Thursday, August 27, 2009
Why The Show You're Watching Makes for Pretty Good Science Fiction, Part 2
(Con't)
Strike the weird outfits, the world-building sets, the outré cultural habits, references to "Gibsons" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Mad Men, like DS9, becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office.
Right? I know I'm driving this thing home. I know you're probably thinking, sure, whatever, middle class people like to be "transported" by way eco-vacations to Brazil in the pages of Monocle magazine or into Flo Rida's bedroom through Cribs or among handsome 28-year-old novelists having meaningful spiritual crises in Manhattan through whatever book's on the cover of the NYTBR. So, why not to the 60's, why not to deepest space? Who's counting?
First, we have to distinguish between the promise of what's flatly impossible and what's merely improbable. The impossible requires a lot more information. From a creator's point of view, Science Fiction and Historical Drama share many of the same pitfalls, the dreaded infodump being foremost among them. Both of these shows show an artful dispatching of this background exposition. Roger Sterling's reference in last Sunday's episode to a “Yetta Wallenda-sized misstep," added nothing to the plot. And though it did evoke atmosphere, it was one potentially alienating to right-thinking people. Yet it was, thankfully, done without a lot of narrative hand-wringing, because "Yetta Wallenda" belongs to the sort of people who wear one-button suits and fedoras, and Matthew Weiner wants very badly for these people not to explain themselves but to simply be. They live within their own infodump. In this same way, the creators of Star Trek don't have to provide exposition when referring to potency of Klingon Blood Wine: if you don't know it's potent, you're simply not of that world.
To want things you can't have has become unbearable. I'm thinking this wasn't always so. I imagine that at one time, our attitude towards wanting things we couldn't have defined what it meant to be an adult. To have everything was the purview of a few mentally-ill half-children like Howard Hugues or Lee Iacocca, and the rest of us struck for a fair wage. Now, wanting to have a 64' flat screen television mounted above our bed is the basis of an unrelenting national ideology approaching the ubiquity and toxicity of Korean leader-worship (if you're able to afford both cable television and basic dentistry at once, you may be tempted to view the comparison as hyperbole -- come back to me when and if you ever fall behind that line). Even sexual pleasure has been reduced to the level of a Ponzi scheme. We have all failed to become Flo Rida, but if we put in a few extra Saturdays we may come a bit closer. What you think you need to survive, like science-fiction, is always just up the road, and the underpinning of this requires a communal exposition very like an infodump. Bernard Madoff, made sociopathic with information, required the same sociopathology of his victims. They had to be brought up to speed before getting fleeced -- they had to know that what Madoff was selling had every appearance of being a diversified investment. They had to be made smart first, and one gets, from their testimony, not only anger at financial loss, but the Flowers-From-Algernonian anger of one who has been made to look stupid after having just been made smart. Capitalism has been colonized by super-intelligent aliens such as these, aliens who now may be dying slowly of the common cold.
Given that very few can master the native ideology, it stands to reason that a good many of us would at least defect to another impossible-to-master ideology. Marxism won't do, of course, until whatever Marxists are left can identify as anything other than a bunch of weak totalitarian douchebags arguing amongst themselves about the disbursment of the world they've yet to win. I imagine that the post-scarcity, social-democratic, polyamorous world that DS9 and I am partial to is not to everyone's liking. For them, Mad Men must be a great relief. Mad Men takes place before the aliens have landed (try now to imagine Don Draper turning on the television to Star Trek's first season, just a few years down the road, in 1966, and huffily switching it back off). Ideological differences in Mad Men were real, and not just hypothetical.
The form capitalism took in Mad Men is utterly unlike the form it takes today: what could be more outrageous in contemporary terms than the scene in which Don Draper defeats Duck on the basis of a handshake deal he made with the partners many years back? What, not even a nondisclosure agreement? They may as well shoot phasers at one another. Peggy's heroic pre-feminism is far more interesting than Hillary's compromised post-feminism. Admit it -- Republican blackface aside -- the late fifties and early sixties were a high water mark for those who believe that capitalism is the tide that raises all boats. The only truly utopic moment of capitalism -- the southern and midwestern soul music industry -- rose (and quickly died) during this period. Their liberal-democratic, high-tax-base world, in which small firms could feel like they could make a big difference, in which not knowing the effects of alcohol did not in any way affect the pleasure of partaking of them, was worth working in. Competence -- either in liberal heroism or Republican stoicism -- was not a wasted effort in that world. There is nothing ignoble in the escape to this world. As any neoliberal can tell you, escape from unrelenting ideological systems has a distinguished history.
All that aside, look at the similarities. These characters are their jobs -- people like Betty Draper on Mad Men, or the Bejorans on DS9, languish for having too much time on their hands. It is in work that these characters find their identities. The open lobby of Sterling Cooper and the promenade in DS9 are constructed from some waystation in the art director's mind where present reality cannot enter. The spaces are perfect imaginings where every problem to be solved -- a march in Selma, Alabama, or the signing of a peace accord among old factions of Bejorans -- will be of the utmost importance. I've mentioned Benjamin Sisko's place in a long line of filmic middle-managers before him, and Don Draper stands at the head of that line. ¶ 10:59 PM
Strike the weird outfits, the world-building sets, the outré cultural habits, references to "Gibsons" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Mad Men, like DS9, becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office.
