Mad Men Class: TV & Social History

Two New TV Writing Books of Note

2011-09-30T09:31:00.000-04:00

Although this class is over, the blog still gets a good bit of traffic through Google searches. With that in mind, I wanted to mention two new books on TV writing that may be useful for folks who are thinking about questions of television writing that I discussed in this class and on the blog.

Pamela Douglas' "Writing the TV Drama Series" has recently been updated and released in a third edition. I found her chapter "How a Classic TV Script is Crafted" particularly relevant to a series of posts on this blog about character goals in each episode and each beat of the episode. Douglas reprints excerpts of two NYPD Blue scripts and analysizes the script beat by beat to isolate the various dramatic elements in each beat, discusses the interweaving of A, B & C stories, and the intersection of long character arcs with the "case of the week" elements of the series.

William Rabkin's "Writing the Pilot" makes an important set of distinctions between a pilot that sets a story in motion, and a pilot that sets up a series theme and set of conflicts that can generate the large number of stories required by a long-running television series. With a series like Mad Men that does not have "case of the week" element, theme becomes even more important as a "story engine".

Although both of these books are written as screenwriting guides, they are not aimed at novice screenwriters, making them all the more valuable to us in an academic setting as we try to understand how the choices writers make, the techniques that they use, and the system they work in impact the final product that we see on the screen.

"Tomorrowland", American Dreams, and Reinventions

2011-06-24T13:49:00.002-04:00

"Tomorrowland" is one of my favorite Mad Men episodes, and one in which I see thematic connections between Don's personal re-inventions and the set of reinventions that America was going through in both the social and political history of the '60s. In some ways, the notion of this independent study was born of my reading of that episode when it was first aired. The shorthand version of my initial analysis went something like this (I'm copying and editing for length from a comment I posted on Slate's TV Club page):

America is an invented country and Americans are united around a set of ideas about freedom and democracy, not a common ethnic heritage. At the big moments in our history, we have re-invented, re-told the story of what it means to be an American. The Civil War - Lincoln's Gettysburg address - being the most promient example of that. The Sixties are another example -- from the civil rights movment (which we saw references to in season 3) to the women's movement (which we've focused prominently on this season) to the counter culture and Vietnam war protests (which we as an audience know are coming soon for these characters).

To me, what the series is trying to say with these parallels between Don's re-inventions (successful ones, false starts, ones that start out hopeful but fade, ones that never quite come to terms with his "original sin") and American re-inventions in the sixties is this: re-inventions are complicated things. They aren't done in one fell swoop. The involve, at least initially, a dream, a romantic belief that life can start again, and be a little better -- even if that dream has a shaky foundation and can't quite match the realities.

Megan believes in Don's re-invention -- has a faith (emotional, without solid rational evidence) in the dream of, if you will, a more perfect union. When, if, she marries Don she will literally become an American (by naturalization). Her faith in the re-invented dream will make her an American.

In this class, I've been exploring that thematic linkage. Is it a legitimate one, and if so, how is it supported in the writing techniques and the dense connection between episodes? What else can we say about the history of the '60s, and how we think about the meanings of the '60s, in making comparisons between aspects of history and the series? This part of the syllabus gives me a chance to come back to the starting point, and explore this thematic connection more directly.

Matthew Weiner's audio commentary for the episode does directly support or deny the linkage between Don's arc and the arc of American history, but does emphasize some elements of Don's choice I had not initially considered. For Weiner, Don's choice between Faye and Megan was a choice between taking a "more viable and more adult" path to future growth where you "accept who you are and use that as the basis for your future", or do you "choose to completely erase everything and reinvent yourself." Weiner then softens the starkness of that choice and points out ways in which Don makes baby steps towards telling the truth about his past to his children (telling them that he is sometimes called Dick when they see the name on the wall in Anna's house) and to Megan (starting to lie about the ring and then saying that it came from someone who was important to him). Wiener underscores that Don is choosing a romantic fantasy, and that falling in love always involves a bit of delusion. He also points out that the line Bobby delivers regarding the Disneyland attractions -- "I don't want to ride an elephant. I want to fly a jet." -- was intended as metaphor for Don's choice as well. Don chooses the fantasy of quick, complete, transformative change instead of the plodding, rational, solidly grounded, and often painful path of growth.

Weiner adds the additional layers of speed vs. deliberateness and youth vs. adult to my initial consideration of romantic leap vs. rational calculation. These layers lead me to consider additional historical parallels, because the political changes of the '60s were generally framed in the same way -- romantic, idealistic, perhaps naive, youth demanding speedy transformative change vs. sober adults defending tradition (on the right) or calling for slower, more rational, more deliberate change in order to manage the unruliness of change (the moderate or old left).

We see these themes in '60s history articulated by different players at different times. In the 1960 presidential campaign, we have the youthful vigor of Kennedy's New Frontier contrasted with Ike's midwestern solidity. Soon afterward, as Todd Gitlin recounts in The Sixties, we see a division emerge between the younger New Left -- pushing for civil rights, arms control, and the transformations of material society addressed in the Port Huron Statement -- and the old institutional left of FDR, Truman, and big labor, focused on fighting communism and expanding economic growth. Within the civil rights movement, as David Halberstam details in The Children, a division emerges between young African Americans pursuing direct action to protest discrimination, led by young ministers like Martin Luther King and Jim Lawson inspired by Ghandian non-violence, and an older generation of more conservative black bourgioisie. (see Chapter 4) And in the later '60s, both Gitlin's SDS and King's civil rights movement will be confronted and criticized by younger factions pushings for faster and more radical change. Vietnam looms over all of this, as it does Phillip Roth's masterpiece American Pastoral, set in the late '60s, which also emphasizes this theme of generational divide over the proper pace of change.

In "Tomorrowland", Don is siding with youth, and romantic, transformative change in his personal life. (The move from cynical thought to youthful thought is part of the zeitgiest, right? It's in Dylan, "My Back Pages", "I was so much older then, I'm young than that now.") He has fallen in love, and that has erased (perhaps only momentarily) his cynical existentialism expressed in the pilot, where he tells Rachel Menken that love is a notion dreamed up by advertising men. For now, Don (largely) believes the advertising. As with his epiphany on the American Airlines pitch (which clearly links Don's personal transformations with American history), Don is falling in love with the dream of a future in which past mistakes don't matter, and slates are wiped clean. Of course, the episode also contrasts Don's romantic belief with Betty's growing realization that her new life with Henry has not resulted in a "fresh start", and with the delightful scene of Joan and Peggy dishing about Don's engagement in clear-headed terms. The episode plays all of these attitudes towards personal change against one another, and ends with one of those ambiguous scenes of Don looking out the window, leading us all to wonder to what extent his new personal dream can be realized.

But here's the thing -- and this is where I disagree, apparently, with most viewers and with Weiner, at least to some extent -- I don't know that personal growth, cultural change, or political change is more possible or more sustainable when it has a rational propulsion rather than a romantic one. Let's go back to Weiner's emphasis of the line in which Bobby contrasts riding in an elephant with riding in a jet. Anything that flies has to overcome inertia and gravity -- the forces attempting to hold it to the ground. From all three perspectives we have been considering here -- the personal, the social, the political -- there are forces of inertia that favor habit and status quo over change. To me, some element of dream, of romantic delusion, is the necessary jet fuel to overcome inertia. Critics of the episode, and Weiner himself in the commentary, fault Don to some extent for needing a belief in a romantic dream to achieve forward motion. Yet in my experience, that's how human nature works. Without the dream, illusory as it may be, inertia wins.

"The Sixties"

2011-06-23T11:54:00.000-04:00

I set aside this final part of the syllabus to look at the political history of the early 1960s. The characters in Mad Men are not directly political actors for the most part: Sterling Cooper pursues an involvement in the '60 Nixon campaign but ultimately don't play much of role; Paul Kinsey participates in one civil rights bus trip, belatedly, to please a girlfriend, when he loses out on work assignment; Joan's husband Greg becomes an army doctor, stationed in Vietnam, when his civilian medical career reaches an impasse. Aside from these examples, the major political events of the early '60s -- the Cuban Missile Crisis, the March on Washington, the JFK assassination -- unfold for these characters as news bulletins, on television, as they go about their work and personal lives. This is not to say that the events have no impact in the series -- the characters are aware of, comment upon, and react to historical events; episodes use historical references as allusion and metaphor -- but to emphasize that political history is something that happens to the world that the characters live in, not something that they actively choose or create.

That storytelling choice, aside from adding to the overall realism of the series, strikes me as a mirror of the way today's audience, made up (perhaps primarily) of people who did not live through the '60s, approaches the decade. We know that these events, these changes, this phenomena we shorthand as "The Sixties" made the world we live in today, but we did not participate directly in the making. The political and cultural fault lines that opened up from these events are still active in our politics, in our culture. We know we live in a world made by "The Sixties", in a world that still actively debates the meaning of "The Sixties".

I'm influenced in this line of thought by a book called Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of Decade by historian Bernard von Bothmer. Von Bothmer examines the way in which political rhetoric in subsequent decades turned the events of the decade into the (contested, and variously defined) political and cultural metaphor of "The Sixties". Von Bothmer opens his discussion with a quote from Bill Clinton stumping for John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, in which Clinton concludes: "If you look back on the sixties and, on balance, you think there was more good than harm in it, you're probably a Democrat, and if you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican." Clinton uses party labels, but in 2004 (and to a large extent this is still true today) party labels were seen as cultural labels as well. Blue state Democrats were college educated, secular, urban, coastal, and accepting of cultural diversity; red state Republicans were religious, traditional, unquestioningly patriotic and small town. These are simplifications, of course, but as Clinton points out, they are stereotypes divided by a binary moral judgement on "The Sixties".

Todd Gitlin's preface to the 1992 edition of his book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, written at the end of Clinton's first campaign for president, also emphasizes the way in which "The Sixties" as symbol is an "absurd reduction" that simplistically "enshrine[s] myths". Gitlin notes that "The Sixties" works as a political symbol because the issues raised by the political and cultural upheavals are still unsettled in some important way -- that "the genies that the Sixties loosed are still abroad in the land, inspiring and unsettling and offending, making trouble." Gitlin's use of the word "genies" is telling; there is the notion that events of the '60s unleashed forces that were unanticipated and uncontrollable. Gitlin writes, "They must have been either wonderfully high times or else a catastrophe anyone was lucky to have survived. They were days of unbridled idealism or rampant destruction, youthful exuberance or degeneracy, moral intelligence or stupidity."

