Mad Men - Why did Don Draper become such a creep?

This may not get me any points with parents, but I have been watching Mad Men with my teenaged daughter for the last few years. This past week, we finally caught up, and now we have to wait until next year to see how the series ends. For my daughter, it has been an excellent way to painlessly learn about the sixties. I have enjoyed the chance to pause the show and help  her with the back story on political events like the Kennedy assassination, and the first Moon walk. It’s not often a teenager actually wants to talk to a parent about history, so this has been a great experience for both of us.

However, when it comes to explaining the social mores of the 1960s, that has been tougher. Throughout Mad Men, there has been a conscientious effort to portray the habits of the age accurately. Most characters smoke, women are treated by the men as playthings or second-class citizens, blacks are invisible or servants, drinking and driving is normal. They get all these details right, although my father tells me few people kept that many bottles of booze at the office. But in season six, the series decided to shift its focus to the love lives of its characters, which quickly became the tale of their endless affairs. At this point, the series seemed to become an unrealistic soap opera. It was an odd turn for a show that had tried so hard to seem plausible, and of course, I needed to explain it to my daughter.

Mad Men and the Inferno

Dante's Inferno, art by Gustave Dore

So here’s what I told her. At the start of season six, the lead character, dashing Don Draper, is seen reading Dante’s Inferno. For those of you who skipped classic lit, The Inferno is the epic poem of Dante’s guided tour of hell.  Don is reading the book on his honeymoon. He has just married Megan, his beautiful secretary, who seems to be everything he ever wanted. Megan is a twenty-something dark beauty, a bit exotic (a French Canadian, would-be actress), and fully subservient to Don, at least at first. It is a marriage of the beautiful people. Don has always yearned to be connected to the Bohemian lifestyle of the sixties, and Megan is already there. Divorce wasn’t common in the sixties, but it did happen, so this much I can explain to my daughter. But the reading of Dante on his honeymoon? Don is obviously not going to stay in heaven for long.

Without giving much away, it is fair to say that for the rest of the season, Don descends into a personal hell defined by drink and adulteries of various kinds. Don has a perfect wife at home, but he spends his time seeking out new sexual adventures everywhere he goes. Other characters do this as well. For this season, it seems like men can have sex with anyone they want, whenever they want. Don’s prince charming becomes a thoroughly unlikeable character, as he cheats and lies to everyone, at home and at work. The adulteries are wanton, and happen so often that the show becomes strangely unrealistic, and even annoying. Don takes ridiculous risks, as though he could never get caught. The core of the series, the actual writing of advertising campaigns, took a backseat in this season, much to the umbrage of many critics and viewers. So why did the writers of Mad Men turn it into a soap opera in season six?

Don Draper, the Perfect Consumer

The key, I explained to my daughter,  is that Don’s character in season six is no longer a real person, but a symbol: he has become the perfect consumer. Throughout the series, Don has written ads about desire – for the perfect family life, for adventure, for escape. But in this season, he leads his personal life just like the perfect consumer is meant to shop. Don’s love life becomes based on whatever he cannot or should not have. If a woman is attractive, and belongs to someone else, he wants her. But once he gets her, he consumes her, then moves on to the next new thing. He has affairs with no thought for the consequences, or for getting caught. In real life he would have been discovered ages ago. But in this season he is not playing a real person, he is playing the consumer of goods which are built to be used and replaced.

It is a brilliant parable of consumerism, because at the root, Don is playing us. We are all consumers, buying products made somewhere far away in conditions we ignore, and we don’t really want to know what happens to our stuff when we throw it away. The rise in global temperatures is also the story of the rise of worldwide consumerism, as we demand more and more stuff to keep us happy. Wisely, Mad Men  reminds us that this consumerism is not just about the world we ignore, but can also be very personal. In season six, Don’s ex-wife Bets, the Barbie-like one, gets overweight for no apparent reason. In season seven, Don’s company vies for a fast food contract. This is where we really become the victims of the consumerist ethic. In the 1960s, only 15 percent of Americans were obese; by the 2000s, it had more than doubled. This explosion is obesity started in the 1980s, and tracks very well with the rise in consumption of fast food, an industry made possible and popular by wall to wall advertising. With junk food, we are the perfect consumer, both the cause and the effect.

