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Nov 2009
21st
Missing Mad Men
I’m having “Mad Men” withdrawal. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true.
I miss the gimlets, deviled eggs, Buicks, and Baked Alaskas.
I miss Joan’s bustle, Betty’s updo, how Don squints when he smokes.
I’m a mother and wife, with plenty of work I should be doing (and that should be interesting me), but I honestly feel a hole in my life and I know what it is: “Mad Men” is over for the season.
It’s the show’s languid atmosphere I miss, an elegance and restraint I lack in my own life. Despite the sexism, racism, and emotional constipation of the era, I miss its landscape of goose neck lamps and girdles. “Mad Men”’s New York pace is more controlled, everyone’s movements more deliberate: it represents exactly the opposite of the velocity and chaos of my days. At Sterling Cooper’s advertising agency, there’s no frenzy, no clutter. In the Draper home, there’s no visible disarray. Sure, we witness plenty of tension and dysfunction, but there’s a stillness I covet. Betty Draper doesn’t do anything hurriedly, she even loads the washing machine gracefully; you never see her manically juggling playdates, errands, or exercise classes; she’s not tapping at, or shouting into, an iPhone. She simply drags on a cigarette at the kitchen table while her children eat a “balanced” meal, sips a glass of wine, glides into a party in pearls, naps off her jet lag without a wrinkle in her skirt after a flight to Rome.
Her husband, Don, is also as smooth as it gets: he never seems to rush or rant, he is cool to the point of cold. I wouldn’t want him for a husband but I’ll miss that coolness now that he’s off the air. Don’s calm may be – okay, is – deceptive, but I should achieve that veneer of composure every once in a while.
Somehow all this reserve and detachment has been escapist for me during this year’s episodes. I guess I could use some repression in my life. I’m up to my ears in candor, confession, memoir. There’s so much nakedness today, so much vomiting of one’s own “truth,” (I’m as guilty as the next person), that I’ve found myself actually welcoming the contained, bottled-up inhibitions of “Mad Men.”
No, I don’t want to go back to the days where women in the office were expected to get coffee, noon martinis were de rigueur, and children were commanded to “Go play.” But I’ve taken some strange comfort in the way things used to be – or at least the way they’re depicted in “Mad Men:” the parsimony of emotion, the tidiness of the office, the dependability of supper on the table. I know it’s facile mythology; but that’s Hollywood, and I bought in. For another dose of ersatz tranquility, I guess I’ll have to wait for season four.
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