story and expect the whole true story. Just as you shouldn’t watch a science-fiction film and expect it to represent the true laws of physics” (“History films can fake it”). These comments are testaments to viewers’ intelligence; they emphasize that the viewers do not need purists to look after them and to point them to the distinctions between facts and fictions. But for Jenkins, and those like him on the solemn side of the fence, audience intelligence will always remain suspect: “Film-makers claim that everyone knows they make things up. I am not sure everyone does.” Retros do not belittle their audience with condescension, neither do they stake claim to ‘sacred’ historical truths. They pose questions rather than offering resolutions, and at the very least, they hope to start a conversation about history. Retro operates on the basis that its audience is intelligent enough to navigate through its metaphorical stories, read into its allegories, trace and decode its historical references, and that it can skip the prompts that provide orienting details. Viewers enjoy not being underestimated and are willing to invest in retros, engaging with them even outside of their narrative universes. The vibrant paratextual cultures around retro demonstrate that viewers are excited by the layers and narrative complexities and look forward to being teased with idiosyncratic connections and retro’s recasting of obscure references in new contexts. Think of retro’s generous use of music intertexts in its narratives that are rarely the obvious chart toppers or runaway hits. There are of course financial advantages of using obscure songs as opposed to iconic ones; retro creators openly acknowledge the financial negotiations that affect their creative decisions. Viewers participate in collective guessing games that involve anticipating which intertexts can be expected in the upcoming installments, and on occasions when the insertions are obscure, members who can identify the citations share their knowledge with others in the community. Retro cultures distinguish themselves from closed systems of knowledge production; they are open, vibrant, and promote conversations between viewers themselves and between viewers and creators. These exchanges allow retros to be casual, experimental, even elliptical.

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Retro creators embrace the paratextual platforms and use them to discuss with their viewers the nuts and bolts that hold their productions together. These direct conversations have two main functions: viewer engagement expands from an interest in the product to include the processes involved in the making of retro; almost as a corollary, this wider appreciation of retro’s production and mediative processes aids in retro’s dispelling of restorative nostalgia. Paratextual spaces enable retro to bare itself to the bones, offering the viewers intimate and detailed discussions on where a particular piece of furniture was bought, why two minutes of its narrative time were cut, or how an actor’s pregnancy was covered by a plot twist. The breakdown of the retro product into an entangled mess of complicated creative decisions that are supported by professionals from different departments keeps the aura of finished products at bay. It reveals retros to be dispersed entities, their value and affective capacities as continually distributed amongst the network of actors that supports and maintains it. Retro’s entanglements lends itself to the use of Actor Network Theory (ANT) to understand its mechanisms. Imagining retro as web-like conveys retro’s dynamism, intricacies, and the interdependencies. Especially in understanding retro’s cultural influence, a distributive network approach is useful in recognizing the net effect of collaborations, the transferences of resources, and the slightest of tractions. For a serialized retro television program, recognizing its assembled nature demystifies notions of self-sustenance and autonomy. An ANT approach facilitates the tracing of interactions between members of the creative team, between creators and viewers, and between viewers and the retro production. Even within a retro’s narrative universe, ANT can be used to observe how constitutive parts of a retro influence each other, the concessions and compromises that they make to work together, and how one component enhances the experience of another, effecting its overall meaning. The network approach can be applied to retro’s intertextualities as well. Observing how a fragment of music interacts with an image or a narrative sequence, how a new frame adds to, or takes away from, a film intertext reveal the affective propensities of intertextualities to be pliable. Each interaction within the retro network results in some amount of translation of meaning and appeal, and viewers’ recognition of retro’s translations—of how it mediates its intertextualities, how it questions nostalgia, and how it associates with its represented pasts—determine to a large extent retro’s cultural location and reception in the 21st century.

