Mad Men

[chalkitdown]

Do stick with it. The first few episodes were rather slow, I thought, but it was well worth it in the end.

[Silent Runner]

Just a quick reminder that this will be starting on BBC4 this Sunday at 10pm.

I really do hope it lives up to the hype.

Don't forget the documentry that's on before it. It sounds pretty good.

BBC 4 at 9PM

Selling the Sixties

How Madison Avenue Dreamed a Decade: Part of the Mad Men season. Exploring America's halcyon days of advertising in the sixties, with contributions from George Lois and writer Gay Talese

[Boyatsea]

This tonight? At 9pm?

Bugger, I've been watching The Last Enemy. Will it be on iPlayer?

[lordcookie]

It's on at 10pm, the documentary Selling the Sixties is on at 9.

[Boyatsea]

Ahh. Right. Phew.

[Graham S]

Repeated Tuesday 04 March 11:20pm BBC2.

Middling, I thought. Nice production design (if not quite Far From Heaven standard). Quite soapy. Quite engaging. Not much else to it yet. Will watch again.

[Pob]

Repeated Tuesday 04 March 11:20pm BBC2.

Middling, I thought. Nice production design (if not quite Far From Heaven standard). Quite soapy. Quite engaging. Not much else to it yet. Will watch again.

It made me think of Far From Heaven as well, but has the potential to be far superior. Whereas Far From Heaven apes fifties film-making techniques to the extent that it actually seems dated and twee in itself, Mad Men seemed to be more postmodern.

Far From Heaven came across as patronising, wheras Mad Men seems to be looking at the past through the prism of the present, and will hopefully deal with the contrasting attitudes in much more depth. Then again, it's a TV series and has the luxury of time.

[Graham S]

"Dated, twee, patronising"? Gah! I reject your analysis. Far From Heaven is ace!

[Pob]

"Dated, twee, patronising"? Gah! I reject your analysis. Far From Heaven is ace!

I really thought I'd like it, but it just seemed so heavy-handed. "Ooh, look at how racist and intolerant people were in the fifties. Luckily we're much more liberal now!" Also, I didn't see the point in copying the style of fifities films, warts and all - overly-theatrical acting, grating music, stilted dialogue. In contrast, the first episode of Mad Men seemed to take the style of the sixties and add a complexity and ambiguity more familiar to 21st century audiences, which I really liked.

I also didn't like Pleasantville, which covers a similar subject.

[JPickford]

That was the worst episode of Bewitched ever!

Actually I loved it.

[Nick R]

Hooray, for once a HBO* drama I've actually seen from the first episode!

* Oh bugger, having just checked it's not actually a HBO series. It was the "From the creator of the Sopranos" that made me think otherwise.

[lordcookie]

I really thought I'd like it, but it just seemed so heavy-handed. "Ooh, look at how racist and intolerant people were in the fifties. Luckily we're much more liberal now!" Also, I didn't see the point in copying the style of fifities films, warts and all - overly-theatrical acting, grating music, stilted dialogue. In contrast, the first episode of Mad Men seemed to take the style of the sixties and add a complexity and ambiguity more familiar to 21st century audiences, which I really liked.

I also didn't like Pleasantville, which covers a similar subject.

Far From Heaven is an interpretive remake of Sirk's All that Heaven Allows so the accurate copying was entirely necessary.

Regarding the first episode of Mad Men: I loved it! It looked and sounded great and even though there were a few on-the-nose moments you get the impression each and every character is fully rounded. I really hope in subsequent episodes they will delve more into the advertising side of things - how images are used, the copywrite etc.

The documentary on before it was pretty good too. I loved the Charles Schridde Motorola ads.

[pledge]

I really hope in subsequent episodes they will delve more into the advertising side of things - how images are used, the copywrite etc.

That does happen, but more how the company operates than marketing principles.

[lordcookie]

Well that is fair enough. A lecture on marketing principles of the 1960s probably wouldn't be the most dramatic thing in the world.

