Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

[breakinglight11]

I have an odd relationship to the show Mad Men. I've watched it several times through, and I really admire it on many levels. Currently it's my best reference for the writing of subtext, something I'm really bad at and need to learn to improve. And the costuming is masterful; analysis of it really teaches you how to do it. But I wouldn't exactly say I like it. I get weary of how consequences for people's negative actions tend to not have all that much of an impact because of the need to keep the show going, and nobody ever grows or changes, which I find wearying.

My mom watched the show before I did. She found it fascinating as a depiction of a time period she remembered very differently. She was born in 1953, so she was a child in the '60s, and her family was working class in a small industrial town, "where people didn't have as much, and they weren't as miserable." She said she found it fascinating to see those people who lived the life that most of the people in her world aspired to-- especially when it didn't seem to make them any happier.

I connect it to her not only because she introduced it to me, but also because of the character of Sally Draper. Personality- and circumstance-wise, they were almost nothing alike. Sally was a privileged girl with a rough, rebellious relationship with her divorced parents, while my mother was nice and well-behaved, "ethnic" for her town, without much money, in a family that was loving and close. But I can't help but think of her when I watch that beautiful little blonde girl, born only a year later than Mom was, experiencing a number of the same cultural influences. Nobody pays any attention to Sally's potential; my mom was always regretful that she was never encouraged to be anything but a teacher or a nurse, when she was smart enough to do anything. And then, of course, there's the smoking.

I still find that part of Mad Men hard to watch. Not just the fact that everybody's smoking all the time, but the culture around smoking. It's ubiquitous, expected, almost enforced. That's the culture that taught my mom the habit. She didn't start as young as Sally-- who I think was around twelve --but not that long later, in high school. My granddad didn't even do it and took a hard line against it. But things still ended up how they ended up. So it's a little hard for me. To watch the culture shape that little blonde girl in the way it shaped another little blonde girl into something that ended up killing her.

That's kind of over-the-top and maudlin. I still watch the show; I've watched it like three times through. But I think about it.

Comments

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

I liked that the characters don't change, for a while. It's okay to make a show whose main plot is that the characters can't change. The problem is that we got the point by the end of season 4, and subsequently the show jumped the shark. Instead of having a wrap-up season 5 showing Don not really having changed and maybe Pete and Peggy starting to turn into Don, they prolonged it for 2.5 more seasons. (I have not seen any of the second half of season 7.) Sally has been the only interesting character for a while now, because, as far as character development goes, the adults are so unchanging it's basically episodic. The story arcs repeat as in a conventional episodic show, except they're a few episodes each; at the scale of 2.5 seasons, it's just as episodic, just slower.

[laurion]

My dad started smoking years before he could legally drive. It took him over thirty years to quit. I think it was the price that eventually made it happen.

I think Studio writers are afraid to have the characters change because they don't want to lose what made season one a success. I think actors are in favor of characters changing so they can explore new things professionally. I think mainstream audiences like the characters to stay the same so they can tune in to any episode or rerun and understand where things are at. I think devoted watchers want the story to evolve and for characters to evolve as well. Almost all the shows I can think of where character evolution is built in to the show are genre fiction shows where you can count on an audience to tune in every week, or shows released on the new Netflix model of dropping a whole season of work overnight where people will binge watch. I remember when Babylon 5 was -the- show that did it. As Genre fiction goes mainstream and new models like the Netflix bingewatch become more common I think we'll see a new generation of writers more willing to let the characters lead the story and see where it ends up, instead of returning back to baseline.