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Expanding the Frame Mad Men’s mediations of 1960s America is crucial to its identity as retro. The ’60s is widely seen as the beginning of the present in American popular cultural imaginations and romanticized as the wellspring of modern political cultures and identities. The period is inundated with appreciation for its good design, music, cinema, fashion styles, and ads and is recalled with fascination and longing. In spite of its immense significance, or perhaps, because of it, the 1960s is wrapped in a glossy cover of awe and admiration that inhibits engagements with its non-eventful greater part. Mad Men, in a characteristic retro way, enters the ’60s through characters that are flawed, struggling, determined, and broken; the series cares less about the perfect embodiments of sexual liberation and is interested more in the complicated everyday sexual struggles and the corporate infightings for power. The series has “managed to explain, implicitly, that its intelligent, even cunning female characters operated within sexual politics whose rules were not arranged for their benefit” (M. Dean). The women in Mad Men are aware of the sexual discrimination at the workplace and do their best to get by. The series is interested in their small victories, the slightest tilting of balance of power, the emotional manipulations and games of seductions, which make the characters human, rather than symbols of heroism or victimhood. In doing so, it demystifies the ’60s and makes it easy for contemporary viewers to identify with its characters. Since Mad Men, a host of period dramas were drawn to off-center narratives, attempting to offer the female perspective: they reproduced themes of sexual neglect towards housewives and the casual sexism in the workplace. But most folded under the weight of ’60s iconicity and jouissance. In Pan Am, the air hostesses appear à la mode, surprisingly unaware of their fetishization. The same is the case with the treatment of the bunnies in The Playboy Club, which is only nominally interested in the idea of female empowerment, and finds itself more attracted to the Club’s glamor and edgy lifestyle. Both series wish to sell the idea of female empowerment—in being a Pan Am air hostess and in being a Playboy bunny—but they do so without giving their characters interiority and without taking the time to be with them through their everyday drudgery and dry spells. The series are infatuated with the idea of a raving ’60s party and the celebration of the transition from the frigid ’50s “into a new decade in which “anything could happen to anybody… or anybunny” (Fienberg). The ’60s exceptionalism and exaggerated temporal discontinuity between the supposed conformist ’50s and the radical ’60s in Pan Am

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and The Playboy Club indulge in delusions of a post-feminist America. In contrast, by following its working women representatives Peggy Olson and Joan Harris into their homes, Mad Men opens up its frames to include scenes that are discomfiting. Viewers see the two women at close quarters, with their guards down, without makeup, and vulnerable. The images of Joan Harris at home, raising her boy with her mother, are far from glamorous (“Mystery Date”). Viewers are let in on Olson’s loneliness and emotional breakdown in the privacy of her home (“Time Zones”). Mad Men’s accommodation of the unpleasant distinguishes it as retro and sets it apart from the other series that followed on its heels. Masters of Sex, which has a slightly toned down portrayal of the mid-century, reproduces the binary of the naive housewife and the sexually liberated working woman. Set during the years 1956–1969, the series tells the story of Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), two early researchers of human sexuality. Masters is an introverted, manipulative physician who asks his secretary Johnson to join him in his sex research as an associate on the condition that she has sex with him. Johnson agrees to his proposition without as much as flinching at its exploitative nature. Johnson’s naïveté or sexual liberation appears forced, as it is hard to believe that a women in the 1950s fails to recognize unwarranted sexual advances. Even in the absence of the legal vocabulary of workplace harassment laws, which takes shape through the mid-’70s, Johnson’s non-reaction is inexplicable and it tests viewers’ relatability. The fear of being sidelined from the project might not have left Johnson with much choice, but the narrative does not grant her the interiority that could have potentially let viewers witness an inner conflict before she accedes to Masters’s proposition. The opacity and spontaneity of Johnson’s decision points at the series’s underdeveloped understanding of sexual politics. In trying to distinguish its protagonist Johnson as being exceptionally self-aware of her sexuality, the series surrounds her with other guileless women: Masters’s neglected housewife, the provost’s wife unaware of her husband’s sexual orientation, the naive daughter of the provost. The series over-compensates, projecting upon Johnson the present’s own liberal sexual fantasies. Johnson’s character is drawn from “what the culture seems to want from ‘liberation’— a woman who has left the judgment of others behind, who doesn’t give a damn, who in her new omniscience sees both past and future clearly—and less like any recognizable human being who has ever lived” (M. Dean). These reckless projections deny women their basic humanity. The portrayals of sexual liberation in Pan Am, Playboy Club, and Masters of