[vcassano]

I thought the first episode was really promising. The best bit was when they joked: "We can put a skull and crossbones on the label," . Really cracked me up.

[karellen]

Hooray, for once a HBO* drama I've actually seen from the first episode!

* Oh bugger, having just checked it's not actually a HBO series. It was the "From the creator of the Sopranos" that made me think otherwise.

HBO passed on it. I wonder if they are kicking themselves yet?

[Graham S]

I really thought I'd like it, but it just seemed so heavy-handed. "Ooh, look at how racist and intolerant people were in the fifties. Luckily we're much more liberal now!"

I think Todd Haynes thinks quite the opposite

When most people see films set in the '50s today," he says, "there's an immediate sense of superiority. It's all about the myth that as time moves on, we become more progressive. Oh wow, they didn't know what sex was until we started to give it to them from our contemporary perspective. So the '50s become a sort of earmark point of oppressive politics and climate, which is very flattering to us as we look back."

I thought that would be an interesting thing to do: to hold up the 50s as a sort of flattery to our innate progressiveness as a culture, of how we've moved on, that we've resolved all those problems. And that would be a great thing to exploit. I think people get that, but what I think is so great is that you have to give an audience something to do, that if you offer them even that slight, metaphoric gap between the frame and the reference, they fully take it. And I realised this when we did our crazy press day in Los Angeles where I did 60 five-minute interviews in one day, and this is very mainstream American press. What I would have expected to hear was choruses of, "Wow, we've really moved on from the 50s." In fact, they all said, "You know, it really makes you wonder how far we've come." At the most basic level, that was so meaningful to me, that they took the bait. I love that, and the film does that in many other ways - it sort of demands that you fill in the gaps and blanks.

TH: The thing about having the 50s as a backdrop is that we easily look at the 50s and see all of this oppression coming from the outside onto poor people, and if only that oppression went away, they'd be free and happy, like we are today.

[Laughter]

TH: But as we all know, there are all these self-regulating aspects of oppression that we sort of inherit at the earliest stages.

Also, I didn't see the point in copying the style of fifities films, warts and all - overly-theatrical acting, grating music, stilted dialogue. In contrast, the first episode of Mad Men seemed to take the style of the sixties and add a complexity and ambiguity more familiar to 21st century audiences, which I really liked.

I also didn't like Pleasantville, which covers a similar subject.

I think it's far from Pleasantville. It's no parody or pastiche. It's a sincere attampt to re-make and re-imagine those Sirk movies, and Fassbinder's remake. In Sirk's day he wouldn't have been able to be quite so explicit.

Douglas Sirk has made reference to wishing he could do a story about a gay man at the time but wasn't able to in that period. So, I suppose I took my lead from that. Of course when Rock Hudson's sexuality became clear after his death, it lends a different reading to his wooden romantic performances in Sirk films. When his book "Sirk on Sirk" was republished after Rock Hudson died, he was able to talk about Rock Hudson's sexuality. He talks about the struggle gay men had coming out, and that he wishes he could have made a film about it in the 50s. It's clearly a theme that influenced him intellectually, and it was something that he found himself in the middle of.

And it's real. It might look unreal, but if, like Julianne Moore you "can see beyond the surface of things" if you "believe that to be truly possible", you'll see that it's more real than most films.

Films today tend to look superficially lifelike at the same time that they promulgate wish-fulfilling fantasies even more shameless than those that flourished in the era of the Hollywood ending. It is not the least of Far from Heaven's paradoxes that in embracing the structure of the classic weepie it asserts a rigor utterly alien to the feel-good dynamics of movies in which, as Haynes says, "every character has to come to some kind of redemptive knowledge of who they are and what they've done wrong. The father who can't deal with his family because he's so ambitious at work has to go through a series of changes that make him realize the value of the family and the wife and the kids, and go home wholeheartedly at the end. It's such an amazingly uninteresting trajectory.... The onus is on the individual to fix it, in a weirdly open-market sensibility of resolution."

