Mémoire 2010

Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV

Aurélie CARABIN

Mad Men: Mirror or Virtual Image of America in the 1960’s?

Mémoire présenté en vue de l’obtention de la première année du Master Etudes Anglophones

Séminaire : « Les années 1960 et leur influence sur la société américaine »

Sous la direction du Professeur Sophie Body-Gendrot

2009-2010

Acknowledgements

Writing this dissertation has been a very difficult task, but an extremely pleasant one as well. I could never have wished for a better topic to study during this demanding year than such a quality television show as Mad Men, and that is why I would like to thank Professor Sophie Body-Gendrot for her open-mindedness, her precious advices and for having allowed me to do this research. I would also like to thank Professor Fabrice Bensimon for paying so much attention to his students, even to those he is not supervising, and I am very grateful for the way he would tell me about useful facts or events concerning Mad Men whenever he heard about them.

Finally, I would like to thank Virginie, Pauline, Camille, Damian, and all of those who kept encouraging me whenever I thought I would not make it despite their own doubts and worries. It could seem that I am not a good “advertiser” myself, as none of my friends, apart from my sister, has been watching Mad Men… It was then difficult to discuss this research with them, but I guess everybody is more or less alone when writing a dissertation. Yet that did not prevent them from listening to me and supporting me whenever I needed them to and I would like to thank them again for that. Besides Mad Men has enough fans among the world for me to ease my frustration and to enjoy the wonderful medium that the internet is, and therefore I am grateful to all of those who keep on discussing the show and have been a very important source of information to me.  

                                                                                                             

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments                                                                                                                    

INTRODUCTION                                                                                                                        

I. Mad Men : a compelling period drama offering a relevant and accurate depiction of  America in the early 1960s                                                                                                    

I.1. Behind the scenes

 

 I.1.1 Mad Men, a “megamovie”

            I.1.1.1 A New Golden Age for Television Series

I.1.1.2 HBO : An Innovative Channel 

I.1.1.3 AMC and Mad Men, a Relevant Combination

 I.1.2 Matthew Weiner, a perfectionist “show-runner” drawing inspiration from the 1960s

I.1.2.1 Matthew Weiner’s educational and family backgrounds

 I.1.2.2  Mad Men’s literary influences

 I.1.2.3  Drawing Inspiration from 1960’s Cinema

I.1.3 Painstakingly recreating an era : a collaborative process

 I.1.3.1 Mad Men’s Fashion, Mirror of the American Society in the early 1960s

I.1.3.2 Materializing the early 1960s : Mad Men’s design and verisimilitude

I.1.3.3 A Collaborative Writing Team

I.2.Madison Avenue as the relevant prism of an era

I.2.1 The early 1960s : The Golden Age of Advertising

I.2.1.1 Advertising : A Booming industry

I.2.1.2 Admen’s Glamorous Life

I.2.2 When Madison Avenue was facing new challenges

I.2.2.1 Advertising Tobacco and Sickness

I.2.2.2 Advertising Politics

I.2.2.3 Television : The Rising Medium

I.3. Filming a slice of life in the 1960’s

I.3.1 Looking beneath appearances: an accurate depiction of the emotional and social landscape of the early 1960s

I.3.1.1 Mad Men Embodying Conflicted Times

I.3.1.2 Uncovering The Problem That Has No Name

I.3.1.3 Mad Women : Adapting the Male-Dominated Society  

I.3.2 An oppressive and enclosed atmosphere where historical events and shifts manage to seep in fictitious characters’ lives

I.3.2.1 Mad Men : an integrative image of the early 1960s

I.3.2.2 Reflecting the social and cultural priorities of specific years

I.3.2.3 Embracing the Characters’ story and History

I.3.3 A show infused with cultural references for a painstaking and lively reconstruction

I.3.3.1 LIFE magazine : Chronicling an Era

I.3.3.2 Referencing and Reviving the late 1950s and early 1960s’ culture

II. Mad Men, an expressionist painting, not a history lesson

II.1 Mad Men, a necessarily limited and subjective presentation of history

II.1.1 A self-congratulory liberalist show?

II.1.1.1 Mad Men, congratulating or explaining the present?

II.1.1.2 Provocation as a trademark?

II.1.2 The White Lens or The problematic Silencing of Minorities

II.1.2.1 Mad Men and the Homosexuals

II.1.2.2. Leaving Afro-American voices on the Margins

II.1.2.3 The Controversial Absence of other Ethnic Minorities and Positive Achievements

II.2 An arsenal of historical landmarks to be completed

II.2.1 An Incomplete Portrayal of History

II.2.1.1Numerous hints to be researched

II.2.1.2 The Missing Year : 1961

II.2.2 Forgetting Youth and Optimistic politics

II.2.2.1 Mad Men’s Characters’ lack of interest in politics

II.2.2.2 The absence of Camelot’s optimism

II.2.3 Elongating the early 1960s

II.2.3.1 Silencing Youth: the denial of pregnancy

II.2.3.2 The 60’s: another interpretation

II.3 Mad Men : a story based on advertising history, not the history of advertising

II.3.1 The Creative Revolution: Madison Avenue’s contribution to a tumultuous decade

II.3.1.1 General Context and Interpretations

II.3.1.2 Mad Men’s historical landmark to be completed : “Lemon”

II.3.2 When Creativity overcame Science

II.3.2.1 The “scientific” fifties

II.3.2.2 William Bernbach, leader of the Creative Revolution

II.3.2.3 Triggering the Creative Revolution : The Volkswagen Campaign

II.3.3 Sterling Cooper versus the Creative Revolution

II.3.3.1 The condensation of contradictory trends in Sterling Cooper

II.3.3.2 Mad Men’s Oversimplifcation of the Creative Process

II.3.3.3 Mad Men’s lack of Madness

CONCLUSION  

APPENDIX  

SOURCES

INTRODUCTION

American television shows have always aroused a deep interest in the author of this study. Indeed, they represent a type of entertainment which, it seems, has never been equaled by other countries’ televised products. Moreover, as they kept on invading our television screens, they became one of the main conveyors of American culture and society. Whether they deal with themes such as family, suburbia, justice or hospitals, their portrayal of the American society is often the first contact that can be established between a young viewer who has never been to the United States and its inhabitants. To what extent these portrayals are accurate is still submitted to discussion, but it seems undeniable that any cultural product tends to reflect the society in which it was conceived in a more or less perceivable way. But one particular TV show managed to distinguish itself in the immensity of the American television series’ landscape, a TV show which seemed particularly timely for a student anxious to do research concerning American society in the 1960s, as this topic is precisely what this show is about, a show whose astonishing quality allows it to be the main subject of a first humble academic study. This show is none other than Mad Men, Matthew Weiner’s widely acclaimed series.

Produced by Lionsgate Television and first aired on the American cable channel AMC on July 19, 2007, the period drama Mad Men, -a drama being a series usually made of episodes lasting at least 40 minutes each and dealing with “serious” themes as opposed to comedy series- completed its third season on November 8, 2009 and is expected to start its fourth on July 25, 2010. It has since then been at the center of critical acclaims, as it notably won an incredible number of awards for a period drama. In 2010, 2009 an 2008 it received the Golden Globe Award for best television series-Drama,  a 2007 Peabody Award from the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama series (the Emmy Awards are commonly called the “academy awards” of television…) in 2008, a price it won again in September 2009 among many others[1]. This amount of awards has been followed by a wave of articles reflecting enthusiasm towards the show and praising, among other qualities, its historical accuracy.

Mad Men revolves around the character of Don Draper, advertising executive at the fictitious agency Sterling Cooper, and is set in the early 1960s. More precisely, the show’s first episode starts in 1960 while the last episode which has been aired to this date ends soon after J.F.Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.  Through the fictitious lives of complex characters, Mad Men attempts to depict an era on the cusp between the conformity of the fifties and the upheavals of the following decade. But to what extent this depiction is accurate? Questioning the accuracy of this extremely well-written series turns out to be very challenging. Indeed, it is difficult to deal with such a material as a television show and to relate it to American civilization issues as this is not the usual type of document a student is confronted to. Moreover, keeping objective remains a difficult task, though necessary, especially as Mad Men was extremely appreciated as a form of entertainment before it became the topic of this study. Finally, it is a very recent product, and while only one slight but interesting book could be found about Mad Men (by television critic Jesse McLean’s Kings Of Madison Avenue, The Unofficial guide to Mad Men), it is still enveloped and pervaded by the enthusiasm it has aroused among critics, an enthusiasm it is tough to navigate through in order to find answers concerning the issues raised by Mad Men‘s depiction of the early 1960s. Nevertheless, this same enthusiasm turned out to be a real asset for this research, as the critics’ works, along with the great possibilities offered by the internet which acts like a bridge between Mad Men’s viewers and its creators, sometimes facilitated access to interesting and relevant information.

The quality of Mad Men has been proven and commented upon in so many accounts that criticizing it cannot be an easy task, especially when one intends to answer to the question “is Mad Men a mirror or a virtual image of America in the 1960s?” Of course, Mad Men is a fiction, and in that respect it cannot be a completely accurate reflection of the American society during this era. Nevertheless, the show is so thoroughly researched and infused with so many historical references that one could feel dizzy when attempting to compare Mad Men to the reality of the early 1960s. Matthew Weiner and his staff relied on many various sources related to this era such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique,  books about advertising or diverse magazines’ issues from the time during which the show is set, to mention only a few of them and which shall be consequently analyzed during this study. Moreover, the cultural impact of Mad Men is such that the sentence “Mad Men”, which has been invented by Matthew Weiner to designate the advertising men working on Madison Avenue in the 1960s, has entered the academic and journalistic language as it is increasingly employed to refer to advertising people, but also to more general aspects of the early 1960’s. The show’s pilot begins with a short note explaining that advertising men coined this sentence, which is actually untrue, and the fact that some journalists refer to these words thinking that they were actually the way advertising men called themselves in the 1960’s might be the best proof that one has to be careful when dealing with a fiction and not take anything it says for granted.

Mad Men cultural impact is such that it affected even the advertising industry and the studies linked to the history of advertising. Indeed, Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator and executive producer, received an honorary CLIO award in 2009[2]. CLIOs are usually rewarding creative excellence in advertising and design, but an exception was made in order to salute the way Matthew Weiner’s show renewed interest in the 1960s media landscape. Many books dealing with advertising in the 1960s are out of print while new accounts of this era emerged following Mad Men’s success. The same way, exhibitions about real Madison Avenue executives were organized[3], while some universities ‘members also gave into what could be called the “Mad Men phenomenon”. But to what extent this phenomenon testifies to the show’s historical accuracy? To what extent a visual fiction can reflect a bygone era? Is it not too much to ask from a TV show that it should depict an era in such a way that it could be put on the same grounds as usual historical or sociological studies?

It is significant that Mad Men deals with the world of advertising. Indeed, advertising is part of American culture and is said to both reflect and influence it. The same way, Matthew Weiner’s show could be said to both reflect and influence the society it has been conceived in. Indeed, any cultural product is, to some extent, the reflection of its contemporary society. Moreover, Mad Men ‘s depiction of the early 1960s relies on  a deep sense of irony itself based on the fact that contemporary viewers are aware of impending changes ignored by the fictitious characters of the series, while Matthew Weiner seems to have a particular message to convey to his audience. Is Mad Men a pure reflection of the American society of the early 1960s? If Mad Men’s depiction of this era turns out be extremely accurate, it is nevertheless insufficient, firstly because Mad Men is a commercial product aimed at entertaining people and conveying a message, which denies the reliance on objectivity required by historical studies, and because it adopts a particular point of view and focus which tend to leave many aspects of America on the margins of its plot. As Matthew Weiner said, the show is “not a history lesson”[4] and instead of stopping ourselves on this assumption it seems that it would be interesting to study why.

           It would be interesting to study to what extent Mad Men, partly transcending the boundaries linked to fiction and television programming as conveyors of historical knowledge, accurately reflects the early sixties through the prism of advertising, and how it achieved a revival of the debates surrounding this pivotal period through its entrance into popular culture. Nevertheless, one shouldn’t take the show’s portrayal for granted, as it remains a commercial product relying mainly on fiction and on the personal interpretation of a debated period as perceived by its creator. Despite Mad Men’s relative accuracy in its depiction of the early sixties, the show cannot be substituted to a history lesson since any art masterpiece necessarily reflects its author’s point of view on its contemporary world, which denies the complete objectivity required by History as a discipline, and this all the more so as a television show is submitted to economic laws history should be independent of.

This study will demonstrate that despite its legitimately praised accuracy, Mad Men remains a limited virtual image of America in the early sixties.

In order to do so, the first part of this dissertation, entitled “Mad Men : a compelling period drama offering a relevant and accurate depiction of  America in the early 1960s” will discuss the way Mad Men’s specific format is a great asset in its ambition of portraying an era, along with the sources its creator and contributors relied on. It will also discuss the relevance of the choice to focus on an advertising agency to depict the early 1960s and the emotional and social landscape characteristic of this era to finally focus on the way historical and cultural references pervade the show and shape its identity.

The second part, entitled “ Mad Men, an expressionist painting, not a history lesson” will discuss the critics made towards the show’s depiction of this era, focusing on what is absent from Mad Men in accordance to the show’s ambition of depicting the early sixties from the white lens characteristic of these pivotal years and to Matthew Weiner’s own subjectivity. It will try to point to the limits necessarily bound to any type of fiction as opposed to History as a discipline and notably to those observed in Mad Men’s depiction of the advertising industry, as it seems to be the show’s topic the most subjected to debate, especially as Mad Men revolves around an old-fashioned agency at a time when an important turning point was experienced in the history of American advertising.  

I. Mad Men: a compelling period drama offering a relevant and accurate depiction of America in the early 1960s

Setting their show  in a fascinating era  close enough in time for current day relevance, and far enough to feel exotic, Mad Men creators manage to immerse their audience in the early 1960s through many dramatic and material devices, contributing to the stunning historical accuracy for which  the show has been widely praised.

I.1. Behind the scenes

More than visually stunning, Mad Men intentionally recreates a whole bygone era thanks to its format, deep research and investigation, and a collaborative spirit.

I.1.1 Mad Men, a “megamovie”

It seems necessary to explain how Mad Men has been created and to locate the show’s history among the wider field/context of American series in general. Indeed, Mad Men’s historical accuracy and artistic quality both depend a lot on each other. Therefore, one has to understand where that “quality” comes from, as compared to other American TV shows along with other visual productions aspiring to any historical ambition.

I.1.1.1 A New Golden Age for Television Series

First and foremost, Mad Men is in line with the phenomenon observed by critics since the middle of the  1990’s : American series are experiencing a “New Golden Age”, acquiring a new status as they   have become gradually accepted as a new form of art to be considered in visual, social and historical studies, by overstepping the mere situation comedies, soap operas or crime dramas which have been flourishing on American Television throughout the second half of the twentieth century and still are nowadays. This renewed interest in television series has been proven by , for instance, the fact that Paris’ cinema Forum des images recently organized the first  “Series festival” of France, entitled “Séries Mania, saison 1”. From April 6^th to April 11^th, the Festival offered to its audience a broadcast of various series from all over the world along with debates and conferences presented by series directors or journalists, such as Olivier Joyard, former writer for Les Cahiers du Cinéma, presently a journalist for Les Inrockuptibles, who notably directed a documentary, Hollywood le règne des series, which preceded the conference entitled Have television series replaced cinema?[5] Olivier Joyard also opened the Festival session dedicated to the presentation of the whole of Mad Men season 2. Apart from one other series (True Blood), Mad Men was the only one of which a whole season was presented during the five days of the festival, which seems to testify to the alleged superiority of the show among the others selected by the Festival. It is also a proof that Mad Men‘s interest relies on its length and on the peculiarity of its format, which we shall analyze later.

If Television series have aroused interest among cinema critics, so did they among academics. Indeed, Mad Men has been used as a catalyst for a symposium exploring the 1960s and organized by Illinois University in February 2010[6]. Entitled MAD WORLD:  Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, the symposium featured faculty experts from Illinois and other universities who discussed various cultural themes which emerged in the 1960s and are tackled in Mad Men. In the same way, Mad Men will be one of the series discussed during a special one-day conference organized at Institut Charles 5, University Paris-Diderot on June 8th 2010. During this conference, The Contemporary American Television Series: Between Fiction, Fact, and the Real, Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (Boston College) will present a study entitled “Realism, Mimesis, and the Commodity in Season One of Mad Men” and will be followed by Lionel Dufaye (Université Paris-Diderot)’s “AD(wo)MEN, ou l’autre dans MAD MEN”[7].

This new Golden Age for TV series results from the profusion of quality shows whose creative teams started borrowing a lot of devices in terms of production and storylines from the cinema, which, along with the format specific to TV series (several episodes, continuity in time), allowed the emergence of a new genre. For long, TV series have been ignored by cinema critics, especially because of the commercial aspect of TV shows depending on very strict rules and designed to fit the model of mass-consumption that TV represents. Indeed, a TV show has to generate money through high audience ratings and advertisements, as these keep interrupting the show, while TV shows producers are aware that their audience must be kept interested and entertained as they are submitted to the “power” of the TV watcher holding his precious remote. Moreover, artistic freedom is more difficult to express on TV series as the powerful TV networks they depend on tend to exert a virulent censorship. Nevertheless, a new trend developed during the mid 1990’s, the one launched by the cable channel Home Box Office (HBO)…

I.1.1.2 HBO: An Innovative Channel

Many TV critics still cannot believe that HBO refused to produce Matthew Weiner’s project, as Mad Men corresponds to the type of TV show HBO that invented, let alone the fact that Weiner was working for HBO when he offered them the script for the pilot of Mad Men.[8] HBO was launched by Charles Dolan in 1972 and was initially a pay-tv service offering uncut motion pictures and major sport events. In 1977, the channel decided to expand its field of action by producing “original programming”[9], which meant that the channel would offer new TV shows that it would finance itself. The fact that HBO is a pay-TV service deprived of advertisements during the broadcast of its shows allowed the emergence of a new genre of series, as these were not submitted to the same constraints encountered on big national networks such as NBC or CBS. As violence, adult themes and profanity seemed to be the mere attributes of the series created by HBO, for a number of years the channel’s productions were more referred to for their provocative content rather than for their quality. 

Nevertheless, HBO’s reputation took a new turn in January 1999 when it first aired David Chase’s The Sopranos. Revolving around a mobster who has to try to deal with his difficult family and criminal lives, the show received a commercial and critical success unprecedented for a television drama. It seems important to mention that fact, first because Matthew Weiner’s experience as a writer on The Sopranos influenced the way he is now producing Mad Men, but also because The Sopranos initiated the genre to which Mad Men belongs. This genre, The New York Times‘television critic Vincent Canby called it the “megamovie”[10]. This genre relies on a deep collaborative process, a sophisticated writing, while its specific format, thirteen episodes per season of one hour each, allows “a cohesive dramatic arc”[11], the complexity of the plot, of the characters, the great attention to details that can be found in the best classical novels, without losing the charm of a greatly directed motion picture. Watching all the episodes successively is like watching a very long movie whose same length allows a wide range of possibilities a motion picture of two hours is necessarily deprived of.

Ten years later, after The Sopranos success gave way to numerous quality series such as The Wire, Benjamin Schwarz, quoting Canby, described Mad Men as a megamovie, since the slow pace of the show, the quality of its production and writing fit Canby’s definition of the genre. Mad Men being a “deeply textured, painstakingly crafted drama”[12], its historical accuracy is facilitated by the format and production of the show itself, slowly depicting the evolution of an era and paying attention to details which would probably not be welcomed in a two-hour movie. Moreover, historical authenticity is allowed by the show’s status of “original programming”. As Matthew Weiner’s script was rejected by HBO, it’s the small cable network AMC which took on the production of the show.

I.1.1.3 AMC and Mad Men, a Relevant Combination

Formerly called American Movie Classics, AMC used to be a premium cable channel exclusively dedicated to airing classic movies in a commercial-free format.[13] An ironic shift occurred during the years 2000s -ironic if one keeps in mind that Mad Men is a show revolving around an advertising agency- which changed the channel’s format: after having aired movies without commercial interruptions, the channel progressively began to rely more and more on advertisement as a source of revenue. To please its advertisers, the channel direction changed its format on September 2002: from then on AMC would broadcast movies from all eras. It nevertheless kept a deep focus on pre-1970s movies, which can make us think that AMC and Mad Men are a nice combination from an historical point of view. Indeed, it is interesting to notice that a show which is inspired by and often refers to 1960s movies such Billy Wilder’s The Apartment should be broadcast on a channel that airs this kind of movies. This combination was allowed by Charlie Collier, the president and general manager of the channel since 2006. Collier wanted to change the image of the network by launching a continuing series. As he had read Matthew Weiner’s script, he decided to “to jump on the chance for a daring first series”[14]. According to Matthew Weiner, AMC’s direction let him free to run the show as he wanted to, a real asset to be exploited in the television world. Characters are free to smoke as much as they want and it seems the need to target a specific audience is less perceivable on AMC than on a wider network like CBS whose own series such as CSI are conceived for mass viewership. According to Nielsen ratings, when an episode of CSI gathers around 22.7 million viewers, Mad Men on average attracts less than 2 million viewers. Moreover, according to television critic Jesse McLean, Mad Men’s creator probably found better grounds on AMC than he would have on HBO.

HBO’s original programming not only takes full advantage of the creative freedom their cable status provides, it also exploits this independence from the strict censorship of the public airwaves. Marketing for The Sopranos relied almost as heavily on its violence and language as its quality. Mad Men, while a supremely adult show, features no violence and only PG 13-level language[15].

But who is Matthew Weiner, the widely acclaimed “show-runner” of Mad Men?

I.1.2 Matthew Weiner, a perfectionist “show-runner” drawing inspiration from the 1960s

It seems necessary to draw a brief portrayal of Mad Men’ creator, writer, producer, and sometimes director, as he is the one deciding almost everything about his show. The combination of all these tasks earned him the name of “show-runner”[16]. Indeed, Matthew Weiner wrote on his own initiative the pilot of the show, he writes every episode (along with eleven other writers depending on the season)[17], he is the producer who has to manage the show’s budget -around 2,3 million dollars per episode-, he “approves every actor, costume, hairstyle and prop”[18] -a prop being any movable articles or objects used on the set of a play or movie- and despite the fact that he doesn’t direct every episode (the directing staff is made of seven other people), he always hold a “tone meeting” during which he explains to the episode’s director how he wants things to be done.

I.1.2.1 Matthew Weiner’s educational and family backgrounds

According to many accounts, whether they come from journalists, his colleagues or surroundings, Matthew Weiner is a perfectionist and the main authority to be respected on Mad Men’s set. Born in 1965 to a Jewish-American family in Baltimore, Weiner grew up in Los Angeles after he was 9. His father, Leslie P. Weiner, is an acclaimed neuroscientist, and his mother graduated from law school in the 1970s but never practiced. According to him, his parents had a real influence on him and on the show, as he says his interest for 1960s comes from them, while they had very strict principles concerning the education and culture he should receive[19]. In season one, when Don tries to seduce Kodak’s representatives by showing pictures of his own family[20], the photo where Don and Betty eat a hot-dog is directly inspired from one of Weiner’s parents ‘picture. But his parents’ influence goes further than a mere picture. For instance, Weiner’s interest in Women’s condition comes from his observing his own mother’s situation. Indeed, here are a question asked by some internet user followed by Matthew Weiner’s answer:

“How much of the show's take on gender roles is rooted in your own upbringing as someone born in 1965? Did the changes taking place in that period resonate with you personally and channel into the characters of "Mad Men"? — BC

Yes. My mother went back to law school in 1972. We were latchkey for a while. And my father was very supportive of this. Then my mother’s career didn’t really go anywhere, which I think also was a product of that period. She used to talk about going to job interviews and being asked how she was going to work and have four kids. And that’s illegal. They're not allowed to do that anymore.”[21]

In that same interview, Weiner explained that feminism was “the most exciting idea going on intellectually when [he was] in college”[22], which is one possible explanation for the show’s emphasis on gender issues. As far as education is concerned, one has to underline the fact that he attended the Harvard School in Los Angeles-now Harvard-Westlake- where he encountered difficulties: “A.P history was his one success”[23]. He nevertheless got into Wesleyan University, a private school of liberal arts and sciences where he followed a program combining history, literature and philosophy, three subjects which certainly gave him some solid material for Mad Men. He then finally got into University Southern California School of cinematic arts. After graduating from film school, he wrote scripts for three years, without any success, and finally got hired on a sitcom called Party Girl, a series which was quickly cancelled, just as the other two he worked for after that. After three years working on the TV show Becker, Matthew Weiner got noticed, thanks to the pilot he had written for Mad Men in 1999, by David Chase, the creator of the Sopranos, who then hired him as a member of his writing team, an experience that deeply influenced the way Mad Men is presently conceived.