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Sex contribute to the imagination that sexual discrimination is a thing of the pre-’60s past. In these times of #MeToo movement that has challenged the present’s notions of sexual liberation—pointing at the pervasiveness of workplace sexual harassment and date rapes, and with explorations of complicated sexual ‘gray zones’—these presumptions are inaccurate as well as dangerous for the cause of feminism. Retros are interested in people, with their conflicting personas, and in their messy lives. The womanizing Draper is shown to have deep feelings for his children; Ida, who has just learnt about her Jewish roots and her dead parents, has a moment of romance with a stranger in a hotel; a Danish Sergeant has empathy for the young German POWs; a Hollywood fixer is a deeply religious man; a vain film star is won over by the communist rhetoric. People are not one-dimensional, their lives do not lend to easy causalities. Retros are not interested in grand narratives, in abstractions of heroism, love, evil and depravity; rather they are curious to find out how, and in what circumstances, these qualities manifest. The cacophony of seemingly incompatible personas do not fit readily into neat categories of genre conventions. Retros such as Mad Men expand their narrative frames to include the bathos and dissonance of everyday life: Draper’s desperateness in trying to recreate the success of the Kodak pitch for Life cereal (“Waldorf Stories”), Joan Harris using her charms to cover for her husbands inadequacies (“My Old Kentucky Home”), Betty Draper’s manipulative attempts at using her psychiatrist (who regularly updates her husband about their sessions) to get to Draper (“The Wheel”), or Margaret Sterling’s self-pity when Kennedy was assassinated on her wedding day (“The Grown Ups”). Often beginning in the aftermath of an event, retro narratives emphasize the continuities in people’s lives rather than clear breaks. Olson’s one night stand is of little interest to Mad Men; instead, it traces her story after her unwanted pregnancy. The same is the case with Draper’s stolen identity, the narrative is interested in how he deals with the incident years into his life. The pattern recurs with other characters: Sterling is shown not as a decorated war hero, but as he descends into existential crisis, Betty Draper’s story begins when her marriage is in shatters, undercutting happily ever after closures. Retro lingers on the aftertastes, the remains of the day. Retros have a distinct place within the energized cultures of memorialization. They detract from the historicity of events, by widening its lens to include the days leading up to, and the days following the events. The changing of the frames changes the story. Retros dwell on the legacies and aftermaths

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of national tragedies, political movements, and national victories; and they wrestle with what settles behind. The story of the civil rights is not contained in the ’60s, but it permeates all the way to the present, the same is the case with the story of sexual discrimination and the recessions—their meanings emerge in their wake. In telling personal stories, alienation, neglect, poverty, feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt become retro’s staples. These emotional states have long term effects, manifesting in transgenerational relations. Using human experiences, retros explore imbalances in gender, class, race, and power.

Futures The ’90s memory boom has now settled into a plateau, promising lateral expansions across cultures and across generational cycles. Consequently, the historical points of return have shifted, with the inclusion of plural identities associated with memory practices. With geographical spread, newer relatable pasts and their histories have been opened up for revisitations in distinct and culture-specific ways. The variations have also affected retro’s irreverent postures, which were never well-defined to begin with, but certainly the diversity has contributed to the retro discourse, tweaking, testing, and pushing its boundaries. Think of Bartek Konopka’s short film Rabbit à la Berlin that presents the story of the Berlin Wall through the perspective of the rabbits that lived and flourished in the thin strip of grassy land between the two walls separating the East from the West. When Konopka heard of the rabbits of the Berlin Wall, he knew that he had found a unique entry point to the Cold War story. The rabbits’ point of view allowed him to “tell [a] well-known story, but from [a] completely different angle” (“Interview Bartek Konopka”). He could present the story of the East Germans from a distance and without judgement. The film sustains the characteristic retro detachment, clinging always to the rabbits’ perspective that is emphasized by the several low angles, while the human drama unfolds on the periphery. Retro’s hybridity and irreverence towards authenticity is noticeable in Konopka’s creative mix of archival images and new footage. He had found only a handful of shots of the rabbits living in the no man’s land, a few interviews with witnesses, and the rest was imaginative extension. Shots of rabbits were collected and assembled from various sources, including a few from YouTube (Catsoulis). The new shots were tweaked in post production

