The End of Mad Men

Mad Men came to an end this year, and once again I found myself again thinking about how the show came to enjoy its high standing. I ended up checking out some of the comments critics offered after I lost interest in the whole thing.

Daniel Mendlesohn offered an incisive piece at the New York Review of Books, in which he found both its appeal to its audience, and its weakness as art, in its extreme superficiality. As he noted, while the show aspired to serious treatment of "social and historical “issues," it generally failed to explore "by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation," the "sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture" that it presumes to take up as themes. Instead what prevailed was implausible "melodrama."

Meanwhile, over at New Republic, Marc Tracy's later article extends the criticism with a discussion of the show's propensity for "Show, don't tell"--"Sally Draper scowling" simply not up to "the heavy work of Saying Something." Indeed, Tracy judges all this as the best "contemporary example . . . of what Dwight Macdonald called 'midcult,'" which Tracy, with a concision which compares favorably with Macdonald's writing, that by this he means "unexceptional art whose highbrow trappings convince consumers they are putting real cultural work into consuming it," all of which is "really empty calories that leave you feeling full," and so worse in its way than the frankly trifling.

Personally I don't care much for Macdonald, or for the labeling of things "midcult" or middlebrow. Historically it has not been a really meaningful concept, this problematic territory only opened up in the twentieth century by the Modernists putting a large part of culture out of reach of even the well-educated by equating "art" with material requiring the reader, viewer, listener to do a very great deal of "cultural work"--an idea that has, by fostering a worship of obscurity and obscurantism as the criterion of artistic accomplishment, and the idea that anything else must be just mass-marketed trash, deeply warped our cultural life.

Still, this is one case where the idea fits. The accent on surface, the evocation of serious subject matter without seriously doing anything with it, the stress on Show-don't-tell technique over content (lots of subtext, which is not really saying anything at all), is all tediously postmodernist--and its easy, nearly unquestioning embrace has been absolutely what Tracy describes. And while Mad Men may have come to an end, there is for the time being little sign of this attitude giving way to a greater appreciation of greater substance.