The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Race And Mad Men

Re: Race And Mad Men

Rainy — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:13:05 -0000

To balance the show out, I expect Don Draper to have an affair with an African American woman. He should at least have an affair with a minority woman of some kind. The show just wouldn't be right without that. I'm joking a bit here.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Rainy — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:09:15 -0000

I expected the Academy to do that for a period piece.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Rainy — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:58:35 -0000

Pete Campbell is the kind of guy you love to hate. He was so spoiled when he was a kid that you kind of feel sorry for him not getting his way. That's how I feel anyway. It's kind of funny that he always needs someone to validate his existence. He always needs Don to verify if what he is doing, is correct or not.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Persia — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:01:45 -0000

CitizenE, if you're still reading this, I think a sign of how Mad Men has built up its storylines is that apparently when the 'gay pick up scene' was shown in Times Square, most of the audience started cheering. (With good reason, I'll add!)

Re: Race And Mad Men

Onyx — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:43:47 -0000

While I've read that the writers were meticulous in trying to capture the feel of the timeperiod (and for the most part have succeeded), I'm surprised that with the agency being based in NY, black entertainers and trailblazers who were able to interact and were courted by adveristing agencies don't play some part in the show. Boxing was a big time sport that had agencies clammoring for a piece of Sonny Liston and Ali, though at that time he was Cassius Clay. Yes, they did their homework regarding white culture and norms, and while I do believe the show is not required to give a lesson on race relations, back then money still talked. African Americans were making inroads in comedy (Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby - this was also the era of the cool, hip, shark skin suit wearing black man cracking jokes), sports (particularly football) as well as the recording artists. Sydney Poitier had won the Oscar as Best Actor, Sammy Davis Jr. was touring with the Rat Pack. Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald inspired awe. These were just a few of the people who could and did mingle with the Don Draper types, blacks who seemed to live a life of priviledge beyond the doorman, elevator operator and maid.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Shawn — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:30:39 -0000

As a side note, David Liss' book "The Coffee Trader's" protagonist, Miguel Lienzo, is a Sephardic Jew. I thought that was unusual and actually emailed the author as to why he chose his character's background. He replied (!) that he did that because up until the 18th century (IIRC, I could be wrong on the date), the Sephardim were the dominant Jewish group in Europe.

Unitl he wrote back telling me this, I had always assumed that the Ashkenazi were always the most prominent/dominant Jewish group in Europe. The things you learn.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Adrian J. Hopkins — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:13:13 -0000

I'm currently reading Matthew E. May's "In Pursuit of Elegance," and he references how what we omit can often speak more powerfully than what we leave in or force when it comes to ideas (i.e., the screen going black at The Sopranos finale, the initial shock and awe over the iPhone's anti-keyboard).

To that end, MM makes deafening statements about how painfully ignorant (of many things) the world of Sterling Cooper is. Change is apparently the theme of this season, so I fully expect many of these illusions to crumble and wouldn't be surprised if, let's say, a fly landed in the buttermilk.

I recommend folks check out what Weiner himself said about race, MM, and the ad industry when giving a red carpet interview: http://ow.ly/kuYP

Re: Race And Mad Men

Juba — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:36:58 -0000

Oh! Duck Phillips = Marimow, thats one of the better fits.

Cosgrove = Sydnor. Young, talented, amiable, does his job well without rocking the boat, gradually being unveiled as a substantive guy.

Pete Campbell = Valcheck...Just a jealous, negative little spoiled jerk whose willingness to play dirty and backstab attracts like-minded people in higher positions of power

I can think of more...

Re: Race And Mad Men

Juba — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:29:41 -0000

Very well Citizen E. I'll strain some comparisons.

Don Draper to me is as fascinating, macho and self-destructive as McNulty, though more in his personal life than professional life.

I love Peggy's character--she is so ashamed of her Brooklyn past and family ties and intent upon breaking the glass ceiling that its turning her just as cold and ambitious as Don--sort of like Ronnie but way, way more hardcore and without a soft side.

Sal is sharp, smooth and kind--one of the most fundamentally decent people on the show, but with a shocking secret of homosexuality he does everything he can do to conceal including getting married to a nice girl. A touch of Bubbles I suppose, in terms of decency and the danger of being undercover, though in a different way.