That sense of limits is what makes the film seem increasingly real as it progresses. But it is, again, not a realism of surfaces: "What people seem to want is the opposite of what this film does; they want something that seems naturalistic on the surface, according to today's codes of naturalism, but that inside is actually incredibly heroic and false. In movies like this, on the other hand, the external experience is very synthetic and highly stylized, but it's actually about people who are much more like us, fragile and afraid, and who cave in when society tells them to." The stylization is thoroughgoing and for the crew meant reinventing every procedure, from the camera's distance from actors (much greater here than in contemporary TV-style framing) to the expressive, non-naturalistic lighting. "All these things that we come to today with a sense of naturalism, we had to break every one. People started to think differently."

And the rules and limitations gave them a creative framework out of which they could make something great and the acting was fantastic and real:

TH: The constraints are wonderful. There's nothing more creatively inspiring than a set of rules and limits that you work within. From the beginning in conceiving the script, nothing that would happen in this universe was going to come from anything other than a very prescribed series of gestures, colours, movements, narrative possibilities from a very specific world of film. That was great and amazing, it gave us this creative framework.

JM: Yes, which I loved because it has this particular kind of shape to it. You have this very presentational, very artificial style, but the content, the emotion is incredibly powerful and very, very real. So, as we were saying, there is no subtext. It is on top of the line. So when I say, "You're beautiful" or any of those lines, I'm giving it in a very pure, unironic way. And it is the style of the time, of these particular films. As an actor, this was fantastic. There was no, "Hmm, what is the behaviour? What are they feeling?" It was incredibly pure.

H: Don't you think that contemporary acting styles are so dependent on this idea of depth?

JM: Yes.

TH: And disclosure, the notion of psychological depth and concealing, of language as cover.

JM: Yes, that is the conceit of our time. And here's another thing that I'm not fond of, that when the camera sees something on a character's face that the other character doesn't see. I just think, that doesn't happen in real life. One of the things that I love about this film is, that in this artificial little world, that didn't happen to us. It was actually closer to real life. Like that scene where the women are having drinks and talking about their sex lives, and people say, "Why doesn't Cathy say anything?" And I say, "Well, that's because you don't. It's only in films where the character cuts away and the woman's going [face crumples]. We don't do that. So I appreciated that this construct existed in this framework. I actually found that this was more moving and more interesting and strangely more lifelike than current ideas about film-making.

And it looks wonderful, it's brilliantly acted, and although it's film-maker might be very clever, it still works as a weepie. Far From Heaven is a masterpiece! Watch it again!

[Pob]

And it looks wonderful, it's brilliantly acted, and although it's film-maker might be very clever, it still works as a weepie. Far From Heaven is a masterpiece! Watch it again!

Well, all that clearly went over my head! I must admit I didn't see any of that when I watched it, and I'm not sure a second viewing would even help. Interesting read though, thanks.

[Graham S]

Was it just me, or did Mad Men clearly seem written in the 21st Century? Would people really have talked and acted like that in the fifties/sixties? Would a woman say a typewriter was simple enough so women could use, for instance? A lot of the dialogue struck me as artificial, and clearly designed to ensnare a modern audience, and make us feel knowing and superior- the same complaint Pob was levelling at Far From Heaven.

Still, it showed promise, and I'm looking forward to Ep 2.

[kool g murder]

You're asking if it was really authentic, as opposed to being written with the audience in mind - I'm guessing it's a combo of the two, but with the emphasis on pleasing the audience of today (cos otherwise, who's going to watch it?) Seems a tiny little bit like unnecessary quibbling to me, I'm a massive Sopranos fan and I think this first series of Mad Men as a whole matches the Sopranos for intelligent, entertaining TV - best thing I saw all last year.