Right? I know I'm driving this thing home. I know you're probably thinking, sure, whatever, middle class people like to be "transported" by way eco-vacations to Brazil in the pages of Monocle magazine or into Flo Rida's bedroom through Cribs or among handsome 28-year-old novelists having meaningful spiritual crises in Manhattan through whatever book's on the cover of the NYTBR. So, why not to the 60's, why not to deepest space? Who's counting?
First, we have to distinguish between the promise of what's flatly impossible and what's merely improbable. The impossible requires a lot more information. From a creator's point of view, Science Fiction and Historical Drama share many of the same pitfalls, the dreaded infodump being foremost among them. Both of these shows show an artful dispatching of this background exposition. Roger Sterling's reference in last Sunday's episode to a “Yetta Wallenda-sized misstep," added nothing to the plot. And though it did evoke atmosphere, it was one potentially alienating to right-thinking people. Yet it was, thankfully, done without a lot of narrative hand-wringing, because "Yetta Wallenda" belongs to the sort of people who wear one-button suits and fedoras, and Matthew Weiner wants very badly for these people not to explain themselves but to simply be. They live within their own infodump. In this same way, the creators of Star Trek don't have to provide exposition when referring to potency of Klingon Blood Wine: if you don't know it's potent, you're simply not of that world.
To want things you can't have has become unbearable. I'm thinking this wasn't always so. I imagine that at one time, our attitude towards wanting things we couldn't have defined what it meant to be an adult. To have everything was the purview of a few mentally-ill half-children like Howard Hugues or Lee Iacocca, and the rest of us struck for a fair wage. Now, wanting to have a 64' flat screen television mounted above our bed is the basis of an unrelenting national ideology approaching the ubiquity and toxicity of Korean leader-worship (if you're able to afford both cable television and basic dentistry at once, you may be tempted to view the comparison as hyperbole -- come back to me when and if you ever fall behind that line). Even sexual pleasure has been reduced to the level of a Ponzi scheme. We have all failed to become Flo Rida, but if we put in a few extra Saturdays we may come a bit closer. What you think you need to survive, like science-fiction, is always just up the road, and the underpinning of this requires a communal exposition very like an infodump. Bernard Madoff, made sociopathic with information, required the same sociopathology of his victims. They had to be brought up to speed before getting fleeced -- they had to know that what Madoff was selling had every appearance of being a diversified investment. They had to be made smart first, and one gets, from their testimony, not only anger at financial loss, but the Flowers-From-Algernonian anger of one who has been made to look stupid after having just been made smart. Capitalism has been colonized by super-intelligent aliens such as these, aliens who now may be dying slowly of the common cold.
Given that very few can master the native ideology, it stands to reason that a good many of us would at least defect to another impossible-to-master ideology. Marxism won't do, of course, until whatever Marxists are left can identify as anything other than a bunch of weak totalitarian douchebags arguing amongst themselves about the disbursment of the world they've yet to win. I imagine that the post-scarcity, social-democratic, polyamorous world that DS9 and I am partial to is not to everyone's liking. For them, Mad Men must be a great relief. Mad Men takes place before the aliens have landed (try now to imagine Don Draper turning on the television to Star Trek's first season, just a few years down the road, in 1966, and huffily switching it back off). Ideological differences in Mad Men were real, and not just hypothetical.
The form capitalism took in Mad Men is utterly unlike the form it takes today: what could be more outrageous in contemporary terms than the scene in which Don Draper defeats Duck on the basis of a handshake deal he made with the partners many years back? What, not even a nondisclosure agreement? They may as well shoot phasers at one another. Peggy's heroic pre-feminism is far more interesting than Hillary's compromised post-feminism. Admit it -- Republican blackface aside -- the late fifties and early sixties were a high water mark for those who believe that capitalism is the tide that raises all boats. The only truly utopic moment of capitalism -- the southern and midwestern soul music industry -- rose (and quickly died) during this period. Their liberal-democratic, high-tax-base world, in which small firms could feel like they could make a big difference, in which not knowing the effects of alcohol did not in any way affect the pleasure of partaking of them, was worth working in. Competence -- either in liberal heroism or Republican stoicism -- was not a wasted effort in that world. There is nothing ignoble in the escape to this world. As any neoliberal can tell you, escape from unrelenting ideological systems has a distinguished history.
All that aside, look at the similarities. These characters are their jobs -- people like Betty Draper on Mad Men, or the Bejorans on DS9, languish for having too much time on their hands. It is in work that these characters find their identities. The open lobby of Sterling Cooper and the promenade in DS9 are constructed from some waystation in the art director's mind where present reality cannot enter. The spaces are perfect imaginings where every problem to be solved -- a march in Selma, Alabama, or the signing of a peace accord among old factions of Bejorans -- will be of the utmost importance. I've mentioned Benjamin Sisko's place in a long line of filmic middle-managers before him, and Don Draper stands at the head of that line. ¶ 10:59 PM