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to simulate grainy black-and-white visuals and then seamlessly weaved in with the archival footage. Television narrator Krystyna Czubówna, popular for her commentaries on educational films, provides the narration, bringing in an additional layer of seriousness and satire. The audience is called upon to extrapolate from the experiences of the rabbits and extend their affinities to the people of Eastern Europe under communism, who had to make a difficult transition at the end of the Cold War. A curious mix of sarcasm and contemplation, the film nevertheless recounts “a story about our parents,” but from the Polish perspective, and in a distinctive Polish style, with its “particular attitude to history, the language of allusion, the metaphors, pars pro toto” (Zarębski). Even though set in Berlin, the film’s use of rabbits as protagonists allows for a wider transposition of symbolic meaning, forging continuities between the experiences of the East Germans, the Polish, and the Czech (“Interview Bartek Konopka”). They are Konopka’s rabbit people, in their shared experience of being pushed into a new world without adequate preparation. Rabbit à la Berlin encapsulates a distinct cultural experience that arose from a specific political situation, but the emotional disorientation captured in the film is sure to find resonance in other cultures. This extension is perhaps where the future of retro lies. Retro’s have a proclivity for allegorical and metaphorical revisitations of the past; these abstractions at once clarify that retro does not aim to be a historical document, and at the same time they give it wider appeal. Retro could also possibly evolve towards zoomed in, culture specific, personalized accounts, tightly organized with sparse details, dialing up eccentric dissonances. To a large extent, these two strands—metaphorical and minimal—already exist within retro’s oeuvre, and each ensures retro’s persistent distance from a realist point-to-point narrative. The German producers of Rabbit à la Berlin “had wanted a sarcastic, humorous film for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall” (Zarębski), perhaps something along the lines of earlier comedic approaches by Germans to represent life of young adults in East Berlin in Sun Alley or the fall of the Wall in Good Bye, Lenin! But the Polish director offered them something more—a unique point of view from less than a foot above the ground.

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List of Mad Men Episodes Cited

Season 1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, season 1, episode 1, AMC, 19 July 2007. —. Audio Commentary by Matthew Weiner, Mad Men, season 1, episode 1, DVD, Lionsgate, 2008. “Ladies Room.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, season 1, episode 2, AMC, 26 July 2007. “Marriage of Figaro.” Mad Men, written by Tom Palmer, directed by Ed Bianchi, season 1, episode 3, AMC, 2 Aug. 2007. “New Amsterdam.” Mad Men, written by Lisa Albert, directed by Tim Hunter, season 1, episode 4, AMC, 9 Aug. 2007. “Walking Distance.” The Twilight Zone, written by Rod Serling, directed by Robert Stevens, season 1, episode 5, AMC, 20 Oct. 1959. “Babylon.” Mad Men, written by André Jacquemetton and Maria Jacquemetton, directed by Andrew Bernstein, season 1, episode 6, AMC, 23 Aug. 2007. “Red in the Face.” Mad Men, written by Bridget Bedard, directed by Tim Hunter, season 1, episode 7, AMC, 30 Aug. 2007. “The Hobo Code.” Mad Men, written by Chris Provenzano, directed by Phil Abraham, season 1, episode 8, AMC, 6 Sept. 2007. “Shoot.” Mad Men, written by Chris Provenzano and Matthew Weiner, directed by Paul Feig, season 1, episode 9, AMC, 13 Sept. 2007. “Long Weekend.” Mad Men, written by Bridget Bedard, André Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton and Matthew Weiner, directed by Tim Hunter, season 1, episode 10, AMC, 27 Sept. 2007. —. Audio Commentary by Tim Hunter and David Carbonara, Mad Men, season 1, episode 10, DVD, Lionsgate, 2008.

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“Nixon vs. Kennedy.” Mad Men, written by Lisa Albert, André Jacquemetton and Maria Jacquemetton, directed by Alan Taylor, season 1, episode 12, AMC, 11 Oct. 2007. “The Wheel.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 1, episode 13, AMC, 18 Oct. 2007.

Season 2 “For Those Who Think Young.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Tim Hunter, season 2, episode 1, AMC, 27 July 2008. “The Benefactor.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Rick Cleveland, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, season 2, episode 3, AMC, 10 Aug. 2008. “Three Sundays.” Mad Men, written by André Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton and Robin Veith, directed by Tim Hunter, season 2, episode 4, AMC, 17 Aug. 2008. “Maidenform.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Phil Abraham, season 2, episode 6, AMC, 31 Aug. 2008. “The Gold Violin.” Mad Men, written by Jane Anderson, André Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton and Matthew Weiner, directed by Andrew Bernstein, season 2, episode 7, AMC, 7 Sept. 2008. “A Night to Remember.” Mad Men, written by Robin Veith and Matthew Weiner, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, season 2, episode 8, AMC, 14 Sept. 2008. “Six Month Leave.” Mad Men, written by André Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton, Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 2, episode 9, AMC, 28 Sept. 2008. “The Mountain King.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith, directed by Alan Taylor, season 2, episode 12, AMC, 19 Oct. 2008. “Meditations in an Emergency.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Kater Gordon, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 2, episode 13, AMC, 26 Oct. 2008.

Season 3 “Love Among the Ruins.” Mad Men, written by Cathryn Humphris and Matthew Weiner, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, season 3, episode 2, AMC, 23 Aug. 2009.

List of Mad Men Episodes Cited

“My Old Kentucky Home.” Mad Men, written by Dahvi Waller and Matthew Weiner, directed by Jennifer Getzinger, season 3, episode 3, AMC, 30 Aug. 2009. “The Fog.” Mad Men, written by Kater Gordon, directed by Phil Abraham, season 3, episode 5, AMC, 13 Sept. 2009. “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency.” Mad Men, written by Robin Veith, Matthew Weiner and Kater Gordon, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, season 3, episode 6, AMC, 20 Sept. 2009. “Seven Twenty Three.” Mad Men, written by André Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton and Matthew Weiner, directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, season 3, episode 7, AMC, 27 Sept. 2009. “The Gypsy and the Hobo.” Mad Men, written by Marti Noxon, Cathryn Humphris, and Matthew Weiner, directed by Jennifer Getzinger, season 3, episode 11, AMC, 25 Oct. 2009. “The Grown Ups.” Mad Men, written by Brett Johnson and Matthew Weiner, directed by Barbert Schroeder, season 3, episode 12, AMC, 1 Nov. 2009. “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Erin Levy, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 3, episode 13, AMC, 8 Nov. 2009.

Season 4 “Public Relations.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, Brett Johnson and Erin Levy, directed by Phil Abraham, season 4, episode 1, AMC, 25 July 2010. “Christmas Comes But Once a Year.” Mad Men, written by Tracy McMillan, Matthew Weiner, Brett Johnson and Erin Levy, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 4, episode 2, AMC, 1 Aug. 2010. “The Good News.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Abrams and Matthew Weiner, directed by Jennifer Getzinger, season 4, episode 3, AMC, 8 Aug. 2010. “The Rejected.” Mad Men, written by André Keith Huff, Matthew Weiner, Brett Johnson and Erin Levy, directed by John Slattery, season 4, episode 4, AMC, 15 Aug. 2010. “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.” Mad Men, written by Erin Levy, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, season 4, episode 5, AMC, 22 Aug. 2010. “Waldorf Stories.” Mad Men, written by Brett Johnson and Matthew Weiner, directed by Scott Hornbacher, season 4, episode 6, AMC, 29 Aug. 2010.

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“The Suitcase.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Jennifer Getzinger, season 4, episode 7, AMC, 5 Sept. 2010. “The Summer Man.” Mad Men, written by Lisa Albert, Janet Leahy and Matthew Weiner, directed by Phil Abraham, season 4, episode 8, AMC, 12 Sept. 2010. “The Beautiful Girls.” Mad Men, written by David Waller, Matthew Weiner, Brett Johnson and Erin Levy, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 4, episode 9, AMC, 19 Sept. 2010. “Hands and Knees.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Abrahams and Matthew Weiner, directed by Lynn Shelton, season 4, episode 10, AMC, 26 Sept. 2010. “Tomorrowland.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Igla, Matthew Weiner, Brett Johnson and Erin Levy, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 4, episode 13, AMC, 17 Oct. 2010.