I.1.2.2 Mad Men’s literary influences

Matthew Weiner often mentions the fact that his parents “ideolized writers”[24] and that he inherited his passion of literature from them. As far as Mad Men is concerned, among his literary influences, Weiner always refers to J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the first book he finished and which supposedly inspired him for the image of New York he wanted to convey in Mad Men along with the “WASPiness” of the show[25], but also Sinclair Lewis, author of Babbitt(1922) and F.Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby (1925) with their critiques of American society, capitalism, materialism and decadence; another major influence on Mad Men were  John Cheever’s many short stories and novels . John Cheever (1912-1982), sometimes called “the Chekov of the suburbs”, “America’s foremost chronicler of suburbia”[26] is probably the main literary influence that can be perceived in Mad Men. Weiner himself declared: “Certainly, John Cheever has been very influential” [27]. Most of Cheever’s fictions are set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in the Westchester suburbs while they mainly deal with issues concerning life in suburbia, the failure of the American dream and the duality of human nature, staging conflicted characters torn between outward appearances and their inner troubles. The tribute Weiner paid to this author is well epitomized by the fact that the Drapers’ residency is established in Ossining, a town in Westchester County, on the East bank of the Hudson River, 35 miles north of New York City, where the writer lived for twenty years, while the Drapers address, Bullet Park Road, is a direct reference to Cheever’s novel Bullet Park[28].  Despite the fact that Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road (1961) has often been compared to Mad Men, it seems that this novel had no direct influence on Matthew Weiner’s work as he read the book only after he had written Mad Men’s pilot[29]. Nevertheless, he is an admirer of the novel and agrees that it tackles many of the points he wanted to depict in his show.

“ ‘Revolutionary Road’ was given to me three years after I wrote the pilot,” he said. He says if he had read the book before, he wouldn’t have had the nerve to write the show: “Yates was there. This is what he was writing about.”[30]

Moreover the novel has been given as an advised reading to January Jones, the actress playing Betty Draper, to help her build her character[31]. Along with Cheever’s stories, Yates’ novel, which tells the story of the Wheelers, a young couple planning to leave the blandness of their suburban life to settle in Paris is part of this literary trend that developed during the 1950s and the 1960s and was aimed at criticizing the conformity of life in suburbia, the anxieties and social ills it was accused of generating, while overheated consumerism and the power of big corporations would be leading to the loss of individualism and initiative described by William H. Whyte in The Organization Man(1956), or to the “other-directedness” analyzed earlier by David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd(1950). Alienation is generally the main theme of these literary or sociological productions characterizing the 1950s and early 1960s and which gave its tone to Weiner’s show, pointing to the ills of a society which was to be challenged in 1960s.

Another major literary influence on Weiner’s work which should be mentioned is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the mere title of which reminds us of the man’s downfall depicted in the opening credits of Mad Men. This play first published and performed in 1949, tells the tragic story of Willy Loman, a salesman who, after having worked for thirty-five years and strived for greatness, pretending in front of his friends and family, and living out his belief in salesmanship as a way to reinvent himself, progressively loses his mind and willingness to go on as he confronts his shattered dreams. Unable to provide the business performance his employers expect from him, he is then fired and starts having hallucinations. His downfall is then the guiding thread of the play which ends on his suicide…  The recurrent use of “flashbacks” in the play to show the way the main character’s mental state deteriorates as boundaries between past and present are blurred reminds us of those used in Mad Men to reveal Don Draper’s past and the deception on which he built his life. Through the character of Willy Loman, Miller criticized the American dream, showing that it is not reachable for anyone and often can’t be achieved without moral compromises.

I.1.2.3 Drawing Inspiration from 1960’s Cinema

But Matthew Weiner is not just fond of reading. He also cherishes a deep interest in cinema which was sublimated by the years he spent at U.S.C school of cinematic arts. That’s during one of his writing classes that he saw Billy Wilder’s The Apartment for the first time.[32]  This movie’s influence on Mad Men is obvious. Not only is it directly mentioned in the show, as Roger and Joan have a conversation about this movie[33] which was released in 1960, the year when Mad Men ‘s season one is set, it is also a period movie which presents many similarities with Mad Men’s depiction of life in New York offices. In this movie set in November 1959, Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a clerk at the huge New York insurance firm Consolidated Life, where he toils at his desk lost among arrays of hundreds of other desks[34] -which, in Wilder’s movie, along with the very low ceilings of the set, are aimed at representing the anonymity of a corporate setting, a feature which is less emphasized in Mad Men as secrets are not kept long in the smaller agency Sterling Cooper’s offices[35]. He also leads an uninteresting life disturbed by the fact that, in order to get a promotion, he lends his apartment every night to his firm’s executives as these need a place to stay for their extra-marital affairs. Despite his devotion and discretion, he never gets the promotion he is always promised. But higher expectations come to his mind when Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), the company’s director, shows an interest in his apartment. Nevertheless, what he does not know is that Sheldrake’s mistress in none other than Fran (Shirley MacLaine),the elevator operator he likes…Many themes tackled by the movie are pervading Mad Men episodes : ruthless offices operations, the function of alcohol and leisure in business, adultery, women’s difficulty to determine their own destiny..In both, a sophisticated humor is laced with a deep melancholy, while the aesthetic of their production design is particularly similar as well. It is interesting to see the way Weiner drew inspiration from the 1950s and 1960s literary and cinematic productions not only in terms of content but in terms of form and style, allowing Mad Men to reflect the early 1960s the way their contemporaries depicted them, but not without some retrospective and realistic detachment. The Apartment was considered as a comedy in 1960, but its melancholic aspect (adultery, the women’s condition and the main female character’s attempted suicide are featured) tended to outcome its humorous tone with time, while Mad Men’s creator, relying a lot on hindsight, tries to dig in these 1960s representations to show what lies beneath surfaces.

This way, Mad Men also borrows some aspects from another comedy of this era, Delbert Mann’s Lover Come Back (1961), but depicts them in a much darker way. Lover Come Back is a lighthearted romance set in Madison Avenue and starring three iconic figures of the 1960s who had already performed together in Mann’s Pillow Talk (1959) : Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. The movie revolves around the rivalry opposing Carol Templeton, a serious account executive at some Manhattan advertising agency, to Jerry Webster, also account executive but for a different agency. As the latter steals clients from Ms Templeton by seducing them with parties, ladies and alcohol, she complaints about Webster’s lack of ethics to an Advertising Council. In order to cover himself, Webster tricks some woman to whom he offers the main role of a fictitious TV ad in exchange of her defending his integrity during the Council’s hearing. As the ad is mistakenly aired, Webster finds himself obligated to invent the product depicted in the ad which presents it as  something which brings happiness, wedding, anything anyone wants to get in life. The satire of the advertising world and of its promises is clear in this movie, along with its lighthearted critic of the unethical business of Madison Avenue. But despite the emphasis put on the “career girl” embodied by Carol Templeton, the movie remains invested with the cliché and prejudices common to its time and analyzed in Mad Men. For instance, Rebel Davis, the character performed by Edie Adams who acts in Webster’s fictitious TV commercial, embodies the woman ready to suffer manipulations of men for success, while Carol Templeton, embodying the “worker” opposed to the “drone” Jerry Webster, is regularly mocked by the latter throughout the movie as a women condemned to remain an old maid because she has a career. After one night spent with Jerry Webster she gets pregnant and accepts to marry Webster nine months later just before she gives birth to her child. 

The movies briefly mentioned above are those which are more directly linked to the world depicted in  Mad Men’s, but other directors can be said to have influenced Matthew Weiner and his directing team, notably Alfred Hitchcock and the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni who both released many of their most remembered movies in the 1960s. This influence is announced starting from the first seconds of the show as the titles of the opening credits of Mad Men pay homage to graphic designer Saul Bass’s skyscraper-filled opening titles for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and to his falling-man movie poster for Vertigo (1958). Moreover, the character of Betty Draper performed by January Jones is often compared to Grace Kelly whose cold and distant beauty has been immortalized by Hitchcock in movies such as Rear Window (1954). Antonioni’s influence is also implicitly confessed to the viewers through a scene in which Don sits at the cinema watching the Italian director’s La Notte (1961)[36], which shows the way the series manage to plunge its viewers through an era by drawing inspiration from the products of this era but also by communicating them to the viewers.

Both Matthew Weiner and Antonioni emphasize visuals or surface appearances, especially that of people, and the fragility of identity. Just as Antonioni’s characters have little or no interiority, so Mad Men encourages us to read superficially, based on clothes and body language. Furthermore, Rushing asserted, both Weiner's show and Antonioni's films reveal an interest in watching things disappear.[37]

We can see then that Matthew Weiner’s ambition of depicting an era relies a lot on influences directly coming from that era. But the show’s historical accuracy also relies on deep researches and a collaborative process where attention is paid to the smallest details. Matthew Weiner, described in the New York Times as a perfectionist[38], directs an efficient team devoted to painstakingly recreating an bygone era.

I.1.3 Painstakingly recreating an era : a collaborative process

A few historical inaccuracies can be found in Mad Men, but as compared with the density of each of the 39 episodes already broadcast, they seem to be “the exception that proves the rule”, the rule being here that a painstaking attention is usually paid to period details following Weiner’s instructions. Here are these mistakes, at least those which have been noticed by diverse attentive observers :

-the use of IBM Selectric II typewriters in Sterling Cooper’s offices : these were introduced  on the American market in 1971[39]

- the Lucky Strike slogan “It’s toasted” in the pilot was not invented in 1960 but in 1917[40]

-Betty could not have been part of a sorority when she was in Bryn Mawr College as mentioned in the show[41], because there never were sororities in Bryn Mawr[42]

-Joan should not have quoted Canadian Scholar Marshall McLuhan, since his quote “The medium is the message”[43] was printed in his book Understanding Media : the extensions of Man which was published in 1964[44], a year Mad Men has not reached yet

-London Fog was not a tired, 40-year old brand in 1963[45], according to ad man Richard Gilbert : “it was launched in 1954 when it changed from Londontown Clothes, a Baltimore men's clothing manufacturer, to its current brand title and rainwear emphasis.”[46]

- “ “The military-industrial complex,” coined by Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, finds itself on the lips of account manager Ken Cosgrove[47] in 1960 ”[48]

- and finally, if Paul Kinsey was a Freedom Rider, he should have been going south to desegregate interstate transportation, not register black voters, as the show has it[49].

Probably other mistakes could be found, nevertheless, after deep researches, those are the only ones that have been mentioned by diverse sources, and sometimes confessed by Matthew Weiner himself. It is also interesting to notice the interaction allowed by new media between the creators of a series and its viewers. The AMC’s official website is very well designed and offers the possibility, through its Mad Men blog and “Talks” section, to comment the show, allowing fans or detractors to criticize what they saw and to denounce the show’s inaccuracy. The cultural impact of Mad Men is such that hundreds of blogs  relating to the show can be found on the internet, while the enthusiasm or unpleasant feelings it provoked among the advertising industry is reflected by the numbers of articles a website such Advertising Age, hold by the magazine of the same name, dedicated to Mad Men and pointing to what the show got right or wrong. But in the main, the general historical accuracy of the show is praised by all, and this accuracy is built on a deep sense of collaboration, thorough researches and an almost fetishistic attention paid to period details. 

I.1.3.1 Mad Men’s Fashion, Mirror of the American Society in the early 1960s

The design of the show, its sets and costumes are an ode to the glamorous early sixties. Janie Bryant is Mad Men costume designer, and the quality of her work has been lauded to the point that she received twice the Costume Designer Guild Award. She is also a specialist of fashion history and studied many sources of the early sixties to conceive the dresses and suits that contributed to Mad Men particular image. 1960 issues of Ladies’ home Journal, Life Magazine, Esquire, Vogue and so on are to be counted among the numerous sources used by Mad Men creative staff, not only for fashion, but also for props, sets, advertisements... To recreate an era, one has to recreate its fashion, itself a reflection of the society. Before the shifts fashion was to experienced with the arrival of mini-skirts and English influence during the “Modern Era” (1964-1967) or the hippie movement for the “Rebellious Era”(1967-1969) when fashion and identity politics fused together, the style of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the “Classical Era” was associated to elegance, glamour, reflecting then the consensus, the “other-directedness” and conformity of society, along with its highly consumerist spirit, but also the great sense of optimism pervading Kennedy’s presidency.  According to Bryant, during the Camelot era, everything had to “look pristine and perfect”[50]. Among the famous people who inspired her for the conception of the two to three hundreds costumes she makes per episode, one can find Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe for the character of Joan in particular, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn for Betty, or Cary Grant and Gregory Peck for Don…

The style of this era was both conservative and luxurious, designed to reflect the opulence of the times. Women had to express their complete feminity to please their husbands, help them through their careers, to assume the role conservative sexual politics had attributed to them as part of the “feminine mystique”. In the early sixties, dresses are not shorter than below the knee yet, but the emphasis is put on women’s waist and breast, notably through the use of bullet bras. The conformist rigidity of the era is also represented by the combed hair, never long, straight and untied. But the optimism and opulence are reflected by the strong colors characterizing female fashion of the period. Moreover, Janie Bryant does not contend herself with recreating period clothes, she also has to deal with the characters personality as described by Matthew Weiner. This way, Peggy’s style is much more restricted and plain than, for instance, Joan’s, or Betty’s, the wealthy housewife. The same way, the fact that Helen Bishop, the divorcee, wears trousers signals that times are going to change just as it marginalizes her among her supposedly happily married neighbors. Out of consideration for his ambition to realistically depict the early 1960s, Weiner also insisted on the fact that he wanted his actors to wear period underwear, even in the scenes when those are not shown, because they influence the people’s posture, itself an indicative factor of the society in which they evolve.

As far as men are concerned, fashion of the early 1960s was very similar to the fashion of the 1950s, with business men all epitomizing Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Elegance was the ruling world, as men had to shave, put brilliantine in their hair, wear three-buttoned suits with cufflinks, skinny ties and neatly folded pocket squares in order to look respectable and serious when meeting clients, and to assert their social status, while they even wear elegant pajamas when going to bed. Of course, the most emblematic fashion element of that era was the hat, especially the fedoras covering New York’s business men’s heads, this gentleman’s symbol which was to disappear from the fashion landscape following the upheavals of the 1960s, whether Bert Cooper likes it or not, (the latter, referring to Kennedy, cannot conceive that American people would elect some “greasy kid” who “doesn’t even wear a hat”[51]). It could be interesting to mention that Vance Packard, in The Hidden Persuaders, analyzed and denounced the way the Men’s Wear industry and its advertisers managed to make men style conscious to counter the fact that they were easily satisfied with one pair of shoes and a few outfits that would last for years in order to increase their sales. It seems obvious that along the rise of the mass-consumption a great importance was attributed to outward appearances, and that people were pushed to buy more and more clothes and accessories.

And something exciting was going on. The American Institute of Men’s and Boy’s Wear was raising from members a 2,000,000 war chest to drive home to males the slogan : “Dress Well-You Can’t Afford Not to’, the first such large-scale persuasion effort it had attempted in history. The aim, as Tide phrased it, was to ‘force the average man out of a drab routine of stereotyped garb into a seasonal, volatile, style-conscious class’[52]

That is then the whole consumerist aspect and dominance of outward appearances characteristic of the late 1950s and early 1960s that is reflected through Janie Bryant’s work.

I.1.3.2 Materializing the early 1960s : Mad Men’s design and verisimilitude

The materialization of the 1960s is also allowed by the painstaking work of Dan Bishop, Mad Men’s production designer, and Scott Buckwald, Mad Men’s property master (prop master). The sets are made in order to recreate the world in which people lived during the early 1960s. The places one can see in Mad Men such Sterling Cooper’s offices or the Draper’s house are far from resembling the space-age design that can be observed in many movies of the 1960s. For realism’s sake, Mad Men sets designers borrowed objects and influences coming from both the 1950s and early 1960s. As Matthew Weiner pointed it[53], in real life, people keep things from the past in their houses, and a set where only 1960s objects could be found would not accurately reflect a 1960s place. That is why, for instance, one can notice the traditional Colonial style of the Drapers house. Along with the settings,  properties play a very important role in the visual aspect of Mad Men as a reflection of the early 1960s. A prop(erty) is any movable object used on the set of a stage play or film. In Mad Men case, this can be a period lamp, or a period issue of Life magazine, for instance. The attention paid to props is such that Weiner refused to use a certain model of watch for Don for the first season since this watch had been introduced in 1961. Scott Buckwald’s task is very challenging, as an episode of Mad Men has to be shot in eight days, a very short time for him to research the products he is asked to provide. He explained his job in a very interesting interview given to Collectors Weekly, a website specialized in the selling of vintage objects[54]. Studying history in College was, according to him, “a great training for doing prop research”. One might agree with that point, considering the task working on Mad Men‘s set represents in terms of props as these must convey the impression that the characters are surrounded by authentic 1950s and 1960s products. For instance, Buckwald had to reproduce many magazines that are not published anymore :

I get the script for the next episode and I have one week to start prepping it, so I don’t have the resources to find an issue of “Advertising Age” that looks now like it looked brand new in 1960. So usually the quickest, most direct route is to reproduce it. We’ll find pictures of it, or we might find an old pattern issue of a magazine, and then I’ll redo it. I’m constantly redoing book covers.[55]

He is the one in charge of reproducing or finding vintage items such as a an old coca-cola sign or an authentic 1963 Barbie doll, and all the little things that convey this sense of realism and  contribute to the viewer’s immersion in the 1960s. 

Weiner’s attention to details, verisimilitude and authenticity is often emphasized in the many articles that can be found about the show, and which relates the way he rejected an actress during an audition because her lips looked “too contemporary”, while every aspect of an episode is debated during the production meetings. For instance, he can ask what the weather was like on a specific day or month in 1962, a question quickly followed by an answer coming from one of his collaborator who will check this information on the internet, and will determine the way the actors will be dressed. Most of the references made by characters in their detailed dialogs turn out to have actually occurred at the time the show is set. For instance, the Website of Westchester, Rockland, Putnam New York  has a page dedicated to Mad Men, as Ossining (Westchester) is the suburban town where the Drapers live, where a map shows and explains every place or event mentioned during the series and related to the town[56]. Language is also a feature which needs to be researched. The recurrent use of the sentence “That’s swell” is one of the show’s aspect that can strike a present-day English student watching Mad Men. During production meetings, sentences are discussed in order to decide if they should be kept or dropped, if their use would be accurate in a show depicting the 1960s. This way, for instance, it has been decided that the sentence “I hear you” was too contemporary to be heard in the show[57]. 

But apart from the general design of the show and its obsessive attention to period details, it seems that it is in its narrative content that the series accuracy is the most impressive, and this thanks to a collaborative team of writers.

I.1.3.3 A Collaborative Writing Team

The writing team of Mad Men is made of eleven people[58], of whom four (Bridget Bedard, Tom Palmer, Chris Provenzano, Cathryn Humphris and Dahvi Waller) have only co-written two episodes each in 2007 and 2009. Marti Noxon and Kater Gordon joined the crew in 2008, co-writing fourteen episodes each, while André and Maria Jacquemetton, Lisa Albert and Robin Veith have been working on the show since its creation. In all, Mad Men writing staff is made of seven women, a “rarity found on Hollywood television”[59], and that probably explains the very critical look cast upon gender-ruled relationships in Mad Men.

According to the Directors Guild of America, the labor union that represents film and television directors, about 13% of its 8,000 directors are female. Women comprised 23% of television writers during the 2007 to 2008 prime-time season, a 12 percentage point decrease from the same period a year earlier. Nearly 80% of TV programs in the 2007 to 2008 prime-time season had no women writers, according to a study by Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University[60].

Following Weiner’s instructions and guidelines, these writers work together, discussing each elements of the plot, sometimes drawing elements from their own experiences, but also relying on research. All have been asked to read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and The Single Girl, Jack Olsen’s The Girls in the Office(1972), David Halberstam’s The Fifties (1993) or John Cheever’s short stories, and to watch movies from the 1960s such as The Apartment. Collaboration and the study of the same resources helps to keep the show’s consistency of tone throughout the three series, for an accurate depiction of the emotional and social landscape of the era…

I.2.Madison Avenue as the relevant prism of an era

Mad Men is a show revolving around the small enough and fictitious advertising agency Sterling Cooper whose admen and only adwoman work on the street that became to advertising what Hollywood is to the cinema.  Setting the show’s main dramatic line in an advertising agency turns out to be a very skilful and relevant choice for Mad Men’s creator ambition of depicting the pivotal early 1960s.

I.2.1 The early 1960s : The Golden Age of Advertising

As Martin Mayer had noticed in his book Madison Avenue U.S.A (1959), advertising was one the most booming industries in America as the latter was experiencing the unprecedented economic prosperity following World War II, entering what the economist Walt Rostow called the “high-mass consumption” stage of economic development[61].

I.2.1.1 Advertising : America’s booming industry

The consensus of the fifties had relied on this astonishing consumerism and prosperity which seemed to erase social issues in people’s minds while idealized families populated the ads flourishing around them. To what extent advertising can be said to reflect the society it is created in or to influence it has never been efficiently measured but it is nevertheless undeniable that it has become part of the American culture starting from this era[62], being both the beneficiary of this new world of consumerism and the main tool in the building and maintaining of this world, while it is said to be “the ubiquous chronicler of social climate”, having “the most accurate finger on America’s pulse”[63]. Between 1947 and 1960, the average real income for American workers increased by as much as it had in the previous half-century, the gross national product soared 250 percent, and advertising increased 400 percent[64]In 1961, 6,5 million of the nation’s families accounted for a third of total consumer buying power, whereas a decade earlier 2,5 million families accounted for a fifth of all buying power. By 1960, the white collars had outnumbered the blue collars, 75 percent of American families owned their own car and washing machine, 87 percent their own TV set,, while the booming car’s industry and the Highways Act of 1956 had allowed the emergence of suburbia where more and more middle-class families came to settle[65] . Optimism and faith in mass-consumption was high, and advertising people became very important people, as they represented the bridge between the goods producers and their consumers, offering them a idealized world where happiness can be reached through buying. The boom in advertising led to the boom of buildings and offices on Madison Avenue and its surroundings, the Street becoming, along with Wall Street, the embodiment of American economic power.

The only Major New York street named after a president of the United States, Madison Avenue runs some six miles up the East Side of Manhattan, and a Madison Avenue address can mean anything at all. Between them the Avenue runs through an area of lofty buildings and decent hotels, and through two of the best residential districts in the city. The stretch that has made the street famous takes up on fifth in length, beginning at about 200 Madison and ending at about 650 Madison, slightly more than a mile of office buildings set side by side in parallel lines, forming what the vulgar call ad alley or ulcer gulch, what the more enlightened describe as the communications belt. On Madison Avenue or within two or three blocks in either direction are the headquarters of the two largest radio and TV networks and the offices of fifty “station reps” who sell advertising time on local stations; the central advertising sales office of almost every major magazine and the editorial offices of such periodicals as Time, and Life, Vogue, Look, McCall’s and Redbook, Esquire and Coronet, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, and many, many others; the main offices of sixty “national reps” who sell white space in a thousand newspapers. Scattered in among them are the advertising agencies themselves, preparing and placing and billing their clients for nearly three billion dollars worth of advertising in a year. Half of American industry’s advertising budget is spent by the agencies of Madison Avenue and nearly half the remainder by branch offices controlled from New York.[66]

I.2.1.2 Admen’s Glamorous Life

The “Kings of Madison Avenue” were experiencing a Golden Age, as they were enjoying the same prosperity they were promoting. This is particularly well represented in Mad Men, where overheated consumerism is epitomized by the incredibly high consumption of cigarettes and alcohol by its characters, fervent amateurs of the stereotypical three-martini lunches, during which account executives talk about business with wealthy clients they try to entertain, in order to seduce them, before taking the train at Grand Central to go home in their suburban houses. According to Jerry Della Femina, an adman and copywriter who started his career in 1961, Mad Men accurately reflects the general atmosphere of these days on Madison Avenue when drinking abounded inside and outside offices : “People had bottles in their drawers. For lunch, we used to go to the Italian Pavilion, which is now where Michael’s is. The bar was still in the same place, and the bartender would start shaking our martinis as soon as we walked in. They would literally serve us the first martini as we were sitting down, the second, the third, then we would figure out what to eat. It was such a wild time, and the best period for advertising, so much looser.”

Through the life of Sterling Cooper’s executives, the viewer is invited in the Glamorous New York of the 1960s, which is skillfully depicted despite the fact that most of the series is shot in Los Angeles Center Studios. This revival of 1960s New York is permitted by close shots, the deeply researched settings and the dialogs, always referring to some famous place of the city. For instance, Matthew Weiner explained in the commented version of Mad Men’s pilot, that a shot taken from the top of a building, showing only a tight portion of pavement walked by a few people dressed with period clothes, is a cheap way of evoking Madison Avenue, just as the shots showing only the ground floor of Sterling Cooper’s building with its employees going in and taking the elevator. It would have been too costly to film whole streets of New York and made them look as if it was still 1960.  The luxurious life of the “Mad Men” of the show allows a travel in the glamorous New York, as these often go to places such as P.J. Clarke’s, Sardi’s, the Toot’s Shore, which all had prestigious regular customers such as Frank  Sinatra or Audrey Hepburn, the Tom-Tom, but also prestigious hotels such as The Pierre, The Roosevelt, The Waldorf=Astoria..

If Mad Men’s depiction of the advertising world is not perfect and might be the aspect of the show the most submitted to debate, as we shall see in the second part of this study, it is nevertheless a general accurate initiation to this world which has influenced so many aspects of the American society, an initiation to its spirit, aims and challenges.