In season seven, Don Draper comes out of hell to some extent, but Mad Men  is subtly suggesting that the rest of us are still there. Will he fully escape the inferno? Dante did – in the last instalment of his Divine Comedy,  he ends up in heaven with his perfect lover, Beatrice. It remains to be seen if Don will be fully redeemed and find lasting love and inner security. In case you are wondering, I did share all of this with my daughter. To my relief, she is still watching, now aware that even television can have multiple layers of meaning, the mark of any great art.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv

The story behind the song, the chair and Marilyn Monroe

Ian Foster

Last night, I went to a CD release party at a local bar. The musician was a gentleman from Newfoundland, Ian Foster, and he spent the night telling stories. The stories came in many forms: his songs were often stories, about things as varied as lost loves to shipwrecks. His music and lyrics were lovely. But he told stories about these stories, too, which is what I found interesting. Each song was introduced with a  story about how he had written it, or a funny thing that happened one night when he was performing the song. None of the songs stood alone. They came wrapped in a story – stories within stories.

It occurred to me that this is quite different from what we usually get in the modern age, and I wondered why. If you go to a rock concert, Mick Jagger doesn’t tell you about how he was sitting in his car ( or wherever) when he wrote “Brown Sugar”. Of course, part of this is that most people who hear a new song won’t encounter it in concert, but on the radio or internet. But even if you attend a rock concert, in my experience few musicians take time to explain the origins of each song on their new album. They might say here’s a track from the new CD, but that’s it. The song is expected to get by on its own merits, cut off from its artistic roots.

Homes without stories

That attitude is a very modern one, and does not just apply to music. If you look around the room where you are sitting, chances are you are surrounded by objects that you bought in a store, that come with no story whatsoever. You have no idea where your computer was made, and even if you guess correctly that it was Taiwan or Korea, you haven’t a clue about any of the people who made it. The same is true for that chair you are sitting on, or the light bulbs in the lamps. They are commodities, made by people somewhere, but we haven’t a clue about the story behind each of these goods. Was Li-Huang having a good day on a Tuesday when she put the circuit board into your Mac? Was this the last computer she would ever work on, or the day after her son graduated from high school? No one knows.

There was a time not so long ago, where pretty much everything came with a story. In pioneer days, families had to create a lot of the furniture and food in the house. That table was made by Pa that first winter we arrived, you can still see where the axe slipped. Food grown in your own garden has stories built in which you literally eat and become part of you. This is the lettuce we rescued from the raccoons, and the pickles Ma made last winter when we had a bumper crop of cucumbers. Even before the pioneer days, when most of our ancestors lived in villages, in Europe, Africa or Asia, people often knew the people who made the things in their homes. Even if it was the smith from the next village who had pounded out the shoes on your horse, you knew his name, and his reputation.

When mass production came along, the price of efficiency was the loss of story. When every product was meant to look exactly the same, insuring consistent quality, then it didn’t matter anymore who made it. In fact, the idiosyncratic element of the worker’s personality needed to be removed, so that Bob’s widgets weren’t preferred over Ellen’s. Every toaster of a particular brand needed to be exactly the same. That sameness was a fiction, of course: some toasters were defective, others lasted longer than most. But in the modern age, all you needed to know was the name of the manufacturer. The worker’s stories were removed, and replaced with advertising campaigns, which provided a story which would apply to every product, as if they were all the same.

Andy Warhol: The Original is the Copy 

This new kind of meta-story was captured brilliantly in Andy Warhol’s art. His genius was to realize that in the 18^th century, artists painted portraits of heroes, and rich people. But in the modern age, the true heroes weren’t people at all, they were products, like a Campbell Soup can. Moreover, what made that soup can heroic was that it was the same as all the other soup cans. Its elevated status came from the fact that it was not unique, but one of a million copies, all purportedly identical.

And what of the heroic people in our culture, the rock stars and movie stars? Warhol realized that what made them famous was not that they created unique performances, but that they too were replicated, via the movies they starred in. Marilyn Monroe would not have become a star if there was only one print of each film she made, which was passed around from theatre to theatre. Her fame came from the fact that through film, her identical image was multiplied, so her movies could be seen on screens all over the country at the same time. Monroe, like an Ikea chair or a soup can, was a product of multiple copies. So when Warhol painted Elvis or Marilyn, he painted them three or four times on the same canvas, like frames from a film. Their power in modern culture came from the fact that they were copies.

It could be argued that one of the paradoxes of the modern age is that while it removed stories from the physical objects in our lives, it also provided a way to vastly increase the number of stories we can consume. In previous blogs, I have mentioned that the average American spends five hours a day watching television, and I suspect few hard working medieval peasants could have spared that much time for story telling around the kitchen hearth. We may have lost the stories of our furniture and food, but we have  (over?) compensated by engorging ourselves on mass-produced stories.

Did we lose something important by forgetting who and how our goods are made? There is something about knowing the story behind an object which gives it some charm. We all know that a jar of jam made by a friend seems to be more valuable than a similar jar bought in the store. It matters that we know the person who made it, it makes it seem more special, more soulful. Similarly, when we go on vacation, we like to buy souvenirs from the local market where (we think) we are meeting the local folk artist who produced it. Those souvenirs are more valuable and soulful than the Chinese-produced “I love Barbados” t-shirt that we can buy in the airport as we leave. A souvenir is not just a thing, it is part of a story that involves you, and may sit on the shelf at home for years to come as a warm reminder of a great holiday.