Mad Men plays with our fascination of The Sixties as a symbol and uncontrollable force, but also reinvests The Sixties with some of the complexities and contradictions that the symbol, in both of its political polarities, obscures. We think of JFK's "Camelot" and assume all young people were for Kennedy, but Mad Men says there were young, professional New Yorkers for Nixon. We project ourselves into 1963 and assume we would have cheered on (or attended) King's "I have a dream" speech, but Mad Men shows it happening, almost unnoticed, on television, in the background. Or we look back and think we'd drink less, smoke less, not litter the roadside, or let our children place plastic dry-cleaning bags over their heads, and Mad Men reminds us that social norms (which change over time) influence individual choices. At the same time, it reminds us that people like Paul Kinsey and Peggy Olsen made "political" decisions for personal, and sometimes confused, reasons. They are like us, and not like us, and that is part of the attraction, and the puzzle.

Sally Draper, Miss Blankenship and Long Arc of Women's History in "The Beautiful Girls"

2011-06-09T13:40:00.002-04:00

I've intended to write about Sally's run-away escape to Don's office in "The Beautiful Girls" for some time now. (Slate's Michael Agger, in a nice turn of phrase, called it an "unexpected take-your-daughter-to-work day".) I've also been rewatching "Tomorrowland", and the overstuffed jukebox in my head has merged the two episodes together with the soundtrack of the Donald Fagen song "Tomorrow's Girls". I'll accept that little assist from my own unconscious, because its clear that the scene in which Peggy, Joan, and Faye accompany Sally in the elevator for the handoff to Betty is meant to evoke speculation in the audience about Sally's tomorrows -- what kind of woman will she become. Miss Blankenship's death, and Bert Cooper's comment about the scope of history in her life -- she was born in a barn and died in a skyscraper -- she was an astronaut -- also primes us for thinking about the long arc of Sally's future.

Keith Phipps at the A.V. Club makes that point in his episode wrap-up, emphasizing that the women in the episode speak of, and represent, choices and limitations:

“The Beautiful Girls” puts a special emphasis on the way things have changed for women in 1965, and the ways they’ll continue to change in the years to come. We never learn why Miss Blankenship ended up alone and in contact with virtually no one outside the SCDP staff—beyond Roger’s Queen Of Perversions line, I guess—but she was doubtlessly given a different set of choices than those presented to other women on the show, and different from those Sally Draper will face when she grows up. Maybe “choices” is the wrong word. It’s the one Fay uses to describe how got to her late thirties childless but accomplished. But where Fay talks about choices, Peggy talks about limitations.

I've discussed the scene with Peggy's talk about limitations here and referenced the still remarkable story of how an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in employment based on gender, as well as race, color, religion and national origin. At the time of this episode, however, the law had not made much impact. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was set up as an enforcement mechanism, but women's complaints were "ignored and ridiculed". (Ruth Rosen, "Chronology" in The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America, 2000, xix) Gail Collins explains that the first complainants to the EEOC were stewardesses, looking for help to fight airline bans on marriage and age discrimination, but male officials took little action. (Gail Collins, When Everything Changed, 2009, kindle location 1239-1253). This inaction would be part of the impetus for the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the summer of 1966 as a "NAACP for women". (Collins, location 1277)

As we move forward in the history, through Sally Draper's lifetime, the theme of choices and limitations continues. Sally is roughly ten years old in this episode, which means that she would graduate from high school in 1972 or 1973 -- both pivotal years in women's history. In 1972 the Equal Rights Amendment passed both Houses of Congress and was sent to the states for ratification, and Title IX was passed to enforce gender equality in education. Ms. magazine was launched, and the television sitcom Maude aired their famous episode about abortion. 1973 brought the Roe v. Wade decision, and in pop culture, Helen Reddy won a Grammy for "I Am Woman". (Rosen, xxiv-xxv) Let's imagine Sally choosing to go to a four-year college (perhaps one of the ones newly open to women in the early '70s) and graduate school. If so, she'd enter the workforce in the late '70s or early '80s, after Nixon's veto of federal child care legislation, as the new conservative movement was gaining momentum and defeating ratification of the ERA, and as the country seemingly decided that it was not the place of the federal government to further remedy limitations.

Sally would find herself, as a young working woman in the early '80s, with new legal rights and opportunities, but also facing additional challenges. Ruth Rosen describes the dominant media image of that time, which coalesced in daily newspapers around various "first women" entering previously male domains through talent and determination -- the American "can do" spirit. (Rosen, 304) Rosen sums up: "by 1980, most Americans imagined a feminist as Superwoman, hair flying as she rushed around, an attache case in one arm, a baby in the other....The Superwoman could "have it all" but only if she "did it all". (295) And the underlying assumption, of course, is that the Superwoman does this all by choice -- it is both her privilege and her burden. As I discussed earlier, I'm a generation younger than Sally, and grew up with these '80s messages, and was not really forced to question those assumptions about individual choice until much later in life.

None of the women who flank Sally in "The Beautiful Girls" face this choice -- Betty doesn't work, and neither Joan, Peggy or Faye have children at this point in the series. Interestingly, Mad Men uses Don's position as a divorced dad to raise these issues. Sally shows up at the office after running away, and he has deal with juggling work and child care when Betty refuses to retrieve Sally. In "Tomorrowland", Don faces the same problem with all three children when Betty fires Carla before the trip to California. In both cases, Don looks for other women to fill the void -- asking Faye to take Sally to his apartment in "The Beautiful Girls" and bringing his new secretary Megan along as babysitter in "Tomorrowland". Megan's stellar turn as substitute mother (and Faye's unease with the task) certainly contribute to Don's impulsive marriage proposal at the end of "Tomorrowland".

Matthew Weiner doesn't expect his audience to know all of the details of women's rights history between 1965 and 2010, when season four first aired. But he does encourage his audience to make contrasts and draw broad conclusions about the similarities and differences between then and now. To be sure, the differences are significant. Peggy wouldn't be the only female copywriter -- there would likely be a female partner and dozens of other women at various management positions. Joan would have had the opporyunity to sue for sexual harassment over the lewd drawings that were posted (though I'm not sure she would have chosen that avenue). Peggy's friend Joyce would have legal protections in a domestic partnership, or in certain states, legal gay marriage.

Yet, frankly, I'm struck more by the similarities in how these women negotiate the workplace of the early '60s than the differences -- by the degree to which these various women must make their own choices, fight their own individual battles, piece together their own personal solutions, with little sense of joint effort or solidarity or little sense of the way in which a larger cultural, economic, and legal system constrains everyone's choices. Laws changed, opportunities opened up, but the "movement" period of women's rights was actually quite short in duration. Television, across the board, is better at presenting individual struggles than group struggles. It will be interesting to see how Weiner deals with the question in season five and beyond.

Mad Men and the Importance of Work for Women

2011-06-07T15:27:00.000-04:00

I've been spending time on the fourth season episode "The Suitcase" while covering the Betty Friedan and Helen Gurley Brown readings that make up the social history portion of this section of the syllabus. One of the Slate.com TV Club posts on this episode jokingly refers to it as an episode about "work-work balance", and in another post Julia Turner says that "this episode should cement Peggy's status as an early working girl as iconic as Mary Tyler Moore."

Many commenters also note the way the episode hints at some future romantic entanglement between Don and Peggy (or perhaps hints that other shows, other narratives, would go down that path) but stays firmly in the realm of professional connection. Matt Zoller Seitz' review notes that as Peggy has evolved from secretary to copywriter and manager of a creative team, her relationship with Don has evolved so that she "habitually speaks to him without any deference at all", despite the fact that he is her boss, and despite a culture that still respects and reinforces all manner of heirarchies. Todd VanDerWerff at the A.V. Club sums it up this way: "It is a series based around the idea that these two are creative and professional soulmates but shouldn't necessarily be personal ones, that the culmination of this relationship could be something as simple as the two of them having mutual appreciation and respect for each other."

That's actually quite revolutionary, and perhaps one of the less remarked upon aspects of social change since the 1960s -- as women entered the workforce in greater numbers and took on greater responsibilities in those workplaces, men and women learned to relate to one another in different ways in the workplace (and in school, though its not Mad Men's topic). To be sure, sometimes those relationships led to affairs and/or marriages, and Mad Men gives us numerous examples of those cases, but often they led to professional collaborations and real friendship. The Don and Peggy relationship may be slightly ahead of its time, and perhaps, as Seitz argues, rare for television, but for someone of the next generation, who has always had friendships and professional collaborations with people who happen to be of the other gender, it rings true in a refreshing way.

Of course, the thing that bonds Don and Peggy's friendship is their mutual belief that work is the most important thing in their lives -- they spend the episode using a work deadline to avoid painful personal relationships. Peggy tells Don, "I know what I'm supposed to want, but it just never feels right. Or as important as anything in that office." As we discussed earlier, it is important to both of them that their work is creative, and that the thematics of the series link creative work with personal reinvention and hope in the creation of new, clean-slate futures. At the end of "The Suitcase", we see another example of this symbolic reinvention. Don's proposed ad for Samsonite has their client's product playing the role of the victorious Cassius Clay / Mohammed Ali , mimicking the famous newspaper photo of decisive triumph. Don is drunk, dishevelled, and anguished about Anna's death for most of the episode, and forced to cry "uncle" in his scuffle with Duck. But he can reverse all of that through creative work, tying his client to a victor that he did not back (Don preferred Liston), and with a clean shirt and a fresh idea, regain some control over his life. Work brings self-respect and renewal for Don and Peggy, as well as the rapport of creative collaboration. That's why it feels more important to them than anything else.

For women, of course, paid work outside the home takes on an added importance. With brief asides in The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman tied women's work outside the home to his conception of autonomy. Prefiguring Helen Gurley Brown, Reisman argues that women in working-class jobs gain "independence that lays the groundwork for some autonomy in play, even when the work remains, as it does for most working women, routine." (282) Prefiguring Friedan, Reisman describes upper and middle class women, increasingly isolated in the suburbs, aware that their housework is not culturally "defined as work" (262) and blocked, in his assessment, from meaningful volunteer work, who "either sink back into indifference or conclude, like their working-class sisters, that it is only through a job, a culturally defined job, will they be liberated." (283) In the same breath, however, Riesman seems to suggest that women's autonomy matters only to the extent that their unhappiness creates problems for their overburdened husbands. (283) Brown and Friedan, of course, would view women's independence and autonomy as far more important in its own right.