Sterling is a brilliant character--charismatic, vulgar and highly intelligent. Has some feeling but wont ever let it stand in the way of chasing his ambitions with no apology. He's sort of like Rawls in that way.

How's that to start out with?

Re: Race And Mad Men

Andrew Levine — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:09:23 -0000

The reason they're not stereotypes is because the show depicts them as real people rather than caricatures. Be careful of getting hung up on the matter of what they do for a living rather than how they interact with their society. Deciding that the measure of a person is defined mainly by their occupation is altogether different from racial prejudice, but it's still a common blind spot that I think all of us engage in to some extent.

I have seen TV shows where black lawyers and politicians were played closer to stereotypes (by buying into the idea that successful blacks are essentially high-class street hustlers) than the elevator operators and housemaids of Mad Men. You can see a subtle mix of deference, resentment, frustration, and other things in they way all the AA characters on Mad Men, as little as we see them, react to the whites around them. It's not like watching a movie from the 1950s where the only black actor plays a train car porter with one line who walks on set and then off. I didn't live through the era but the MM approach rings more true.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Mark Mays — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:24:43 -0000

Well, there's no way The Wire and Shield would have been the same if on broadcast networks, more clearly with the former. It would have been as much about what you explore on the show as how it's explored.

Re: Race And Mad Men

JL — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:47:23 -0000

One thing I find interesting about the Seinfeld case is that while Jerry Seinfeld the character is white, with two white Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Jerry Seinfeld the actor is mixed. His father is a white Ashkenazi Jew, his mother is a Syrian Jew (the Syrian Jews' ancestry is a blend of Spanish and Middle Eastern, and they traditionally spoke dialects of Spanish and Arabic). So the character version of Jerry Seinfeld is actually a whitewashed Jerry Seinfeld.

I think it would have been cool if they had not whitewashed him, if they had allowed the character's mother, like the actor's, to be a Jew of color, a non-Ashkenazi Jew, from a distinct cultural background, had the character reference that background. Non-Ashkenazi Jews and Jews of color are woefully underrepresented in pop culture, to the point where many Americans don't realize that they exist.

Re: Race And Mad Men

CitizenE — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:44:12 -0000

Comparisons are always invited whether superlative or negative. Part of evaluating a work is in its relative merit. For example, I recently was sent a recording to review. The recording was done by an artist I admire and have been listening to for over two decades. In this case, this artist was doing an homage to another artist by playing his songs. What can one say; it does a disservice to the original because it lacks many of the original's virtues. Personally, I would have rather this artist done a retrospective on his own work where his style of playing and arrangement would have been far more suitable and effective. I think critical writing while secondary to the work it refers to and containing a double edged sword can have a salutary effect when it is presented honestly, even given that all of us have cultural assumptions and biases that affect our perspective.

I wonder in our current cultural milieu, its relationship to gender, money, etc, for example, if Jack Kerouac's cast of characters living at the same time as Mad Men would be half so appealing to the US televiewing audiences as Mad Men is.

Re: Race And Mad Men

CitizenE — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:32:02 -0000

@TN--well, I agree with you that life is too short to bother with entertainments that don't appeal to one's taste. So investing in seing earlier seasons will be contingent on whether I like what I see here. Even if I had only seen the last season of the Wire, which was the least of the five, I would have gone back and seen the whole thing.

While I know taste is personal--you raise True Blood, I have the same problem with Breaking Bad--far be it from me to put the show down, I'm just not interested--my comparitive perspective in this case seems to have some critical backing to it.

I do think on every level the Wire was the far and away most superior television program that I have seen in my life, and it's foolish to talk about this show that while it appears to have a good ensemble of actors being in the smae category. For me, if I am going to enjoy Mad Men, it's not so much a matter of letting go the idea of "objective" quality, but not having to contend with a hype to which the show cannot live up and with which it will likely continuously fall short.

@Juba--ok, to put it another way, I'll give you another word: Bubbles. There you have it, Omar and Bubbles--secondary characters both--and who else, who else--how many? So...in Mad Men there is...?