During this era of great prosperity, admen became widely assailed by requests from American industries representatives willing to sell more goods to more people and to outsmart their numerous competitors. The “hidden persuaders” denounced by Vance Packard in 1957 had to outsmart each others, producing efficient advertisements in order to seduce both their clients and the consumers the ads were targeting. As more and more people were achieving a middle-class status, these had to be convinced that happiness could be found in buying more products, even if that meant buying products they already had. The development of suburbia, with its population of baby-boomers, offered a new and prosperous market to advertisers and their clients. As far as the suburban market is concerned, a very interesting film can be found on the internet. It was conceived as an advertisement for Redbook Magazine and its relevance as a journal dedicated to young adults, in order to attract advertisers and American goods producers to buy media space in the magazine pages. Claiming to the clients it is made to attract that “Right now [they] can ride along with a happy-go-spending, buy-it now young people of today”[67] while showing happy people on a rollercoaster, the film is particularly representative of the way advertisements and mass society were perceived at the time, the way people became malleable consumers and preys in the eyes of the industries ruling the American economy. But the prosperity accompanying the astonishing economic growth of post-war America also had its drawbacks, as a growing number of products presenting the same qualities and offering no particular novelty were already possessed by more and more people. Competition was high and advertisers encountered new difficulties when promoting products whose differences increasingly diminished while the Federal Trade Commission adopted “a sternly righteous and disapproving attitude toward over-extravagant claims and promises”[68] such as those which characterized previous forms of advertising.  Mad Men’s pilot episode accurately reflects the issues at stake for admen in 1960 through the plot line revolving around Don’s difficulties to create a campaign for the representatives of Lucky Strikes.  Sterling Cooper’s collaboration with Lucky Strikes has some particular resonance for the common viewer aware of the dangers linked to cigarettes. It cleverly depicts the way advertisers can proceed to sell products to people notwithstanding the fact they can be bad for them, raising questions of ethics, morality as related to the power of advertisers and big profitable corporations. It also accurately represents the importance of relying on the concept of “branding” emerging with the mass society.

I.2.2 When Madison Avenue was facing new challenges

The very beginning of the pilot gives the tone to the series. We can see Don, smoking in a bar, asking a waiter what type of cigarettes he smokes and why he is loyal to that particular brand, to which the waiter replies that he smokes Old Gold out of a sense of nostalgia and habit because these were the cigarettes that were given to him and his companion soldiers :

 -Don : What is it, low-tar? Low-nicotine? Those new filters? I mean, why"Old Gold"?

- Busboy : they gave them to us in the service. A carton a week for free.

- Don : So you're used to them. Is that it?

- Busboy : Yeah, they're a habit.

- Don : So I could never get you to smoke another kind? Let's say, my Luckies?

- Busboy : I love my Old Gold.

-Don : Let's just say tomorrow a tobacco weevil comes and eats every last

Old Gold on the planet.

-Busboy : That's a sad story.

-Don : Yes, it's a tragedy. Would you just stop smoking?

-Busboy : I'm pretty sure I'd find something. I love smoking.

-Don (writing as he speaks) : "I love smoking". That's very good.

-Busboy : My wife hates it. "The Reader's Digest" says it will kill you.

-Don :  Yeah, I heard about that.[69]

In his campaign for Lucky Strikes, Don is facing three problems : the first one is linked to the similarity of cigarettes brands, as six major tobacco companies( Philip Morris, R.J Reynolds, Lorillard, American Tobacco, Liggett and Myers, and Brown and Williamson)[70] basically sell the same products, the second is the progressive spread of the cancer scare linked to scientific revelations linking death and diseases to cigarettes, and finally the Federal Trade Commission’s announcement in early 1960 that it had engineered a voluntary ban on references to tar and nicotine in cigarette advertising… It seems necessary to briefly recapitulate the evolution of the influence of anti-smoking campaigns on cigarette advertising to understand the problems encountered by Don which he confesses to his mistress Midge :

- Don : I have this situation with my cigarette account.

-Midge :Wow, you really are here to talk.

-Don : The Trade Commission is cracking down on all of our health claims.

-Midge : I get "Reader's Digest". This is the same scare you had five years ago. You dealt with it. I know I slept easier knowing that doctors smoke.

-Don :  But that's the problem. The whole "safer cigarette" thing is over. No more doctors, no more testimonials, no more cough-free, soothes your t-zone, low-tar, low nicotine, filter-tipped, nothing. It's over. All that's left is a crush-proof box and "Four Out of Five Dead People Smoked Your Brand."[71]

I.2.2.1 Advertising Tobacco and Sickness

The contemporary viewer might be shocked by the amount of cigarettes smoked during the show, it is nevertheless an accurate depiction of the popularity of cigarettes during this era. World War I had popularized and patriotized cigarettes through the rations packets given to America’s doughboys, and the interwar years had seen the glamorization of cigarettes through movies and advertising. Smoking had then become increasingly accepted among men and women of all classes embracing the modern values of the twentieth century, a tendency again increased by World War II. By the mid-fifties, 57 percent of men and 29 percent of women smoked and by 1964, 43 percent of the adult population smoked.[72] But by the early 1960s, the cancer scare had already started to spread and to generate some pressure from the State towards cigarette advertising. Along with the revelation of scientific findings linking death and diseases to cigarettes consumption, relying on studies made in the 1940s and 1950s which were progressively covered by the press, with notably the Reader’s Digest’s articles “Cancer by the Carton” (December 1952)[73] and “The Horror of Lung Cancer” (March 1959), the growth of scientific institutions and funding for their research contributed to the awakening of a sense of responsibility among certain policymakers concerning the health of their citizens.[74] In order to counter the spread of the cancer-scare, cigarette-makers tried to conceive “safer” cigarettes, notably thanks to the invention of the filter-tip, while cigarettes advertisements emphasized the safer aspect of each brand along with its better taste or mildness, relying on doctors testimonials or supposed scientific studies. It might be interesting here to notice that watching old cigarettes commercials from this era, many of which can be found on the internet, is something both amusing and bewildering, with doctors claiming they smoke only Camel or a young couple swinging in the “wonderful world of softness, [the] wonderful world of freshness” of “the wonderful wonderful wonderful world of Salem cigarettes!”[75]. Emerging antismoking activists recognized the power of cigarette advertising and sought to disarm the industry, but the Federal Trade Commission’s actions, such as the issue of a seven-point guide to cigarette advertising in 1955, remained limited as compared to the great power of the Tobacco industry until the early 1960s, when the real counterparts of Don and his colleagues started having troubles advertising cigarettes. But thanks to the pressure of a handful of Congress members, such as Maurine Neuberger, and voluntary health organizations, the Kennedy’s administration ordered in 1962 its surgeon general Luther Terry to form a committee to study the issue, the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, which released its report in 1964, officially stating that a link was to be found between tobacco use and lung cancer among other diseases and therefore opening a new era of regulatory policy-making .

Don is then facing difficulties when trying to find a way to counter the restrictions newly imposed by the FTC. The slogan he fictitiously and skillfully finds for Lucky Strike, “It’s toasted” is what the advertising man Rosser Reeves has defined as a USP: a unique selling proposition[76], which means a quality by which the product is said to be demonstrably different from the others. As in many cases, such as for cigarettes, competing brands are so similar that finding a product’s USP usually means finding a feature common to all but which no other brand thought of claiming before. That is exactly what Don does, when asking Lucky Strikes representatives to describe the way they produce their tobacco. When he offers his slogan, his clients retort that everybody else’s tobacco is toasted, to which Don replies “No, everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike is toasted”. Mad Men then shows the importance of branding and the way it can be made, implicitly putting its viewers in front of the reality of the deceptive power of advertising.

But USP’s are not the only devices that can be used to brand a product and attract consumers. Something which is not mentioned in Mad Men but which fit what’s demonstrated in the show and would deserve to be evoked here is the way Marlboro paradoxically took advantage of the cancer scare. Until 1956, Marlboro cigarettes were initially conceived for women, but as more men began to use filter-tips following the scientist’s discoveries about the effects of tobacco, Marlboro leaders decided to increase their market by targeting men through what Packard called “a spectacular transvestism”[77]. An eminent advertising man of the Mad Men era, Leo Burnett, then designed the iconic Marlboro Man in order to attract male consumers, an image which never left the brand to which it is associated in people’s minds.

I.2.2.2 Advertising Politics

In the deceptive world of consumerism, Advertising men are the leaders, building images to attract gullible consumers and sell them products they don’t need or worse, which are poisonous for them. But the early 1960s also experienced the extension of the power of Advertising men through the increasing role they came to play on higher grounds than the mere sale of consumer goods, those of politics. Again, this turn specific to the 1950s and early 1960s has been accurately depicted in Mad Men through the fictitious collaboration of Sterling Cooper with Nixon’s party for his presidential campaign of 1960, one of the main guiding lines of the series’ first season. What Vance Packard had analyzed and predicted in The Hidden Persuaders became an undeniable reality during the Nixon/Kennedy campaign: politics were advertised, politicians becoming products to sell and voters becoming consumers. As Sterling Cooper is engaged in Nixon’s campaign, its executives keep on despairing when comparing Nixon’s television announcements to those of Kennedy and his charming wife Jackie, who is showed[78] in some archive footage speaking in Spanish as part of her husband’s campaign.[79]  The animated cartoon ad[80] for Kennedy showed in Mad Men[81] deeply contrasted with the stern look and seriousness of Nixon’s announcement, as it was light-hearted, and, as Sterling Cooper’s executives say, not evoking issues people don’t want to hear about. To counter Kennedy’s camp’s strategies and boost Nixon’s chances in the undecided states Pete Campbell gets the idea of buying up on air-ads for laxatives (one of Sterling Cooper’s account is Secor Laxative) to decrease Kennedy’s presence in those states. Even though this device is fictitious, it depicts well the way the importance of advertising increased in political campaigns, the politician’s success relying more on his image, on the way he is advertised than on his program.

If the impact on American voters of both candidates’ campaigns cannot be precisely measured, considering the very tight results which granted the victory to Kennedy, who won 49, 71% of the vote, while Nixon won 49, 55%, this election nevertheless represented a historical shift that should not be underestimated, as for the first time in American and even global history, television had played a determining role[82]. In 1950, 3,9 million households were equipped with a TV set, while this figure amounted to 45 million in 1960. 115 million American people followed one of the four televised debates that opposed the candidates, and these debates are often mentioned as the determining factor in Kennedy’s victory. Sterling Cooper’s executives don’t understand why people would vote for a privileged and inexperienced young catholic man when his opponent is, like Don says, “a self-made man, the Abe Lincoln of California”, a war hero, the experienced vice-president of Eisenhower. One of the explanation of Kennedy’s victory is based, as previously said, on the televised debates, especially on the first one, which occurred on September 26, 1960 and attracted the largest audience. Kennedy appeared more confident, younger and healthier than Nixon on TV, when the latter was only four years older than him. Before the debate, Nixon had stayed two weeks at the hospital for a knee infection, which partly explains the fact that he looked tired on screen. He also had refused CBS executives invitation to review the debate venue along with camera and lighting placement, just as he had refused the offer of professional make-up application. Kennedy accepted all of these offers, while his dark blue suit allowed him to appear more distinctively on the TV set than Nixon who was wearing a grey suit[83]. Moreover, Kennedy showed better oral skills than his opponent during that first debate which markedly influenced the seventy-five million people who watched it and granted Kennedy with, according to journalist Theodore White, an aura of “television or movie idol”[84]. Of course a televised debate alone cannot explain a presidential victory, but it is undeniable that television became the most powerful medium in the early 1960s, a factor that Sterling Cooper underestimated, as they created their television department only during 1962[85]...

I.2.2.3 Television : The Rising Medium

The mere fact that Mad Men’s fictitious agency thought of creating a television department shows the way advertisers had to adapt to this powerful medium which was to influence so many things in American society. What happens in Mad Men is that Harry Crane learns that the TV show The Defenders, an American courtroom drama series which ran on CBS from 1961 to 1965, has no sponsor for an episode entitled The Benefactor (originally telecast on March 28, 1962), because it contains a plot involving abortion, an issue too controversial at the time. He then offers one of Sterling Cooper’s account, Belle Jolie, a fictitious company specialized in the merchandising of lipsticks, to sponsor the show as it is likely to be watched by many young women. Belle Jolie executives refuse this opportunity, fearing that the show will tarnish their image, but Harry Crane’s idea is welcomed by his superiors who accept to appoint him director of the then newly created TV department. In another episode, Harry gets in trouble because Maytag representatives, (Maytag being a famous brand specialized in electric appliances) are unhappy with the fact that one of their commercial extolling their washers’ agitators followed a movie referencing “communist agitators”[86]. In order to prevent this kind of disagreement to happen again, a new job is created implying the reading of TV scripts for strategic advertisement placement.

This evolution of the agency shows the way advertisers had to adapt to the new medium, but also implicitly uncover the way advertising can influence the content of TV programs. In this particular scene, the advertiser buys media space according to the televised show’s content, but this could work the other way around. During the 1960s, TV shows were sponsored by one single brand, and therefore, a show which could not find a sponsor was condemned to disappear, unless they were broadcast through the former network National Educational Television and Radio center, now called Public Broadcasting Service. Today, television private channels still heavily rely on program sponsorships sold to businesses attempting to promote their products to a mass audience. One can then wonder to what extent advertisers and merchandisers influence the content of the cultural products TV has to offer in order to fit their own need . Vance Packard early denounced this aspect of advertising, as he even explained that advertisers could not be willing to sponsor a show too entertaining because depth studies have proven that a potential consumer is less receptive to advertisements when he or she is watching an interesting and captivating show which you would be talked about during the commercials.

A show can be not only too suspenseful but too funny for its own good. That at least was the sad conclusion of the Philip Morris people, who poured millions of dollars into their top-rated comedy show I Love Lucy. While Lucy became the most popular show on television, Philip Morris sales lagged behind and in fact dropped 17 percent. Tide magazine reported , “There are those at Philip Morris (…) who subscribe to the idea that an extremely good show might never sell products”.[87]

 In any case, admen are those who have to keep an eye on every aspect of society.

They are image-builders, both reflecting and influencing society in order to promote consumption. Particularly during the late 1950s and early 1960s they were experiencing a Golden Age, as prosperity was still new, and as technology was simple enough to easily target mass audience, as compared to nowadays world which has entered a new era in the 1990’s with “the “revolutionary” forces of globalization and cyber-culture”[88].

According to Don Draper, “Advertising is based on one thing : happiness.(…) happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay. You are okay.”[89]

In the early 1960s advertising promoted happiness, and the admen were those maintaining this fantasy, shaping images which influenced society, promoting an ever increasing consumption of products, promoting conformity and the idea that one had to keep up with the Joneses, denying a growing sense of anxiety that was to lead to the upheavals of the 1960s. In his realistic portrayal of the early 1960s, Matthew Weiner, who said he chose “advertising as a subject because it’s a great way to talk about the image we want to give of ourselves versus who we really are”[90], tried to uncover the uneasiness lying under the glossy pictures shaped by the kings of ad alley.

I.3. Filming a slice of life in the 1960’s.

It would be interesting to see how the show manages to put flesh, blood, colors and sounds to this pivotal moment in American history, relying on realism and on fictitious character’s narratives embedded in history. Indeed, the show skillfully investigates shifting societal mores and historical events which, more than a framing device, inform every episode the same way current events inhabit our daily lives.

I.3.2 Looking beneath appearances : an accurate depiction of the emotional and social landscape of the early 1960s

Through conflicted and archetypal characters and their multilayered narrative, Mad Men manages to convey recognizable aspects of private and public life in the early 1960s. As the narrative progresses, the viewer learns about the secrets, despair, and shadowy pasts of the characters hiding behind the glossy façade of conventional behavior. Maybe one of the most substantial aspect of the show is the way its characters are both archetypal and complex, allowing a large sample of personalities each conveying one specific issue as related to this specific era. The intense personal narratives are coupled with the deterioration of the traditional family and communal and spiritual values in favor of a materialist frenzy and rising consumerism, while rampant displays of racism, misogyny and homophobia, excessive smoking and drinking, along with “a desperate clinging to conservative beliefs”[91]characterize the oppressive environment in which the characters try to evolve.

I.3.1.1 Mad Men Embodying Conflicted Times

The men in Mad Men, the employees of Sterling Cooper, neatly suited and driven by money, all hide some secret torment or nourishes ambitions far different from what they are used to do for Sterling Cooper. Adultery is rampant throughout the show, testifying to the men’s need to assert their masculinity and to women becoming consumer goods; the slow pace of the show is a great asset in  the portrayal of conflicted characters since as the series progress, each character’s outward appearance demolishes in front of the viewer.

Don Draper, or Dick Whitman, the main character, the anti-hero, embodies times as conflicted as him. His whole life is built on a deception: born from a prostitute, and raised by farmers, he stole his companion soldier’s identity in Korea and we know he worked in a fur company and as a car salesman for a while. How he reached his position as a creative director at Sterling Cooper is a mystery. His wife knows nothing about his past, nor do his colleagues, apart from Pete and Cooper. His upcoming fall is forecasted by the falling man of the opening credits. Indeed, Don is a liar, and in America liars are punished, as Nixon’s fate can prove it.  The beginning of the pilot gives the tone to the show as we first discover Don from the back. We don’t know who he is, who see him working, we follow him to his mistress who lives in the Village, to only discover he is married and has children in the last scene of the episode. Little by little, notably through his flashbacks, we learn about the mysteries surrounding this complex character. His duplicity embodies the tensions between appearances and reality that pervade throughout the series, themselves symbolizing the tensions fostered by the conformity and high consumerism of the late 1950s and early 1960s which were to lead to the social upheavals of the decade. Don has all the things he promotes in his ads, a Grace-Kelly looking wife, three children, high incomes, a house in a nice suburb, success with women and a promising career, yet he is unhappy. He might be the one promoting consumption, he is a consumer too. In one episode, we can see him yield to the rules he usually masters as he buys, after some hesitation, a Cadillac coupe-de-ville[92], to fit his status as he gets promoted. He is both the hidden persuader and the status-seeker, the upward striver deceived by the implicit laws of the consumption society he contributes to maintain.  His immorality is not deprived of a sense of guilt, such as when after having a conversation with a beatnik (“You make the lie. You invent want, you are for them not us”)[93] he goes to his son’s bedroom to wake him up and promise him he will never lie to him. He embodies the frustration of the era, the unexplainable “misery of the rich”[94] depicted in the studies and novels of the post-war, the “workaholic” unsatisfied in his home, unable to desire his wife, smoking and drinking excessively. In his quest for identity, he keeps on re-inventing himself and epitomizes both the conflicted society about to burst and the American dream.

At Sterling Cooper, the characters’ workplace, tensions, hypocrisy and rivalries rely on appearances. Ken Cosgrove, an account executive, is not deprived of sensitivity and seems to be nourishing artistic ambitions contrasting with his status of business man, as he has written two unpublished novels while one of his short stories gets published in The Atlantic Monthly[95] which makes Pete Campbell, the impatient and ambitious executive jealous, as well as the left-leaning intellectual Paul Kinsey who secretly writes a play[96]. The extramarital affairs between executives and secretaries are hidden despite the misogynous atmosphere pervading the office, while the men’s wives must appear at their best when attending important meetings or parties with their husbands they have to promote in front of their bosses. Through the character of Salvatore, homosexuality and the issues related to it are tackled. The fact that he would not even admit to himself his sexual orientation fit this dramatic tension between outward appearances and reality and conveys well the idea of the repression of the self by “other-directed” people.  Pete Campbell, one of the most enigmatic characters of the show and often despised by fans, is unscrupulously thriving for success. One can indeed remember the way he tried to blackmail Don when learning the secret about his true identity in order to get a promotion[97]. His successive failures make him frustrated, and he is therefore having affairs or exchanging a wedding gift against a rifle in order to assert his masculinity. [98] It is interesting to notice that adultery is a common feature among the diverse fictions critically portraying this era, such as in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, confirming the tendency observed in the controversial reports of Dr Alfred Kinsey Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)[99].

The progressive uncovering of the characters secrets convey a great sense of irony among the viewers, an irony emphasized by the fact they are watching  conservative, old-fashioned and arrogant men cheating on their wives and blinded to the social changes surrounding them, stuck in their prejudices towards women, homosexual, black people and Jews. They are unaware of the impending changes and of the fact that their excesses might lead to their death. Irony is at its climax through such scenes as when Don lights a cigarette just as one of his client is telling him her father died from a lung cancer[100].

Paradoxically, it could seem that Mad Men main characters are women. Whether it is because the majority of the writing staff behind the show is made of women or because Matthew Weiner has been very influenced by the feminist movement during his college years or by the situation of his mother, it is undeniable that women’s condition is thoroughly examined throughout the series, especially as compared to other social minorities’ condition. Matthew Weiner always refers to Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) when mentioning the books he studied when writing the series’ scripts :

“The other books I've always talked about are "The Feminine Mystique" and "Sex and The Single Girl." Huge part of the show. I read them before I wrote the pilot. Just to catch up and see "what were the names of these secretaries again?" And I realized "Oh my God. This is the whole series. This is more than 50% of the show." And how the men react to this is also just as interesting. It's such a huge change coming. And then it changes back (laughs).”[101]

The Feminine Mystique is probably the most obvious source behind the show, and the way the writers absorbed this thorough and emblematic sociological study is impressive as Mad Men manages to convey most of Friedan’s statements.

I.3.1.2 Uncovering The Problem That Has No Name

Betty Friedan (1921-2006), was an American writer, a feminist and activist who is generally said to have started the “Second Wave” of the U.S. Women’s movement. Before founding the National Organization for Women in 1966, she published what was to be considered as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century : The Feminine Mystique. Feeling that something was “very wrong with the way American women [were]trying to live their lives [in the 1960s]”[102] and relying on her experience in psychological studies, she conceived a questionnaire for her former classmates, fifteen year after their graduation from Smith College. Collecting the answers of 200 women, she discovered that a majority of women were suffering from a common ill-being, and then started her investigations, relying on her experience as a writer for women periodicals, to uncover, define, denounce, and offer solutions to what she designated as “the problem that has no name”. This problem was the result of the feminine mystique, that is to say of the way post-war American women gradually became forced into subservient roles, as they were told by society, and notably by women magazines and advertising, that the only way they could reach happiness was through being loving, devoted mothers and housewives, denying any sense of self-fulfillment through work outside the home. Uncovering the plight of American housewives confined in their “comfortable concentration camps”[103], she relied on many statistics, articles, ads, interviews and psychoanalysts’ account to demonstrate her point. The link between The Feminine Mystique and Mad Men is all the more significant that the American housewife, or, as Packard called her, “Mrs Middle Majority”[104], was the main target of advertising.

Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house. In all the talk of feminity and woman’s role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. [105]

According to Friedan, American housewives represented 75 per cent of the purchasing power in America, implying then that advertisers and merchandisers had all the reasons to make women stay at home for the well-being of the economy. Despite Fridan’s thorough demonstration, to what extent women have been willingly manipulated and confined into this role is unsure, but the major interest they represented for marketers is confirmed by all the studies and papers dealing with advertising in the 1950s and 1960s. One would be impressed to see how many times David Ogilvy, who used to be a famous adman, uses the word “housewife” in his Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) when giving advice for making good advertisement. 

The Feminine Mystique is a really fascinating study that could not be easily summed up through these pages. Nevertheless, one could say that Betty Draper is like the summation of Friedan’s book about the housewife problem. Betty is a young mother who married Don at the age of 20 when she got pregnant and then stopped her career as a model. We know she is educated as she graduated from Bryn Mawr College, and speaks Italian fluently[106]. Betty Friedan insisted on the fact that American women often stopped their education or career to get married and denounced the fact that “by the end of the nineteen-fifties [1959] the average marriage of women in America dropped to 20.”[107] Betty does not work outside the house and starts getting anxiety crisis after her mother’s death, her hands shaking without her knowing why. That’s when she asks Don if she can visit a psychiatrist[108]. Don does not understand why she would be unhappy and regularly calls the doctor to know about his wife mental health. It is significant that Betty should consult a psychiatrist only during the first season of the series, as it is set in 1960, the year when the problem that has no name started to be analyzed by the media :

In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife. In the television commercials the pretty housewives still beamed over their foaming dishpans and Time’s cover story on “The Suburban Wife, an American Phenomenon” protested : “Having too good a time…to believe that they should be unhappy”. But the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported-from the New York Times and Newsweek to Good Housekeeping and CBS Television (“The Trapped Housewife”), although almost everybody who talked about it found some superficial reason to dismiss it. [109]

Moreover, Betty is depicted as a childlike woman. When Don calls her psychiatrist, the latter, breaking his confidentiality oath, tells him : “She seems consumed by petty jealousies and overwhelmed with every day activities. We’re basically dealing with the emotions of a child here.  We’re finding that this kind of anxiety is not uncommon in housewives”. Betty is a young mother whose only role is to take care of her children, cook the dinner, and be pretty when going out for her husband’s job’s purpose. She is so lonely that the only person she is willing to confide in is her nine-year-old neighbor Glen[110]. In one episode she is offered a job as a model, a chance that Don won’t let her take by refusing the position offered in exchange at the agency Mc Cann-Erikson[111].  Don tries to ease Betty’s disappointment, claiming : “ You have a job. You’re the mother of those two little people and you are better at it than anyone else in the world”, a quote that could make the viewer smile considering Betty’s lack of attention and affection for her children. This scene is followed by the one staging Betty smiling in the morning, trying to appreciate her “job” as a mother and housewife, before we see her bored and smoking in the kitchen, still in her dressing gown, and finally going outside and shooting her neighbor’s pigeons. This scene, which can be said to symbolize her frustration, has been based on Mad Men script writer Robin Veith’s memory of her own mother[112], and fits the symbolic imagery of birds pervading the show. Indeed, birds names are often used during the show, with Don calling Betty “Birdie”, Pete calling his wife Trudy “Tweety”, while Roger offers a bird in a cage to Joan[113]. Women are seen as birds in a cage, and when Betty shoots the pigeons, it seems she wants to prevent them from flying because she is herself unable to fly. She fits the image of the woman who lost her individuality, who can live only through her husband and children and progressively becomes, to quote Betty Friedan, “dehumanized”. This over reliance on her husband who is himself too busy in the world outside to take care of her or even desire her is well expressed in these lines addressed to Don that resemble many of the interviews mentioned in Betty Friedan’s book : “I want you so much. I thought about it all day. I mean it. It’s all I think about, every day. Your car coming down the driveway. I put the kids to bed early. I make a grocery list. I cook butterscotch pudding. I never let my hands idle. Brushing my hair, drinking my milk…It’s all in a kind of fog because I can’t stop thinking about this. I want you so badly.”[114]  

I have heard from many doctors evidence of new sexual problems between man and wife-sexual hunger in wives so great their husbands cannot satisfy it. “We have made woman a sex creature”, said a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger marriage counseling clinic. “She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does not know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is not interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, waiting for her husband to make her feel alive.”[115]     

Many other parallels could be made between the show and The Feminine Mystique. One can understand the role that book played in the conception of the series which constantly deals with the question of identity and of the quest for this identity. According to Friedan, the feminine mystique encouraged women to ignore that question, thanks to the public feminine image conveyed through magazines and ads. In the early 1960s, as women thought they had to choose between a career and a family, many of them were excluded of the advancements made in the outside world, unlike the pioneers’ wives who had helped to build the country. In the early 1960s, the new frontier was spiritual, and self-realization, according to Friedan, could be achieved only through work and creativity.

I.3.1.3 Mad Women : Adapting the Male-Dominated Society

Nevertheless, all the women of Mad Men don’t necessarily fit the image of the “trapped housewife”. On the contrary, the various women staged in the show have their own personalities and their own ways of dealing with sexual discrimination. In that respect, Mad Men avoids stereotypes and offers a larger view of the early 1960s as compared to many depictions of this era tending to focus on the anxiety linked to life in the suburbs, such as in Revolutionary Road, for instance. 

This way, Peggy embodies the first cracks in the glass ceiling. She is clever, a hard-worker, and her talent at writing allows her to leave the steno pool to become a junior copywriter. Unlike Joan, she does not use her feminity to seduce her surroundings and climb the social ladder or get a husband. On the contrary, during the first season, the fact that she did not know she was pregnant shows that she voluntarily put on weight to become desexualized and be accepted among her men colleagues. If Peggy is the only woman to become an executive at Sterling Cooper, she had many real counterparts in the early 1960s. Indeed, advertising was an area where it was possible for women to succeed, as women were the main targets of the advertising industry. Women like Mary Wells Lawrence, who founded her own agency in 1966 and became the highest paid advertising executive at the end of the decade, or Charlotte Beers, who became the first woman in America to head two advertising agencies (J.Walter Thompson and Ogilvy&Mather) showed that it was possible for women to make a place for themselves in the male-dominated world of the 1960s[116].

Another important career woman who deserves to be mentioned, and this all the more that she wrote one of the books that inspired the series, is Helen Gurley Brown, the author of the 1962 best-seller Sex and the Single Girl . Born in a poor family in Arkansas in 1922[117], H.G.Brown went through seventeen different secretarial positions before becoming the secretary of advertising executive Dan Belding of the agency Foote, Cone and Belding, where she worked from 1948 to 1958. As Dan Belding’s wife, reading a letter Brown had written to her boss, recognized her writing skills, she suggested her husband that he gave her a chance to write advertising copy. He refused, but changed his mind when H.G. Brown got successful in a “Ten Girls with Taste” essay contest in Glamour Magazine.  As she was promoted to the copywriting department, H.G Brown rapidly advanced to become one of America’s highest paid ad copywriters in the early 1960s, and, in 1965, she became editor-in-chief of the failing magazine Cosmopolitan whose fate she managed to radically transform. She held this position for thirty-two years. In Sex and the Single Girl, she gave advice and encouraged women to become financially independent and to experience sexual relationships outside the marital bond. Even if her book promoted some stereotypes linked to feminity such as the use of culinary skills to get a husband, some argued that it was a milestone in the feminist movement[118], preceding the Second Wave of feminism triggered a bit later by Friedan. If its content is rather light-hearted, the fact that it promoted sexual gratification for women outside of marriage was a considerable advancement at the time preceding the upcoming sexual revolution, itself favored by the commercialization of the contraceptive pill in 1960. Helen Gurley Brown’s work and personal story inspired different aspects of Mad Men.

If Peggy Olsen’s advancement in Sterling Cooper resembles more the one experienced by Brown in her own life, it seems that Joan Holloway fits better the image of the woman promoted in Sex and the Single Girl. Joan is not afraid to use her charms to get what she wants, she does not conceal her desire to find the perfect husband and has an affair with Roger, a married man. Peggy seems to go in a different direction, as she voluntarily declines Pete Campbell’s advances to focus on her job. In the very first episode of the series, Joan explains to Peggy the gendered-rules of the office and advises her to evaluate her body for her strongest assets and to enhance them to succeed at the workplace, and tells her “In a couple of years, with the right moves, you’ll be in the city with the rest of us. Of course, if you really make the right moves, you’ll be out in the country and you won’t be going to work at all” and also offers her a doctor who prescribes contraceptive pills to unmarried women... Nevertheless, once Joan found the supposedly perfect husband-a young and “handsome” surgeon- she does not seem willing to stop working and follow what was considered as the “natural” order of things, and one can feel sorry for her when after having showed her skills at strategic advertising placement she sees a less talented man taking her job[119].  It is actually interesting to notice that through Sterling Cooper’s steno pool, Mad Men allows a new look upon women of the early 1960s, focusing on their pink-collar workers and not only on the stereotypical housewife. By 1960, twice as many women were employed as in 1940, and 40 per cent of all women over 16 held a job[120]. But despite the real achievements made by women like Helen Gurley Brown, the glass ceiling of Sterling Cooper and its sexist atmosphere were characteristic of the era.

By the 1960s, employment for middle-class white and married women had become the norm rather than the exception; and a two-income household had become almost a prerequisite for the consumer culture(…)Yet, most of these jobs were “women’s work”-sex segregated and offering little opportunity for individual advancement or promotion. Despite the large number of women in the work force, assumptions about male and female spheres of responsibility were so deeply ingrained that to question them amounted to heresy.[121]

In the male-dominated world of the sixties, the women of Mad Men all try to evolve in their own way, without claiming their rights yet as they are submitted to deeply rooted social values they don’t think of legitimately challenging. But things are about to change, and the upcoming change is well epitomized by the last episode of Mad Men season 3 when Peggy straightforwardly answers “No” to Roger as the latter ask her to pour him some coffee.

One could finally mention the visual subtlety and depth of Mad Men which often takes the time to pay attention to details which are deeply evocative, such as in a scene where Joan, after her workday, takes off her dress and rubs her shoulder which is red, marked, as her bra was too tight. Through such scenes it is the efforts made by women to fit this world of images created by men and the silence suffering they produce which are uncovered. This scene could make us think of this testimony by Nancy Gorell, a woman who grew up in the early 1960s :

It was as if we were encased in plastic. Girls were expected to wear stockings-not panty hose, but stockings-and girdles with garters that made holes in your legs. We wore stiff petticoats and brassieres that pushed you up and out in a very unnatural way. And we used to tease our hair and then spray it, and when we walked out in the morning on the way to school, it looked as if we were surrounded by plastic. Everything was artificial…And then in 1964…it was as if I had stepped onto another planet. Everything was so free and loose…I wore jeans everywhere and let my hair grow the way it naturally wanted to. It was as if I had become another person. I felt as though I was myself for the first time.[122]

It turns out that at its core, Mad Men is a profound meditation on the deceptive allure of surface and on the deeper mysteries of identity.

I.3.2 An oppressive and enclosed atmosphere where historical events and shifts manage to seep in fictitious characters’ lives

Thanks to its reliance on realism and on the complexity of its characters, Mad Men captures the zeitgeist of the early 1960s without mythologizing it. As the emotional landscape is accurately set, historical events are used efficiently to fit the plot and pervade the show. The historical accuracy of the series has been widely and rightfully praised, and therefore it seems that it would be unproductive to take out all the historical landmarks of the show and compare them to what will be found in diverse sources. Even the only real-life character of the show, Connie Hilton, has been thoroughly researched as Matthew Weiner relied on many accounts concerning the man’s personality such as those given to him by historian Mark Young (University of Houston)[123]. It seems that it would be more interesting to see the way history is used and artfully conveyed in Mad Men.

I.3.2.1 Mad Men : an integrative and image of the early 1960s

As previously said, the show skillfully investigates shifting societal mores and historical events which, more than a framing device, inform every episode the same way current events inhabit our daily lives. The show relies on archival footage and broadcast, newspapers, dealing with historical events without depicting them directly but showing how they were, or could have been experienced by the common people of this era, while the characters ‘narratives are embedded in the historical process, which acts as both a background and an influential factor in their lives. According to Robert A. Rosenstone, a theorist dedicated to approaching period movies as serious historical material, if movies cannot substitute themselves to history as a discipline, as we shall see later, they nevertheless convey a sense of history in an “integrative” way.

Film shows history as process. The world on screen brings together things that, for analytic or structural purposes, written history often has to split apart. Economics, politics, race, class and gender all come together in the lives and moments of individuals, groups and nations. This characteristic of film throws into relief a certain convention-one might call it “fiction”- of written history. The strategy that fractures the past into distinct chapters, topics, and categories. That treats, say, gender in one chapter, race in another, economy in a third. Daniel Walkowitz points out that written history often compartmentalizes “the study of politics, family life, or social mobility.” Film, by contrast, “provides an integrative image. History in film becomes what it most centrally is : a process of changing social relationships where political and social questions-indeed, all aspects of the past, including the language, are interwoven”.[124]

This “integrative image” generally conveyed in historical movies is particularly noticeable in Mad Men as its characters evolved in a fictitious world stratified with accurate historical events and shifts. Moreover, it seems that its format, its slow pace and the consistency of tone maintained throughout the series allows a more compelling depiction of history as a ‘”process”  than feature movies, which are generally two-hours long, and therefore restricted by their narrower frame. In Mad Men, characters don’t really take part in historical events, they are surrounded by them and experience them the way common people experience events that will be related to as history in later days. The very detailed dialogues of the show are one of its main assets in its depiction of the early 1960s. For instance, when Sterling Cooper’s executives have a morning discussion in the elevator, they briefly refer to what they heard on the news, and the viewers learn, by touches, what is happening at the time the show is set. For instance we hear surreptitiously about the French exploding their first atomic bomb inFebruary 1960 :

Ken Cosgrove : I mean, it’s France, what do they want with the bomb?

Paul Kinsey : We must have given it to ‘em. No way the frogs came up with it on their own.

Harry Crane (as Pete Campbell enters the elevator) : Hey it’s the honeymoon kid![125]

The reference is brief, so is the debate, quickly followed by another topic linked to the intimacy of their colleague. The show is densely riddled with this kind of historical references that contribute to the series’ realism.

Despite the enclosed and oppressive atmosphere of Sterling Cooper and of the Drapers’ suburban house in Ossining, changes and major events managed to seep in the characters’ life through the media. For instance, Betty Draper might be far remote from the Civil Rights struggles characterizing the times in which she evolves, she will hear about it on the radio, such as when she comments upon the Birmingham Church Bombing[126] as Carla listens to the funeral of the four girls killed during this attack which occurred in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,(this church was used as a meeting-place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King) on September 15^th, 1963 and is said to have been perpetrated by Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977[127]. The same way, Don, the WASP hedonist, is unlikely to be interested by the civil rights movement, but cannot avoid hearing about it, such as when he discusses Martin Luther King’s now so-called “I have a dream” speech (which he delivered on August 28th 1963 during the March on Washington[128]) with his mistress as they listen to the radio in Don’s car[129]. The influence of media in the characters life is particularly well depicted in the episode referencing J.F. Kennedy’s assassination[130]. As the characters gather in front of a TV set, whether they are at work, at home, or at a wedding, to understand how such a thing could happen and relying on CBS news’ journalist Walter Cronkite’s words, the viewer can be recalled of the important role played by television when dramatic events occur and whose scope is such that it affects people from any social background. This is well epitomized in such scenes as when Carla, asking about the president’s condition after she arrives at the Drapers, breaks into tears, sits down on the couch besides her employer Betty and lights a cigarette, notwithstanding the social code usually established between them. Betty spending the day in front of the television can remind a student of the way she spent hours watching television following the events of September 11^th, 2001…

I.3.2.2 Reflecting the social and cultural priorities of specific years

Another interesting aspect of Mad Men’s realism and which has been underlined by Landon Palmer, a student currently finishing a MA in Cinema Studies at New York University, is the way the show reflects the “cultural priorities”[131] of the early sixties through such as episodes as the one showing the impact of Marilyn Monroe’s death on Sterling Cooper’s secretaries who all seem particularly affected while Hollis, the black elevator operator, who almost never talks to Sterling Cooper’s employees unless they ask him about the black market, breaks the usual social conventions, showing how this type of events is generally experienced by our contemporary societies notwithstanding social, political and economic differences[132]. The same way, the emphasis on events which are usually forgotten with time and not considered as relevant enough to be regularly mentioned in the wider History is another particular trait of Mad Men. For instance, the crash of the American Airlines Flight 1 in Jamaica Bay, which occurred on March 1^st, 1962, the same day when a parade was organized in New York to honor the astronaut John Glenn (who was the first American to orbit the earth on February 20^th, 1962[133]) turns out to be a great plot line[134]  : it shows the way a disaster can become an “opportunity” for a advertising agency notwithstanding the constraints of decency ( Sterling Cooper wants to get the American Airlines account) while underlining Pete Campbell’s ambitions (his father died in the crash yet he is willing to woe American Airlines’ executives). But the episode’s focus on this event is characteristic of the way Mad Men attempts to revive the sixties by depicting life the way it was or rather could have been experienced by people in this era: the crash of this specific plane would not be mentioned in a history book about the 1960s in America and is unlikely to be referred to nowadays as it looks like a minor event compared to those usually characterizing that tumultuous decade, unless maybe in a documentary focusing on American aviation’s history, for instance. Yet, this crash had a relative impact on people the day it occurred and probably after, just the same way a significant crash would be talked about for days on the news in our contemporary society. This “reliving” of the sixties has been praised in the New York Times which significantly published an article dedicated to the crash of Flight 1 following the broadcast of the Mad Men episode of the same name[135]. This testifies to the cultural impact of the show on its audience and of the educational value one can sometimes draw from the series.  

I.3.2.3 Embracing the Characters’ story and History 

But Mad Men also deals with major events of this era, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 or, as previously said, Kennedy’s assassination, sometimes in a symbolic way as the narratives of the characters embrace the turn history seems to be taking, as the upheavals disturbing their personal lives reflect those characterizing the decade. For instance, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deterioration of Don and Betty’s marital life reflect each other, while Kennedy’s assassination symbolizes the end of innocence and the beginning of a new era with Betty finally deciding to get divorced from Don himself breaking away from Sterling Cooper to start a new agency. Nevertheless, this symbolic aspect doesn’t prevent the show from dealing with history in a subtle way :

Mad Men doesn’t handle the iconic events and struggles of the decade ham-fistedly. It never feels like there’s a checklist of historical events the show goes through(…).The events shape the periphery of the narrative and character struggles—like the paranoia of the Cuban missile crisis permeating the Madison Avenue office as Don Draper’s personal life breaks down at the end of season 2—but it never simplistically defines them and their surrounding culture in a unidirectional manner. It resonates in the background, making a slow and unseen influence only acknowledgeable over time, just as many major tragic world events or social changes do in our lives.[136]

According to Landon Palmer, this subtle way of dealing with history, along with the complexity of human behaviors embodied by the rather complex characters of Mad Men allows a new look upon the early 1960s and late 1950s, as compared to other depictions of this era which tend to either represent it as a period of prosperity and social consensus in a nostalgic way or as an era which needs to be demystified and criticized for all the social ills it was hiding.

Unlike films that seek to reveal the many myths of mid-twentieth century America, Mad Men doesn’t view popular interpretation of this era as a huge façade hiding racist and sexist skeletons in its closet ripe for the outing, but instead sees the white picket fence as equally relevant to the reality ignored around it—they exist mutually. The ignorance of the eponymous “mad men” to the impending social changes that will surround them stand as a result of thoroughly implemented social structures that the white men of the show, yes, enforce and embody, but just as equally follow and conform per the standards and social expectations of their fellow men—a process posited as essential to success in the personal and professional culture of early-60s Manhattan. And these social structures are not wholly demonized, demystified, and dismissed as a façade nor are they celebrated as the best in American values(…)

The oppressive social systems and misguided value structures of the era may have stagnated progress and given birth to the polarizing, violent culture wars later in the decade, but this doesn’t mean they weren’t reflective of very real value structures that permeate in American society even to this day. (This is why admiration and disgust are often simultaneous emotions with which we approach the characters of Mad Men, centralized in the walking contradiction that is Don Draper.) The façade, then, sometimes reveals itself to be just as strikingly real as the reality that it clouds[137].

This point of view is particularly interesting and relevant, but one should remembers that Mad Men is a television series necessarily imbued with the subjectivity of its author and whose neutrality concerning the “real value structures that permeate in American society even to this day” shall be discussed in the second part of this study.

Finally, one could not forget to discuss one of Mad Men ‘s most pleasant assets, that is to say its over reliance on culture through the various shapes it may take.

I.3.3 A show infused with cultural references  for a painstaking and lively reconstruction

In Mad Men, musical, cinematic and literary references, among other elements of the culture of the early 1960s, play a significant role in the show, as they convey a  sense of realism and authenticity, acting as part of the characters life but also shaping the show’s identity.

I.3.3.1 LIFE magazine : Chronicling an Era

Mad Men characters often read or mention LIFE magazine. This not only contributes to the show’s conveying of a certain daily experience of history, as previously discussed, but it also reflects the wide cultural influence this magazine had at the time. Besides, real former issues of LIFE are to be counted among the most important sources which have been used for the conception of the series. Indeed, LIFE was probably the most influential weekly magazine from its creation in the 1930’s until its decline in the early 1970s. Created by Time founder Henry Luce, LIFE magazine was first published on November 23, 1936, revolutionizing the press through its emphasis on photojournalism, and chronicling America for several decades. At its height in the mid 1960s, LIFE had a paid circulation of over 8 million, but the magazine suffered from the rise of television, as it progressively lost its status as “the largest mass market platform for advertisers”[138]. As its advertising revenues decreased, so did its circulation which was cut from 7 million in 1971 to 5.5 million beginning with the January 14, 1972, issue. The weekly LIFE magazine shut down on December 8, 1972, and its monthly version, launched in 1978, never obtained the same popular and critical success as its ancestor. LIFE is referenced in all the books about advertising in the 1960s as a main source for the study of ads and of the society they reflected or influenced, which shows the importance this magazine held during the era depicted in Mad Men. Thanks to a partnership between Google and Time Inc, the integrality of the pictures that were illustrating LIFE can be found on the internet [139], while the full archive of the issues of the main run (1936–1972) is available through Google Book Search. It is then very interesting to have a look on the issues of the early 1960s, those that have inspired Mad Men creators and that were read by people evolving during the years depicted by the show, to understand the way the series was conceived and to immerse oneself even more in this era. Mad Men can trigger a deep interest in this magazine among the common viewer trying to investigate the show and American culture and history.

           

I.3.3.2 Referencing and Reviving the late 1950s and early 1960s’ culture

Early 1960s culture is literally infusing the show, notably, for instance, through its soundtrack, almost exclusively made of songs dating from the late 1950s or early 1960s such as Bobby Helms’ My Special Angel[140] which beautifully illustrates the irony of Betty’s situation during the shooting scene, Jody Reynolds’ Come on Twist[141], Miles Davis’ Blue in Green[142] , Roy Orbinson’s Shadaroba which, according to Le Monde journalist Pierre Sérisier[143], perfectly fits the series’ Season 3 last episode, following Kennedy’s death, Don and Betty’s separation and the creation of a new ad agency, as the song is about loss, change and hope…Many other songs of this era could be mentioned. They contribute to both the artistic aspect of the show and to its depiction of the early 1960s as they immerse the viewers in the musical atmosphere experienced by the characters, and one could easily be tempted to discover or rediscover the music people were listening to in these bygone days.

The same way, one could be tempted to have a look at the various movies or plays referenced in the show as part of the characters’ daily lives. For instance, as previously said, Roger invites Joan to go and watch Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, a movie she has already seen[144], while the representatives of the company Bethleem Steel are invited by Sterling Cooper to a performance of Bye Bye Birdie, a musical which was played in Broadway in 1960 and inspired the director George Sidney for the film of the same name, released in 1963, on which Sterling Cooper’s executives base their campaign for Patio Cola, a former branch of Pepsi[145]. A clip from this movie is showed during Mad Men’s season 3, which allows the viewer to (re)discover actress Ann-Margret’s lasting performance. Don and Betty go to the Broadhurst theater on Broadway[146] and see Fiorello!, a musical about New York City mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia which opened on November 23, 1959 and closed on October 28, 1961 after 795 performances[147]while their children like watching Shirley Temple’s storybook on TV (Shirley Temple is a American actress who started her television career at the age of 3 in 1932 and played starting from 1958 in a two-season television anthology series of fairy tales adaptation, the Shirley Temple’s storybook…), and Peggy goes[148] to one of Bob Dylan’s concert at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village(1962).

Literary references are pervading the show as well. For instance, bohemian poet Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency (1957) is read by Don who seems to be deeply influenced by these poems dealing with themes such as identity crisis and life in New York[149]. He even quotes one of them entitled Maïakovsky : “Now I am waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern”[150] before sending it to some mysterious person who turns out later to be the widow of the real Don Draper[151].  It would be interesting to mention here that an astonishing increase in sales of Frank O’Hara’s book was observed on the website Amazon following the broadcast of the episode referencing it[152], as it testifies to the show’s cultural impact and to the way it manages to revive the sixties culture by exposing it to contemporary viewers curious to know more about it.

II / Mad Men, an expressionist painting, not a history lesson

Criticizing Mad Men turns out to be a difficult enterprise. Indeed, very rare are the articles which disagree with the general enthusiasm aroused by the series among the press but also among academics. Moreover, Matthew Weiner never claimed to be an historian trying to educate his audience. As he himself declared, Mad Men “is not a history lesson”[153]. Nevertheless, it would be too simplistic to arrest ourselves on this assumption without trying to assess Mad Men‘s relevance when linked to the concept of history as a discipline. It is precisely because Mad Men’s historical accuracy has been so widely praised that one should point to the aspects of the show that prevent it from transcending its status as a virtual image of America in the early 1960s. Mad Men remains a work of fiction which could not be substituted to a history lesson and whose particular interpretation of a debated era necessarily relies on a process of selection and omission. Therefore, a complete portrayal and analysis of America in the early 1960s would be an impossible task to assign to Mad Men, as to any other TV shows, as artistic expression along with the desire to entertain a particular audience are always prevailing. It would then be interesting to see to what extent Mad Men remains a single and incomplete interpretation of an era, to finally focus in particular on its depiction of the advertising world to see that Mad Men could not be substituted to a history lesson about American advertising to illustrate more precisely our point. In the end, it will turn out that most of what is absent from Mad Men is so because of the adoption of a specific point of view which sometimes convey the impression of a deferral of the 1960s.     

II.1 Mad Men, a necessarily limited and subjective presentation of history

Despite Mad Men’s praised historical accuracy, Mad Men remains a visual fiction, a necessary reflection of its authors’ subjectivity, and a commercial product, and in certain cases the surface verisimilitude of the show doesn’t stand up, as we shall see, to closer scrutiny. Even if Mad Men’s format of “megamovie” allows its access to a higher level in historical authenticity than usual historical movies or dramas, it remains submitted to  the same boundaries  as those acknowledged by Robert A. Rosenstone (as previously said, a theorist dedicated to approaching the feature film as a serious work of history) concerning the mainstream film  :

Our sense of the past is shaped and limited by the possibilities and practices of the medium in which that past is conveyed, be it the printed page, the spoken word, the painting, the photograph, the moving image. Which means that whatever historical understanding the mainstream film can provide will be shaped and limited by the conventions of the closed story, the notion of progress, the emphasis on individuals, the single interpretation, the heightening of emotional states, the focus on surfaces.[154]

When we watch the show we are not watching “the Sixties” on our screen, but a particular projection and interpretation of the 1960s, which is, to some extent at least, the particular vision of Matthew Weiner. And to go a little further, it seems that the latter wants us to watch a projection of ourselves watching a projection of the sixties, an intention embodied by the last scene of Mad Men opening credits depicting the back of a man seated on a couch.  Through his depiction of the early 1960s, it may seem that Matthew Weiner sought to criticize his contemporary society, and in that instance Mad Men, as nuanced as it is, cannot be completely neutral and objective. Therefore, the process of selection and omission of historical facts necessarily required in a visual fiction is not only a dramatic device: it is also, as we shall see, a useful way of conveying a particular message to a particular audience. 

II.1.1 A self-congratulory liberalist show?

When criticized by his fans for some anachronisms such as the use of Bob Dylan’s song Don’t think twice it’s alright, a song which has been released in 1963, for an episode set in 1960[155], Weiner defends himself by claiming that this song seemed to fit Don’s situation, that “in terms of artistic expression” he wants “to have the freedom to put contemporary music in there” and that he’s “allowed to do “whatever [he wants] anyway” : “Don could pull a cell phone out at some time. I don’t do that stuff because I don’t want the reality broken”[156]. This artistic freedom could be therefore problematic when applied to issues more important to American history and society, as it denies the complete objectivity required by History as a discipline. The glamorous aspect of the show, its eroticized surfaces, its highly provocative aspect relying on the emphasis put on cigarettes, alcohol, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, or on the lack of concern for the environment, have become its trademarks, and one can wonder to what extent it might be exaggerated in the wide context of artistic freedom conferred to fiction.  The rare articles which don’t settle for a mere appraisal of Mad Men have criticized what their authors designated as its tendency to create a sense of condescendence and self-contempt among viewers aware of the impending changes about to occur and still ignored by Mad Men’s characters.