Helen Gurley Brown's relationship to feminism is a complicated. Jennifer Scanlon argues in Bad Girls Go Everywhere that Brown's life and work are an "untold element of the second wave and a clear antecedent to the third." (xiv) Brown's single girl was not inferior to married women or a "defective species" or "social problem". She "aims for financial independence" through her own earnings, and "enjoys the various sexual choices available to her". (Scanlon, 66) Describing Brown as advocating a "Horatio Alger version of feminism" that appealed to many "outside the organized women's movement", Scanlon remarks that Brown "believed not in overthrowing the system, but, rather, in working it." (xi) Brown's individualistic philosophy, Scanlon argues, originated in her working-class background and years of experience supporting herself as a copywriter in an advertising agency. (97) Aside from Friedan's obvious focus on married women rather than single women, Scanlon points out that Friedan's focus on college educated women and their personal and education growth -- their self-actualization -- overlooks the degree to which women could gain self-esteem through less intellectually demanding work as well, "regardless of the status of their jobs or the size of their paychecks." (100)

Although Mad Men's Joan, with her obvious sex appeal, is generally seen as emblematic of Brown's approach, Peggy embodies much of Brown's philosophy as well, seeing work as key to her independence from her family and others who would put limits on her. Yet Peggy's desire to move up in the ranks at the agency -- to achieve respect for creative and intellectual work that she could not have achieved as a secretary -- distances her from the more egalitarian, but also more materialistic, aspects of Brown's philosophy. One suspects that the Friedan of The Feminine Mystique would have seen the typical secretary as too much like a housewife, performing dull and routine work that serviced her boss rather than "putting for the effort to become all that [she] has it in [her] to become" through work that "uses [her] full capacities." (Friedan, 336)

To return to the "The Suitcase", Peggy's growing sense of equality with Don, and his respect for her as a professional, although they are not equals in years of experience or in the heirarchy of the agency, indicate her growth over the long character arc of the series to that point. In choosing work, and pushing to make the most of her professional opportunities, Peggy has become more independent, more confident, more like Riesman's autonomous type or Friedan's self-actualized one, than the "new girl" we meet in the pilot. In the last episode of season four, "Tomorrowland", she takes the initiative to bring in the first new client to the agency after the loss of Lucky Strike. Peggy's arc in Mad Men, though not without its difficulties, is the closest thing we have in the series to a heroic trajectory. In "My Old Kentucky Home" she tells her secretary Olive that she's going to be alright, and we believe her.

The Unsold Helen Gurley Brown "Sex and the Single Girl" Sitcom

2011-06-02T10:22:00.000-04:00

I have been making my way through Jennifer Scanlon's recent book on Helen Gurley Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere. Scanlon presents a number of arguments regarding Brown's contributions to second wave feminism, including a thought provoking chapter comparing her philosophy to Betty Friedan's. I will post on that aspect of the book sometime next week.

Today though I want to briefly mention a lost bit of television history that Scanlon uncovered when going through Brown's papers. Following the runaway success of Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown and her husband David Brown pursued numerous business and marketing opportunities, including a television sitcom. The proposed series, "The Single Girl Sandra", would feature a single woman who worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency and lived on her own. Scanlon reprints this description from Brown's papers:

[Sandra is] old enough to make quite a good salary and afford the pretty clothes she will wear and the delightful apartment she will live in, young enough to have lots of beaux and lots of delectable-looking girlfriends and sometimes be caught up in the follies of the young. (135)

Brown intended Sandra to come across as intelligent, responsible, fun, and sexy. She envisioned a comedy that would be partially set in Sandra's workplace, describing several plotlines involving Sandra's accounts and clients. Brown wanted Sandra's work to be taken seriously, and was concerned that the ad agency "not be peopled with monsters and imbeciles" but "with the kind of folk who actually work there". (136) She draws comparisons to dramas like Dragnet and The Defenders when describing the work setting for her proposed series. Brown also envisioned Sandra's non-work life, in which her apartment was a hub of activity for male and female friends. Sandra would be "in love with a jazz musician both she and the audience know she will never marry" and date a variety of other bachelors, who Brown describes in detail. (137)

"The Single Girl Sandra" was rejected twice by Warner Brothers and also rejected directly by ABC. Brown subsequently proposed other television shows in various formats including talk shows and game shows, but never inked a deal. It would be the late '60s before Marlo Thomas' That Girl would showcase a single girl living (somewhat) independently, and 1970 before The Mary Tyler Moore Show would feature a female protagonist as independent as the one Brown proposed in 1962.

It interesting though to think about the timing of Brown's pitch, arriving in the wake of FCC Chairman Newt Minow's "Vast Wasteland" speech. Although there's still a great deal of debate over the actual effect of Minow's pronouncement on actual programming decisions at the time -- Robert J. Thompson argues Television's Second Golden Age that it had some effect and led to CBS's decision to schedule The Defenders (27); Stephen Bowie at The Classic TV Blog takes the opposite view here, arguing that the literate, sophisticated shows of the early '60s like The Dick Van Dyke Show, were not a response to Minow. It's easy to assume that Brown's proposal for the "The Single Girl Sandra" stood little chance of ever making its way past the proposal stage with or without the climate created by Minow's speech, but it seems likely that its odds were longer in the wake of the speech than they might have been otherwise. It would be interesting to see if either the Warner Brothers or ABC archives include any correspondance on the rejection of the proposal, and see if their language is at all revealing.

The Personal and the Political

2011-05-30T20:34:00.001-04:00

As much as I enjoy writing about television history and writing techniques, it’s time to switch gears again and return to the social history aspects of the syllabus. We scheduled several weeks to cover early feminism, as it is arguably the aspect of social change in the early 1960’s that Mad Men addresses most directly and consistently.

I feel I need to address some personal history before wading into the depths of academic discourse, or current cultural discourse, on feminism. I need to situate myself among the cross-currents in order to avoid being carried off by a rogue wave or smashed into the rocks on shore. Abstract definitions are easily employed as weapons.

Virginia Woolf has taught me that fiction can be useful in these sorts of essays, so following her lead, I'm going to tell you that I'm having lunch tomorrow with a good friend, outside on the patio in the warmth of late spring, overlooking Portland harbor. My friend "A" and I are part of what scholar Kathleen Gerson calls the "unfinished revolution" -- women born in the late '60s who undeniably benefitted from legal and social breakthroughs of second wave feminism, but find the grand promises of full equality for women that were part of that revolution still unrealized in many ways.

A and I were under five years old when Helen Reddy’s anthem “I Am Woman” was hitting number one in 1972. I cannot reasonably claim to remember the song from that time, but it was played often enough on the radio throughout the ‘70s that I find myself remembering every inflection of Reddy’s phrasing although I haven’t heard the song in decades. The message of the song was echoed throughout the pop culture media of the ‘70s, particularly the elements of that media that were aimed at the young. It’s message merged effortlessly in my mind with the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon on women’s rights and with idealist messages on PBS shows for kids, asserting that girls could do anything boys could do. It was a message of personal empowerment, suggesting that the playing field for women was being leveled, or would be soon, and all women were required to do was stand up for themselves in their personal relationships and find the personal strength and self-confidence to reach for their own future.

A and I first met in the early '90s on an ill-fated political campaign to elect the first women governor in Louisiana. She still works for a top national organization dedicated to electing women to political office. In my previous career, I worked as a consultant to the same organization for many years, and worked as a consultant to numerous other women running for political office. We've also both worked for male candidates, and for other issue organizations. We are (or were, in my case,) political professionals on a certain side of the fence, not cause-oriented activists.

In that first campaign in Louisiana, we were accused by an older woman of taking the gains of second wave feminism for granted. I can say now, with 20/20 hindsight, that there were times in my 20s and early 30s where that was true. I am on record in (perhaps defunct) technology industry magazines saying that I never felt discriminated against as a woman working in the male dominated field of technology for political campaigns. I certainly believe that to be true at the time of the interview. To grab a phrase from another recent book title, I entered the early part of my working life believing that "feminism's work was done" and women could compete in politics or anywhere else on the basis of merit. When the woman candidate in Louisiana no longer met my personal definition of merit, I moved on. Does that mark me as a "third wave" feminist? Perhaps.

Then something curious happened: I had a baby. While I was on maternity leave, an employee quit with little notice. Suddenly I was back in the office, trying to run my consulting business and care for a baby at the same time. I did any number of things wrong, but through some combination of stubborness, naivete, belief in my own merit, and belief in the rhetoric of the political organizations that were my clients, I thought I could do it all. I was wrong. I struggled through the end of the 2004 campaign, and got out with what was left of my sanity.

Later, I came across the work of legal scholar Joan Williams. Her work allowed me to understand that the situation I faced after my daughter was born was not only a personal one -- that I made personal choices and compromises in the context of an economic system and culture that constrains the choices of caregivers (who are still overwhelming women) and within a legal system that has not remedied many forms of discrimination. A 2007 New York Times article on Williams’ work summarizes her arguments:

In the book, which set in motion the legal trend that now consumes much of her time, Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the “ideal worker” who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying “immunity from family work.” At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.
(Eyal Press, “Family-Leave Values”, The New York Times, July 29, 2007)

In this system, as Williams describes it, job advancement (and the definition of who is worthy of merit) goes to men and a small percentage of women who can perform as ideal workers – putting in the long hours, travel, and uninterrupted, concentrated effort that those jobs demand. I couldn't do so with a small child, and so I "opted-out". It was my choice, certainly, and a choice that many do not have, but if there had been a different system, I would have had different choices. I can't claim to support all of William's legal theories and policy proposals to create a different system, but her analysis brought me real understanding and acceptance in a difficult time. I suppose my consciousness was raised.

One of the interesting things to me about workplace issues for women in Mad Men, particuarly in season four, is the extent to which the series presents the dilemmas faced by the "women on the verge of the second wave" (as Mary Beth Haralovitch puts it in the title of her essay in the Edgerton book on Mad Men) as fundamentally similar to the work issues faced by women today. To me, the key set of definitions is not second wave vs. third wave feminism, but political action vs. private sector action.

At the height of the second wave in the early '70s, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her team were winning legal victories and the ERA was passing easily in the states, there was a palpable sense that things were changing in the public sphere -- laws were changing, behavior was changing. And they did change in real ways: my alma mater was off limits to women in the late '60s. I might have been unable to get a credit card in my own name, or a home loan. Changes in the law in the early '70s shaped what the private sector could and could not do. And then the changes stopped. ERA was defeated, and never revived. Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993. Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act in 2009. Those two new laws constitute the significant legislative victories for women's rights since the fight over ERA.

Peggy, Joan, Faye and all the other working women we see on Mad Men largely fight their own individual battles within the private sphere of Sterling Cooper. Small moments of solidarity, like the moment in "Tomorrowland" when Joan and Peggy dish about Don's marriage to Megan, are celebrated by commentators as a sign of things to come in the women's movement. And perhaps we will see more signs of solidarity in seasons to come. I think though, on balance, we will see more divergent opinions and continued competition between the women of Mad Men's workplace. I think Matthew Weiner's realism about the workplaces of today informs his depiction of the workplaces of the early '60s. Competition trumps solidarity when the vast majority of the spoils go the "ideal worker".

Thoughts on the Purposes of Narrative Complexity in Different Series

2011-05-21T15:03:00.001-04:00

With this post, I want to pull back and take a wider perspective from the last post on styles of dramatic dialogue, and talk about different storytelling purposes of complexity in different series, and what that might mean for our larger questions about Mad Men and how it tells stories of social history in the early '60s. Let me take a minute to recap the last few posts and make connections between them to set this wider angle perspective in place:

Earlier this week I focused on particular lines of dialogue in one scene of one episode of Mad Men, and discussed how particular dialogue techniques worked in the scene and added layers of complexity as compared to a more straightforward dramatic exchange. My analysis borrowed from scriptwriting instructor David Freeman's concept of advanced dialogue techniques, which are used to add emotional and dramatic complexity to a scene.

