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February 5, 2010
Mad Men world
"Mad Men may be lauded for scratching at the dark underbelly of society in the 1960s, but its scratches are surface deep. Perhaps because if it dug any deeper, the audience would see their own reflections staring back at them." - Melissa Witkowski in The Guardian
I completely agree.
You would think Mad Men was my kind of series: writers in 60s clothes, history, men in suits - what's not to love? When I first started watching Mad Men, it made me deeply uncomfortable. Not because the supposedly misogynistic, racist 60s were so incredibly different and exotic and scary (a friend of mine said she watched Mad Men as a horror show), but because I could relate to it too much. I saw the first season as "proof" that people fail each other for no reason, and that women's worth is always related to the men in their lives.
Witkowski writes that Mad Men creates "an illusion of distance between our past and our present (...) through the erasure of real accomplishments by women and people of colour of the era, and by downplaying the institutional and systemic oppression in favour of presenting easier (and more salacious) targets such as sexual harassment and racist banter as the biggest obstacles facing women and people of colour in the workplace."
Posted by Julie at February 5, 2010 5:28 AM
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