I do feel we are living in the Golden Age of television. It used to be that movies stars with failing careers seemed to traipse into obscurity after a desperate stint on a sub-par mini-series or sitcom. Now it is the opposite. Who cares about the movies when you have great television to watch and discuss? Summer blockbusters? Just more explosions and mindless action from the latest super hero film (cough, cough, Cghh-Man-of-Stcough...)
Yes, if you look back over the last decade you can see the increase in good writing devoted to drama and the like. Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey and so forth. Even How I Met Your Mother is brilliant.
And I'd never thought I would be discussing television shows the way I have discussed novels or poems, let alone independent films. Perhaps I can see the influences of literature on t.v. For instance, I learned Jullian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame is a lover of Anthony Trollope and if you read the latter's works you'll see his distinct influence on the scripts penned by Fellowes. At one point in the first season, a character at the dinner table recalls the day's hunt and likens it to an episode in a Trollope novel.
If you watch Six Feet Under, you'll know Alan Ball of American Beauty took the dysfunction of the famed film and translated it for the smaller screen, incorporating psychology, philosophy (the Bhavagad-Gita is referenced in the second season), and art.
But another factor I happen to love is the element of complexity. Downton is not only poetry, first on the page, then spoken but it is a world filled with characters that have varying dimensions. There is depth to this estate of upstairs and downstairs and one can only wonder what the fourth series will bring come 2014 (those in Britain will get the scoop in the fall when the show is resumed in September).
And then there's another of my favourites: Mad Men. One can look no farther than the flawed but charming Don Draper. When I had a chance to watch the first episode of the very first season I regarded the ending shot as a kind of voyeuristic glimpse into the troubled life of the ad man. Here we see the man, the everyman at the end of his day. He's just spoken to his wife, his Betty, the suburbanite blonde beauty played by January Jones who has sleepily turned on the bedside lamp to say she called the office and there is a plate in the oven. Her voice is soft and home-maker perfect but it too hides something desperate and woeful. Next, the everyman is on the stairs. We see his black socks on the floorboards. And then through a doorway. Yes, we discover, he is the father, a son and daughter, his hands now on their sleeping heads. Now the wife appears behind him, lovingly looking, dressed in her negligee, and we are pulled away from this tableaux which resembles a sullen scene in a Hopper painting, pulled out the window, out into the street listening to Vic Damone's rendition of 'On The Street Where You Live'.
We the viewers fall in love with Don the way audiences of Ancient Greece fell in love with the legends of their culture on stage. They had Agamemnon and Oedipus, broken heroes, men with pasts and sordid histories and so too, do we learn of Draper's past - he isn't who he says he is. We discover who he is, it would seem at the same pace as he learns to accept his earlier lot in his life. He's another man from another life but his costume is his security, his meal ticket. The orphan grown-up was raised in a whore house. His father was killed when he was very young and his mother died in childbirth. We catch vignettes of this past throughout the show, moments crafted tenderly as if written by a John Steinbeck or Jack London.
And yet that haunting first scene. In a sense, before that scene we are watching the mysterious father in his absence. We learn about his infidelity and his drinking at work but also his brilliance, his ability to think and then talk. We enjoy this. He's not a charlatan but a kind of magician, an illusionist. He is a father figure last and a business man and lover first. The show's drama, its tension and ultimate entertainment depends on him being the absent father. I often feel a wince of guilt or even a melodramatic moment of melancholy when I think of that ending scene. We the audience participate in this need for Draper for he is too fascinating a character just to be normal. We are hooked. We are the jilted lover, the lover not called. We call back and we keep coming back.
And yet the absent father. Whether this is intentional or not, I don't know but yet I scan the list of characters. Betty's father soon dies once we are introduced to him but there is some hints he was sexually abusive. Then there's Peggy, the secretary-turned-prodigy whose family consists of a mother and sister in Brooklyn. Don is a kind of pseudo-father figure but this is quickly remedied and we recognize Draper to be a twisted mentor.
Joan, played by the ravishing redhead, Christina Hendrick's is equally fatherless. She has a child out of wedlock and the father figure soon becomes absent. Roger, one of the head partners of the ad agency is the biological father though Joan wants her son to believe her little boy's dad is an army doctor.