II.1.1.1 Mad Men, congratulating or explaining the present?

The most virulent critic towards Mad Men has been expressed by Mark Grief, (a journalist who received a BA in History and Literature from Harvard in 1997 and who hold a PhD in American Studies from Yale)[157] who considers Mad Men as “an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better”[158]. According to him, the show uses its vision of the past to congratulate the present, as it seems to emphasize the worst aspects of the era such as sexism, sexual harassment at the workplace, homophobia, racism and housewives’ depression while these haven’t disappeared from the American landscape. According to this conception Sterling Cooper (SC) stereotypically represents what is “bad” during this era and what needed to be changed. Many of the clients of SC have some special resonance for the contemporary viewer. Indeed, among them can be found the cigarettes maker Lucky Strikes, Gilette’s Right Guard[159] which was the first company to license the aerosol spray technology (used for insecticides during WWII) for deodorant in the late 50’s, allowing the doubling of deodorant sales by the late 60’s[160] along with their now-well-known bad consequences for the ozone, and of course, Nixon himself, whose presidential campaign is one of the guiding threads of the first season.

In the same way, Benjamin Schwarz, editor of The Atlantic and an otherwise fervent admirer of Mad Men, shows how the fact that Mad Men “deliberately shocks its audience by presenting as reasonable and commonplace behavior we now find appalling” constantly presses the viewers to condemn the world depicted, a stance responsible “for the rare (and therefore especially grating) heavy-handed and patronizing touches in [that] otherwise nuanced drama”[161]

Must the only regular black characters be a noble and cool elevator operator, a noble and understanding housekeeper, and a perceptive and politicized supermarket clerk? Must said elevator operator, who goes unnoticed by the less sensitive characters, sagely say when discussing Marilyn Monroe’s death, “Some people just hide in plain sight”[162]? Get it—he’s talking about himself. He’s invisible. Even worse, that stance evokes and encourages the condescension of posterity;[163]

This aspect of the show has been designated under the term “self-congratulory liberalism” by Alexander Doty, Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, according to whom it acts like a hook on contemporary audience[164].

           

II.1.1.2 Provocation as a trademark ?

To demonstrate his point Schwarz also refers to provocative scenes such as the one where one of the Drapers’ guests slaps the child of another neighbor without him disapproving his gesture[165], a scene which denies the influence Dr Spock’s advice and Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care could have had on child-rearing practices of the Northeast’s professional class, while the scene where the Drapers throw their trash on the ground after their picnic[166] depicts what he considers as an event unlikely to happen among affluent and educated families.

To which one could add that Betty’s attitude towards her children is also something particularly shocking, such as when she threatens Sally of punishing her because she took out a dress out of a plastic bag, instead of worrying about the fact that her daughter could suffocate[167]. The lack of Betty’s tenderness and interest in her children doesn’t represent well other possible conceptions of motherhood characterizing the diverse interpretations of this era. For instance, Betty Friedan insisted on the fact that many housewives, deprived of individuality and outside interests, were devoted to “the cult of the child” which led to a pathologic “symbiotic love” between the mother and her child who becomes passive and deprived of his/her own self like his/her mother[168]. Betty’s relationship towards her children has nothing to do with “the love affair”[169] observed by Friedan among many housewives. As seen in the first part, Betty is an embodiment of many of the themes tackled in the Feminine Mystique, but the emphasis on her cruelty sometimes turns out to be another attempt of Mad Men’s authors to shock their audience. The emphasis on adultery is just as provocative as Betty’s cruelty or Sterling Cooper’s executive racist and sexist comments. But if these are the accurate reflection of some aspects of the early sixties’ society, they act as a dramatic hook for a judging audience, and silence other interpretations of the era by adopting the restricted point of view of its main characters. During an interview, Matthew Weiner said :   “There were a lot of important books that were self-critical and about improvement. The Feminine Mystique is from the early Sixties. And The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, which was all about poverty in America, and The Silent Spring, which was all about environmentalism. These were the issues that people were expected to be interested in – and they were”. This stance shows that Weiner knows well the period he is dealing with but also that he is deliberately putting those “interested in” the issues mentioned on the margins of his show. Don and Betty are unlikely to care about the situation of the poor analyzed by Galbraith, and even less to have read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book published in September 1962 but first serialized by The New Yorker in June of the same year and which is often credited with having launched the environmental movement.  By a process of selection and omission relying on the WASP and conservative point of view adopted in Mad Men, Weiner depicts a particular image of the early sixties, as seen through the eyes of those who were ignoring the changes to come and their necessity. It sometimes seems that he wants to show why change had to come more than how it did. By emphasizing the blindness of its main characters, the show silences the people and things they don’t see, and in that respect it is difficult to qualify Mad Men as a perfect reflection of America in the Sixties, and this all the more so as the show focuses on one particular advertising agency and its surroundings, which prevents the depiction of any other area of the United States apart from the brief excursion to California[170]…

Nevertheless, the “self-congratulory liberalist” theory does not seem to hold good. Indeed, it seems that Mad Men is not aimed at congratulating the present, but rather, if at anything, at explaining the origins of certain of its aspects and even, as we shall see, at denouncing it.

II.1.2 The White Lens or The problematic Silencing of Minorities

The adoption of a restrictive point of view is all the more problematic when it comes to the depiction of minorities.  According to the report of a symposium entitled  MAD WORLD : Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960’s (which took place this year at Illinois University), which summarizes the papers of three teachers, Clarence Lang( African American Studies/History, Illinois), Leslie Reagan (History/Gender & Women’s Studies, Illinois) and Alexander Doty (Communications & Culture/Gender Studies, Indiana), the three of them have argued that despite the fact that Mad Men portrays sexual and racial minorities and denounces their marginalization, it also “limits such characters to structural functions or plot devices.”[171]

One the one hand, the images of homosexuals, blacks, and sexually active women point to a contemporary-and even politically correct-awareness of their existence and their problems. However, the panelist’s deeper analysis exposed the relative lack of thematic relevance of these minorities to the show’s central narrative, suggesting their use as props[172].

           

II.1.2.1 Mad Men and the Homosexuals

It is difficult to completely agree with this assumption as far as homosexuality is concerned.  According to Ana Vivancos’ account of Alexander Doty’s presentation, “The Homosexual and the Single Girl”, Mad Men constructs its homosexual characters through stereotypical attributes such as foreignness, stylishness or the attachment to the mother, attributes which would have been in use in 1960s America and still prevail today. It is true that the two homosexual men working at Sterling Cooper fit these stereotypes: Salvatore Romano is an Italian whose close relationship to his mother is evoked during the series through a phone conversation taking place at work[173], and Kurt, the young creative who joins Sterling Cooper’s team during the second season and who baffles his colleagues by asserting he’s homosexual[174], is European and “stylish”. Doty explained the relationship between straight and homosexual characters, such as Don and Sal’s, or Peggy and Kurt’s (who cuts her hair to help her meeting men[175] ) as being only a narrative device “useful to complicating heterosexual characters or illustrating the prejudices of the 1960s”, which makes the presence of homosexual characters insufficient to fully describe the realities of homosexuality prior to the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 (a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations following a police raid that took place at the Stonewall Inn, a day bar in Greenwich Village, and which are considered as a milestone in the struggle for sexual minorities’ rights in American history)[176]. This is true to some extent, but other homosexual characters briefly appear in the show, and these don’t fit the stereotypes mentioned above while they appear in the plot to complicate Sal’s life, not Don’s or other straight characters’. These are important clients of Sterling Cooper, representing the Lucky Strikes[177] and Belle Jolie accounts[178] who try to seduce Sal and make him accept his sexual orientation. Sal is married and we can see him falling in love with Ken Cosgrove, an account executive at Sterling Cooper[179]. Female homosexuality is also evoked through Joan’s best friend[180]. More attention is paid to the problems linked to homosexuality in the 1960s than what Doty seems to believe, even though they’re not studied deeply.

As far as History is concerned, that is probably one of the main disadvantages of the show, resulting directly from its great quality. By tackling so many issues of the 1960s, with more or less emphasis depending on the episodes, the show can’t really convey a deep historical account about one specific theme such as, for instance, homosexuality in the 1960s. But yet again, one has to keep in mind that Mad Men is not a documentary and that conveying a “deep historical account” is not it prime intention.

II.1.2.2. Leaving Afro-American voices on the Margins

However, Mad Men‘s depiction of Afro-Americans in the sixties has been more polemical[181]. Through the reading of comments on AMC’s official website or on diverse blogs on the internet, one can see that the WASP aspect of Mad Men hurts some viewers who don’t understand why Black characters should be confined to subservient roles where they talk only to answer questions concerning the Black market. None of the black characters seen through the show, that is to say the waiter answering Don’s questions in the first episode, Sterling Cooper’s sandwich seller, the two black women that are ladies room attendant, Hollis (the elevator operator), Sheila (Paul Kinsey’s girlfriend)[182], and Carla, the Drapers’ maid, is given a specific importance in the plot and all are deprived of a narrative of their own. They always stay at the margins of the show which never depicts their life outside the rooms where they encounter the main characters. 

The fact that there are only three Afro-Americans appearing more or less regularly in the show and that their life is not part of the narrative, if it has the merit of depicting segregation and poverty, prevents a deeper study of this minority’s situation in the early sixties, despite regular references made to the Civil Rights movements. For instance, when Betty tells Carla: “I hate to say this but, it makes me wonder about Civil Rights. Maybe it’s not supposed to happen right now”[183] as she was listening to the funeral of the girls killed in the Birmingham Church Bombing , Carla replies nothing to this, remaining a silent and suffering observer.  This absence of Black voices is coherent with the show’s logic of depicting the early sixties through the white lens characteristic of this era, but because of this particular interpretation one should not expect a thorough study of the condition of African-Americans in the early sixties through Mad Men. According to Clarence Lang, a geographical distortion can be perceived in Mad Men as the show tends to suggest that the Civil Rights struggle occurred only in the South while it occurred “also in Midwestern and Northeastern cities and on the West coast”[184]. As African-American characters stay on the margins of the plot, not only no information can be conveyed concerning their progressive arrival in New York and other northern cities before and during the 1960s (34,3% of the African-American population lived in the North by 1960[185]), the tensions and the “white flight” to the suburbs it created along with the poverty associated to them, but also none of the positive achievements which occurred in this era are portrayed.

II.1.2.3 The Controversial Absence of other Ethnic Minorities and Positive Achievements

 The same way, history of other minorities is not depicted as these are almost completely absent of Mad Men’ picture. Only one Chinese man is seen through the show, standing in Pete Campbell’s office as his colleagues wanted to play a prank on him[186], and one Asian waitress serving Don in a Japanese restaurant[187], while absolutely no Latino can be seen throughout the series. This fact could be a bit disturbing as the show is set in New York. Indeed, Puerto Ricans have been in New York since the nineteenth century, even though not in significant numbers. The bulk of their migration occurred between World War II and the 1970s and mainly focused on New York where they amounted to 642,622 people in 1960, most of them settling in East Harlem, the South Bronx, and the Lower East Side.[188] Their immigration had been favored by New York City Mayor Robert Wagner’s policy as his administration welcomed the cheap labor they represented. Poverty was rampant among their community, and they were often victims of economic exploitation and prejudices, as they were increasingly portrayed as unwilling to work, welfare leeches, drug addicts and juvenile delinquents.[189] Absolutely none of this aspect of New York’s population is visible through Mad Men.

Along with the absence of stories telling the history of minorities, the volunteer “erasing” of the achievements made by some of them has been a point on which Mad Men has been attacked[190].  

During one of Don and Roger’s dialogue, we briefly learn that the ad agency BBDO “hired a colored kid”[191]. That “kid” is Doug Alligood, BBDO senior Vice president. He did not know he was mentioned, even though not named, in the show before attending a conference comparing Mad Men and real advertising people’s experience of the sixties.[192] He then explained the way BBDO had hired him and that he could not tell “any horrid stories” concerning racism among the agency he is still working for, expressing the pride such successes represented for those of his community who were becoming models, examples to follow. By not focusing on such successes, Weiner, as he says, refuses to “pander to modern sensibilities” and to lose the honesty of his focus on the fictitious Sterling Cooper.

They’re not [Afro-Americans] in the world that I am in and I’m not prepared to make the television leap of making Sterling-Cooper the first place to hire a black executive. There were African-Americans (in advertising). They had their own agencies. But I didn’t want to do that sort of pandering revision of history. Don mentioned that BBDO had just hired their first African-American - “colored” is what I think Roger says. But Sterling-Cooper would not be the place for that. What I’ve tried to do is have some honesty about it, show the jobs that they were in and show my world, which is white. It’s the story of the show[193].

Nevertheless, it also seems that he wants to make a point : “there are still no people of color in advertising today”[194]. Our own point here is not to know whether he is right about this fact or not, but it is rather to underline the fact that he relies on history to criticize and denounce his conception of the present, and that the show’s depiction of the early 1960s is sometimes submitted to his subjectivity and political beliefs. 

Along with the subjectivity of the show, the processes of selection and omission necessary to any work of fiction prevents Mad Men from conveying a detailed historical, political and sociological explanation of the 1960s, and this all the more so as the emphasis is put on individuals inner struggles.

II.2 An arsenal of historical landmarks to be completed

None can deny the importance of Mad Men’s reliance on history along with the astonishing density of each of its deeply researched episodes. Nevertheless, the show remains limited in its depiction of the early 1960’s and it is up to the viewer to complete this otherwise accurate panaroma. 

II.2.1 An Incomplete Portrayal of History

II.2.1.1Numerous hints to be researched

The 1960s Handbook which can be found on AMC’s official website and which is aimed at detailing historical references made throughout the show is in itself a proof that Mad Men is not a sufficient account of the early sixties for the common viewer. So are the special features of Mad Men dvd’s such as the small documentaries which accompanied the episodes of the third season : Clearing the Air : The History of Cigarette Advertising, Medgar Evers : An Unsung Hero… By realistically and skillfully depicting the way common people of an advertising agency and their surroundings could have experienced life in the early 1960s America, the show necessarily lacks of depth in its mentioning of historical events or facts which therefore constitute an arsenal of landmarks to be completed by the viewers. For instance, in one symbolic scene, Sally Draper watches TV, alone and lying on the floor after her grandfather’s death[195]. What she sees is a short news report about Thich Quang Duc, a buddhist monk who immolated himself on June 11 1963 in order to protest against South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh Diem, “a Catholic, U-S backed leader accused of repressing Buddhists”[196]. The short note available on the website is aimed at explaining this precise event, its consequence on the relationships between the American government and South Vietnam before Ngo Dinh Diem’s assassination in November of the same year. To draw some real educational value from Mad Men, one has to do their own research to complete the landmarks set by the show.

Moreover, one could wonder why Weiner chose this particular event to evoke Vietnam. Probably is it due to its symbolic aspect, its present-day resonance with China, and the fact that it fitted the plot well in its depiction of a little girl under grief and let on her own watching tough realities she cannot understand on television.

II.2.1.2 The Missing Year : 1961

Mad Men’s format allows a high level of freedom to its creator who decided to go forward in time during the show’s second season. Whereas the first season ends on Thanksgiving 1960, the second one opens on Valentine’s Day 1962. According to Weiner, “There’s more storytelling in moving ahead and taking a season to find out what happened”. If this lapse in time reveals a useful dramatic device, it nevertheless implies the erasure of significant events of American history. 1961 is the year when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35^th President of the United States, when Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev pledged support for “wars of national liberation”[197] throughout the world and when American military involvement in South Vietnam became significant. It was also the year when American presidency had to face its first diplomatic crisis with the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the unsuccessful attempt by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade Southern Cuba and overthrow Castro’s government which increased the aura of crisis emanating through American Foreign Policy[198] and represented another humiliation for America just a few days after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth[199]. It was the year Kennedy travelled to Vienna to meet Khrushchev to discuss Berlin’s fate…But it was also a significant year on the domestic front, with, for instance, the Congress of Racial Equality launching the Freedom Rides, when black and white students took bus rides into the South to challenge the continued segregation on bus stations[200].

II.2.2 Forgetting optimistic politics

The fact that the events mentioned above are the first coming to the mind of a student trying to recall the events characteristic of 1961 in America show the importance of politics in historical studies, and it is then even more interesting to notice that politics are a theme  generally absent from Mad Men.

II.2.2.1 Mad Men’s Characters’ lack of interest in politics

Despite Sterling Cooper’s involvement in Nixon presidential campaign during the first season, a plot line which is in itself a distortion of history, since Nixon had formed his own advertising company called Campaign Associates, which was ran by Caroll Newton(responsible for the slogan “They Understand What Peace Demands”) and Ted Rogers (Nixon’s chief debate negotiator)[201], politics don’t take up much of Mad Men’s painting of the early sixties, as compared to the show’s emphasis on the emotional landscape of the time. Indeed, apart from Henry Francis(the man who seduces Betty in the third season), “Director of Public Relations and Research for Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, no characters of Mad Men is directly involved in the political life of the country. Mad Men doesn’t focus on those at the top of the administration or on those who belong to any type of association. When Helen Bishop briefly mentions that she volunteers for Kennedy’s campaign “stuffing envelopes at Kennedy’s headquarters”[202] , she doesn’t try to promote Kennedy to Betty who tells her she doesn’t know who they are going to vote for.  Paul Kinsey may sometimes look like an activist, participating to the Freedom Rides[203] with his girlfriend, and sometimes referring to Karl Marx[204], but throughout the show he’s depicted as a character who most of all likes to be different, which denies the depth of his political beliefs. For instance, when talking to representatives of the Madison Square Garden’s account, Kinsey provokes them with flyers contesting the destruction of Penn Station, as he is opposed to the demolition of this monument, but then keeps on working for them. The lack of interest in politics among Mad Men’s characters is best showed in Nixon vs Kennedy, the episode in which Sterling Cooper’s employees celebrate while waiting for the elections results. No one among the company seems to be on Kennedy’s side, just because Sterling Cooper works for Nixon. This prevents any character from having any political thoughts and individuality, any interest in social issues. Yet, in 1960, a record number of American eligible voters turned out at the presidential elections, amounting to 62.6 per cent[205]. The lack of interest of its characters in politics combined to the fact that no focus is put on the actions of political leaders of the time is another aspect of Mad Men‘s limits.  As M.J Heale (Professor of American History at Lancaster University) wrote:

The actions taken by governments are crucial to an understanding of the 1960s. The ferment of the decade owed something to the liberal optimism radiating from Washington in its early years. [206]

            II.2.2.2 The Absence of Camelot’s Optimism

According to him, what characterized the “Camelot” presidency of Kennedy and public life was “a pervasive activism”. Two decades of economic growth had resulted in a sense of optimism which was to characterize the early sixties when the government thought that “anything was possible”, that many potentialities were still untapped. This optimism has been reflected in a collection of essays entitled The Politics of Hope published in 1962 by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr[207]. The “New Frontier” rhetoric was followed by Kennedy’s administration as the president proposed, between 1961 and 1962, an array of social programs including expansion of the minimum wage, health care for the aged, federal aid to education, increased Social Security benefits, creation of a cabinet-level Department of Housing and Urban Development, and allocations of fund to build up underdeveloped areas of the country. Some of these propositions were successful, including improvements in Social Security, expansion of the minimum wage, and passage of an Area Redevelopment Act and a Manpower Retraining Act.[208]

Optimistic activism also characterized the Supreme Court[209] as it showed a greater willingness to exert its power of judicial review; for instance, in Baker v Carr (1962), the Court asserted the right of the judiciary to strike down laws regulation elections district, preventing state politicians to manipulate election districts for partisan purposes, and therefore reshaping the distribution of political power; the Schempp decision of May 1963, in which the Court ruled against the reading of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer in schools could also be mentioned…These particular changes are never referred to in Mad Men. 

 It is then interesting to notice that Mad Men doesn’t really depict the sense of hope and optimism, along with the resulting activism of the early sixties, as it focuses mainly on its characters’ inner-struggles, pointing to the lies hidden under appearances and a sense of anxiety. This sense of anxiety is emphasized through the use of dreadful historical events such as the Cuban Missiles Crisis or Kennedy’s death. Similarly, when, for instance, urban renewal is tackled, it is to denounce the demolition of an historical monument (Penn Station), not the building of new affordable housing… And what could we think about the fact that two of the rare young people (apart from Roger’s daughter and Kurt and Smitty) who can be seen in the series are violent thieves far removed from the idealism characterizing youth during this era?[210]

II.2.3 Elongating the early 1960s

II.2.3.1 Silencing Youth : the denial of pregnancy

In Seven Twenty Three, Don picks up a young couple hitchhiking to Niagara Falls. We then learn that they want to get married so that the young man can avoid being sent to Vietnam. Later in a motel room, and after they gave Don Phenobarbital pills, the young man punches Don in the back of the head. When Don wakes up, they’re gone with his money. Despite the fact that the Port Huron Statement, the political manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, is briefly mentioned in the show[211], the politically aware youth of the early 1960s isn’t given a voice as it is not embodied by any character. Youth is actually almost completely absent from the show, mainly made of young and older adults along with children. Yet, the sixties was the decade of the Baby-boomers. During the 1940s, America’s population had grown by 19 millions, more than twice the growth of the 1930s, and in the 1950s it had grown by almost 30 million people and approached a level of population growth identical to that of India[212]. This growth was due to high fertility and birth rates, a phenomenon which was translated in schools’ population: all during the 1940s, school enrollments had increased by only a million, to “skyrocket” by ten million during the fifties[213]. In the twenty years before 1960 the number of young people in the 15 to 24 age group had remained stable, at around 23 or 24 million but by 1970 the figure had soared to over 35 million[214]. The absence of youth or teenagers in Mad Men is therefore problematic, and this all the more that they came to represent a giant market for advertisers in the 1960s:

Almost every one of the countless [advertising] articles or speeches on the subject of the youth culture mentions, in some form, the decade’s favorite statistic: that half of the nation’s population was, or would  soon be, under the age of twenty-five ; and its corollary, that young people had control of some $13 billion in discretionary spending dollars-$25 billion if the entire age span from thirteen to twenty-two was counted. In addition, young people were widely regarded as economically powerful beyond their immediate means. They had become the decade’s arbiters of taste, and advertising could target adults through appeals to their children[215].  

If during the time Mad Men is set (from 1960 to 1963) counterculture hadn’t fully invaded America yet, young people had their own icons and culture, and rock’n’roll, through artists such as Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, was already representative of this youth before the Beatles made their entry on the American soil in 1964. It is significant that Elvis’s songs are never heard throughout Mad Men, which sometimes mentions teenagers without ever showing one, for instance, when Father Gill asks Peggy to draw a campaign to attract teenagers to a bal organized by his church[216], or when Martinson’s Coffee representatives explain to Sterling Cooper’s executives that they want to target young people who “don’t drink enough coffee”[217]. These young people were not only important consumers, they were also politically-aware and many of them started to advocate activism, self-realization and the will to change society, with the Students for a Democratic Society developing the idea of “participatory democracy”[218]. This activism and political awareness could be perceived before the turmoil that was to come later during the decade: in May 1960, thousands of students had staged demonstrations against hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco, after it had came to the Bay Area because of the support it had offered to the civil rights cause.[219]   

Peggy’s denial of pregnancy during the first season is in itself the best symbol of the show’s intention to set youth aside, to ignore it, ignoring at the same time the sense of optimism pervading the early sixties, the belief in the possibility of dramatic change and through the mobilization of hope.

One could then agree with Lauren Goodlad, Professor of English at Illinois University, as she suggested that “Mad Men is about is the deferral and sublimation of that transformative longing and mobilized hope. The show, so far, elongates the duration of the early 1960s almost indefinitely. If the social history it takes for its mise-en-scene is not wholly frozen, it is thawing very slowly.”[220]

The absence of this sense of hope in the series, a feeling so important in the early sixties, testifies to Mad Men’s particular and, to some extent, restrictive interpretation of this era.

 II.2.3.2 The 60’s : another interpretation

Matthew Weiner said he had set Mad Men first episodes in 1960 because that was the year when the contraceptive pill was authorized for sale, and that he hoped to finish the depiction of the decade, showing how his characters would evolve until 1970. He also stated that he would not go further than six seasons. How he is going to deal with the rest of the decade is still a mystery, but probably the “deferral of the transformative longing” evoked by Lauren Goodlad is about to stop, since the show’s last broadcast episode ends on Don Draper breaking away from Sterling Cooper. But as far as the third first seasons are concerned, the show has not dealt with the power of social movements characterizing the 1960s.