Freeman has a particular aptitude for naming and describing techniques, but does not discuss them in the larger context of when or why a writer might choose one technique over another, or the various reasons why a mix of techniques might be employed in an episode or a series. To fill in some of that context, I attempted to put Freeman's analysis in the context of a different styles of writing dramatic dialogue and describe ways in which well-known series employ a mix of those techniques over time.

Furthermore, the dramatic complexity created by various dialogue techniques is only one category of the kinds of complexity employed by serialized narratives. Steven Johnson, who has studied complexity in various forms of entertainment, lists three categories for television drama -- multi-threaded narrative, complexity of social relationships (both of which are a function of ensemble casts), and the removal of "flashing arrows". (Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You, p.65. An excerpt is online here.) Johnson's flashing arrows term requires a bit of explanation. He contrasts narratives in which we have questions about what will happen in the action -- how the story will end -- with narratives in which the viewer must work to understand what is happening on screen in the moment -- because exposition is omitted, specialized jargon is unexplained, and references to the outside world, previous episodes, or off-camera action are purposefully opaque. (Johnson, p. 73-84) And Johnson's categories of complexity in serialized narrative are certainly not exhaustive. Jason Mittell's work, here, looks at complexity in a number of different ways as well.

My purpose in this post is not to provide an overview or synthesis of the work done on complexity, but to make reference to the existence of that work as a platform for considering questions about the purpose of narrative complexity to the storytelling of different series -- to the themes and "worldview" of different series. I think that the oft-repeated notion that narrative complexity provides greater realism than other modes of storytelling can sometimes mask the way in which different series use complexity in different ways.

Hill Street Blues, of course, is the consensus starting point in this story of television history, and it did use narrative complexity provide a gritty, urban realism to formulaic cop shows. Todd Gitlin's famous chapter in Inside Prime Time on the creation of Hill Street is tellingly titled "Make it look messy", using director Bob Butler's description of the visual style of the pilot to symbolize it's overall intent. Cops weren't always good guys. Bad guys weren't always caught. The inner city precinct was like a war zone. As Steven Johnson summarizes, Hill Street marries "complex narrative structure with complex subject matter" to reflect the complexities of inner city police work and better match the picture of urban crime that early '80s viewers saw in the news every day. (I'll leave aside the thorny question of whether or not news reports were an accurate reflection of urban crime.)

The two other MTM dramas at the time used their own forms of complexity to different ends. St. Elsewhere, sometimes shorthanded at the network as "Hill Street in a hospital", was also set in a gritty urban locale, had an ensemble cast and multi-threaded narratives, and told stories in which doctors were not always heroes -- patients died; doctors died. (Robert Thompson, Television's Second Golden Age, 78-79) Yet St. Elsewhere also used ironic humor and references to other television shows to undercut its own "reality", culminating in the finale in which they the suggest that the whole series was imagined by an autistic boy gazing into a glass snowball. (Thompson, 95-96) St. Elsewhere was self-aware about fabricating realism on TV. MTM's Remington Steele, by contrast, was not multi-threaded, not an ensemble, and still maintained a fiction of good guys always catching bad guys, but added complexity in other ways, including the slow evolution of the main characters. More importantly for this discussion, it added complexity by contrasting multiple layers of role playing to demonstrate that what most people unquestioningly accept as reality is rarely "real". Steele used the detective and romance hybrid format to contrast varieties of lies and masquerades (criminal deceit, undercover posing, role playing to meet social expectations, role playing to maintain romance) with rare moments of unguarded truth. (see this analysis by Jaime Weinman) Steele's complexity served a worldview that said charades were common and truth was rare, and therefore exceedingly valuable.

Northern Exposure emerged from this second branch of MTM complexity, created by St. Elsewhere's Joshua Brand and John Falsey and employing Steele's Jeff Melvoin as writer and supervising producer in its latter seasons. As I discussed in the post on styles of dialogue writing, Northern Exposure used all manner of symbols, metaphors, dream sequences and magic realism to question what spiritual or other metaphysical truths might exist outside of ordinary reality. In the sixth season episode "The Quest", which ended with the return of Joel Fleischman to New York, Fleischman embarks on a mythic quest to find a lost city on an remote Alaskan island, while self-consciously referring to the quest as symbolic and mythic, and saying that as a child he felt he was always viewing the world through a veil. Northern Exposure used complexity to suggest that the unreal (or supernatural real -- definitions get tricky here) was always embedded in the rational, the scientific, and the mundane.

ER, The West Wing, and all the other workplace adrenaline dramas follow from the Hill Street branch, depicting complicated, demanding work environments in which dedicated employees struggle to keep up with complex and constantly unfolding professional crises. Many of the examples Johnson references in his description of dialogue that eliminates "flashing arrows" come from these types of shows. Complexity in the dialogue mirrors complex and socially demanding workplaces in a way that seems to ring true, particularly to educated urban professionals who face increasing complexity in their own work.

All of which brings us back around to Mad Men. What does its mix of techniques that increase complexity tell us? I'm particularly interested in the fact that it employs metaphor more often than the adrenaline dramas, but in a much, much more subtle and naturalistic way than a series like Northern Exposure.

As we discussed earlier in a slightly different context, Matthew Weiner made a conscious decision to make the series less directly workplace focused than a series like The West Wing. As we also discussed in a different context, Don Draper uses metaphoric language when describing his creative breakthroughs on particular advertising campaigns. His announcement to the creative team working on the American Airlines pitch -- "There is no such thing as American history, only the frontier. That crash happened to someone else." -- operates on a literal level regarding the work product, and as a metaphor referring to Don's own life, and to the arc of American history.

I would argue that there are key moments in which the metaphors in Mad Men do more narrative work than other storytelling elements. Like the example I detailed here in the Northern Exposure episode "First Snow", the metaphorical implication of Don saying "There is no such thing as American history, only the frontier" is more important than its literal implication in solving the work problem of how to pitch the client. In both examples, the metaphorical meanings of the object (the new campaign, the chair) do more storytelling work than the literal meanings.

I want to reach (perhaps too far) for one more implication of Mad Men's use of metaphor, which is to note the correlation between series that make heavy use of dialogue techniques that employ symbolism and metaphor and series that highlight the degree to which reality is constructed through myth, media, and social role playing. Don Draper is a fabrication, and is playing a social role (and questioning the role he has fabricated). Peggy Olson is breaking away from the social role she was assigned, fabricating a new one to go along with her job as copy-writer, and is part of a wave of social change that questioned old roles and fabricated new ones.

Metaphors work by allowing the audience to hold more than one meaning in their mind at the same time. The three meanings of Don's line (personal, work, historical) indicate the way in which people, campaigns, and history are constructed -- by people, out of language, employing myth to move past tragedy and harness hope in some clean-slate unseen future. The technique is very subtle in Mad Men, which is perhaps why the contrast with less subtle examples helps to bring it into focus. It may be another example of Steven Johnson's "flashing arrow" being removed, or at least dialed down to a lower wattage.

Styles of Dramatic Dialogue

2011-05-19T17:45:00.005-04:00

My previous two posts (here, and here) have examined dialogue techniques in one scene of one episode of Mad Men, using analytical framework suggested by screenwriting instructor David Freeman in his description of "naturalistic" advanced dialogue techniques. Today I want to pull back from that a bit, and do more work to place those particular techniques in context.

I often work best by examining juxtapositions, and to that end spent several hours yesterday watching scenes from the fifth season of Northern Exposure. I was curious to what extent NX used "naturalistic" dialogue, and if so, how it combined that dialogue with its offbeat characters, use of symbolism, use of magic realism, and its philosophical/spiritual concerns.

That exercise led me to devise a matrix of different styles of dialogue writing. In my current thinking it has a diamond shape and contains four styles that can be defined with some precision. Points in the middle of the diamond would define mixes of techniques, because different episodes and series use different mixes of techniques in their storytelling, although some may predominantly use one style or one unique mixture. Here's a scan of my sketch, and I'll talk about some examples below:

At the top of the diamond I'm placing the category of dialogue techniques that create direct, articulate, heightened emotional exchanges between characters. These are the most fundamental bread and butter techniques in drama of all kind, and you can probably think of numerous examples and variations. For the sake of clarity here, I'll summarize them as techniques in which a character is articulate enough to put his or her feelings into words, says what she means to say, and is understood by her conversational partner. Additionally, these are dramatic exchanges, not plot exposition. In the vast majority of these scenes, the characters will have some sort of emotional conflict (which is what makes it drama) or will show the characters in some sort of emotional synch (again, for dramatic purposes -- the set-up or resolution of a story arc).

When I say these kinds of exchanges are fundamental and common to drama, I don't mean to suggest that they are less artistic than other techniques. They are the foundation of drama on stage and screen, and even those dramas that predominantly use other techniques also use direct dramatic exchange. For a totally random example, I walked over to the bookshelf and selected Death of a Salesman assuming this sort of dramatic exchange would be on nearly every page. Opening at random to page 16, early in Act One, Willy Loman and his wife Linda argue about their adult son Biff:

WILLY:	Biff is a lazy bum!
LINDA:	They're sleeping. Get something to eat. Go on down.
WILLY:	Why did he come home? I would like to know what brought him home.
LINDA:	I don't know. I think he's still lost, Willy. I think he's very lost.

I flipped through other movie and TV scripts for more examples, but I don't think there's a need to belabor the point -- in this kind of dramatic exchange characters express their emotions and express what they mean. The dramatic situation, which we understand to be either out of the ordinary or emotionally heightened in some way, provides narrative complexity and maintains interest in the emotionally direct dialogue.

I think its safe to assert here that television in general and serialized drama in particular, too much directly expressed and emotionally heightened dialogue begins to feel unrealistic because we spend so much screen time with the characters. How much is too much? That's subjective, right, but we can probably agree on the extremes -- the long-running soap opera couple who faces all manner of tribulation and marries, divorces, re-marries, etc. -- or to pick (perhaps unfairly) on a show I don't know that well -- how many times can Jack Bauer be placed in life or death situations as he tries to stop terrorist plots in 24 hours.

The other 3 points on my diamond diagram represent ways to deal with that dilemma of dramatic realism over long narrative time and provide complexity, nuance, and realism to the basic dramatic conflict while keeping viewers engaged over time. (Ensembles are another part of the solution to this same problem -- dramatic conflict is parceled out over multiple characters who can take turns coming to the foreground with A stories or dropping back with less prominent stories.)

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Moving clockwise on the diamond, there's a category of dramatic exchange I call high-stakes prompted emotional admission. Most of the workplace "adrenaline" dramas use these techniques -- ER, West Wing, Homicide, NYPD Blue, etc. -- and there are two important characteristics. The first is that the work itself provides a regular source of dramatic tension -- the protagonists have to save a patient, investigate a crime, deal with a political crisis. The work itself is in a setting that realistically provides drama, and the personal lives and romantic dramas of the characters are secondary. Secondly, this kind of dramatic exchange is used sparingly.

I've set this category across the diamond from indirect emotional expression because the characters who reveal heightened emotion in these kinds of scenes are the same characters who are the most indirect or guarded at other times. This often takes the form of characters speaking passionately about work but communicating more indirectly with romantic partners, and seems to be a useful tactic in dealing with long-running romantic subplots on these kinds of series.

As one example, late in the fourth season of ER, in an episode called "Of Past Regret and Future Fear", Carol Hathaway and Doug Ross have resumed their romantic relationship but little screen time was spent in having the characters speak directly about where they stand with one another. In this episode, Carol treats a dying man who wishes to see his estranged daughter before his imminent death. This prompts Carol to reveal elements of her back-story to the patient about her relationship with her own father. After the man dies, she and Doug have an unusually open and direct conversation about the way her unresolved emotions about her father affect her feelings for Doug, ending in this exchange:

CAROL:	I say I want time, but the truth is I'm scared to death of losing you.
DOUG:	Don't be.
CAROL:	I'm so sorry, Doug.
DOUG:	Don't be.

Lines that would be melodramatic in another context, or if repeated too often week to week, gain realism and retain impact because they are relatively rare, and supported by the drama of the work storyline.

As another example of the way the indirect emotional exchange techniques balance with the high-stakes admission, consider the episode "17 People" from the second season of The West Wing. At this point in the series, the romantic subplot between Josh Lyman and his assistant Donna Moss has been largely conveyed indirectly and remained secondary (if somewhat confused with) their work relationship. This episode uses the work plot of a late night spent attempting to work on jokes to include in the President's speech to the Correspondent's Dinner to reveal back-story about Josh and Donna's relationship and prompt Donna into a rare admission of her true feelings.

First, a portion of the indirect exchange -- Josh has sent Donna flowers to mark the anniversary of their work relationship. Donna is upset by the gesture but has been trying to cover it in front of the other staffers, who are joking about it. In this exchange Josh and Donna are alone in a White House corridor:

JOSH:	Do you know what I sent them?
DONNA:	I know why you think you sent them.
JOSH:	It's our anniversary.
DONNA:	No it's not.
JOSH:	I'm the sort of guy who remembers those things.
DONNA:	No, you're the sort of guy who sends a woman flowers to be mean.

To someone who doesn't know the characters or the situation, this dialogue may look like a direct emotional exchange, but for these characters it is indirect. Most importantly is the confusion of the personal and work relationship -- Josh won't admit his romantic interest and sends flowers for a "work" occasion. Donna is annoyed that he would do something with a romantic overtone when she works hard to keep her feelings in check. In this scene both characters display what Freeman calls "own track", holding on to their own interpretation of the meaning of the anniversary without adjusting to the other person's view. The "work" anniversary, in turn, is both a symbol and false target. It is something they can talk about because they can't talk about their romantic feelings for one another.

By act four Donna comes to the conclusion that the tiff over the flowers should come to an end. Although her decision in not strongly motivated before the scene begins, it is tied thematically to the much more dramatic A story in the episode where President Bartlet makes an uncomfortable admission to another staffer. In this scene, Donna decides to tell Josh the truth about aspects of her relationship with a boyfriend back home that led to her decision to re-join the Bartlet campaign. This exchange follows the story:

DONNA:	Does this make you feel superior? Yes, you're better than my old boyfriend.
JOSH:	I'm just saying that if you were in an accident I wouldn't stop for a beer.
DONNA:	If you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for red lights.

As with the ER example, this admission from Donna is the most direct admission of her actual feelings for Josh until the end of the series, several years later. The combination of workplace drama, indirect exploration of the inter-personal drama, and the very rare direct emotional exchange allowed the relationship arc to stretch for seasons.

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At the bottom of my diamond, I placed symbolic and metaphoric dialogue techniques. Northern Exposure uses these kind of techniques more than most series, and uses several different kinds of these techniques. Most of my examples today seem to focus around long-arc romantic subplots, and that is true for two examples from the fifth season of NX that I want to discuss. Unlike a workplace series, NX is focused on the life of Cicely, Alaska and episodes often revolve around events that affect the whole town. Joel Fleischman, the main protagonist, is in Cicely against his will, paying off medical school debts as the town doctor. His character arc traces his slow evolution as he comes to feel that he is at home in Cicely in some way (although that decision is ultimately reversed when he leaves in season six). As part of this arc he becomes romantically involved with Maggie O'Connell. Their relationship at different its different stages is also a metaphor for his degree of comfort with life in Cicely and its metaphysical implications.

In the episode "First Snow", the C story follows Maggie's progress in redecorating her cabin before winter. She purchases an antique arm chair in Juneau that she loved, but has second thoughts about the purchase. Goldilocks-like, several of her male friends sit in the chair over the course of the episode but find that it is not a good fit. At the end of the episode, Joel sits in the chair and it is a perfect fit. From this description alone, you might find the chair a rather slight metaphor, but it connects with the A & B stories in a way to make a more profound statement. In the A story, Joel has been struggling with the fact that one of his elderly patients has decided that it is time to die, although he can find nothing medically wrong with her. It disturbs his rational, scientific worldview that his patient can feel it is time to die, and that her family and friends accept this irrational belief.

When Joel arrives at Maggie's cabin, his patient has just died. The part of their scene that discusses the patient (Nedra) is extremely indirect:

MAGGIE:	Fleischman.
JOEL:	Hi. I was walking around and I saw your cabin and I don't know...You're probably busy....
MAGGIE:	No, no. Come on in. I heard about Nedra. I'm sorry.
JOEL:	Yeah....

As the scene continues they discuss her new goldfish and Joel sits in her new chair. Again, the dialogue is indirect, and all of the dramatic weight of the otherwise mundane exchange is carried by the symbolic meaning of the chair for them both:

MAGGIE:	What?
JOEL:	This is nice
MAGGIE: (wary)	What do you mean?
JOEL:	It's comfortable.
MAGGIE:	You really think so?
JOEL:	Yeah.

Northern Exposure is quite overt about the meaning of its use of symbols in storytelling. In the B story of the same episode - which crossed over into magic realism - Shelley literally believes that her nose is growing because of a lie she told. She approaches Ed, a native American film-maker and shaman in training, to ask if he can provide the sacrament of confession as her priest might. Ed responds that shamans "sometimes use stories to help people", makes a connection to Biblical parables, and makes a connection to an old film.

In this example, they combine indirect and naturalistic language with visual symbols, metaphorical and thematic connections between story arcs, and magic realism to heighten the complexity and drama of an otherwise ordinary story.

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So where does Mad Men fit on my diamond -- what mix of these styles of dramatic dialogue does it use in its storytelling? I believe Mad Men's mix is unique in a number of ways.

First of all, as we discussed here, because it is not a workplace drama in the same way as West Wing or ER, it does not use the heightened drama of high-stakes crises as often as those kinds of series, although it does occasionally. It also uses the high-stakes drama of Don's hidden past in the same way, but only in key episodes.

Most episodes seem to land between the top and bottom left of my diamond diagram, mixing direct emotional exchange with the kinds of indirect, naturalist dialogue techniques that David Freeman ascribes to thirtysomething, and which we discussed in some detail in the last post using the Abe & Peggy scene.

Frankly, one of the most interesting things to me about Mad Men is the way in which they use allusions to historical events as symbols in very subtle ways. This aspect of the series in some way gets us closest to the large questions about history and social change that we set up in the syllabus. For example, there are episodes like "My Old Kentucky Home" which do very little in terms of moving particular story or character arcs, but instead tie those story and character arcs to a multitude of American historical and cultural symbols.

But they use the allusions and symbols differently than Northern Exposure does -- the symbols have a different storytelling purpose. That is my current hunch, my intuition, but it's going to take some further exploration before I can say something more meaningful on this front, and explain the different purpose with precision.

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We haven't had many comments on this blog, but I want to specifically invite comments on this topic, from any regular readers or people who happen upon this through Google. Does this representation of styles of dramatic dialogue ring true to you? What nuances am I missing? There are lots of other series that I have never watched or don't know well -- what other examples are out there? I welcome all discussion.

More Details on Dialogue Techniques in the Peggy-Abe Scene

2011-05-17T13:06:00.000-04:00

While making a few edits to yesterday's post about the civil rights / women's rights discussion between Peggy and Abe in "The Beautiful Girls" I realized that it might be helpful to go into a bit more detail on the dialogue techniques in the scene.

As we've discussed before, it can be difficult to learn about these kinds of writing techniques because the writers themselves keep the process fairly well-hidden (for a number of good reasons), and because for-profit guides to film and television writers are generally geared to novices. Over the weekend, I listened to a phone seminar on advanced dialogue techniques, given by instructor David Freeman. He has posted an article on some of the techniques here on his web site along with a lot of sales language, and also discussed additional techniques in the seminar. Freeman is touchy about participants revealing too much of his work product, so I'm going to walk a fine line in this post between giving him proper attribution for concepts that I discuss in the analysis of this scene, and not unfairly "giving away" on the internet work product that is the core of his business.

I also want to put Freeman's analysis into context. In his opinion, thirtysomething pioneered a style of writing "naturalistic" dialogue that has been widely copied in television drama. His recommendations assume that this kind of naturalistic dialogue is the gold standard for capturing realism and dramatic tension between individuals interacting in ordinary settings. Whether or not we agree with his value judgment on that style of writing, it is interesting to note that this style, these techniques, are touted to aspiring writers, at least within some Hollywood circles, as the "best", most complex, most advanced, style of writing because it is "real". (It's beyond the scope of this post to discuss the history and implications of different styles of realism in both literature and drama, but it is another interest of mine.)

With that in mind, I'll turn to the techniques that are in play in the Peggy/Abe scene.

The first (not to mention most obvious and standard throughout TV) is that the audience enters the scene with the characters already engaged in their conversation and action. Another screenwriting instructor called this "entering the scene as late as possible". We get right to the dramatic meat of the encounter without a lot of exposition or other set-up. This slice of life technique makes the audience feel like they have just happened upon two people having a real conversation.

Secondly, the dialogue achieves naturalism through the use of simple vocabulary, incomplete sentences, and a certain degree of inarticulateness -- phrases like "you know" and "it was a couple of places." Short, naturalistic exchanges also provide a contrast for the more heightened, articulate sentences later in the scene.

Although the characters are speaking naturally and using relatively simply vocabulary, their goals -- what they want from one another in the scene and what they indicate about their larger goals as individuals -- are complex, layered, and in conflict to some degree. Several techniques combine to create this effect in the scene.

First, the dialogue reveals that the characters have a layered, multi-dimensional relationship. (Mad Men does this particularly well.) They see each other in more than one way and want more than one thing from one another. There is a romantic attraction, but Abe wants Peggy to agree with his politics and wants her to either change her job or the way she does her job to conform with his beliefs. Peggy wants to like Abe, and agrees with some of what he is saying, but also defends her integrity -- her work, her client, and her perspective as woman facing discrimination. The scene reveals the layers of the relationship and puts them into conflict.

The conflict gives each character multiple goals, which also adds complexity. The conflict puts Peggy in a position of having to take some action. She can agree with Abe's point of view and possibly advance the romantic relationship, but she would have to compromise her own sense of self and possibly take some action at work. Or, she can maintain her own point of view and integrity, but end her time with Abe on a bad note. As the audience we may pull for her to make a certain decision, but we also recognize the conflict. We'd like the character to achieve both goals, while acknowledging that is not likely.

The second half of the Peggy and Abe scene is an example of the technique Freeman labels "own track" and describes on his web site with an example from thirtysomething. As Peggy and Abe are trading dialogue on civil rights and women's rights they are each staying on their own track - their own line of argument. Peggy says that the only way she could enter the University Club is if she arrived in a cake, and Abe responds by saying there are no Negro copywriters. He doesn't completely ignore what she is saying, but uses his response to bolster his own point without openly acknowledging hers. At the same time, the exchange reveals that neither character is completely right in their opinion -- they both make valid points. The competing truths create multiple empathies for the audience, who can see an aspect of truth on both sides (even though they may ultimately side with one argument or another).

Finally, within the scene as a whole there is a shape to the emotional progression. As the audience experiences multiple empathies, our feelings shift, sympathizing on some lines with Abe's point of view and goals, and then sympathizing with Peggy's. The scene gains complexity through the shift, and gives the narrative a sense of movement.

When we look at these techniques in total, we get a scene with seemingly simple, naturalistic dialogue that achieves complexity by indicating that characters have multi-layered relationships and conflicting goals that may not be able to be reconciled. In turn, these techniques build complexity over time -- in the course of the episode, the season, the series, we see Peggy in multi-layered relationships with multiple characters, while watching her pursue multiple goals. Every Mad Men scene is not this complex, but many are.

And as I concluded at the end of the last post, this is one scene where the complexity of the character conflict is a good reflection of the historical conflict, perhaps because it brings up classic '60s examples of the way in which the personal was political.

Peggy Olson, Civil Rights and Women's Rights

2011-05-16T12:49:00.000-04:00

Today marks the beginning of three weeks of our syllabus set aside for the question of Mad Men and early feminism. Several months ago, I was writing a long paper for another class on pop culture depictions of lawyers, civil rights and women's rights and researched women's rights legal history.

For a time, I considered including the following Mad Men scene as an illustration of the relationship between civil rights and women's rights in the early '60s, but ultimately found the scene too complex for the rhetorical purpose of my paper. Luckily, this class gives me a reason to discuss the scene. It is from the fourth season episode "The Beautiful Girls", and is set in the summer of 1965. Peggy Olson sits at bar with Abe, a bohemian guy that she is interested in romantically, and who has more radical politics than she does. As we enter the scene, Abe mentions one of Peggy's clients:

ABE:	Fillmore Auto Parts is worse than a corporation, what with the boycott and all.
PEGGY:	What boycott?
ABE:	The southern stores won't hire Negroes.
PEGGY:	Says who?
ABE:	It was in the Voice. It was a couple of places.
PEGGY:	I don't think that's true. I would have heard that.
ABE:	It is true.
PEGGY:	It doesn't seem like them.
ABE:	I'm sure they are perfectly nice, for racists, you know.

This first part of the scene sets up the civil rights issue and builds tension between the characters. Abe is interested in Peggy romantically but wants her job and her politics to conform to his moral position. Peggy is attracted to Abe but is put on the defensive by his statements. She defends her client's integrity although she has less information than Abe does about their actions. Even in this short scene there are layers to their relationship -- they want more than one thing from one another and those goals are brought into conflict.

The following continuation of the scene flips the dynamic between the characters to some extent as Peggy raises the question of women's rights in the context of civil rights. Abe pushes back.

ABE:	Civil rights isn't something that can be fixed by a PR campaign. It's inequality. It's something that the world has its eyes on.
PEGGY:	I know, but I have to say, most of the things Negroes can't do, I can't do either, and nobody seems to care.
ABE:	What are you talking about?
PEGGY:	Half of the meetings take place over golf, tennis, in clubs where I'm not allowed to be a member or even enter. The University Club said that the only way I could eat there was if I arrived in a cake.
ABE:	There are no Negro copywriters, you know?
PEGGY:	I'm sure they could fight their way in like I did. Believe me, no one wanted me there.
ABE: (sarcastically)	All right, Peggy, we'll have a civil rights march for women.
PEGGY: (disgusted)	I have a really early day. It's nice to see you again.
ABE:	All I'm saying is that they're not shooting women to keep them from voting.
PEGGY: (leaving)	You're opinionated and you're criticizing me.

Part of the complexity of the scene comes from the fact that neither character is perfectly right. Abe is inconsiderate, but makes a valid point about the violent reaction to the civil rights movement. Peggy is naive in some sense and also puts work ahead of politics (in the same scene she says agency would have taken Goldwater as a client), but raises the issue of justice for women at a time when it wasn't even on the radar screen of radicals like Abe.

Until a few months ago, when I was doing research for the paper I mentioned above, I was unaware of the politics and history regarding the inclusion of an amendment prohibiting gender discrimination in the 1964 civil rights act. Here's how I summarized the debate in my paper (and here's a link that includes citations):

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 passed Congress and was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy, but it was “amended until it was so riddled with holes” that its sponsor, Edith Green of Oregon, felt it would do little to remedy wage discrimination. The next year, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia proposed an amendment to the Civil Rights Act that added women to the list of classes that would be protected from discrimination in employment. Smith, no friend of civil rights, hoped his amendment would stop passage of the bill. Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan, the only female lawyer in the House of Representatives, realized that Smith’s ploy created an opportunity, allowing her to add the votes of Southern conservatives opposed the Act to the votes of liberals who would support the amendment on its merits. Eventually, both the House and Senate passed the Civil Rights Act with the gender provision intact, and it was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. Years later, the now retired Howard Smith ran into Martha Griffiths in Washington and their conversation turned to the gender provision of the Civil Rights Act. “Martha,” Smith said, “I’ll tell you the truth. I offered it as a joke.”

The interpersonal complexity of the relationship between Peggy and Abe in the Mad Men scene -- complexity created through the dialogue techniques, character deepening techniques and movement of the scene through the competing moral considerations of the characters -- mirrors the complexity of the real politics of the time.

Peggy and Abe are not like the historical actors in the way that a direct comparison might first suggest, but their wrangling with the moral considerations of the issue -- how is the fight for women's justice like the fight for racial justice and should one fight take precedence -- what is the relationship between the personal (one's relationship, one's job) and the political -- is an accurate reflection of the debate from a certain vantage point. The storytelling techniques give us access to both characters thoughts and feelings, but also place us slightly outside, where we can empathize to some degree with both character's point of view.

A Digression on TV History and the Evolution of Writing Techniques in Serialized Narrative

2011-05-13T19:13:00.000-04:00

** The recent blogger crash effected this post, which was first written May 11. I have re-edited following the restoration of service on May 13. **

[Dear reader, if you are reading this blog because you care only about Mad Men in particular and not about the development of serialized narrative and writing techniques, you may want to skip this post. I won't be offended.]

In the first two weeks of this class and blog, I had a number of posts regarding storytelling techniques in serialized narrative, including this one on character development and this one on a theory of character motivation. My interest in exploring relationships between form and content leads to me to search out sources where writers discuss the writing process and choices they make along the way to the finished product that we see on our screens.

Most of the information available on this process comes from screenwriting guides and from audio commentaries or other types of interviews with television writers. However there is often a disconnect between the detailed type of question I might like to ask as part of study of writing techniques, and the more general information available in these sources.

I'm also greatly interested in the history and evolution of the writing process that led to the kind of mature techniques of serialized narrative that we see today on Mad Men and other series.

Which leads me to the package I received in my mailbox today.

I purchased through e-bay three authenticated shooting scripts from the second season of Remington Steele, the early '80s MTM series that was one of the pioneers of serialized character development in a non-soap genre. The scripts are all from 1983. Only three other series at the time, outside of the night-time soaps, were experimenting with slow arcs of character evolution -- Cheers, with the Sam and Diane romance, and the two other MTM dramas, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. (I talk more about its place in that aspect of TV history here, scroll down to sub-point 1.) Two of the three scripts differ significantly enough from the aired episode to provide insight into the writing process.

As background, we know from audio commentaries and interviews on the DVDs that detective mystery portions each episode (which were not serialized) were plotted and written first, in collaboration between the staff writer or freelancer assigned to that episode and Michael Gleason, the executive producer and co-creator of the series. We know from Gleason, with confirmation from the actors, that, unlike many other series, lines were not changed on set. Therefore changes from shooting script to the final episode were either made in an additional draft by Gleason after pre-production was underway, or, in the case of omissions, in the editing process. We know from the same sources that Gleason would write the relationship scenes (the serialized element) largely on his own, particularly the ending scene of each episode (the scene that had to carry the most weight on providing episode closure while also keeping the relationship storyline ongoing).

These shooting scripts provide added confirmation for that process. The scenes that were most significantly changed from the shooting script to the final episode were the relationship scenes and the case-related scenes that contained thematic elements that commented on the relationship. Additionally, lines of dialogue and full scenes were changed to add complexity the characters -- to remove extraneous character exposition, to make character behavior less clearly motivated, and to add ambiguity to remaining scenes. At the same time, symbolic and thematic language was added to make subtle reference to character revelations and relationship conversations from previous episodes.

My conjecture is that Gleason, as the show-runner and final authority on changes from the shooting scripts to the final episode, used his final pass on these scripts to shape character arcs and character complexity. Of course show-runners do final edits as a routine part of their jobs. It is not the editing itself that is remarkable. However, the kinds of changes Gleason made in these final edits indicate that he carried some notion of long-range character arcs in his head, and re-wrote the scripts to that end within the constraints of the detective format and the limitation of having to keep the audience hooked in the romance without bringing it to a full resolution. As I discussed in this post, my theory is that characters in continuing narrative are less clearly motivated in their long-term goals than characters in film. The revisions to these scripts seem to support that theory.

Again, my interest here is in the history and evolution of writing techniques. Today's show-runners plot out character arcs in great detail, and see that process as a major part of what they do in writing their shows, even shows that we would not consider serialized narratives (shows were the "case" element, whatever it may be, is resolved in each episode.) Yet thirty years ago, no one used the term character arc, and audiences did not expect character development (outside of soap opera) over the course of a series. These writing techniques evolved to the mature techniques that we see now. I contend (often, and to anyone who will listen) that Gleason's work on Steele was an important part of the development of those techniques.