The story behind the movie

But does the story behind a story work this way? When DVDs started replacing VHS tapes, it was assumed that one of big draws would be the extras on how a movie was made. The director’s commentary through the entire film,  and the behind-the-scenes mini-documentaries became a standard feature of DVDs. But when movies became downloadable, these features dropped away. Part of the reason may be cost, but I suspect the other reason is that most people weren’t watching the making-of features, especially for films they had not seen before. Making-of stories can detract from the power of a movie, since they show how films are ultimately made of boring actors, equally boring directors, and a lot of special effects that look like nothing  special on set. Unlike a jar of jam, knowing how a movie was made can hamper the enjoyment of a film. Our suspension of disbelief can be eroded, particularly when we haven’t seen the film before, or it is new. For a movie to work, we need to forget that the film crew is there.

Paradoxically, once a film has become famous, like Star Wars or Casablanca, then it is easier to watch making-of features. I think this shift occurs because an older movie becomes a myth, a story with its own power, regardless of who made it. Star Wars was created by George Lucas, but it is independent of him now ( which is one of the reasons Disney can safely take over the franchise and make new versions). The story has entered that kind of movie heaven where stories live forever, divorced from their origins. This allows us to return somewhat nostalgically to how it was made. We can marvel at the misconceptions the original cast and crew held about the film they were working on. The stars have aged, the director is bald, the effects are passé, but the film is still forever young, preserved against time, living in its own parallel universe. Like a myth, it has a life of its own, and can be remade by new people, but the story itself will persist independent of them.

That takes us back to where we started – to our modern-day troubadour at the CD release party. Mr Foster charmed us with tales of how he first wrote his songs, and told us funny anecdotes about the places he had performed them. The people in the audience will carry away his CD with a story about the night they saw him, and heard the making-of tale behind a particular favourite song. His story-telling style beckons back to a lost age when everything had a story attached to it, from chairs to love songs. But my guess is that if his songs live on among his fans, it will be because, like movies, they will attain a life of their own. If people are still performing them fifty years from now, they won’t know much, if anything, about the circumstances of how they were written. What will become important is that the songs have their own inherent power. Songs, like stories, float through time. But hearing the song’s origin is certainly a nice send off.

To hear some of Ian Foster’s music, click here.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv

Why do we love movies so much?

The summer blockbuster season is starting at the movie theatres, and Hollywood hopes that droves of us will go to watch the latest crop of big-budget flicks. Even if you don’t go to the theatres very much, you probably watch a lot of movies at home, whether on television or YouTube. The average American watches television five hours a day, and even when the kids are on their video games instead, they are still watching moving pictures. Most of us spend our non-working hours watching motion pictures of one kind or another, far more hours than we spend reading, and frankly, more time than even our grandparents spent reading or listening to the radio each day. We are story junkies, and moving pictures are the way we get our fix.

But why are moving pictures so popular? 

Why not reading, or listening to the radio? One of the most interesting theories comes from  Walter Murch, the editor of Apocalypse Now and American Graffitti. He has argued that when movies first appeared in the late 19^th century, they caught on because they reminded us of the movies that were already in our heads : our dreams. For as long as we have been human, we have woken each morning to memories of visual stories, complete with soundtracks, editing ( often jump cuts) and strange landscapes and situations.  Murch argues that “if we assume people's dreams were cinematic before the invention of the motion picture, then what cinema has done is to take the language of dreams and bring it under our control.” Those dreams amazed early movie goers, and perhaps it is no coincidence that some of the first silent films were science fiction. Those early films of adventures on the Moon with monsters and alien babes were just as strange as the dreams people were used to inside their heads. (Martin Scorsese’s wonderful film Hugo captures this period of early film making really well). In time, movies branched out to encompass all forms of the human experience.

I like Murch’s theory, but I think that there were other forms of movies in our heads before the movie industry arrived. I am thinking of the movies we call memories. There are many types of memory of course, and not all play out as mental movies. Memories of the deep past can flash simply as images – think of that first date with your significant other, or when you first learned to ride a bike. Those are glimpses, less like the full movies of dreams. But more important, I think, are the memories we use to stitch  together what we are doing right now. You walk into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. That action makes sense to you because you are living in the movie of having just been in the other room where you were talking to someone.