 One could compare Mad Men ‘s depiction of this era with Mark Piznarski’s mini-series The 60’s which was broadcast on NBC in 1999[221], to see how different their approaches are. The 60’s was made of two films, each being two-hours long, aimed at dealing with the whole decade. Of course many of the themes it then tackles can’t be expressed in Mad Men as the last season ends in 1963, soon after Kennedy’s death. The reliance on the dramatic devices of compression, condensation and metaphor[222] is more obvious in The 60’s than in Mad Men, as The 60’s depicts ten years in four hours when Mad Men goes through three years (or two if we don’t count the missing 1961) in 39 episodes of around fifty minutes each. The 60’s metaphorical, archetypal characters are directly involved in the social movements of the decade and participate to its historical events. Here is the plot summary that can be found on The Internet Movie Database :

The Herlihys are a working class family from Chicago whose three children take wildly divergent paths: Brian joins the Marines right out of High School and goes to Vietnam, Michael becomes involved in the civil rights movement and after campaigning for Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy becomes involved in radical politics, and Katie gets pregnant, moves to San Francisco and joins a hippie commune. Meanwhile, the Taylors are an African-American family living in the deep South. When Willie Taylor, a minister and civil rights organizer, is shot to death, his son Emmet moves to the city and eventually joins the Black Panthers, serving as a bodyguard for Fred Hampton.[223]

Like Mad Men, The 60’s chronologically restricted framework (it starts in 1960 and ends in 1969) prevents it from discussing enduring themes or long time processes preceding and extending the decade. If the characters depicted in the mini-series are less complex, more “cliché” than those of Mad Men, it is because they are used as symbols and put along  binary narratives in order to depict the main social and political rifts of the era[224], a theme Mad Men has not directly  confronted yet, as it leaves many actors of the sixties on the margins of the show following Matthew Weiner’s own interpretation and treatment of this era.

As Lauren Goodlad said: “if Mad Men invites us to believe in anything, it is not in the power of social movements, but of isolated feats of self-invention”[225].

II.3 . Mad Men : a story based on advertising history, not the history of advertising

Despite the show’s rather accurate depiction of the world of advertising in the early sixties, some discrepancies can be found between Mad Men and the Real Madison Avenue. One could rely on testimonies of the real “Mad Men” and “Mad Women” who worked in this booming industry in that specific era to evaluate the accuracy of Matthew Weiner’s fictitious Sterling Cooper, but these are mitigated. For instance, George Lois, a famous art director who created his own agency in the 1960s, declared: “When I hear ‘Mad Men,’ it’s the most irritating thing in the world to me. When you think of the ’60s, you think about people like me who changed the advertising and design worlds. The creative revolution was the name of the game. This show gives you the impression it was all three-martini lunches (…) We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night. We had three women copywriters. We didn’t bed secretaries. I introduced Xerox. It was hard, hard work and no nonsense”[226]. In the same way, Mary Wells claimed that “Mad Men has nothing to do with the real advertising world of the Sixties”[227]. On the other hand, for Jerry Della Femina, another major figure of the industry in the 1960s, “Mad Men accurately reflects what went on”[228]…

Nevertheless, one can assert that the fictitious aspect of Sterling Cooper is in itself a proof that Mad Men cannot substitute itself to a history lesson about advertising in the sixties : Sterling Cooper isn’t based on one specific agency, despite the fact that the main advertising consultant on the show, Bob Levinson, spent twenty years in the media and television departments of BBDO, starting in 1960[229], (Indeed, BBDO is even mentioned as a rival agency of Sterling Cooper[230]) and all the campaigns created by their members are as fictitious as they are. Sterling Cooper then is an illustration of what an advertising agency could have looked like at the time. The same way, Don Draper’s character is not based on one particular adman even though he has been compared to various figures of the time such as Draper Daniels[231], a womanizer who was the creative head of Leo Burnett in Chicago in the 1950s( the advertising agency responsible for many iconic figures such as the Marlboro Man or the Jolly Green Giant)...

Therefore, a necessary process of selection, conjugated with the need to enhance a sense of drama, makes impossible a deeper analysis of the revolution that was occurring among the advertising industry at that time through the only fictitious Sterling Cooper. Indeed, what happened in the advertising world of the sixties is a complex and fascinating phenomenon, still debated, and which could not be summarized in the history of one particular agency and which implies too many factors for them all to fit the restrictive frame of a TV drama. Moreover, as we shall see, in its ambition to depict the shift associated to advertising in the sixties, Mad Men sometimes fails to give a definite trajectory and personality to the fictitious Sterling Cooper as compared to real agencies of the time. On the one hand, Sterling Cooper is an old-fashioned agency, and this is well embodied, for instance, by the fact that the slogan Don Draper finds for Lucky Strike in 1960 has actually been invented in 1917. On the other hand, some aspects of the Creative Revolution pervade the fictitious agency. Where could we locate Sterling Cooper in the advertising world of the early 1960s ?

In order to show that Mad Men isn’t a sufficient material for a study of advertising in the sixties, it seems necessary to explain what the Creative Revolution associated to the advertising industry of the sixties is, and to confront Sterling Cooper to the historical texts and testimonies and more contemporary accounts of that era.

II.3.1 The Creative Revolution : Madison Avenue’s contribution to a tumultuous decade

II.3.1.1 Context and Interpretations

In the pivotal sixties, an era characterized by the diverse upheavals that rose to break the consensus and conformity of the fifties, advertising proved a strong and malleable industry as it managed to resist the threats implied by the questioning of the materialistic values of consumerism, and more than resisting these threats and the violent critics that targeted it, it actually managed to rely on them, adopting a co-optation strategy that allowed it to counter its “enemies” by assimilating their values and assumptions.[232] The sixties were indeed a real challenge for the advertising industry as the mass-consumption society it had contributed to create and was aimed at maintaining was denounced and rejected, by the counter-culture, the beatniks for instance, as we can see it in Mad Men[233], or later by the hippies, but also by social observers, and this as early as the fifties.  Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders had revealed in 1957 the diverse and immoral manipulative techniques such as motivational research, depth probing and subliminal devices employed by advertisers to promote products that all looked the same and which had to be sold massively and indefinitely to people who did not necessarily need them.

The book had received national attention and  was even mentioned by the American stand-up comedian Bob Newhart in his routine entitled “Abe Lincoln VS Madison Avenue” which is the first track of the album The Button-down Mind of Bob Newhart to which Sterling Cooper’s junior ad executives listen to in Pete Campbell’s office[234]. In this precise routine (which isn’t the one that can be heard through the show but which turned out to be a precious source of information in the context of this study) Bob Newhart asks his audience if they have read The Hidden Persuaders to introduce a fictitious conversation between Abe Lincoln and his press agent before his Gettysburg address, mocking the science depicted in The Hidden Persuaders and the need to create appealing images in order to sell not only products but politicians as well . In 1960, Vance Packard published another book, The Waste Makers, dealing more precisely with the planned-obsolescence on which manufacturers and advertisers rely a lot to maintain consumption and productivity, planned-obsolescence being the process through which a product becomes obsolete after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned, designed by the manufacturer or the advertiser in order to push the consumer to purchase the same product again and again, such as a car, for instance, which would become obsolete after a year when the brand would launch a new one “more powerful, more stylish, longer, bigger,etc” or which was designed to break early and to be replaced, without its gullible driver being aware of it…

Society became more and more skeptical about advertising, more immunized against it while its main productions were characterized by their blandness, as the advertising landscape of the fifties reflected the conformity of the era through idealized visions of consumption and through trite, repetitive ads.[235] Moreover, advertisers had to compete harder as mass consumption implied that a greater number of products presented the same qualities while they had to find new ways of catching their potential consumers’ attention.

A shift then progressively took place in advertising : creativity, defiance of authority and hierarchy, humor, individualism, self-realization through difference and the critic of conformity were progressively adopted among the industry, therefore reflecting its newly adopted values in ads emblematic  of “the new advertising” which started to criticize consumption in order to promote it. This paradox allowed the industry to solve the dilemma it was facing, and raises questions concerning the role of advertising as both a social mirror and communicator. For Hazel G. Warlaumont, Associate Professor of Communications at California State University, Fullerton, the advertising revolution of the sixties was only a strategy designed to resist the cultural upheavals of the times :

advertising while intricately bound to established order and its ideology, nevertheless appeared to switch allegiances by becoming a “turncoat” in the sixties, masking its alliance with the establishment by  joining the antiestablishment movement in order to validate its own threatened image and that of its clients. We see how advertising not only distanced itself from that nebulous yet targeted notion of the “establishment’, but appeared to turn against it as well, poking fun at it and eschewing themes of elitism, the consumption ideology, authoritarianism, the reverence of institutions and other traditional beliefs that had previously heralded in ads for so long.[236]

For the American cultural historian Thomas Frank, the creative revolution was more than a mere strategy[237]. According to him, this shift in advertising, and in the way it was ruled, sometimes anticipated the cultural revolution, reflecting a global shift in the corporate world which was perceived by some as threatened by the stultifying Organization described by William H Whyte in The Organization Man. To Frank, advertising was not only adapting to new social trends, it was contributing to their development while challenging and questioning the shortcomings of big corporations where other-directed individuals whose individualism and creativity are denied at the expense of these same corporations and American economy. The leading figures of the Creative Revolution have then not only adopted and adapted the general “mass-society critique”, they were, to some extent, agreeing with it and communicating it, blaming the advertising industry for its reliance on the social ills depicted in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, or William Whyte’s The Organization Man. 

American business was undergoing a revolution in its own right during the 1960s, a revolution in marketing practices, management thinking, and ideas about creativity. It was a revolution as far-reaching in its own way as the revolution in manners, music, art, and taste taking place elsewhere, and it shared with those revolutions a common hostility for hierarchy, for inherited wisdom, and for technocratic ideas of efficiency.[238]

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, leaders of advertising developed a critique of their own industry, of over-organization and “creative dullness” that had much in common with the critique of mass society that gave rise to the counter-culture. Nevertheless, none of the theories regarding advertising’s evolution or revolution in the sixties, including Frank’s, denies this particular fact : advertising was promoting consumption, offering consumption as an answer to the social ills implied by consumerism. According to the sixties ads, individualism and self-realization could be achieved through consumption, and the creative revolution allowed this shift in the message conveyed by advertising.

If the assimilation of the counterculture by advertising cannot be depicted in Mad Men, as it occurred fully only during the late sixties and early seventies, the Creative Revolution is tackled, even though it has not been named yet. Nevertheless, it seems that this aspect of the history of advertising contributes more to the enhancement of a sense of drama and to a interesting plot than to the explanation, interpretation and analysis of this particular process so typical of the history of American advertising.

II.3.1.2 Mad Men’s historical landmark to be completed : “Lemon”

The first historical landmark of the Creative Revolution visible in Mad Men, a step stone which is still remembered among the industry and its analysts as one of the best advertising campaigns ever created if not the best (it ranked number one in the top 100 established by the trade magazine Advertising Age) [239] and most of all as the most emblematic ad of the Creative Revolution, is the Volkswagen campaign. At the very beginning of the third episode of the first season, Marriage of Figaro, Don Draper is baffled by an ad he’s observing in his issue of Life magazine, and which represents in a rather simplistic way a black-and-white photograph of the car with the word “Lemon” in bold letter. Later in Sterling Cooper’s offices, Don discusses the ad with his colleagues :

Salvatore : I got one… How about “Secor…satis-feculent”?

Don : Stay in the art department Sal.

Salvatore : I’m just saying we could be funny, like those Volkswagen people. Have you seen this yet?

Don : I have. I don’t know what I hate about it the most, the ad or the car.

Harry : You know they did one last year, same kind of smirk. Remember Think small? It was a half-page out of a full page-buy! You could barely see the product.

Paul : I don’t get it. Elvis just got back from West Germany why not put him in it?

Don : They must be getting results. They keep going back to the well.[240]

In a later scene, after Roger and Pete entered the room where the others were still discussing the ad:

Roger : Bernbach. He’s a jew. If I were him I wouldn’t help reindustrialize Germany.

Salvatore : Everybody’s got a price.

Pete : Oh yeah I saw that, “Honesty”. It’s a great angle.

Salvatore : No chrome, no horsepower, foreign, ugly. Guess they went with their strengths.

Paul : It is funny.

Harry : Is it? Cos I think the joke’s on us. You’re supposed to look at that and say it’s a great car not a great ad.

Pete : I laughed. I think it’s brilliant.

Roger : I’ll tell you what brilliance in advertising is-99 cents. Somebody thought of that Campbell.

Don : Well, say what you want, love it or hate it, the fact remains we’ve been talking about this for the last fifteen minutes.[241]

Anyone familiar with the history of advertising and the importance that the Volkswagen campaign earned in that history would have to admit that this dialogue is witty and well written and has the merit to tackle some important issues related to this ad and to the way it must have been perceived among the advertising business of the time. Nevertheless, one couldn’t content themselves with such a summary debate to understand the implications of the Volkswagen campaign and of the new trend of which it has become the symbol. Sporadic mentions of  rival agencies’ real campaigns, such as the controversial “Dream Campaign” launched by the agency Norman, Craig and Kummel for Maidenform bras [242], McCann Erickson’s work for Coca-Cola[243], or of leading figures of the era such as Bernbach, or David Ogilvy whose book’s release is mentioned briefly by Roger Sterling[244] who also tells Don about  the agency BBDO hiring “a colored kid” [245] are not sufficient and complete portrayals of the real Madison Avenue of the sixties and couldn’t be substituted to the reading of books about advertising or to a mere exploration of the various  and numerous ads that marked the sixties…

Thus, further readings are required to understand Don Draper and his colleagues’s bewilderment when discussing the Volkswagen campaign.

II.3.2 When Creativity overcame Science

II.3.2.1 The “scientific” fifties

            According to Frank Thomas, in the fifties, the central principle of the advertising industry was “science”: ads were to be created according to established and proven principles, after thorough research on public attitudes had been conducted. Advertising men efficiency was to be scientifically measured through studies and laboratory tests. In this scientific business, the creative was often considered as the one to be wary of, as his artistic impulses could be in contradiction with the scientific principles he had to follow.

Vance Packard’s alarming depiction of the manipulative techniques used by advertisers to “channel [people’s] unthinking habits, [their] purchasing decisions, and [their] thoughts processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences”[246] revealed to its outraged readers to which extent advertising could rely on science through processes that far exceeded the mere resort to statistics, surveys and other market studies. In his reference book, Vance Packard demonstrated how “ the use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry” and how ”professional persuaders have seized upon it in their groping for more effective ways to sell us their wares-whether products, ideas, attitudes, candidates, goals, or states of mind.”[247] Motivational research, which is a type of marketing research that attempt to explain why consumers behave the way they do, assuming they’re influenced by factors they’re unaware of, by underlying or unconscious motives, became very popular in the fifties. Indeed, many advertisers allied with social scientist, psychologists, psychiatrists and other motivational analysts to find better ways to sell products (and ever-increase their sales)  to consumers by appealing to their subconscious.

According to some writer of Advertising Age quoted by Packard, “In very few instances do people really know what they want, even when they say they do”. This assumption, which reminds us of Don saying “People want to be told what to do so badly that they will listen to anyone”[248] , reflects both the problem encountered by market surveyors with nose-counting and they way advertisers perceive people, but also opens a vast field of possibilities: manipulation of consumers in order to make them buy products they don’t really need or want becomes even more conceivable if one considers people rarely know what they want. Manipulation then appeared as a plausible and lucrative solution to the problems encountered by merchandisers in the context of mass consumption such as the growing sameness of many products or market saturation. How could people be convinced to buy one brand of cigarette instead of another, and why people who already had a car, a TV, and a washing machine would need a new one if those are still functional?  Pioneers of Motivational Research such as Dr Ernest Dichter, who was the president of the Institute for Motivational Research, Inc, and Louis Cheskin, director of the Color Research Institute of America, started to offer their services to merchandisers and advertisers, turning social sciences into a particularly lucrative business. Some of the major advertising agencies, such as Young and Rubicam, had already required this Institute’s service by the time Packard wrote his book. The concept of Motivational Research had many followers and relied on the profusion of accredited psychologists who became more and more solicited by advertisers. By 1955, for instance, the agency McCann-Erikson had five psychologists manning a special motivation department, while the small but bustling Chicago ad agency Weiss and Geller expected its employees to read frequently the books of its special library dedicated to social science and psychology. Edward Weiss, as quoted by Packard, considered that “When you admit the social scientist to your fraternity, advertising becomes less of a gamble, more of an investment”[249].            

The methods employed in Motivational Research are varied but many of them were derived straight from the clinics of psychiatry. Potential consumers are interviewed and observed in order to discover their secret miseries or self-doubts, in order to manipulate or cope with their guilt feelings, fears, anxieties, hostilities, loneliness, feelings and inner tensions to sell them more and more products. Hypnosis is even mentioned in Packard’s book who describes how motivational analyst James Vicary found out, by using a hidden motion-picture camera recording the eye-blink rate of women while shopping, that ladies were falling in an “hypnoidal trance”, a light kind of trance which is the first stage of hypnosis. This hypnoidal trance is the main explanation he gives to impulse buying and is a weakness, a vulnerable state that can be taken into account by advertisers and merchandisers who can then team up to design, for instance, hypnotic packages to push women to buy products they don’t necessarily want in the first place. The importance of packaging has been demonstrated by Louis Cheskin. In his study, a group of women was offered three different boxes in which the same detergent could be found. One package was blue, the other one was yellow, and the third one was blue and yellow. None of the women knew they were using the same detergent as they tried the different packages. As they were interviewed later, most of them said that the first two detergents were bad (some even said that they had damaged their clothes) while the detergent contained in the blue and yellow box had made their clothes softer. Many other examples show how gullible people were considered to be by advertisers willing to find out their most inner weaknesses.  The studies of motivational analysts were used to improve selling strategies and even to change the image of a product after finding the hidden reasons why some people were resisting or attracted to it.

People's subsurface desires, needs and drives were probed in order to find their points of vulnerability. Among the subsurface motivating factors found in the emotional profile of most of us, for example, were the drive to conformity, need for oral stimulation, yearning for security. Once these points of vulnerability were isolated, the psychological hooks were fashioned and baited and placed deep into the merchandising sea for unwary prospective customers.[250]

Packard’s thorough study was aimed at showing the ways advertisers tried to condition consumers, comparing them to Pavlov’s conditioned dog, to denounce the hidden-persuaders’ immorality and the dangers linked to mass-manipulation, in order to alarm his readers and contribute to “the process of public scrutiny”.

Nevertheless, as Packard himself admitted, “even the advertising agencies most devoted to motivation research still [carried] on exhaustively the two mainstay kinds of research : market research (study of products, income levels, price, dealers, etc) and copy research (the testing of specific layouts, phrases, etc..)”[251]. This important reliance on science, rationality, and strict organization of the advertising agencies prevented any real sense of creativity both in the advertising industry and in its products. This “scientific” trend is well epitomized by Martin Mayer’s 1958 book, Madison Avenue, U.S.A. In this book, focusing mainly on the nation’s largest ad firm of the time, the vast J.Walter Thompson company, Mayer describes Madison Avenue as a place of order, stability and reason, ignoring  the creativity “which would obsess advertising writers in the 1960s and after”[252] and emphasizing instead “process : the organization of agencies, the execution of a given idea, media placement, and, above all, research-the collection of statistics, polling , studies to determine how well certain appeals have worked”, a process where precise rules guided everything, the same rules that were to be subverted during the Creative Revolution.

One of the most important advertising theorist of the fifties whose assumptions would be challenged during the 1960s was Rosser Reeves, chairman of the Ted Bates agency, who published in 1960 Reality on advertising, a book in which he exposed the principles he considered to be followed for efficiency in advertising.

He wrote the most widely read advertising treatise of the era, and he was the individual most responsible for the stereotypical advertising style of the day, the so-called hard sell, whose “main idea”, as David Halberstam [who was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture…] put it, “was to hit people over the head with the product as bluntly as possible.” [253]

Reeves claimed that the Ted Bates Company had discovered a “scientific” means of quantifying the effectiveness of a given advertising campaign through which it had designed a fundamental formula for producing successful sales message. According to Reeves, ads were not supposed to entertain people but should rely on repetition, continuity (a successful campaign should not be abandoned) and adherence to a simple message that the viewer could easily absorb. In order to convince a consumer to buy a given product, a “unique selling proposition”(USP) should be associated to a repetitive message, a USP being a quality by which the product is demonstrably different from all others. Ads for such accounts as the pharmaceutical brand Anacin whose slogan was “Fast!Fast!Fast relief!” or Viceroy cigarettes claiming that “Only Viceroy gives you 20,000 filter traps in every filter to filter-filter-filter your smoke while the rich-rich flavor comes through” embody well Reeves’ advertising style.

Another important figure and theorist of advertising should be mentioned in this overview of the “scientific” Madison Avenue that was to be challenged in the sixties: David Ogilvy. Along with Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy is the only real adman mentioned in Mad Men as one of Sterling Cooper’s rivals, arousing jealousy from Roger Sterling: “Ogilvy wrote a book.(…)It’s called Confessions of an advertising Man. It’s the book everybody writes, except he got published. It should be called “A thousand reasons why I’m so great”[254]. This jealousy could be explained, if one dares to link fiction and reality, by the fact that David Ogilvy was called “the most sought-after wizard of today’s advertising industry” by the Times in 1962.[255]  Such as Rosser Reeves, David Ogilvy, a British advertising executive who found the agency Ogilvy, Benson and Mather in New York in 1948, was one of the leading proponents of managerial rationality in advertising. One particular characteristic of Ogilvy was that he entered the advertising business after having worked for pollster George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute, an experience he often referred to as an important influence on his advertising methods. In his book Confessions of an advertising man, which has published in 1963, Ogilvy exposes his successful concepts, tactics and techniques through eleven chapters which all, except for the last one, begin with the words “How to…”. For instance, the first chapter is entitled “How to Manage an Advertising Agency”[256] and the fifth one “How to Build Great Campaigns”[257]. It is in fact a book of authoritative rules he designed through his reliance on research.

The rules I postulate do not represent my personal opinions ; they are the quintessence of what I have learned from research.”[258]

It includes advices such as a list of thirty-nine rules for making goof layouts, ten criteria for new accounts, and “recipes for cooking up the kind of advertising campaigns which make the cash register ring - eleven commandments which you must obey if you work at [Ogilvy’s] agency”[259]. Despite his confessing that talent and imagination are welcomed in an advertising agency[260], he considered that these should be subordinated to the application of precise rules, and that the managerial orderliness he praised by asserting his role as a “father figure”[261] of his agency should not be disrupted. Finally, he was a fervent critic of the word “creativity” that had started to become fashionable in 1963 :

“My next step is to tell [my new recruits] that I will not allow them to use the word CREATIVE to describe the functions they are to perform in our agency. The even more fashionable word CREATIVITY is not in the twelve-volume Oxford Dictionary.(…) Ed Cox thinks that “there are no creative or non-creative copywriters ; only good ad-makers and bad.”[262]

Yet, it was this very adherence to rules, science and authority and denial of the power of creativity  that was to be challenged by the Creative Revolution. Following Bill Bernbach’s conception of advertising, many “creative” figures would come to disrupt Madison Avenue’s order, with the flourishing of successful agencies relying on new concepts defying corporate authority, the submission to clients’ wishes , the power of the account executive as opposed to the creatives and the commonly accepted assumption that consumers are gullible people easy to manipulate, through the creation of original and innovative ads on which copywriters and art directors had to work on an equal basis.  Among the leading figures of this movement, one could mention Howard Gossage, George Lois, Mary Wells, Jerry Della Femina, some of whom had already started their innovative enterprise by the time Mad Men is set in but whose work is never explored through the series.

II.3.2.2 William Bernbach, leader of the Creative Revolution

William (Bill) Bernbach is often regarded as the father and unchallenged leader of the Creative Revolution[263]. This successful advertiser mocked by Sterling Cooper’s executives for his Jewishness[264] also became the symbol of the rise of important ethnic figures which was one of the most singular features of the Creative Revolution (George Lois is the son of Greek immigrants while Jerry Della Femina is Italian and both grew up in Brooklyn) which is completely absent from Mad Men, as the series focus on a typically WASP agency, where the only executive coming from an ethnic minority, the homosexual Italian art director called Salvatore, is fired in the ninth episode of the third season. The Doyle Dane Bernbach agency, which was founded in 1949, ran in direct contradiction with the other ad agencies of the time. Indeed, as the industry’s preeminent leaders and theorists were amassing mountains of research and formulating scientific rules for effective advertising, Bernbach was declaring that rules were to be scrupulously ignored.. A fervent opponent to technocracy, he left one of the biggest advertising agencies, Grey (the agency Duck Phillips joins after having been fired by Sterling Cooper[265]) to found his own, as he feared that Grey was going to “worship techniques instead of substance”, claiming that “advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science but an art”[266]. 

It would have been interesting to have access to Bob Levenson’s account, Bill Bernbach’s Book, A history of Advertising That Changed The History of Advertising (New York : Villard, 1987), because it is, according to Frank Thomas, “a compilation of Bernbach’ s aphorisms, writings, and DDB’s best-remembered ads”[267]. Unfortunately, the book is out of print, and can’t be found in any French library. Nevertheless, Frank Thomas, who studied Bob Levenson’s (who should not be confused with Bob Levinson, advertising consultant on the series Mad Men…) book, exposes some of Benrbach’s most typical statements in The Conquest of Cool : “Rules are what the artist breaks ; the memorable never emerged from a formula.”, “Immitation can be commercial suicide”, “Research inevitably leads to conformity”, “For creative people rules can be prisons”… All of these illustrate Bernbach’s philosophy that was to lead to the breaking of the conformity of the cliché-ridden ads of the fifties. Bernbach sought to maximize the freedom of creative workers by eliminating much of the hierarchy and bureaucracy that was customary at large agencies in the 1950s. An inhibited environment was, according to him, necessary to creative inspiration, itself necessary for the making of efficient ads.