***

Addition May 12, 2011:

Most days I feel like I may be one of very small number of people who care about this little slice of TV history, but since Google may reveal this post to others who care, I want to be as complete as possible in my chronicle.

I have speculated elsewhere about the connection between Gleason's experience as a staff writer on Peyton Place in the mid-'60s and the use of character arcs in Remington Steele. I found this television oral history project online, containing an interview with Peyton Place writer Richard DeRoy, who hired Gleason for that show and supervised the writing team. Gleason, in turn, used DeRoy as a writing supervisor on early season of Steele. The person who runs the oral history web site, Stephen Bowie, draws the following conclusion of the kind of writing DeRoy and his staff pioneered on Peyton Place: "that’s how DeRoy and the other writers approached their task, building intricate, character-driven story arcs with a meticulousness that would drive a modern audience mad."

Stephen Bowie has also blogged about a new book on Peyton Place that includes an interview with Gleason, which I hope to read soon. As you can see in my comments to Bowie's post, I believe key pieces of TV history could be filled in through an interview with Gleason regarding how he applied his experience gained on Peyton Place to the writing of the character arcs on Steele. Bowie suggests that if I want the questions answered, I'll have to set up my own interview.

Mad Men and the Work of Advertising

2011-05-09T10:31:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I touched on the fact that Don Draper and his team have not produced (so far) the kind of advertising identified by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool as emblematic of the creative revolution that took place in advertising in the '60s -- the DDB Volkswagen campaign that Frank calls a kind of "anti-advertising".

Although the series is (obviously) set in an advertising agency, it is not as much about advertising as you might expect. Here's what I mean. Firstly, the show is not a procedural -- we don't follow professionals (police detectives, doctors, lawyers, etc.) as they work cases through to their conclusion. Secondly, compared to many other kinds of shows set in workplaces that are not procedurals, we spend a great deal of screen time with our characters in non-work settings, particularly with Don, Peggy & Pete.

Think, as a point of comparison, about The West Wing -- a show which Matthew Weiner says in this interview that Mad Men could have been like if he hadn't worked as a writer on The Sopranos and gained confidence in telling subtle psychological stories. Although West Wing is not a procedural, the characters spend a great deal of screen time discussing work-related problems and trying to find solutions. Work storylines are A stories; personal storylines are B stories. In fact, the characters are so immersed in their work that their personal lives suffer or don't exist at all. Also, like many of the MTM influenced workplace dramas, West Wing characters treat their co-workers like family.

Mad Men is different is a number of ways. Although we see work bleeding over into the personal life of the characters -- Don working at home, the creative department working on weekends, and accounts guys socializing with clients -- Mad Men characters have more fully realized non-work lives and interests than characters on workplace dramas. I suspect that this is partly a stylistic choice by Weiner, and partly a reflection of the time in which the series is set -- a time in which professionals spent fewer hours at work than the do now. Secondly, Mad Men is more focused than other series on the way in which work pressures -- financial pressures, hierarchical pressures, social pressures -- impact who people "are" in the workplace and restrict their choices. Again, I suspect that this is partly a thematic choice, and partly a reflection of the more rigid social codes of the workplace in the early '60s.

Collectively, this creates a series that is more concerned with how people "act" in the workplace vs. who they "are" outside of the workplace (and how those identities clash or coincide) and less concerned with their work product -- the advertising itself. The advertising we see in show is largely used symbolically (as we discussed with the Lucky Strike campaign and the American Airlines pitch) or used as a platform for character development.

There is a third difference between the way Mad Men treats the work of advertising and the way many other serialized narratives treat characters' work that is worth exploring in more detail. Let's go back to the West Wing comparison as an example, and consider a first season episode titled "A Proportional Response" (the script is included in The West Wing Script Book). In the A story of this episode, there has a been an attack on an unarmed air force jet and the staff must decide the appropriate military response. Much time is spent explaining the merits of and debating the morality of various military responses while weighing the practical and political impacts. The audience is brought into this complicated moral debate and invited to consider various sides of the question as members of the staff debate the question. The work problem is given public moral stakes in additional to practical stakes, and audience is included in the moral deliberation. (I can think of lots of other dramas where this is the standard operating procedure -- the second half of Law & Order as the lawyers debate the morality of a prosecution, many episodes of ER and House where doctors debate what degree of medical intervention is appropriate to save a life.)

Advertising, of course, does not provide the same platform to pursue questions of life and death or complicated ethical questions of justice and retribution as dramas set in different kinds of workplaces. Even so, where Mad Men does raise ethical questions in terms of the advertising itself (cigarette advertising, Abe's questioning of Peggy over the boycott Fillmore Auto Parts in season 4) the ethical questions are not given as much storytelling time as they are in other workplace dramas. Mad Men more often sets up a dilemma between the freedom of creative expression and the limitations of commerce than it explores the ethics or morality of different advertising strategies.

As I noted in the last post, those "creative" solutions to advertising problems are attached to moral questions differently in Mad Men -- as with Don's breakthrough on the American Airlines campaign, they provide a symbolic commentary about the power of creativity itself, they are symbolic of rebirth and moving past tragedy. Mad Men's moral dilemmas are situated more in the personal sphere of their character's lives than than the professional, and the dilemmas revolve around questions of aspirations, happiness, hope and acceptance. These questions of personal happiness and self-expression have bearing on questions of social and political ethics and the social history of the '60s (the idea that the personal is political), but in a different way than they do in workplace dramas like The West Wing.

I want to make one more pivot on this topic of the work and morality and advertising.

In the late '50s and early '60s, the question of the morality of advertising as whole was topic of cultural conversation, due largely to the impact of Vance Packard's 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders. Packard, researching techniques of psychological "depth" research into consumers unconscious needs and desires and the resulting advertisements that attempted to manipulate those desires, declared advertising that did not appeal to rational thought as morally suspect, if not a completely unethical attempt at subliminal "mind control". Packard's obituary in the New York Times outlines the impact of his work on the public consciousness, and Lizabeth Cohen, in A Consumer's Republic, argues that the reaction to Packard's book was one of the forces that led to efforts to teach consumers (and schoolchildren) about the persuasive techniques of advertising in an attempt to inoculate the public against manipulation at the hands of these powerful media forces. Thomas Frank notes that Packard's book was part of the mass society critique than many advertisers addressed and embraced through the creative revolution in advertising. (41) Cohen notes that the psychological depth research chronicled by Packard eventually led to market segmentation, as advertising began to understand that there audience was not only differentiated by gender and income, but also by psychology. (299-302)

The advertising techniques of mass manipulation (though never as pervasive as Packard's book would lead many to believe) declined at nearly the same as they were being identified. In fact, reading Packard today, the arguments and examples seem naive, and somewhat histrionic. But this reaction, I believe, says more about the way that society has changed than the validity of Packard's arguments at the time. We do know more about how advertising works than the culture of the late '50s. We've been immersed in mass media advertising for our entire lives and have developed techniques to deal with onslaught -- consumer education as Cohen notes, "anti-advertising" ironic distance as Frank notes, and the development of psychological defenses that come from repeated exposure. We are more aware of living our lives as the constant target of advertising.

Perhaps this is another reason why Mad Men narratives do not concern themselves as directly with the work of advertising as we might expect. As an audience in 2011, I suspect we know more about advertising and the way it works than the ad men of the early '60s did.

Mad Men and the Rise of the Creative Class

2011-05-04T16:24:00.000-04:00

"This is America." Bobbie Barrett says to Don in the season two episode "The New Girl". "Pick a job and then become the person who does it." Later in the episode, she offers similar advice to Peggy, "You have to start living the life of the person you want to be."

Although these statements have multiple resonances, they refer to Don and Peggy as people who work in "creative". It is not the same as pure artistic creation (if that exists) -- they are paid to create for clients, within a hierarchy, with the goal of increasing profits for their clients and their own company. And yet, as Richard Florida describes, creative professionals, as compared with those in the working class or service class who are "primarily paid to execute according to plan", are instead "primarily paid to create and have considerably more autonomy and flexibility than the other two classes to do so." (8)

As I discussed here, Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class, opens with a thought experiment to highlight the degree of social change that has taken place in America since the early 1950s. Florida emphasizes the extent to which that change is a product of transformation in the economy as whole, the organization of the workplace, and the style of work which is now dominant. Florida's economic analysis supplements the sociological and political analysis that is a more familiar lens for examining these changes, and he suggests a way in which the economic, social, psychological and political changes may be linked. (I'll have more on that possible causal relationship as a sidebar below.)

Although there have always been creative jobs, the creative professionals' way of working and way of living (for they are difficult to separate) has "moved from the margins to the economic mainstream." (13) Creative class norms differ significantly from norms of the service and working class and the old norms of the managerial class (which also contributes to cultural and political divisions in the current political climate). Florida elaborates:

Like Whyte's managerial class, which "set the American temper" in the 1950s, the Creative Class is the norm-setting class of our time. But its norms are very different: Individuality, self-expression, and openness to difference are favored over the homogeneity, conformity, and "fitting in" that defined the organizational age. (9)

Advertising both reflects and contributed to this change, as Thomas Frank explains in The Conquest of Cool. Inside corporations, he argues, many managers were pursuing their own critique of conformity and strict hierarchy in the workplace, starting a "revolution in marketing practice, management thinking and ideas of about creativity". (20) Frank quotes from a popular business guidebook, The Human Side of Enterprise, written in 1960 to persuade business to loosen bureaucratic procedures, reward ingenuity and recognize employees self-actualization needs. (22) Advertising industry management was affected by this trend before the emergence of the counterculture in the late '60s, making "vast changes in corporate practice, in productive flexibility, and especially in that intangible phenomenon known as 'creativity'". (27)

Carrying this line of thought from management practice to the style and content of the ads themselves, Frank describes the DDB campaign for Volkswagen as the vanguard of advertising's creative revolution, inventing ads that "cut through the overblown rhetoric of the 1950s and speak to readers' and viewers' skepticism of advertising" and harnessing "public mistrust of consumerism" and conformity "to consumerism itself". (55) For Frank, this style of advertising was its own critique of mass-culture, "a statement of alienation and disgust, of longing for authenticity and for selfhood." (55)

The ironic anti-advertising of the Volkswagen campaign was not the only face of the creative revolution in advertising. Natasha Vargas-Cooper argues in Mad Men Unbuttoned that Don Draper "would be (or is) a disciple of Leo Burnett's Chicago School of advertising" in which an emotionally evocative image was more important than rational text and reflected "the consumer's basic desires and beliefs." (3-4)

In Mad Men, Don's creative breakthroughs tend to connect deep feelings of hope and acceptance to themes of renewal. In the Lucky Strike pitch in the "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", Don realizes that government restrictions on cigarette health claims make cigarette previous advertising strategies moot and create a blank slate where "we can say anything we want." In that vacuum, Don suggests an evocative but simple phrase, "It's toasted", which he explains, can be a symbol for happiness and acceptance. "Whatever you are doing is OK. You are OK." Unlike the Volkswagen campaign, Don's concept is not embracing a position of alienation (Don has enough of that in the rest of the episode). It is embracing a longing for authentic emotion and longing for a society that is less rigidly judgmental and divisive.