You may object that this sense of being alive right now doesn’t feel anything like a movie, it is simply reality, the present. That is what it feels like, I agree. However, it feels real because your mind is stitching together this moment with everything that has happened in the last half hour or more. Think of what happens when that process breaks down, as it does for people with Alzheimers. They find themselves in the kitchen, but they can’t remember why. The present is cut off from two minutes ago. They have now, but it doesn’t make any sense, it is the end of a story that appears to have no beginning, so it isn’t a story at all. It is just confusion. Their internal movie isn’t working, so they can become confused about who they are, or where they are. It is a terrible condition, but it proves in extremis that we rely on an internal movie simply to make sense of the here and now, every second of the day. We are all living in a mentally created movie, where we are the star, and if we forget the plot, we also lose our identity, and our sanity.

The difference between us and those with Alzheimers is that our memory is working properly. Alzheimer’s attacks a part of the brain known as the hippocampus, where memories are not stored, but sorted.  This is where short-term memory is turned into long term memory. Tragically, this is the first part of the brain that is targeted by the disease, so that short-term memory itself is compromised. They cannot remember what happened in the last two minutes, so there are no events to be placed in long term storage. They get stuck in the present, with a huge gulf between now, and the deep past, which they retain from before the disease took over.

In healthy people, the hippocampus acts like a film editor. It reviews the footage of the day, and decides what will get into your personal movie, and what boring details will get lost forever. This may be why most of our memories of childhood are about exceptional events, but we can’t remember a typical day in any detail. At the time, the normal was in good supply, but that day you broke your arm seemed more important, so it got stored in deep memory, becoming part of the movie of your life.

In the Middle Ages, they had a way of gaming this system to force people to remember important events. If a town was hosting an important event, like the investiture of a new mayor, a boy would be brought around to witness all the official events that day, the signings, the oaths, etc…Then, at the end of the day, they would suddenly throw him into the river. After they fished him out alive, the astonished child would go to bed. That night, his brain decided to store all the events of the day leading up to being thrown in the river, on the assumption that knowing what preceded the near-drowning would help to avoid having it happen again. Decades later, that boy, now an old man, would still remember the events of that important day in the city’s history, serving as a kind of living record. ( Thanks to James L. McGaugh's book, Memory and Emotion, for this strange fact).

This internal form of movie making helps make sense of why motion pictures have become so common in modern life. 

We like movies because we have always had movies in our heads, as memories, as dreams, and as our sense of the present moment. So, in this early part of the 21^st century, we have become motion picture junkies. We fill every moment we can with moving pictures, whether they come in the form of tv, movies, YouTube videos, or video games. We do it at home, and when we are commuting. Even on the street, it seems most of us are talking on the phone or checking emails, keeping us jacked into the bigger story of our lives. We have shown that our internal instinct for stories is leading us to spend as much time as possible in external stories, often in the form of moving pictures.

Ironically, this fascination with external stories may be interfering with our ability to create our own internal movies. Remember the hippocampus, our internal film editor? It works best when you stop taking in new experiences. Our memories are sorted during down time, when the mind isn’t doing much of anything. Daydreaming, lying around, staring out the window on the streetcar, and most of all, sleeping. The hippocampus doesn’t work well when our minds are constantly taking in new information, like checking our emails every few minutes, in between YouTube videos and Facebook postings. All that constant digital activity that is so normal in our lives now is actually really bad for our ability to form memories.

People who multi-task do far worse on cognitive tests than people who don’t. People who get less than seven-nine hours sleep ( which statistically is pretty much everyone) on a regular basis harm their brain’s ability to form memories.  50-100 years ago, everyone got up to two hours more sleep per night than we do now. Our reduction in sleep means the next day you can’t remember that new employee’s name, or what time the meeting will occur. Our addiction to stories and moving pictures is keeping us up too late at night, undermining our ability to make lasting memories.

The irony in this is that our devices are making personal memory less important. Our digital calendars can tell us when the next meeting is, and our massive personal photo collection in our phone or computer can show us exactly what we were doing on that first date.  You could argue that with a universe of data and memories in the cloud, we can afford to lose some personal memory. It is a fair trade. But that misses the fact that what makes us special as individuals is our ability to stitch together events and information in novel ways. That’s the essence of creativity, the mixing of different things together to make a new idea, a new technology, or a new business strategy. That creative process only works if you have the information in your head, so your mind can come up with new connections and combinations. It can’t all be in the cloud.

This is new territory for everyone, so I don’t have a simple answer. But this much is clear: our brains like to dream, to have down time. Out of those fertile fields come our best ideas. Staying jacked in undermines that creative process, the way in which we bring something new and wonderful to the boardroom, to the kitchen table, to our friends at the bar. We shouldn’t let our fascination with stories and movies get in the way of us making our own stories and movies in our heads. Who knows, if you unplug a bit more you may become the person with ideas others tweet about:)

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary filmmaker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv