When Mad Men debuted six years ago it was unlike anything else I had ever seen, as melancholic and atmospheric as an Edward Hopper painting brought to life. At the time much was made of its attention to the detail of the period. Oh and the clothes and the achingly beautiful cast. We were stunned as we watched attitudes and behaviours that used to pass for normal: sexism, racism, here a woman smoking in pregnancy, there a child playing with a cellophane bag on its head and sucking in the air. We watched the casual family picnic where at the finish the mother shakes out the blanket strewing food and packaging onto the grass before they drive off. How we smiled.
Then something else kicked in. We saw the characters and through them a mirror held up to our own lives. Sure, we were not as well dressed or as attractive but hang on a minute wasn’t that us on screen? Wasn’t that our sorrow being dissected on front of our eyes? I know of no other show that says as much about relationships than this.
I love the men, who wouldn’t, the strikingly handsome Don Draper, although actually but I would choose Roger Stirling every time but it’s the women who mesmerise me. Superficially I am drawn by their loveliness and their amazing clothes but I am, and have been, all of them at some points in my life.
Had I been younger when the programme first appeared I would have empathised most with Peggy. In a world driven by looks she has no obvious charms and has fought for everything she’s got. She is the secretary who becomes the first female a copywriter at the agency. She moves out of the suburbs to the city, she smokes pot and where other female characters have their eyes on the prize of an engagement ring and respectability Peggy has uncalculating sex with bohemian men. Yet as unconventional as she tries to be the moment in the last series where she is taken out to dinner by her boyfriend expecting a proposal and is instead asked whether they should move in together is a masterpiece of crystallised disappointment.
The character I most connected with at the time of launch was Betty, the first trophy wife of Don Draper. I don’t mean her glacial good looks, obviously, but the sense of isolation as her marriage melts away before her. The breakdown of her relationship took a similar trajectory to the decline of my own. In 2007 I had recovered from a breakdown but was still on the happy pills and had downsized my work commitments such that I was solely working from home part-time. Having been defined by work all my life I was left directionless and without the props that had given me an identity and purpose. So I became Betty and set about being the perfect housewife. As I was at home I took up the slack with my stepchildren when their mother was working. I baked. I built a nest. I watched myself became uninteresting to my partner.
I used to love Christmas and decorated extravagantly and my step children used to enjoy helping me. As 2007 gave way to 2008 my stepdaughter brought me a new decoration for my collection: a little bird in a gilded cage. Within six months my relationship was over bar the shouting and the further year and a half it took us to sell our home.
Some programmes capture me with the dialogue. When I watch The Thick of It I want to remember every fabulous word. In Mad Men the dialogue must be good because I can’t remember a single syllable of it. All I know is that I am so immersed in the story and the characters I lose consciousness that I am watching a programme at all.
No it’s not the dialogue but the spaces between words that hold me. These silences convey precisely the aloneness that you can only feel in the presence of someone who should understand us the most. They remind me of the Philip Larkin poem Talking In Bed that always plays in my head at low points in my life and his observation that in the half-life of a decaying relationship ‘It becomes still more difficult to find, Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.’ Mad Men is the moving Technicolor embodiment of this for me and that is why I watch and hope every time for a different outcome.
So by all means view Mad Men for its style and grace, for the curvaceous charms of Christina Hendricks, the chiselled magnificence of John Hamm and the telling nod to our recent history. I am observing something else. For me the programme is is about the gulf of misunderstanding between men and women and the way that even with the best of intentions we fail each other.
I see how Mad Men shows us the gaps between the things we want and the things we get. It illustrates the folly of trying to fill our empty spaces with someone else. It reminds us to be careful what we wish for and teaches us that despite our mistakes we pick ourselves up and we carry on because there is no alternative.
Where many shows will end at an emotional high point mostly Mad Men ends in repose, often in complete silence, with a character staring out beyond us. It looks like nothing is happening but that is the moment I am most drawn to. The characters don’t need to say a word because my thoughts are their thoughts and I cannot take my eyes off the screen until the credits close. I remain because in that silence I see every dream and disappointment I ever had. I see the people I lost and the reasons I stayed and it breaks me but I just can’t bring myself to look away.
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