However, while as Ezra Pound says comparisons are odius, I did pick out the two scenes that struck me most for discussion.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Doug T — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:19:58 -0000

Spoiler Alert--

I think you're off a decade in your assignemnts--Rabbit Run is the 50's, Redux is the 60's, Rich is the 70, and at rest is the 80's. (ALthough each of the Novels was published at the end of the decade in question/beginning of the next decade, so there's some slight overlap and foreshadowing.)

Redux was set in 1969--it opens with the moon landing--and was published in the early 70's. It's very much about the late 60's experience, with Rabbit seperating from his wife and then ending up somehow with a black Vietnam veteran and white hippy runaway chick living in his house, doing drugs, debating the war, etc.

It all felt very forced to me, with Updike trying to shove in the war, Civil Rights, drugs, hippies, Summer of Love, sexual revolution, etc. Maybe it really was all that mashed up and confusing and random--I wasn't alive at the time so I can't say for sure. But I don't think Updike managed to craft the chaos of the period into a very good novel. And I really liked the other 3.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Persia — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:04:00 -0000

Yeah, it's hard to see something as idealized when we spent half the second season wondering if a main character was going to commit suicide.

Re: Race And Mad Men

Persia — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:00:34 -0000

Good luck to you, MissBabette. I think there totally need to be more black women onscreen!

Re: Race And Mad Men

Persia — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:55:28 -0000

Yeah. Mad Men wouldn't be a problem in a world where we were used to a lot of diversity on and off-screen. I think a lot of the criticism of Mad Men is not about the show as much as it is about the world the show is being produced in-- where whitewashing still happens and there are very few black/POC directors, agents, etc.

Re: Race And Mad Men

StevenAttewell — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:53:24 -0000

Where, exactly is the idealization?

The whole point of Mad Men is creating an exaggerated, fetishized image of privileged white society in the 1960s - and then showing that everyone inside it is completely miserable, that the whole thing is a facade that's about to crack open.

Re: Race And Mad Men

StevenAttewell — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:49:51 -0000

Stereotype? It's New York City in 1960 - who do you think is working the crappy service sector jobs that make upper class white peoples' lives more comfortable? Why do you think that some of the biggest civil rights protests in the North were centered around either retail stores or construction sites?

This is a show that, in the end, is trying to tell a story about our history - and a big part of that history was segregation. How do you portray what segregation was, how it functioned as an economic, social, and cultural institution without actually showing at it was?

Re: Race And Mad Men

StevenAttewell — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:44:54 -0000

God, I needed to take a second to edit.

*like, not lie

*into, not in

Re: Race And Mad Men

StevenAttewell — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:41:45 -0000

I just saw the movie. Actually, it seems less lie a comment on apartheid, altho there are elements there. It's really more on the nose regarding the current situation with Zimbabwean refugees who've poured in South Africa, where the locals don't want them there (especially with the outbreaks of cholera, etc. in Zimbabwe, there's a connotation of uncleanliness), the shunting of people into shantytowns and their exploitation by criminal gangs.

Re: Race And Mad Men

rikyrah — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:31:12 -0000

It was the brutal honesty of Mad Men that drew me in....because, this was REALITY. REALITY of Blacks who had MBAs, PhDs, advanced degrees, and they were literally cut off from even having the possibility of fulfilling their potential. I, too, was mad as a mutha, but this was reality back then. that's why when folks talk about the ' good old days', my side eye goes up, because I KNOW WHAT THEY MEAN. ...and no, I'm not going back to that.

Re: Race And Mad Men

themightypuck — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:20:00 -0000

Mad Men is pretty great but you can't help feeling that the reason a lot of people like it is because it presents this idealized white male fantasy world. That's probably the price of doing business since shows that pull punches or get preachy or try to deal with social issues unambiguously almost always suck.

Re: Race And Mad Men

John B. — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:09:53 -0000

I'm with ya here, TNC. I think the people who do "Mad Men" know exactly what they're doing.

The Season Three premiere: No Duck Phillips? It was obvious at the end of last season that he was on the way out, but I'd hoped they'd let him be kicked around for a few more episodes. Sigh! Also, I hope Jimmy Barrett makes a few more appearances.