Another innovation introduced by Bill Bernbach was the creation of teams of copywriters and art directors, who had to work together and exchange their ideas concerning a given project, rather than segmenting the creative process from the top executives down to the copywriters who would then give their instructions to art directors who, as Don reminds us in the “Volkswagen scene”[268], were not supposed to give their opinions concerning the writing of an ad copy… The tandem copywriter/art director was to be copied by the agencies flourishing during the sixties. The copywriter Jerry Della Femina, for instance, who used to always work in a close relationship with the art director Ron Travisano, with whom he founded Della Femina Travisano & Partners in 1967,   demonstrates in his autobiographic account of advertising From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, the importance of the collaborative process uniting copywriters and art directors, and shows how it contrasted with Reeves’s methods at Ted Bates agency and those of other old line places .

There is a great difference in the way ads and commercials are produced at the creative agencies and at the old-line places. Before Bill Bernbach, old agencies used to produce advertising by the assembly-line method. This method, by the way, is still being used at most of the establishment agencies(..)What Bernbach did was put the art director and the copywriter together in a room and let the chemistry take over.[269]

In his both cynic and joyful account of life in advertising, Della Femina insisted on the problems linked to big agencies and praised the better efficiency of the smaller shops, the “boutiques” and drew a satire of stressed executives whose job often depended on the whims of clients representing multi-million dollars accounts. Another important trend to be noticed among Bernbach’s agency and those who agreed with its basic principles was the desire to resist clients’ orders : the creatives should never drop ideas which don’t satisfy their clients but should rather prove them that they are the only one to know how to create  efficient ads, even if that implies losing the account.

Many anecdotes concerning revolting advertising figures of the sixties could be mentioned, each epitomizing the spirit of the era and its contrast with the advertising world of the 1950s. For instance, George Lois, a provocative and respected art director who graduated from New York private art college Pratt Institute, worked one year at DDB in 1959 and founded his own advertising agency Papert Koenig Lois(PKL) in 1960, would often stand up to recalcitrant clients and liked to hire employees as irreverent as him, while he considered that eccentric habits were more than welcomed in his agency. None of his employees were WASP and none came from the comfortable classes that dominated the industry in the 1950s. Their ethnicity and supposed aggressiveness earned them the nickname “Graphic Mafia” in the business .  [270] George Lois was 29 when he created his agency, and Jerry Della Femina was 31 when he founded his own, both showing that youth was another major asset in this creative revolution.

Non conformity and defiance of commonly accepted rules had become the rule to follow in many advertising agencies of the sixties as the success of DDB or PKL pushed even the large “establishment” agencies such as McCann-Erickson or Young & Rubicam to reorganize and to loosen up creative restrictions, while many from their creative personel broke away from the large firms to found their own less-structured agencies and meet the great demand for the new type of advertising that followed the revolution triggered by Bernbach’s Volkswagen campaign.[271]

Finally, according to Frank Thomas, relying on his studies of Madison Avenue and Advertising Age issues of the 1960s, the Creative Revolution “was fought out along something resembling class lines : the division being between creative workers-art directors and copywriters-and the account men who communicated with clients”[272]. According to creative partisans, it was the traditional power of the account executives, who were said to know little about admaking itself, that made so much of their industry’s product boring and ineffective, while they were believed to be predominantly WASPs, wearers of gray flannel, and consumers of the famous “three-martini lunch”.  Illustrating this tension, Jerry Della Femina can be counted among those who opposed to the power of the account executives :

I’ve had account executives who sit down and practically cry, asking me to change something because the client’s going to yell. We’re going to lose the account’. That’s the big word all the time from the account executives to the copywriters and the art directors.  [273]

Plenty of things could still be told about the Creative Revolution and many ads could be mentioned, but this is not the main focus of this study. It seemed nevertheless necessary to draw the main lines related to this phenomenon, as it is not explicitly explained in Mad Men. As the general context surrounding the advertising industry of the early 1960s has been set, it would be interesting to see why Sterling Cooper’s executives are so bewildered by the Volkswagen campaign with which DDB triggered the Creative Revolution.

II.3.2.3 Triggering the Creative Revolution : The Volkswagen Campaign

The Doyle Dane Bernbach’s agency specific style and skills at designing ads and which were to open a new era in advertising had already been efficient before the launching of the Volkswagen Campaign, notably through the ad designed for the Jewish department store Orchbach[274] which inspired the fictitious Menken’s store, one of Sterling Cooper’s accounts during the first season[275].  What the agency needed to have an impact on advertising was a product as singular and unorthodox as their technique. As previously said, “ No chrome, no horsepower, foreign, ugly” are the words used by Sterling Cooper’s art director Salvatore to describe the famous Volkswagen car, underlining the difficulties the DDB’s team had to face while preparing their copy. Indeed, promoting this “ugly” German car designed by Ferdinand Porsche from whom Adolf Hitler had first ordered the construction of prototypes[276] was no easy task, especially as it was completely contrary to any type of cars American people were used to in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The same way, the Volkswagen campaign ran against nearly every convention of auto-advertising, just as it defied the main conventions of commercial speech and salesmanship in general by focusing on the product’s defects and by criticizing, revealing advertising tricks.[277]

During the Jet Age, Detroit’s streamlined cars produced massively by the “Big Three” (General Motors, Chrysler and Ford) represented the supremacy of American power and economy, through their bigness, their supposedly powerful technological devices, their length and flashing chrome and tailfins…  But these devices were also particularly representative of the mass society and the conformity of the 1950s as they were made to appeal to American “upward strivers”[278]. Moreover, consumerism was to be encouraged and maintained, and in order to avoid the economic shortcomings linked to overproduction, competition and an overcrowded market ( by the end of the decade, 75 percent of American families own their own car [279]),auto-makers and their advertisers mainly relied on  the planned-obsolescence denounced by Vance Packard in The Waste Makers .

As the car culture came to be revealed as a “gigantic fraud” by social observers, DDB decided to rely on the public’s skepticism to catch its attention through a campaign which revolutionized advertising through its minimalism and “honesty”. Indeed, the Volkswagen campaign contrasted thoroughly with the glaring Technicolor ads usually designed for cars whose heavily retouched photographs aimed at making the car look longer or whose idealized drawings depicted the image of happy white middle-class families(see appendix), accompanying long copies describing the new qualities of the car. Volkswagen ads were black and white and minimalist, much to Harry Crane’s surprise (“ You could barely see the product!”); their copy was confined to three small columns on the bottom of the page and they “were always organized around  a pun or joke, an extremely rare thing at the time, especially since the pun or joke usually seemed to mock the car’s distinctive shape or its no-tailfin, little-chrome ugliness”[280]. Along with their graphic distinctiveness, it was their attitude to the reader, their “honesty” which was the real innovation. The humor of the ads showed that their designers assumed that their readers would be smart enough to understand it, inviting them to cast a critical look on the ad which often targeted advertising itself, while turning the product’s supposed defects into assets. In 1961, DDB went further by directly satirizing the cars market and its reliance on planned obsolescence, while proudly claiming that the Volkswagen could not be obsolete as it remained unchanged, this mere fact being in itself a proof of its quality. This appeal to public’s skepticism was DDB’s main innovation, contrasting with the usual contempt felt by advertisers toward the public. As Jerry Della Femina noticed  :

Doyle, Dane’s advertising has that feeling that the consumer is bright enough to understand what the advertising is saying, that the consumer isn’t a lunkhead who was to be treated like a twelve-year-old.[281]

For the first time in history an advertiser said that he was capable, on rare occasions, of turning out an inferior product. An advertiser was saying that all wasn’t sweetness in life, that everything wasn’t fantastic in the world of business, and people took to it immediately[282].

II.3.3 Sterling Cooper versus the Creative Revolution

The debate surrounding the DDB’s ad which confuses Sterling Cooper executives accurately reflects the impact that this real agency had among the business at the time. Nevertheless, it also reflects something that could be seen as a contradiction throughout the series which, in order to reflect the advertising world and to draw a general picture, borrows many elements from the history of the creative revolution, gathering and condensing them among an agency where they’re unlikely to be found, and where they are better used to enhance a sense of drama than to educate the viewer about the history of advertising.

II.3.3.1 The condensation of contradictory trends in Sterling Cooper

Through the scene of the Volkswagen ad, one can recognize Matthew Weiner’s intention of putting Sterling Cooper outside of the Creative Revolution, on the old-lined, old-fashioned agencies’ side. In another episode, Sterling Cooper is explicitly said to be “more glamorous” than DDB by, for instance, Israeli ministers who explain to Don why they chose to solicit Sterling Cooper for their touristic campaign rather than Jewish adman Bill Bernbach whose humour they find “kitsch” .[283] Before the debate around the ad starts, Don contemptuously orders Salvatore to “stay in the art department”, reflecting the subordination of the art directors to the copywriters that was to be changed by Bill Bernbach and his followers. If Don notices that DDB and Volkswagen “must be getting results”, he does not acknowledge the creative quality of the ad. He doesn’t understand DDB’s line of thought. Neither do Roger or Harry. But Pete does.

Throughout the series, Pete is depicted as a young clear-sighted business man ahead of his time, a quality that makes Don hire him when founding Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in the last episode of the third season, telling him : “You’ve been ahead on a lot of things Aeronautics, teenagers, the Negro market. We need you to keep us looking forward”[284]. But Pete is an account executive. And as previously said, according to the major leaders of the Creative Revolution such as Bernbach, Lois and Della Femina, the account executives were those who prevented advertising from moving forward, who guaranteed the establishment’s durability, its inhibiting conventions and its submission to the clients wishes. Yet, despite his thirst for success, Pete is not afraid to contradict his clients, such as when he offends Admiral (a TV sets brand of the era) representatives to take advantage of their predominance on the “negro-market” by integrating their ads, showing black and white people in the pages of the Afro-American magazine Ebony[285]. Of course an account executive of the 1950s could have had ideas ahead of his time and feel admiration towards the so-called creativity, but despite Mad Men’s realism mainly achieved through the complexity of its characters, this seems to run against the main historical interpretations of the era. In Pete’s case, the fact that he’s ahead of his time serves to emphasize the generation gap of the sixties through the one between Sterling Cooper’s executives.

But the division creative-account executive is a main dramatic line of the show. The rivalry opposing Duck Philips, director of account services, and Don, Creative director, is one of the main assets of the plot throughout the second season. For instance, Duck, perceiving a great opportunity for Sterling Cooper in wooing the giant American Airlines account, pushes Don to drop the smaller Mohawk Airlines account, which he does with bitterness and a sense of guilt, which counters the image of the unscrupulous business man [286]. When Don learns that Duck is to become the president of the new entity formed by the merger of Sterling Cooper with the fictitious British agency Putnam, Powell, and Lowe (PPL)[287], he reveals him that he has no contract, and that he won’t stay in an agency directed by Duck who is then fired by SC, losing his battle against the powerful “creative genius” that Don Draper, who received a advertising award for one of his campaign[288], represents for Sterling Cooper and its competitors.  But yet again, along this division line creative-account executive opposing Don and Duck, Don appears to be the “old-fashioned” one, notably in one episode, called For Those Who Think Young[289]( in reference to BBDO agency’s Pepsi Generation campaign, one of the most important landmarks of the history of advertising as it epitomized the importance of youth in the sixties and acted as an opponent to Coca-Cola’s conformity[290]…) where Duck suggests him to hire a tandem of creative young people to which Don replies :“Young campaign don’t necessarily come from young people” and “Young people don’t know anything except that they’re young”. Yet youth was another important feature of the Creative Revolution. But Don, whose favorite drink is the Old-Fashioned (a cocktail made of bourbon whiskey), doesn’t perceive changes, while epitomizing the rebellious creative at the same time, and that could be the main contradiction of the show in its surfacing depiction of the Creative Revolution.

Don arrives late at meetings, can’t bear the turn Sterling Cooper is taking under PPL bureaucracy, is attached to the fact he has no contract (until the seventh episode of the third season), defends his creative executives when Sterling Cooper’s Chief Financial Officer’s Lane Pryce suggests they cost (and drink) too much[291], and finally leaves the agency to start his own as he refuses to be bound to the giant publicly-traded firm McCann Erickson which buys Sterling Cooper(SC) at the end of the third season and which he compares to a “sausage factory”. The fact that Don and some other Sterling Cooper’s figures start their own breakaway agency reminds us more of the innovative agencies of the Creative Revolution than of the old-line agencies SC was supposed to epitomize in the first place, and in the end,  Don then epitomized both the maverick and the man in the gray flannel suit, the creative genius and the one who blames his employees for their artistic and creative impulses ( like when he tells Peggy that she’s not an artist and that she should let some tools in her toolbox[292] and that they’ll give to their client the type of ad they’ve asked for, or when he says to Pete, who claims he has good ideas too, that Sterling Cooper “has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich”[293]…).

All of this could make us think that in order to depict a certain turn of the advertising history Mad Men’s creators condensed too many different aspects of it in the smaller frame of Sterling Cooper which cannot be substituted to a thorough study of the history of advertising.  

As previously mentioned, the real mad men and women of the sixties have divergent opinions concerning the realism of the show. Nevertheless, one aspect of the series on which most of them seem to agree is what Bernbach’s son called its “overly simplistic view of the process of coming up with ads”[294]. During a conference organized at Duke University Libraries, three panelists who all worked in advertising, Charlotte Beers, William O’Brien and Doug Alligood, discussed their experience of 1960s Madison Avenue in comparison to agency life as depicted in Mad Men. All agreed when Charlotte Beers, probably referring to the pilot episode’s scene when Don makes his pitch to the Lucky Strike account[295], declared : “The one thing that is totally not true is that Draper wandered around asking a couple of questions to the client, gets a line and sells it to the client the next day, pardon me but none of us did that”, a remark which was followed by a joke from Doug Alligood comparing Don Draper to a modern version of Darrin Stephens, the character interpreted by Dick York in Bewitched…[296]

II.3.3.2 Mad Men’s Oversimplification of the Creative Process

After studying many accounts of the advertising business of the sixties, it seems indeed obvious that Mad Men’s depiction of the building of advertising campaigns is oversimplified in order to keep the viewers interested, and therefore no proper educative value should be expected of the show in that field. Motivational Research is evoked in the pilot, with the character Dr Greta Guttman who appears only twice during the series[297]. This character, whose Austrian accent seems to be a direct reference to Dr Dichter, the father of motivation research whose “broken English” is mentioned in Packard’s Hidden Persuaders[298] , exposes to Don the results of her research stating that people's desire for cigarettes is actually a Freudian death wish, and that the love of danger should trigger the love of smoking among consumers. Don, the creative, refuses to rely on such assumptions to create what would be a campaign in bad taste and throws the report in his trash can. The “Big Idea” will come later, during the meeting with the Lucky Strikes representatives, an event which is in itself very unlikely to happen this way : Roger Sterling, one of the two senior partners of SC and responsible of the Lucky Strikes account, the biggest account of the agency, should at least make sure that Don prepared a convincing pitch. But no such thing happens in the episode, while the easiness with which Don finds Lucky Strikes ‘ Unique Selling Proposition, “It’s toasted”, doesn’t reflect accurately the whole process of creating an ad,  whether the latter results from the scientific conceptions of the fifties or the innovative practices of the Creative Revolution leaders.

In both cases, ads would require research, communication between the employees of the agency, and a thorough study of the client’s product.  DDB’s ad for Volkswagen wasn’t produced in a day but after a team sent by the agency went to spend three weeks in Germany at the Wolfsburg plant to observe the production of the vehicle from which they came back with admiration for the stringent quality control evoked in the “Lemon”ad.  Even Jerry Della Femina mentions his reliance, or at least listening, to “the research guy” who“does it with numbers” after which a visit to the client’s plant is necessary in order to know the product by heart[299]…

II.3.3.3 Mad Men’s lack of Madness

Another aspect of Mad Men which could be criticized is, paradoxically, its lack of madness. According to Doug Aligood, the cult of personality was prevailing in the sixties[300] which saw the rise of eccentric people among advertising agencies.”You had to be a character to be noticed”. He then recalls the way one of his colleagues partisan of the Black Power used to scare people as he had shaved his head would wear “only black t-shirts, black pants” and had painted the walls of his office in black. The same remark has been made by Jerry Della Femina[301] who besides often refers to the “craziness” of the era in his autobiography :

Let’s face it, my section was crazy, guys yelling, secretaries screaming. It looked strange as hell(…). Our nuts are nuttier than anyone else’s. We have more madmen per square inch than any other agency.[302]

This lack of craziness pervading Mad Men seems to be in line with Matthew Weiner’s intention of focusing on people stuck in conservative beliefs and social values, and here again we could refer to Lauren Goodlag’s interpretation of the series : the “deferral”[303] of the 1960s’ social history she perceived in Mad Men could be applied to its depiction of the advertising industry, as it leaves the Creative Revolution’s leaders and its ebullient aspects beyond the margins of its plot. 

CONCLUSION

After deep research, it appears that Mad Men is an extremely skilful and relevant portrayal of the early 1960s, even if it could not be substituted to a history lesson. Matthew Weiner’s interpretation of this era may be aimed at criticizing his contemporary society, his work nevertheless turns out to be very difficult to dismantle.

Mad Men remains a virtual image of the 1960s, not only because it is a subjective fiction, but also because it adopts a specific point of view relying on the blindness and inner struggles of its main characters. Nevertheless a history lesson would not be as entertaining as Mad Men and the show’s quality would not be so astonishing if it was aimed at depicting America in the early 1960s in its entirety. What one likes about Mad Men from a purely artistic point of view necessarily relies on the process of selection and omission that prevents the series from showing every aspects of American history. History itself, as a discipline, fails to depict the past it analyzes as it “really was”[304] and the diverse interpretations made about a same past are always submitted to debate. Mad Men has the merit to revive the debates surrounding the early 1960s by offering a rather nuanced interpretation of this era which it avoids mythologizing, notably thanks to its reliance on realism and on the complexity of its characters. Mad Men is a virtual image of America in the 1960s, but it can be said to represent the virtual world of advertising and of outward appearances associated to this era. 

By denouncing to some extent the power of advertisers and the social ills still pervading American culture, Matthew Weiner invites Mad Men’s audience to think about its own condition as compared to the situation of his fictitious characters. It is significant that the show’s success occurs at a time when the actual world economic situation is characterized by a massive lack of confidence in a system that fully emerged during the era depicted in Mad Men. This way, Mad Men does not only partly reflect the early 1960’s, but also its contemporary audience, forcing it to question itself through a new look upon its past. Maybe the way the show tends to marginalize social movements’ influence and to defer the 1960s and the upheavals characterizing them through its focus on the conservative Sterling Cooper is aimed at showing that maybe we are still living in these early 1960’s, at epitomizing the return to conservative beliefs and deeply rooted social structures denying the cultural optimism of that turbulent decade.

It was difficult to apprehend the issues related to Mad Men considering the show’s density. Nevertheless, through the kind of research that led to this study, one can be immersed in this particular era through the main show’s attributes such as the songs or movies both shaping and influencing it. If one wants to draw some educational value from Mad Men, they have to look for answers themselves. Mad Men’s historical landmarks are accurate and it is up to the viewer to complete them, to question the show and what it tries to depict. Mad Men is a show based on the history of advertising, not a history lesson about advertising and the Creative Revolution. Nevertheless, the student writing these lines had never heard of the Creative Revolution before studying this series.  In that respect, Mad Men, despite its limits, can be said to convey some sense of historical knowledge as it does not encourage the viewer’s passivity.

In Mad Men, the smallest detail is important and can be referred to in a later episode, and therefore the viewer’s attention is constantly encouraged.  It seems sometimes that the attentive viewer is always rewarded during later episodes or when re-watching the show. It was therefore difficult to select examples throughout this study as the density of Mad Men could push us to be willing to discuss each of the elements it depicts. A sense of frustration can arouse as such an ambitious project seems impossible to achieve at this stage. Besides, this study could have been brightened up by sources which are inaccessible at the moment but will be very soon after a final dot will be put on this study. Indeed, Mad Men will soon be discussed during a conference at Université Paris-Diderot, while the release of two books has been announced early this year but won’t be accessed before the end of June. Edited by Rod Carveth and James B South, Mad Men and Philosophy will be released on June 9^th, 2010, while Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned, a romp through 1960s America, has just been released and is already out of stock on Amazon website… Moreover, Matthew Weiner’s series seem to be following a predestined path as he claimed that he wanted to depict the evolution of his character from 1960 to 1970[305], and it would have been interesting to see the show’s evolution in its apprehension of the decade and to study it as a completed and finished whole.

Finally, it is kind of ironic that Mad Men turns out be an extremely well marketed show. Its success partly relies also on its partnership with, for instance, the brands Brooks Brothers and Banana Republic[306] which both started a line of clothes inspired by Mad Men costumes, while the release of Barbie Dolls[307] representing four of Mad Men characters has been widely commented upon among the press. AMC was even recognized with a “silver medallion at the Advertising, Marketing and Effectiveness Award for [its] outstanding work in the category of Social media”[308] in relation to the application called “Mad Men yourself” which can be found on AMC’s official website. This application allows people to create a cartoon depicting them in the Mad Men style, a device which turned out to be a great marketing operation as thousands of fans “Mad Men-ed” themselves, putting the obtained pictures as avatars on social websites such as Facebook and therefore promoting, advertising the show through their cyber-communities. In the end, Mad Men ironically survives and flourishes thanks to advertising, to the same devices it criticizes. Besides, Mad Men would probably not have been created if AMC had not relied on the financial resources provided by advertising. Therefore, one could admit that if advertising allows the creation of such quality shows, it can be seen as a real creative force in American culture, and this makes the processes of hidden persuasion more acceptable and even, enjoyable.      

APPENDIX                          

Schedule of the Symposium organized at Illinois University in February 2010[309]

Matthew Weiner giving his instructions on the set of Mad Men. [310]

Matthew Weiner receiving his honorary CLIO award (2009)

« I’m thrilled to be here, and I admire very much what you all do. And I was interested in the history of advertising, and now ironically I feel like I get to be part of the history of advertising so, thank you very much for this award, it means a lot to me. »[311]

Sterling Cooper’s fictitious storyboard for Patio Cola’s commercial[312].

Ann-Margret in George Sydney’s Bye Bye Birdie (1963).