Roger is a pathetic father figure in his own way. We know his father started the ad agency but he's dead now. Roger, like Don has his extra-marital escapades and his daughter learns of daddy's dark side. But what is Roger to do? He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and in many ways, we only respect him because he went off to war. He ruins two marriages and yet manages to glide on and on, escaping heart problems and living life in the only way he can - single.
Then there's Pete Campbell who impregnates Peggy in the first season. He's about to be married but just needs something wild. His dad never approved of him and dies in a plane crash. As for his child, he doesn't find out until later about the baby and the adoption. Then, after a few seasons, when he finally gets caught cheating with the neighbour's wife, he becomes the father figure in the city. No, he doesn't have to commute anymore but he's essentially homeless and without any guiding paternal star. Even his own father-n-law whores around.
I would say this existential absence casts a fascinating pall over the show. Sometimes I find myself asking, who really are the grown-ups? Considering the majority of the events in the show centre around major historical events in the 1960s - Kennedy and Martin Luther King's assassination being the two predominant ones - we, the audience get this feeling both of freedom and of fear. Even even if we reflect on the two seminal deaths, two great men, two father figures are killed. And in their absence, a wake of chaos and crisis.
Yes, it is the sixties in Mad Men and yes, there is sexual freedom, sexual license; still the world still clocks in and out and people lead their lives. I wonder if Andrew Weiner is hinting at how corrupt and distrustful a patriarchy is without paternal guidance. The fatherless world created the sixties, you might surmise. How sad but how real, and how in-depth such a reality is when given to the best people to write about. It is the sixties, however, we must remember that started the Civil Right's Movement and Feminism. The fatherless patriarchy created something awe-inspiring because the absence, the nothingness motivated them to search. Religion wasn't working so the secularized world had to turn to themselves, their lives; from this, answers to the social cancers and sores began to emerge underneath the surface of those complacent and joyful ads.
I always find it fascinating when I think how many of the original and successful ad men of the post-War generation were sons of pastors and preachers. In the popular culture books of James B.Twitchell, the English and advertising professor at the University of Florida reminds his readers that the original formula for a successful advertisement came via Christianity. The trick was to replace Jesus with the product and the problem of sin with the problem of necessity. Bad breath (halitosis - Latin for bad breath) doesn't require the messiah but Listerine, for instance. You need a lawn mower? Well, there's John Deere.
Also Twitchell comments that when people drink Corona, they are not drinking a beer (or cerveza) but the idea of Mexico. People, moreover, when they get into a luxury car are not driving the automobile but the ad and the mythos behind it. They feel powerful when they turn on the engine. But not because of the car itself, the tactile one they are touching. No. They feel disturbingly strong because of the illusion they cherish when they press down on the pedal. The fantasies, the ads, whether on television or in newspapers have already fueled the madness. And men like Don Draper know this. The name 'Draper' says it all. A man who screens, covers and obstructs. His work is to tell the right story, weave up the right fantasy. Because hey, we learn from the get go, from the very first episode of the award-winning show, all cigarettes are alike, they are all toasted but when you advertise the obvious and make it a novelty, calling Lucky Strikes 'toasted', you launch into the mystique and confounding.
Advertising, like religion truly plays on people's insecurities and their need for palatable stories. Both inflict their listeners with longings and doubts about alternatives and then sells the dream. Both offer empty promises and many people, both those suckered by the lure of the marketing or the 'message' feel it incumbent on themselves to spread the message. Tell me the difference between someone who buys a pair of Nikes and someone who has 'found' Jesus? In a way, the self is pushed aside in both scenarios to have something foreign persuade you you are nothing without it.
What is interesting to note is that in the Gospels, God is the absent father. When Jesus is on the cross, he asks "why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Forsaken, abandoned... the absence of an all-loving father appears here though in Christianity, one would like to believe He loves us.
Returning to Mad Men, near the end of season 2 we find Don in California. He's returned to a maternal figure, Anna who has helped keep his secret safe. As if being baptized, Don walks along the beach and then into the surf, arms up, the foam rushing against his chest, his shirt soaking, his pants drenched. George Jone's earlier version of 'Cup of Loneliness' is cued and we see the ironic pilgrim on his baffled way to identity. Even here, the audience, still in love wonders when the troubled soul will find his road of salvation to self-acceptance, to becoming the father that never fathered him.
