Of Mad Men and Woodstock!

[FOTD]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

OP-ED COLUMNIST
'Mad Men' Crashes Woodstock's Birthday


By FRANK RICH
Published: August 15, 2009
IN our 24/7 mediasphere, this weekend's misty Woodstock commemorations must share the screen with Americans screaming bloody murder at town hall meetings. It's a vivid reminder that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be — literally in some cases — those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation '69.

The most historically resonant television event this weekend, however, may be none of the above. Sunday night is the premiere of the third season of "Mad Men," the AMC series about a fictional Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s. The first episode is to be simulcast in Times Square after a costume party where fans can parade their retro wardrobes. This promotional event is Woodstock, corporate style, with martinis instead of marijuana, Sinatra instead of Shankar and narrow ties supplanting the tie-dyed.

Woodstock's 40th anniversary is being celebrated as well — with new books, a new documentary, a new Ang Lee movie and the inevitable remastered DVDs and CDs. But it's "Mad Men" that has the pulse of our moment. Though the show unfolds in an earlier America than Woodstock, it seems of far more recent vintage, for better and for worse.

As many boomers have noted, Woodstock's nirvana was a one-of-a-kind, one-weekend wonder anyway, not the utopia of subsequent myth. It wasn't even meant to be free; in the chaos, the crowds overwhelmed and overran the ticket sellers. That concept of "free" — known to some adults as "theft" — persists today in the downloading of "free" music, which has decimated the recording industry far more effectively than brown acid ever did.

Even in Woodstock's immediate aftermath, there was no consensus on its meaning. A Times editorial titled "Nightmare in the Catskills" saw "a nightmare of mud and stagnation" and asked rhetorically, "What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?" Time magazine, surprisingly, was more sympathetic. "It is an open question," the writer intoned, "whether some as yet unknown politician could exploit the deep emotions of today's youth to build a politics of ecstasy." Actually, both proved wrong. Woodstock was no apocalypse, but neither was it a political turning point. Nixon would be re-elected in 1972, and the only politician with a touch of ecstasy, Robert Kennedy, had already been murdered.

Ten years later, a New Yorker cartoon depicted a Woodstock reunion as a buttoned-down yuppie cocktail party, not a hippie love-in. By then, the '60s counterculture had been completely commodified. Today a Woodstock couldn't exist without corporate sponsorship; in fact this weekend's planned 40th-anniversary concert was canceled for lack of one. Any large-scale youth "community" would be virtual, on Facebook and Twitter, and so might some of the sex. Only pot remains eternal.

That the early '60s of "Mad Men" seems more contemporary than the late '60s of Woodstock has little to do with the earlier period's style or culture in any case (however superior the clothes). The rock giants of Woodstock remain exponentially more popular than Vic Damone and Perry Como, the forgotten crooners heard in "Mad Men." The repressive racial and sexual order of Sterling Cooper, the show's fictional ad agency, is also a relic, in part because of the revolutions that accelerated in the Woodstock era. The misogyny, racism and homophobia practiced in the executive suites of "Mad Men" are hardly extinct — and neither are the cigarettes that most of the characters chain-smoke — but they are in various stages of remission.

What makes the show powerful is not nostalgia for an America that few want to bring back — where women were most valued as sex objects or subservient housewives, where blacks were, at best, second-class citizens, and where the hedonistic guzzling of gas and gin went unquestioned. Rather, it's our identification with an America that, for all its serious differences with our own, shares our growing anxiety about the prospect of cataclysmic change[/u]. "Mad Men" is about the dawn of a new era, and we, too, are at such a dawn. And we are uncertain and worried about what comes next.

In his new book "1959: The Year Everything Changed," Fred Kaplan writes about the forces that were roiling America in the year before "Mad Men" begins. It was in 1959 that Berry Gordy founded Motown, that G. D. Searle applied to the F.D.A. for approval of the birth-control pill, and that Texas Instruments announced the advent of the microchip. The year began with a Soviet technological triumph, the launching of the spacecraft Lunik I, and ended with an embarrassing capitalist fiasco, Ford Motor's yanking of the ignominious Edsel. Along the way the first two American soldiers were killed in South Vietnam. "By the end of 1959," Kaplan writes, "all the elements were in place for the upheavals of the subsequent decades."

The first season of "Mad Men" was set in 1960. This season — and there will be no spoilers here — opens in 1963. That's the year of Beatlemania's first sightings, of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington and, of course, of gunfire in Dallas. Bruce Handy sums it up in the current Vanity Fair: "As in Hitchcock, the characters are unaware of shocks that the audience knows all too well lie ahead, whether they be the Kennedy assassination and women's lib or long sideburns and the lasting influence of Doyle Dane Bernbach's witty, self-deprecating 'lemon' ad for Volkswagen."

