“They carry their pasts around with them,” Matthew Weiner says of his Mad Men characters in his audio commentary to the third season episode “My Old Kentucky Home.” In that episode in particular he could also have been speaking of big swaths of the American past, as the episode includes Roger’s blackface recital of the Stephen Foster tune named in the title, Pete and Trudy dancing “The Charleston”, and Don’s introduction to a Conrad Hilton who bears an awfully close visual resemblance to Mark Twain, all in a Long Island country club setting that alludes to The Great Gatsby. Mad Men is not only set in the past, it has as one of its main themes the tension between the persistence of the past and the process of change.
Mad Men is one of the few serialized dramas set in the past. In the history of prime time episodic television there are relatively few series, of any genre, set in the past. In comedies, there is M*A*S*H and Happy Days -- in dramas, The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Of these examples, M*A*S*H used its historical setting as cover for discussing contemporary issues. As Steven Stark summarizes, “M*A*S*H was envisioned as a thinly disguised antiwar allegory on the still-raging Vietnam War.” (Stark, Glued to the Set, 279) The others used historical settings largely as nostalgia, as a way of relieving anxiety about the complications of the present through a “contrast with a simpler past,” as Bonnie J. Dow noted in her study of Dr. Quinn. (Dow, Prime-Time Feminism,169)
Although some find a certain nostalgia in Mad Men’s style and fashion, the overall tone of the show is not one of nostalgia for a less complicated era. Mad Men’s approach to history bears closer resemblance to the historical miniseries (although without the generational sweep.) As Glen Creeber discussed in his introductory essay to Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, some of the first and most prominent examples of serialized narrative outside of soap opera were in historical miniseries, starting with 1976’s immensely popular Rich Man, Poor Man, which “appeared to trigger a wave of historically based serials,” perhaps due to an interest in American history surrounding the Bicentennial celebrations in the same year. (Creeber, 19) Historical miniseries like Roots, Centennial, The Winds of War, and North and South attracted large audience on network television through the 1980s and continue today on premium cable with prestige projects like HBO’s John Adams and The Pacific.
What can an examination of historical miniseries tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of serialized television as a vehicle for storytelling about history? Creeber argues:
An historical miniseries like Roots is perhaps best understood in terms of its ability to offer viewers a form of ‘the real’ that may go beyond traditional notions of realism of historical accuracy alone. While historical ‘facts’ are inevitably crucial in its successful rendering of history, perhaps just as important is its ability to breath life into the emotional side of the past, thereby personalizing the political nature of history and imbuing these sometimes stale facts with individual power and relevance to a contemporary audience. (Creeber, 27)
Calling upon Ian Ang’s study of Dallas, Creeber suggests that serialized narrative invites viewers to use “melodramatic imagination” as we empathize and “identify with characters over a surprisingly large period of screen time.” (Creeber, 27-28) When these characters are in a historical setting, this melodramatic imagination can be extended back in time, as we imagine what it might have been like to live at the time and be forced to make certain choices.
To be sure, all historical drama of any length invites some of this kind of identification.
Serials, however, intensify the identification, as the length of the narrative and the pauses between episodes creates a different kind of investment in character over time.
Serials allow more time for viewers to become invested in their characters, allowing for the slow, gradual, careful accumulation of character traits, back-story and main story. To return to Mad Men, we do not learn of Don’s childhood and the events that led him to become ad man Don Draper in one fell swoop. Flashbacks, revelations, and encounters with people from his past are parceled out over multiple episodes. Don may “carry around his past” as Weiner says, but we only learn about that past through the slow accumulation of detail. Similarly, when we view the confident, creative copy-writer Peggy Olson of 1965 in the fourth season of Mad Men, we are aware of the slow process of change over four seasons that began with her first day on the job as Don’s secretary in the pilot episode.
In a study of serialized narrative in many formats, from Dickens' serialized novels to daytime soap opera, Jennifer Hayward argues that all serialized storytelling tends to “intertwine fictions with the everyday lives of audiences” as the pauses between episodes allow the audience time to ponder character dilemmas. (Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, 29) Their stories become intertwined with out stories as we think about what might happen next and perhaps discuss those possibilities with other fans.
Of course social history is a history of slow, gradual change in the lives of individuals. Serialized narrative should be particularly well suited to telling this kind of history and allowing the kind of investment in character over time that invites viewers to move past preconceived notions of “the sixties” as a monolithic symbol of cultural change and instead see the slow and gradual process of cultural change as individuals change their lives and react to changes in the culture.
Mad Men should also allow us an opportunity to delve deeper into storytelling and character development technique in serialized narrative. How is slow and gradual change portrayed? How is it parceled out among scenes, episode arcs, character arcs, and season arcs? What are the techniques that build investment in character over time? As we look at individual episodes over the course of this class, I plan to explore those questions in greater detail.
Creeber's mention of Ien Ang's study of Dallas reminded me that I've seen her book mentioned nearly a dozen times now in various works on television. I read through it today, and found (among many things) an interesting elaboration on the experience of the passage of time in serialized narrative.
ReplyDeleteAng describes the sequential nature of serialized narrative as creating a "notion of the continuance of time, a continuance which is linear and irreversible." (Ang, 52) Ang's phrase reminds me of a line from late an episode late in the third season of Remington Steele (which was partially serialized) where Laura Holt says to Steele in discussing their relationship, "We don't go forward and we can't go back." Characters in serials are not only aware of their own histories, but aware that there is no going back to beginning of their storyline, which, of course, more closely approximates the reality of time as we experience it.
In the next paragraph Ang discusses the audience's experience of the time in between scenes of an episode and in between episodes. Calling this in-between time "unrecorded existence", Ang says that serials construct "the feeling that the lives of the characters go on during our absence", as "psychological cliffhangers" at the end of scenes and episodes leave characters in a new conflicted situation.
Building from Ang's term, I would add that the newer forms of prime time serials (Ang is writing in 1982 specifically about soap opera) have become particularly good at creating episode ends that provide some narrative closure while also constructing new psychological conflicts. For example, in the pilot of Mad Men, Don Draper returns to his home in Ossining in the final scene, where the viewer learns that he has a wife and kids. The return home provides narrative closure to the episode, yet as we have seen Don in one affair and possibly pursuing another, the revelation of wife and kids also raises a new psychological conflict (and raises our level of interest in finding out who this guy is.)
These additional nuances from Ang about the nature of time in serialized narrative underscore the suitability of this kind of narrative for stories of slow, gradual change in social history. The characters are moving forward in history and can't go back (and the audience has some idea what forward in history means). The characters "unrecorded existence" also takes place in historical time and place. When we fill in the gaps between scenes and episodes, we are not only using melodramatic imagination but also historical imagination.