                                       

Billy Wilder’s The Apartment[313]

“Consolidate Life” insurance company’s offices

1960’s poster for The Apartment 

C.C Baxter(Jack Lemmon) and Fran (Shirley MacLaine)

                      

                     

Delbert Mann ‘s Lover Come Back[314]

Advertising Tobacco before the Surgeon General Warnings[315]

                   

Two ads for Marlboro cigarettes (1950 and 1957 for the Marlboro Man) and an ad for Lucky Strikes (1955)

1950’s ad for Camel before the Federal Trade Comission’s restrictions[316]

The Real Life “Mad Men” and “Mad Women”

Draper Daniels and Donald Draper( Jon Hamm)[317]

George Lois (1964)

David Ogilvy[318]

       

Mary Wells Lawrence in the 1960s and in 2009[319]

Helen Gurley Brown [320]

Charlotte Beers

DOYLE DANE BERNBACH’s new advertising[321]

Bill Bernbach 

                                                      

                                                                       

DDB’s ad for Ohrbach’s store in the late 1950s

Revolutionary « We try Harder » campaign for Avis( 1963)

Ad for Levy’s Rye Bread (1967)

                   

                                                                                  

                                                            

                                                     

Volkswagen’s  minimalism versus American Car Culture…[322]

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 Filmography

Mad Men, season 1, Matthew Weiner, 2007

Mad Men, season 2, Matthew Weiner, 2008

Mad Men, season 3, Matthew Weiner, 2009

Bye Bye Birdie, George Sidney, 1963

Lover Come Back, Delbert Mann, 1961

The Apartment, Billy Wilder, 1960

The 60’s, Mark Piznarski, 1999

La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961

                                               

                         

---

[1] « About the show »AMCTV.COM.2010, American Movies Classics Company LLC. <http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/about/>

[2] Parpis, Eleftheria. “CLIO Honors “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner”.Adweek.May 13, 2009.Adweek.                < http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3iacbc03133413785fcb183ce33d78d3d2>

[3] Koo, Carolyn.  “Mad Men’s Real-Life Counterparts Get Two Exhibitions In NYC”. AMCTV.COM.September 23, 2008. American Movies Classics Company LLC.< http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2008/09/mad-men-artists-in-real-life.php>

[4] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[5] The Festival’s booklet can be downloaded on the Forum des Images website at this address :                                        < www.forumdesimages.fr/fdi/content/.../2/.../brochure+SERIESMANIA.pdf>

[6] Forrest, Sharita.”Mad Men  catalyst for symposium exploring culture of 1960s”.News Bureau Illinois.January 21^st 2010. Illinois University.< http://www.news.illinois.edu/news/10/0121madworld.html>

[7] Dupuis,P. « Colloques de l’UFR » UFR Anglais, Université Paris Diderot.< http://www.ufr-anglais.univ-paris-diderot.fr/COLLOC_CHV/menu.html>

[8] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009, p 6

[9] Ibid,p 9

[10] Canby, Vincent. “From the Humble Mini-Series Comes the Magnificent Megamovie”. The New York Times,Art.October 31,1999. The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/31/arts/from-the-humble-mini-series-comes-the-magnificent-megamovie.html?pagewanted=all>

[11] Ibid

[12] Schwarz, Benjamin.”Mad about Mad Men”.The Atlantic.November 2009.Atlantic Magazine.                                           < http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/mad-about-i-mad-men-i/7709/>

[13] Gildemeister, Christopher. “The Fine Arts Are Hard To Find “.Parents Television Council.October 2, 2006<http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/culturewatch/2006/1002.asp>

[14] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009,p 11

[15] Ibid, p 12

[16] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[17] “Full Cast and Crew for Mad Men”The Internet Movie Data Base <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804503/fullcredits#writers>

[18] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[19] Ibid

[20] Mad Men, season 1,episode 13, The Wheel

[21] Lyford, Kathy.”Mad Men Q&A: 'I'm fascinated that people get so much out of it'”.SeasonPass.October 22, 2008,Variety. <http://weblogs.variety.com/season_pass/2008/10/mad-men-qa.html>

[22] Ibid

[23] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[24] Fisher,Bob “On Film Interview Matthew Weiner”.Kodak Cinema and Television.                                                        < http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Publications/On_Film_Interviews/weiner.htm>

 [25] Lyford, Kathy.”Mad Men Q&A: 'I'm fascinated that people get so much out of it'”.SeasonPass.October 22, 2008,Variety. <http://weblogs.variety.com/season_pass/2008/10/mad-men-qa.html>

[26] Berger, Joseph. « How Cheever Really Felt About Living in Suburbia ».The New York Times.April 30, 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/nyregion/connecticut/03cheeverCT.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[27] “Online Chat with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner”.AMCTV.COM.July 28,2008. <http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2008/07/online-chat-with-matthew-weiner.php>

[28] Wilson, Michael. “Finding some facts for the Mad Men fiction”.The New York Times.October 23, 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/nyregion/25madmen.html>

[29]Kaplan, Fred.” Drama confronts a dramatic decade”.The New York Times.August 6, 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/television/09kapl.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[30] Ibid

[31] “Q&A:January Jones(Betty Draper)”.AMCtv.com.December 27,2007.<http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2007/12/qa-january-jone.php>

[32] Fisher,Bob “On Film Interview Matthew Weiner”.Kodak Cinema and Television.                                                        < http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Publications/On_Film_Interviews/weiner.htm>

[33] Mad Men, season 1, episode 10, Long Weekend

[34] See appendix

[35] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009,p105

[36] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 3, The Benefactor

[37] Ferber,Andrea“MAD WORLD : Looking at Gender, Antonioni and the Soviet Sixties”.KRITIK.March 16, 2010. Illinois University.<http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/03/mad-world-looking-at-gender-antonioni.html>

[38] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[39] Keane,Marybeth, Lewis, Jessica. “An interview with Scott Buckwald, Prop Master for the Hit TV show Mad Men”.Collectors weekly.October 15^th, 2009 < http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-scott-buckwald-prop-master-for-the-hit-tv-show-mad-men/>

[40] Bierut,Michael “Mad Men : Pitch Perfect “.The Design Observer Group.September 30 2008.The design observer.<http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=6227>

[41] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 4, New Amsterdam

[42] Witchel,Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[43] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 6, Babylon

[44] Levinson, Paul.”Mad Men 6 : the medium is the message!” Paul levinson’s infinite regress.August 24, 2007. Blogspot..<http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/2007/08/mad-men-6-medium-is-message.html>

[45] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 1, Out of Town

[46] Wheaton, Ken.“Real London Fog Adman Not Happy About Mad Men”.AdvertisingAge.February 11,2009.Advertising Age ;<http://adage.com/adages/post?article_id=140129>

[47] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 2, Ladies Room

[48] Schwarz, Benjamin.”Mad about Mad Men”.The Atlantic.November 2009.Atlantic Magazine.                               < http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/mad-about-i-mad-men-i/7709/>

[49] Mad Men, season 2, episode 10, The Inheritance

[50]Lomrantz, Tracy « 12 Questions For “Mad Men” Costume Designer Janie Bryant”.Glamour. January 26, 2009 <http://www.glamour.com/fashion/blogs/slaves-to-fashion/2009/01/tk-questions-for-mad-men-costu.html>

[51] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 7, Red in the Face

[52] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962

[53] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[54] Keane,Marybeth, Lewis, Jessica. “An interview with Scott Buckwald, Prop Master for the Hit TV show Mad Men”.Collectors weekly.October 15^th, 2009 < http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-scott-buckwald-prop-master-for-the-hit-tv-show-mad-men/>

[55] Ibid

[56]“Mad Men moments in Weschester”.Lohud.< http://www.lohud.com/flash/madmen/>

[57] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[58] “Full Cast and Crew for Mad Men”The Internet Movie Database. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804503/fullcredits>

[59]Chozik,Amy.”The Women Behind Mad Men”.The Wall Street Journal.August 7, 2009. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332284143366134.html>

[60] Ibid

[61] Chaffe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, America since World War II. 4^th ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999, p 112

[62] Twitchell, James B. Adcult USA : The Triumph of advertising in American culture. New York : Columbia University Press, 1996

[63] Warlaumont, Hazel G. Advertising in the 60s : Turncoats, Traditionalists,and Waste Makers in America’s Turbulent Decade. Westport :  Praeger Publishers, 2000

[64] Chaffe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, America since World War II. 4^th ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999, p 111-113

[65] Ibid, p 112-119

[66] Mayer, Martin. Madison Avenue U.S.A. Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1961, p 18-19

[67] “In The Suburbs(1957): On Film, Inc. sponsored by Redbook Magazine.”Internet Archive.2001. <http://www.archive.org/details/IntheSub1957>

[68] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962, p 25

[69] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 1, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

[70] Pennock, Pamela E. Advertising sin and sickness : The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing,1950-1990. Dekalb : Northern Illinois Press, 2007, p 99

[71] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 1, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

[72] Pennock, Pamela E. Advertising sin and sickness : The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing,1950-1990. Dekalb : Northern Illinois Press, 2007, p 96

[73] Ibid, p 98

[74] Pennock, Pamela E. Advertising sin and sickness : The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing,1950-1990. Dekalb : Northern Illinois Press, 2007,p 92

[75] « More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette(1949) ».Youtube.November 2006 .<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI> and “Old Commercial for cigarettes(Salem)”.Youtube.May 2006.< http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86lYG1V2-n4&feature=related>

[76] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997,p43-44.

[77] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962, p 84

[78] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 9, Shoot

[79] See the video on youtube : “Spanish JFK Campaign Commercial-Jackie Kennedy”.Youtube.October 2008.<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5466hZLHPk>

[80] « 1960 -Kennedy !Kennedy !Kennedy ! »Youtube.June 2008. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yegVgH7s6Tw>

[81] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 10, Long Weekend

[82] Kaspi,André.Les Américains, Les Etats-Unis de 1945 à nos jours.Paris : Editions du Seuil, 2002, p 440

[83] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009, p118

[84] Ibid

[85] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 3 : The Benefactor

[86] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 8, A Night To Remember

[87] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962

[88] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997, p iX

[89] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 1, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

[90] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[91] Trbic,Boris. “Social Values in Mad Men and Revolutionary Road”.Australian Screen Education. January 1,2009

[92] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 7, The Gold Violin

[93] Mad Men, Season 1, episode  8, The Hobo Code

[94] Kaspi, André. Les Américains, Les Etats-Unis de 1945 à nos jours, Paris : Editions du Seuil, 2002, p 461

[95] Mad Men, Season1, episode 5, 5G

[96] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 12, Nixon VS Kennedy

[97] Ibid

[98] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 7, Red in the Face

[99] Kaspi, André. Les Américains, Les Etats-Unis de 1945 à nos jours, Paris : Editions du Seuil, 2002, p 461

[100] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 11, The Gypsy and the Hobo

[101] Lyford, Kathy. ”Mad Men Q&A : I’m fascinated that people get so much out of it”.Variety.October 22,2008  <http://weblogs.variety.com/season_pass/2008/10/mad-men-qa.html>

[102] Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York : W.W Norton, 2001, p 49

[103] Ibid, p 393

[104] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962, p 104

[105] Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York : W.W Norton, 2001, p 299

[106] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 8, Souvenir

[107] Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York : W.W Norton, 2001, p 58

[108] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 2, Ladies Room

[109] Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York : W.W Norton, 2001, p 66

[110] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 4, New Amsterdam and episode 13, The Wheel

[111] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 9, Shoot

[112] Chozik, Amy.“The Women Behind Mad Men”.TheWallStreetJournal.August 7, 2009 <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332284143366134.html>

[113] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 6 , Babylon

[114] Ibid

[115] Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York : W.W Norton, 2001, p 74

[116]Jagger,Suzy.“Mad Men : The Real Mad Women”.Timesonline.February 10, 2009.The Times. <http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5696515.ece>

[117] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009, p 43

[118] Ibid, p 44

[119] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 8, A Night to Remember

[120] Chaffe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, America since World War II. 4^th ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999, p 126

[121] Ibid, p 329

[122] Warlaumont, Hazel G. Advertising in the 60s : Turncoats, Traditionalists,and Waste Makers in America’s Turbulent Decade. Westport :  Praeger Publishers, 2000

[123][123] Galehouse, Maggie. “Mad Men nails its history with help from UH”.ChronLife.October 12, 2009. Houston Chronicle.< http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/main/6663142.html>

[124] Rosenstone, Robert. A. The Historical Film as Real History .Film-Historia, Vol. V, No.1 ,1995 : 5-23

[125] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 3, Marriage of Figaro

[126] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 9, Wee Small Hours

[127] Tyson, Thimothy B. « About the 1963 Birmingham Bombing ».Modern American Poetry .Illinois University.

<http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/birmingham.htm>

[128] Heale, M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest .Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2001, p118

[129] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 9, Wee Small Hours

[130] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 12, The Grown-Ups

[131] Palmer, Landon. “Culture Warrior : History, Nostalgia and Mad Men.”FilmSchoolRejects. September 17, 2009 <http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/culture-warrior-history-nostalgia-and-mad-men-lpalm.php>

[132] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 9, Six Month Leave

[133] « John Glenn ».The John and Annie Glenn Historic site and exploration center. 2000-2010. The John and Annie Glenn Museum Foundation.<http://www.johnglennhome.org/john_glenn.shtml>

[134] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 2, Flight 1

[135] Maynard, Micheline. « Reliving a 1962 Crash on “Mad Men” ». The New York Times.August 4, 2008.The New York Times.<http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/reliving-a-1962-crash-on-mad-men/>

[136] Palmer, Landon. “Culture Warrior : History, Nostalgia and Mad Men.”FilmSchoolRejects. September 17, 2009

[137] Ibid

[138]Halstead, Dirck.”The Last of Life” .The Digital Journalist <http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0004/editorial.htm>

[139] Guillot, Claire « Dix millions de photos de « Life » en libre consultation sur Internet ».Le Monde.December, 5, 2008

 

[140] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 9, Shoot

[141] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 6, Man Walks Into an Advertising Agency

[142] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 5, 5G

[143] Sérisier, Pierre.«Mad Men, Les hommes et leurs fantômes ».Le Monde des séries.November 13th, 2009. Le Monde.FR.< http://seriestv.blog.lemonde.fr/category/mad-men/>

[144] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 10, Long Weekend

[145] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 3, My Old Kentucky Home

[146] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 9, Shoot

[147] Goodman, Walter. “Reviews/Theater : Strutting Those “Fiorello” Tunes.”The New York Times.October31, 1988<http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=940DE6D81031F932A05753C1A96E94826>

[148] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 11, The Jet Set

[149] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009, p 206

[150] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 1, For Those Who Think Young

[151] Mad Men, Season 2, episode  12, The Mountain King

[152] Bradner, Liesl. « Mixed Media ».Los Angeles Times.August 10, 2008. Los Angeles Times.  <http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/10/entertainment/ca-amazon10>

[153] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[154] Rosenstone, Robert. A. The Historical Film as Real History .Film-Historia, Vol. V, No.1 ,1995 : 5-23

[155] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 13, The Wheel

[156] Lyford, Kathy.‘Mad Men’ Q&A: 'I'm fascinated that people get so much out of it' .WeblogVariety. October 22^nd,2008.Variety.<http://weblogs.variety.com/season_pass/2008/10/mad-men-qa.html>

[157] Grief, Mark.The New School. Eugene Lang College,<http://www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty.aspx?id=19330>

[158] Grief, Mark. « You’ll Love The Way It Makes You Feel ».London Review of Books.October 2008,LRB,                         < http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n20/mark-greif/youll-love-the-way-it-makes-you-feel> 

[159] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 2, Ladies Room

[160] Swartz, Bruce “ ‘Mad Men’ sells the 60’s with authenticity”. USATODAY, august 23^rd 2007, USA TODAY.<http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2007-08-22-mad-men-props_N.htm>

[161] Schwarz, Benjamin.”Mad about Mad Men”.The Atlantic.November 2009.Atlantic Magazine.                  <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/mad-about-i-mad-men-i/7709/>

[162] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 9, Six Month Leave

[163] Ibid

[164] Vivancos, Ana.”MAD WORLD : Reading Mad Men from the Margins (Panel One)”.Kritik. March 3^rd, 2010.University of Illinois.<http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/03/mad-world-reading-mad-men-from-margins.html>

[165] Mad Men, season 1, episode 3, Marriage of Figaro

[166] Mad Men, season 2, episode 7, The Gold Violin

[167] Mad Men, season 1, episode 2, Ladies Room

[168] Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York : W.W Norton, 2001,p 400-404

[169] Ibid, p 401

[170] Mad Men, season 2, episode 11 and 12, The Jet Set and The Mountain King

[171] Vivancos, Ana.”MAD WORLD : Reading Mad Men from the Margins (Panel One)”.Kritik. March 3^rd, 2010.University of Illinois.<http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/03/mad-world-reading-mad-men-from-margins.html>

[172] Ibid

[173] Mad Men, season 1, episode 8, The Hobo Code

[174] Ibid

[175] Ibid

[176] Heale,M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest.Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2001, p152-153

[177] Mad Men, season 3, episode  9, Wee Small Hours

[178] Mad Men, season 1, episode  8, The Hobo Code

[179] Mad Men, season 2, episode 7, The Gold Violin

[180] Mad Men, season 1, episode 10, Long Weekend

[181] See,for instance,Layota Peterson’s ”Why Mad Men is afraid of race”Slate. <http://www.doublex.com/section/arts/why-mad-men-afraid-race?page=0,1>

[182] Mad Men, season 2, episodes 2 and 10, Flight 1 and The Inheritance

[183] Mad Men, season 3, episode 9, Wee Small Hours

[184] Vivancos, Ana.”MAD WORLD : Reading Mad Men from the Margins (Panel One)”.Kritik. March 3^rd, 2010.University of Illinois.<http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/03/mad-world-reading-mad-men-from-margins.html>

[185] Kaspi, André. Les Américains,2. Les Etats-Unis de 1945 à nos jours. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002 ,p 465

[186] Mad Men, season 1, episode 3, Marriage of Figaro

[187] Mad Men, season 2, episode 2, Flight 1

[188] Rodriguez, Clara E. « Puerto Ricans : Immigrants and Migrants ».Americans All.      .<http://www.americansall.com/PDFs/02-americans-all/9.9.pdf>

[189] “History”.Palante.org. Latino Education Network Service.< http://palante.org/History.htm>

[190] Witkowsky, Melissa.”7503 Mad Men Racism Redux”.Multicultclassics. February 6^th 2010, Blogspot <http://multicultclassics.blogspot.com/2010/02/7503-mad-men-racism-redux.html>

[191] Mad Men, season 2, episode 8, Six Month Leave

[192] DukUnivLibraries.”The Reality of Mad Men”.Youtube. February 11, 2009.                                                                    < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5of03Pp59Z4>

[193] Lyford, Kathy. ”Mad Men Q&A : I’m fascinated that people get so much out of it”.Variety.October 22,2008  <http://weblogs.variety.com/season_pass/2008/10/mad-men-qa.html>

[194] Wheaton, Ken.”Mad Men Creator: “There Are Still No People Of Color in Advertising”. The Big Tent. January 10^th 2009.Advertising Age.<http://adage.com/bigtent/post?article_id=139399>

[195] Mad Men, Season 3, episode

[196] Hochberg, Mina. “1960s handbook- Thich Quang Duc”.AMCTV.COM.April 13,2010.AMC. <http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2010/04/1960s-handbook-thich-quang-duc.php#more>

[197] Chaffe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, America since World War II. 4^th ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999,p 197

[198] Ibid,p 200

[199] Heale,M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest.Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2001

[200] Ibid, p61

[201] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009,p80

[202] Mad Men, season 1, episode 4, New Amsterdam

[203] Mad Men, season 2, episode 10, The Inheritance

[204] Mad Men, season 3, episode 3, My Old Kentucky Home

[205] Heale,M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest.Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2001,p44

[206] Heale,M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest.Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2001,p49

[207] Ibid, p 51

[208] Chaffe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, America since World War II. 4^th ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999, p 193

[209] Heale,M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest.Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2001,p21

[210] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 7, Seven Twenty Three

[211] Mad Men, season 2, episode 7, The Gold Violin

[212] Chaffe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, America since World War II. 4^th ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999,p123

[213] Ibid

[214] Heale,M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest.Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2001,p134

[215] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997, p 109

[216] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 8, A Night To Remember

[217] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 7, The Gold Violin

[218] Heale,M.J.The Sixties in America, History, Politics and Protest.Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2001,p25

[219] Ibd, p 135

[220] Goodlad Lauren M.E, ”MAD WORD, Opening Remarks”.Kritik.February 24,2010.University Of Illinois.                < http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/02/mad-world-opening-remarks-by-lauren-m-e.html>

[221] See the trailer on Youtube : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rST9ku2c-08>

[222] Rosenstone, Robert. A. The Historical Film as Real History .Film-Historia, Vol. V, No.1 ,1995 : 5-23

[223] « Plot summary for The 60’s »IMBD.< http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169528/plotsummary>

[224] Meyers, Oren. "Narrating the 1960s via "The '60s": Television's Representation of the Past Between History and Memory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007 <Not Available>. January 24, 2010 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p168345_index.html >

[225] Goodlad Lauren M.E, ”MAD WORD, Opening Remarks”.Kritik.February 24,2010.University Of Illinois.                < http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/02/mad-world-opening-remarks-by-lauren-m-e.html>

[226] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[227] Jagger, Suzy.“Mad Men : The real Mad women”TIMESONLINE.February 10, 2009.The Times. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5696515.ece

[228] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

[229] Ibid

[230] Mad Men, season 1, episode 7, Red In the Face

[231] Janco Daniels, Myra. “I Married a Mad Man”ChicagoMag.com.August,2009.Chicago Magazine.  <http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2009/I-Married-a-Mad-Man/>

[232] Warlaumont, Hazel G. Advertising in the 60s : Turncoats, Traditionalists, and Waste Makers in America’s Turbulent Decade. Westport :  Praeger Publishers, 2000

[233] Mad Men, season 1, episode 6, Babylon, and Mad Men, season 1, episode 8, The Hobo Code

[234] Mad Men, season 1, episode 4, New Amsterdam

[235] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997

[236] Warlaumont, Hazel G. Advertising in the 60s : Turncoats, Traditionalists ,and Waste Makers in America’s Turbulent Decade. Westport :  Praeger Publishers, 2000

[237] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997

[238] Ibid, p 20

[239] « Top 100 Advertising campaigns » Adage.com.2005, Advertising Age Crain Communications Inc                            < http://adage.com/century/campaigns.html>

[240] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 3, Marriage of Figaro

[241] Ibid

[242] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 6, Maidenform

[243] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 9, Shoot

[244] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 7, Seven Twenty Three

[245] Mad Men, Season 2, episode  9, Six Months Leave

[246] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962, p 11

[247] Ibid.

[248] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 6, Babylon

[249] Ibid,p36

[250] Ibid, p37

[251] Ibid, p43

[252] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997,p 42

[253] Ibid, p 43

[254] Mad Men, season 3, episode 7, Seven Twenty Three

[255] Times, U.S.Business : THE MEN ON THE COVER : Advertising.October 12, 1962 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829288-6,00.html>

[256] Ogilvy, David. Confessions of an Advertising Man. London :  Southbank Publishing, 2004, p 33

[257] Ibid, p 117

[258] Ogilvy, David. Confessions of an Advertising Man. London :  Southbank Publishing, 2004, p 119

[259] Ibid, p 121

[260] Ibid, p 47

[261] Ibid, p 40

[262] Ogilvy, David. Confessions of an Advertising Man. London :  Southbank Publishing, 2004, p 116

[263] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997, p 55

[264] Mad Men, season 1, episode 3, Marriage of Figaro, and Mad Men, season 1, episode 6, Babylon

[265] Mad Men, season 3, episode  5, The Fog

[266] Bill Bernbach, as quoted in Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997, p 56

[267] Ibid,p 252

[268] Mad Men,season 1, episode 3, Marriage of Figaro

[269] Della Femina, Jerry. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. London : Pan Books Ltd, 1972,p 134-135

[270] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997, p 83

[271] Ibid, p 97

[272] Ibid, p 96

[273] Della Femina, Jerry. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. London : Pan Books Ltd, 1972, p 102

[274] See appendix, p 116

[275] McLean, Jesse. Kings of Madison Avenue, The unofficial guide to MAD MEN. Toronto : ECW Press, 2009, p61

[276] Ibid, p61

[277] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997, p 61-67

[278] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962, p 106

[279] Chaffe, William H. The Unfinished Journey, America since World War II. 4^th ed. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999, p 112

[280] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997, p 63

[281] Della Femina, Jerry. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. London : Pan Books Ltd, 1972, p 27

[282] Ibid, p 20

[283] Mad Men, season 1, episode 6, Babylon

[284] Mad Men, season 3, episode 13, Shut the Door. Have a seat.

[285] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 5, The Fog

[286] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 2 , Flight 1

[287] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 13, Meditations in an Emergency

[288] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 5, 5G

[289] Mad Men, Season 2, episode 1, For Those Who Think Young

[290] Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool, business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago : the University of Chicago Press, 1997,p 169-170

[291] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 5, The Fog

[292] Mad Men, Season 3, episode 2, Love Among The Ruins

[293] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 4, New Amsterdam

[294] Witchel, Alex. “Mad Men Has Its Moment”.The New York Times. June 29,2008.The New York Times. March 3^rd, 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>

[295] Mad Men, season 1,pilot, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

[296] DukUnivLibraries.”The Reality of Mad Men”.Youtube. February 11, 2009.                                                         <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5of03Pp59Z4>

[297] Mad Men, Season 1, episode 1, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Mad Men, season 1, episode 6, Babylon

[298] Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. London, Pelican Books, 1962,p 33

[299] Della Femina, Jerry. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. London : Pan Books Ltd, 1972, p 137

[300] DukUnivLibraries.”The Reality of Mad Men”.Youtube. February 11, 2009.                                                          <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5of03Pp59Z4>

[301]   Horovitz, Bruce, “Veteran ad exec says “Mad Men” really were about sex, booze”. USATODAY.August 31,2009.USATODAY.< http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/adtrack/2009-08-30-real-life-mad-men-were-about-sex-and-booze_N.htm>

[302] Della Femina, Jerry. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. London : Pan Books Ltd, 1972, p 204

[303] Goodlad Lauren M.E, ”MAD WORD, Opening Remarks”.Kritik.February 24,2010.University Of Illinois.                < http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2010/02/mad-world-opening-remarks-by-lauren-m-e.html>

[304] Rosenstone, Robert. A. The Historical Film as Real History .Film-Historia, Vol. V, No.1 ,1995 : 5-23

[305] Sepinwall, Alan.”Mad Men : Talking “Out of Town” with Matthew Weiner”What’s Alan Watching.August 16,2009.Blogspot. <http://sepinwall.blogspot.com/2009/08/mad-men-talking-out-of-town-with.html>

[306] De Smet, Severine.“Mode, La Folie Mad Men”.NouvelObs.Com.October 10, 2009. Le Nouvel Observateur <http://obstyles.nouvelobs.com/article.php?rubrique=mode&id=7359&page=2>

[307] Stuart, Eliott.“Mad Men Dolls in a Barbie World, But The Cocktails Must Stay Behind”TheNewYorkTimes.March 9,2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/business/media/10adco.html>

[308] Shaw, Ashley. “Mad Men yourself Avatar nabs two AME awards”.AMCTV.COM.April 28, 2010.                                    < http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2010/04/ame-awards.php>

[309] « Event Archives, Conferences and Symposia ».Unit for Criticism at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.2010.<http://criticism.english.illinois.edu/archives/EventArchivesConference.htm>

[310] http://thisrecording.com/storage/large_matthew-weiner-mad-men.jpg

[311]Parpis, Eleftheria.“CLIO honors”Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner.” Adweek.com.May 2009, AdWeek <http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3iacbc03133413785fcb183ce33d78d3d2>

                       

[312] AMCTV.com , <http://blogs.amctv.com/photo-galleries/sterling-cooper-portfolio/sterling-cooper-portfolio-13.php>

[313] “The Apartment (1960)”.The Internet Movie Database.<http://imdb.com/title/tt0053604/> 

[314] Adclassix.com.< www.adclassix.com/ads/62lovercomeback.htm>

[315] AdClassix.com

[316] “Not a Cough in a Carload : Images from the Tobacco Industry Campaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking”.Lane Library.STANFORD School of Medicine.< http://lane.stanford.edu/tobacco/index.html>

[317] Daniels, Janco Myra. « Draper Daniels vs. Don Draper »ChicagoMag.com.August,2009 <http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2009/I-Married-a-Mad-Man/Draper-Daniels-vs-Don-Draper/ >

[318] Google Images

[319] “An Open letter (from 2002) to Mary Wells Lawrence”The Madison Avenue Journal. <http://www.madisonavenuejournal.com/2005/10/16/an_open_letter_from_2002_to/>

[320] Jagger, Suzy.“Mad Men : The real Mad women”TIMESONLINE.February 10, 2009.The Times. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5696515.ece

[321] Google Images

[322] “Classic car ad index”AdClassix.com. <http://www.adclassix.com/caradsindex.htm>