Season 5 “A Little Kiss, Part 1.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Jennifer Getzinger, season 5, episode 1, AMC, 25 Mar. 2012. “Tea Leaves.” Mad Men, written by Erin Levy and Matthew Weiner, directed by Jon Hamm, season 5, episode 3, AMC, 1 Apr. 2012. —. Audio Commentary by Matthew Weiner, Jon Hamm and Erin Levy, Mad Men, season 5, episode 3, DVD, Lionsgate, 2012. “Mystery Date.” Mad Men, written by Victor Levin and Matthew Weiner, directed by Matt Shakman, season 5, episode 4, AMC, 8 Apr. 2012. “Signal 30.” Mad Men, written by Frank Pierson and Matthew Weiner, directed by John Slattery, season 5, episode 5, AMC, 15 Apr. 2012. “At The Codfish Ball.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Igla, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 5, episode 7, AMC, 29 Apr. 2012. “Lady Lazarus.” Mad Men, written by Tracy Matthew Weiner, directed by Phil Abraham, season 5, episode 8, AMC, 6 May 2012. “Christmas Waltz.” Mad Men, written by Victor Levin and Matthew Weiner, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 5, episode 10, AMC, 20 May 2012. “The Other Woman.” Mad Men, written by Semi Challas and Matthew Weiner, directed by Phil Abraham, season 5, episode 11, AMC, 27 May 2012. “The Phantom.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 5, episode 13, AMC, 10 June 2012.

List of Mad Men Episodes Cited

Season 6 “The Doorway.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Jonathan Igla, directed by Scott Hornbacher, season 6, episode 1, AMC, 7 Apr. 2013. “Collaborators.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner, directed by Jon Hamm, season 6, episode 3, AMC, 14 Apr. 2013. “To Have and To Hold.” Mad Men, written by Erin Levy and Jonathan Igla, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 6, episode 4, AMC, 21 Apr. 2013. “The Flood.” Mad Men, written by Tom Smuts and Matthew Weiner, directed by Chris Manley, season 6, episode 5, AMC, 28 Apr. 2013. “Man with a Plan.” Mad Men, written by Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner, directed by Joh Slattery, season 6, episode 7, AMC, 12 May 2013. “The Crash.” Mad Men, written by Jason Grote and Matthew Weiner, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 6, episode 8, AMC, 19 May 2013. “The Better Half.” Mad Men, written by Erin Levy and Matthew Weiner, directed by Phil Abraham, season 6, episode 9, AMC, 26 May 2013. “A Tale of Two Cities.” Mad Men, written by Janet Leahy and Matthew Weiner, directed by John Slattery, season 6, episode 10, AMC, 2 June 2013. “Favors.” Mad Men, written by Semi Challas and Matthew Weiner, directed by Jennifer Getzinger, season 6, episode 11, AMC, 9 June 2013. “The Quality of Mercy.” Mad Men, written by André Jacquemetton and Maria Jaquemetton, directed by Phil Abraham, season 6, episode 12, AMC, 16 June 2013. “In Care Of.” Mad Men, written by Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 6, episode 13, AMC, 23 June 2013.

Season 7 “Time Zones.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Jonathan Igla, directed by Scott Hornbacher, season 7, episode 1, AMC, 13 Apr. 2014. “A Day’s Work.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner, directed by Michael Uppendahl, season 7, episode 2, AMC, 20 Apr. 2014. “Field Trip.” Mad Men, written by Heather Jeng Bledt and Matthew Weiner, directed by Chris Manley, season 7, episode 3, AMC, 27 Apr. 2014. “The Monolith.” Mad Men, written by Erin Levy, directed by Scott Hornbacher, season 7, episode 4, AMC, 4 May 2014.

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–. Audio Commentary by Matthew Weiner, et al., Mad Men, season 7, episode 4, DVD, Lionsgate, 2008. “The Runaways.” Mad Men, written by David Iserson and Matthew Weiner, directed by Chris Manley, season 7, episode 5, AMC, 11 May 2014. “The Strategy.” Mad Men, written by Semi Chellas and Jonathan Igla, directed by Phil Abraham, season 7, episode 6, AMC, 18 May 2014. “Waterloo.” Mad Men, written by Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 7, episode 7, AMC, 25 May 2014. “Severance.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Scott Hornbacher, season 7, episode 8, AMC, 5 Apr. 2015. “The Forecast.” Mad Men, written by Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner, directed by Jennifer Getzinger, season 7, episode 10, AMC, 19 Apr. 2015. “Lost Horizon.” Mad Men, written by Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner, directed by Phil Abraham, season 7, episode 12, AMC, 3 May 2015. “Person To Person.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner and Carly Wray, directed by Matthew Weiner, season 7, episode 14, AMC, 17 May 2015.

Works Cited

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Elisa Ganivet

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All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-publishing.com

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Jocelyne Porcher, Jean Estebanez (eds.)

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All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-publishing.com