What we don't know is how the characters will be rocked by these changes. But we're reasonably certain it won't be pretty. That's where the drama is, and it's tense.

In the world of television, "Mad Men" is notorious for drawing great press and modest audiences. This could be the season when the viewers catch up, in part because the show is catching up to the level of anxiety we feel in 2009. In the first two seasons, the series was promoted with the slogan "Where the Truth Lies." This year, it's "The World's Gone Mad." The ad hyping the season premiere depicts the impeccably dressed Don Draper, the agency executive played by Jon Hamm, sitting in his office calmly smoking a Lucky Strike as floodwater rises to his waist.

To be underwater — well, many Americans know what that's like right now. But we are also at that 1963-like pivot point of our history, with a new young president unlike any we've seen before, and with the promise of a new frontier whose boundaries are a mystery. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan framed this mood the last time around, but you don't know what it is. We feel Don Draper's disorientation as his once rock-solid '50s America starts to be swept away. We recognize his fear that the world could go mad.

It's through this prism we might re-examine the raucous town hall eruptions this month. Even if they are inflated by activist organizations and cable-TV overexposure, they still cannot be dismissed entirely as made-for-media phenomena made-to-measure to fill the August news vacuum. Nor are they necessarily about health care. The twisted distortions about "death panels" and federal conspiracies "to pull the plug on grandma" are just too unhinged from the reality of any actual legislation. These bogus fears are psychological proxies for bigger traumas.

"It's the economy, the facts that millions of people have lost their jobs and millions of others are afraid of losing theirs," theorizes one heckled senator, Arlen Specter. That's surely part of it. So is fear of more home foreclosures and credit card bankruptcies. So is fear of China, whose economic ascension stands in stark contrast to the collapse of traditional American industries from automobiles to newspapers. So is fear of Barack Obama, whose political ascension dramatizes the coming demographic order that will relegate whites to the American minority. In our uncharted new frontier, even the most reliable fixture for a half-century of American public life, the Kennedy family, is crumbling.

These anxieties coalesce in various permutations right, left and center. In most cases they don't surface in the explosions we're seeing at these town hall meetings but in the kind of quiet desperation that afflicts Don Draper and his cohort in "Mad Men." But this summer's explosions are also in keeping with 1963.

The political rage at the young, liberal Kennedy administration in some quarters that year was rabid and ominous. When Adlai Stevenson, then ambassador to the United Nations, spoke in Dallas that October, jeering zealots spat on him and struck him with a picketer's placard. Stevenson advised Kennedy against traveling there. Dallas rushed to draft a new city ordinance restricting protesters' movements at lawful assemblies and passed it on Nov. 18. We need not watch "Mad Men" to learn how that turned out.

Oh, to be back in the idyllic summer of 1969, when the biggest sin committed by the rebellious mobs at Woodstock was getting stoned. Something else is happening here in our anxious summer of 2009, when instead of flower-power and free love there are reports of death threats and fanatics packing guns.



If you aren't into AMC's Mad Men, it's devilish delightful despite being a little soapy...

[waterboy]

I love the show, and I love that op-ed. I especially like how the show has captured the look and feel of the late fifties, early sixties. Pointy bras, sexism, hats, cigarettes, handkerchief in the tight suit coats and Vitalis hair. Its a fun, if not intense, experience.

Very interesting to note the incongruent themes of the town hall meetings, and Woodstock (which at the time was pretty much ignored in this area). Both 59 and 69 were tipping point years, though the critical events determining the next decade went largely unnoticed at the time.  Change and fear of change indeed are still the issues of the moment.

[Conan71]

Frank Rich Channeling Woodstock in the healthcare debate, lovely.  Woodstock comparisons are so, so... 1989.

[FOTD]

Frank Rich Channeling Woodstock in the healthcare debate, lovely.  Woodstock comparisons are so, so... 1989.

Did you even read the article? Intellectual difficulty?

Woodstock was about acid....Mad Men is about the period before acid....  and for the post acid period of today, well..let's face it. The whole damn right Wingnutia could stand to be dosed to fix those "psychological proxies for bigger traumas."

[Conan71]

Did you even read the article? Intellectual difficulty?

Woodstock was about acid....Mad Men is about the period before acid....  and for the post acid period of today, well..let's face it. The whole damn right Wingnutia could stand to be dosed to fix those "psychological proxies for bigger traumas."

FOTD, for once, I bothered to read something you posted in it's entirety.  Poignant to a degree, but it read like an idyllic freshman comp essay.  Woodstock.  Town Halls.  Mad Men. 

Must.  Resist.  Saying.  Can't.  Here goes...

FAIL!