[Pob]

Was it just me, or did Mad Men clearly seem written in the 21st Century? Would people really have talked and acted like that in the fifties/sixties? Would a woman say a typewriter was simple enough so women could use, for instance? A lot of the dialogue struck me as artificial, and clearly designed to ensnare a modern audience, and make us feel knowing and superior- the same complaint Pob was levelling at Far From Heaven.

Still, it showed promise, and I'm looking forward to Ep 2.

I was wondering that. I wondered whether people in Far From Heaven were speaking as people really spoke at the time, and I came to the conclusion that it was highly stylised. Not having lived in the fifties, it's hard to know!

The "simple enough for a woman to use" was sarcastic - are you wondering whether a woman would have made that joke in the sixties?

Rather than enabling me to feel superior, I expect Mad Men to show how attitudes shifted during the sixties, charting the journey to today's accepted views on race, gender etc.

[Graham S]

The "simple enough for a woman to use" was sarcastic - are you wondering whether a woman would have made that joke in the sixties?

Oops. I didn't realise that.

I'm happy for things to be authentic, or to be highly stylised (I don't for a minute think phone taps of mafia bosses' conversations would be as funny and enthralling and operatic as The Sopranos), but the first episode seemed to fall into a soapy middle ground.

I'm happy to be re-assured that there's a high standard of writing throughout the series. Any Sopranos writer has more than earned the benefit of any doubt.

[kool g murder]

Well, I remember thinking the first episode was promising rather than brilliant, but on reflection that's perhaps a little bit because I wasn't paying enough attention first time round, watched it again the other day and really enjoyed it. Also, I really don't think the red haired girl in the office was being sarcastic when she said 'simple enough for women to use'. I mean, I can't prove it either way but a big theme through the whole series is how women are seen as second class members of society, by the women themselves as well as the men.

[Pob]

Well, I remember thinking the first episode was promising rather than brilliant, but on reflection that's perhaps a little bit because I wasn't paying enough attention first time round, watched it again the other day and really enjoyed it. Also, I really don't think the red haired girl in the office was being sarcastic when she said 'simple enough for women to use'. I mean, I can't prove it either way but a big theme through the whole series is how women are seen as second class members of society, by the women themselves as well as the men.

Yes, that's the exact word - 'promising'. The experienced secretary seems to be canny, which is why I thought she was being ironic. Though only having seen the first episode, it's hard to be sure.

[FishyFish]

I spent most of the first episode agonising over where else I'd seen the actress who plays Peggy, before realising she played Zoey Bartlett in the West Wing.

[Petrousgyre]

I finally got round to watching the first episode and found it a very disappointing - poorly written, full of clumsy exposition, incoherent in places, constant reiteration of the premise, limp humour and average acting. About the only thing they got right was avoiding the weary cliched mistake of trying to shoot and write it like it was shot and written in the 60's. Other than that, pisspoor.

Does it get better?

[pledge]

No it stays the same for the whole season. But then all of your assertions are false

[So. Angry.]

Well if it's the same throughout then I don't think I'll be tuning in again either. That first episode just didn't grab me at all.

[Petrousgyre]

No it stays the same for the whole season. But then all of your assertions are false

Really? They didn't make constant ham-fisted sexist comments just to make sure you were in no doubt just how different 60's adland was? The scene where the one secretary is giving the other advice on her first day is one of the clumsiest attempts at setting tone I can remember. The pitch to lucky strike was just cringeworthy, as they're walking out the door he suddenly springs to life with some wholly implausible drivel. Just awful.

Wasn't this something to do with the people behind the Sopranos? That was great. This, judging by the first episode, is shit. IMO obv.

[Kenshi]

Anyone watching this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/madmen/

I caught an episode last night thanks to the crappy (but useful) BBC iPlayer... and, it seems really good. Some interesting characters, and a refreshing portrayal of the time it was set in.

Why the hell they've stuck it on the BBC4 ghetto is beyond me.