California and Irony in Mad Men

Rodney Taveira

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i2.2769

Abstract

The combination of melodramatic and art cinematic techniques and influences in AMC’s television series Mad Men (2007¬–) reveals how a melodramatic televisuality can image novel modes of social and intimate relations and an alternative to the archetypal American narrative of the self-made man. Set in 1960s’ America, the series uses a contemporaneous and cosmopolitan California to triangulate the formal and narrative insistence of the past on the present. This triangulation is played out by Don Draper’s relations with his family, women, and his former identities and by the representation of homosexuality throughout the series. The application of Lee Edelman’s concept of “sinthomosexuality” and Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” reveal a queer, visual rhetoric to the show’s narrative and formal structures, forming a queer irony that allows the show to straddle the aesthetic extremes of “quality TV” (Jane Feuer) and soap opera, which, in turn, queers the exemplary American heterosexuality of Don Draper.

Highlights

What a lucky man, —chronically restless, temperamentally anxious, a man in constant motion to prove what cannot be proved: that he is a real man and that this identity is unthreatened by the action of other men
This essay will delineate what happens when the cinematic space of California is met by a habitué of television melodrama, ask what kinds of social and intimate relations are either necessary for or result from this meeting, and argue for irony as the show’s critical mode of representation
What was once a contradiction between realistic mise-en-scène and an overblown expression of emotion becomes verisimilar in Mad Men in the carefully crafted exterior of Don Draper, a man who appears to have it all: handsomeness, success in business in New York City, beautiful wife, kids, and home, and an upwards social trajectory

Summary

Introduction

What a lucky man, —chronically restless, temperamentally anxious, a man in constant motion to prove what cannot be proved: that he is a real man and that this identity is unthreatened by the action of other men.

Results

Conclusion