Don has a thematically similar epiphany regarding the proposed American Airlines campaign in "Four Sundays", in this case talking of renewal for the company following a plane crash in terms of positive visions of the country's history: "There is no such thing as American history, only the frontier. That crash happened to someone else." In Don's philosophy of advertising, individuals, companies, and the country as whole shed guilt and shame over past failures (the episode is full of Easter imagery) and move towards the hope of new future. "We're going to the moon."

"Creative", in this case, not only breaks free of conformity and old ways of thinking, but offers a way to move past the claims of the past and its sorrows. It creates a vision of a new, positive future that may not be realistic or even possible, but is worth striving for. Of course, for the modern viewer, irony attends this vision of the future as well. When Don ends his presentation with, "Let's pretend we know what 1963 looks like," the viewer understands that '63 will bring both "I have a dream" and the Kennedy assassination.

Don is a flawed and complex character who never completely leaves his own past and his own guilt behind. The most cynical among us would say he is simply lying. Don himself may say that from time to time. Yet I think Don believes what he is saying when he says it. It sometimes takes an overly large and positive expression of hope to move past the inertia of disappointment. His vision of a hopeful future requires frequent creative rebirth, but is not crassly cynical. He finds new ways to create.

Sidebar on Florida and Causality in The Rise of the Creative Class

Florida argues that a significant creative class emerges in a culture as economic conditions improve over time. He cites Ronald Inglehart’s quantitative research on the relationship between economic well-being and social values across nations, summarizing:

As nation’s economies advance, the values favored by their people tend to shift along two scales. They move from “traditional” values (marked, for instance, by respect for civil and religious authority) toward more “secular-rational” (free-thinking) values, and from “survival” values (favoring financial and social stability) to “self-expression” values favoring the rights of individuals to express themselves.(xxv)

Why do these correlations exist? Inglehart's theory, based upon psychiatrist Abraham Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs, assumes that people who grow up in conditions of affluence would have different social values and norms from people who grew up in conditions of scarcity. With generational change advanced industrial societies "are undergoing a gradual shift from emphasis on economic and physical security above all, towards a greater emphasis on belonging, self-expression, and the quality of life." (Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, 11) Inglehart's data is cross-national. Education, religion, national culture and other factors may influence this shift in individuals or sub-cultures, but the data shows strong statistical correlations over time.

Journalist Bill Bishop, quoting Inglehart's research in the context of American political and social change in the '60s and '70s, writes the following:

The fulfillment of material needs would generally be taken for granted, and education levels would rise along with incomes, [Inglehart] surmised. And all that material progress, he found, "brings unforeseen changes -- changes in gender roles, attitudes toward authority and sexual norms; declining fertility rates; broader political participation; and less easily led publics. (Bishop, The Big Sort, 84)

I find Inglehart's research compelling as a macro-level, broad-based engine of cultural change in the U.S. at this time. More people, raised in more abundance than ever before, began to desire more autonomy, individuality, and opportunities for self-expression. Early waves of creative professionals in advertising and popular culture created products that reflected this broad desire and demonstrated possible ways (lifestyles, products, rebel role models) that might bring a person closer to achieving their unique individual desires, leaving behind old rules and rigid codes of behavior that had developed in a world of scarcity. It's not the whole story, certainly, but offers an underlying logic, grounded in common human psychology, that gives some shape to millions of diverse individual lives and choices.

Another Angle: The Pressures of Conformity, Autonomy, and Family Life

2011-04-30T11:04:00.000-04:00

As an ensemble show, Mad Men is able to show the audience the consequences of a character's actions from the viewpoint of other characters. In the latter episodes of the second season, for example, while Don was off attempting to find himself in California, Betty was in Ossining with the kids and discovered that she was again pregnant. "It must nice," she tells him when he returns, "to need time and be able to take it." Season 2 ends with Don and Betty re-committing (on some level) for the sake of the children, but the audience knows enough about their unhappiness and infidelities to be highly skeptical of the re-union.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, makes the provocative argument that the "crisis of conformity" was a "code word for male discontent" with the breadwinner ethic, "the masculine equivalent of what Betty Friedan would soon describe as 'the problem without a name'" (30). Ehrenreich describes the cross-cutting cultural pressures for men -- the pressure to prove their manhood (and disprove homosexuality) by adjusting to their "normal" adult life role of work, marriage and bread-winning for their family (15) -- and the counter-pressure to preserve their masculine individuality, independence, and sense of control (29-39). Using the novel Revolutionary Road as an example, Ehrenreich argues that Riesman's depiction of the autonomous man is "fainthearted alternative" to the cultural and economic pressures of making a living and providing for a wife and family (40). What real difference does it make, she argues, if a man remains autonomous only in mind (knowing that he could have chosen a non-conforming life) but conforms in fact. Ehrenreich, looking backwards from the early '80s, emphasizes economic constraints where Riesman saw grey flannel discontent as a possible lever of positive social change.

Ehrenreich, never an optimist, chronicles social change through the '60s and '70s through the lens of a "male revolt" against the bread-winner ethic, exemplified through diverse cultural phenomena of "Playboy through the counterculture of the sixties and the psychological re-evaluation of masculinity in the seventies", creating a new male ethic with a vision of "more leisure and good times for men - made possible, of course, by the reduced dependency on women" (171). And while I don't think Ehrenreich's analysis tells the whole story, it does provide a compelling through-line for one of the ways in which a cultural stereotype of grey flannel conformity became replaced with an image of slacker men from a Judd Apatow movie in which men marry and have children but refuse to "grow up" (although in the Apatow version the good times are made possible by increased dependency on competent professional women who have jobs and take care of the kids).

Bringing this back to Mad Men, does Ehrenreich's analysis give us any insight into the behavior of Don and the other married men at Sterling Cooper? In addition to the personal, psychological reasons for their serial philandering and other behavior is there also a sociological aspect? Are they expressing discontent with conformity, with the breadwinner ethic, with the constraints of their social role? Or does the culture simply allow them to have their cake and eat it too? Certainly none of them "escape" bread-winning. Roger's divorce and impending marriage to Jane becomes one of the factors motivating the merger of Sterling Cooper with the British firm. Don has opportunities to "escape" -- to actually abandon his life as Don Draper -- but never suggests and abandonment of his financial responsibility to his children. As with our discussion of Paul Kinsey in the last post, the complexity of the character portraits in Mad Men gives us an opportunity to view these questions of motivation, personality and social pressure from multiple angles over time as the storytelling unfolds.

Autonomy, "Cool" and Social Change

2011-04-29T14:40:00.000-04:00

So as not to overburden today's earlier post, I momentarily tabled the relationship between the concept of "cool" or "hip" that is related both in historical time and in concept to Riesman's discussion of anomie and autonomy.

Cultural historians often reference Normal Mailer's essay "The White Negro", published in the fall of 1957, as a landmark, connecting the outsider stance of the beatnik and the Negro as the only way to live with authenticity in the face of the existential horrors of the nuclear age. Although Mailer makes no reference to pop culture, this connection of the young white rebel with a "Negro" hip was also present in jazz, teen movies, and early rock 'n' roll. The early Elvis Presley, the white boy Sam Phillips had been looking for who could "sing like a black boy", modeled his look on James Dean and Marlon Brando, combining a disdain for adult, parental authority with an outsider music (David Halberstam, The Fifties, 457). Although Elvis, and rock 'n' roll softened in the late '50s and early '60s (to be revived later post-British Invasion and Bob Dylan), a cultural connection of youth, rebellion, and "cool" was established in popular culture at the same time that Mailer's essay made its arguments to a more highbrow audience (see Glenn Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America). And the youth rebellion element of hipness, which Mailer does not address directly, may be the most important element as the notion of hip spread from American sub-cultures to mainstream popular culture.

If, as Thomas Frank argues in The Conquest of Cool, Mailer's essay posited hipness as "an actual solution" to the crisis of conformity, a "blueprint for the cultural eruption by which the civilization of conformity would be overturned" (12), it was one which straddled the distance between Riesman's categories of anomie and autonomy. Both types are non-conformist, but only Riesman's autonomous character has the choice, the opportunity, of conforming. Inhabiting Mailer's worldview, or that of Presley posing as Brando or Dean, the question of "why conform?" seems a reasonable one. Yet here we get into the slippery territory of who rejected who first. The affluent middle class suburban conformity of the '50s wasn't much of option for the "white trash" Presleys of Tupelo, Mississippi or Mailer's Negroes. Conformity was been a mindset, but it also had boundaries of class, region and race.

As culture changed throughout the 1960's we see the parallel processes of entry to middle-class life opening up for groups of Americans who had previously been excluded (more opportunity to conform) and a growing acceptance of individual difference within middle and upper class life (more opportunity to publicly express an individualized self (that is perhaps authentic) without as much risk of social rejection). The conquest of cool in advertising, and the wide reach of popular mass media, was influential in both processes. Youth, associated with things that were new and hip, became not just a natural and growing demographic group, but a "consuming position to which all could aspire" (25). New styles of advertising downplayed old value systems. As Frank explains, "The old values of caution, deference, and hierarchy drowned creativity...and enervated not only the human spirit but the consuming spirit and entrepreneurial spirit as well" (28). Consuming became redefined as both inclusion into the mainstream and rebellion against and older, stodgier, less profligate ways of conformity (31).

Perhaps this is part of what Paul Kinsey had in mind in the brief scene in season two where he is riding the bus to civil rights protests in Mississippi and stating that advertising can be part of the solution, because advertising sees no color, and sees everyone as a consumer. Yet, at the same time, corporate advertising is inherently conformist. This contradiction is apparent in Paul's character. Paul is mocked by Joan in earlier episode following his party in South Orange, and presumably mocked, at least questioned, by the audience watching the bus scene, as someone only posing as hip through his beard, artistic aspirations, and less than fervent commitment to civil rights. The complexity of character in this case allows the audience to examine these questions of cool / conformity / and authenticity from multiple angles. Kurt, the European, Dylan-listening, out-homosexual, is presumably authentic in his cultural choices -- he doesn't seem to care what his co-workers think. Paul Kinsey embodies contradictions.

Autonomy and Social Change

2011-04-29T11:56:00.000-04:00

Discussions of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd often overlook the third section of the book, titled simply "Autonomy", yet I feel it is the most important section for understanding the social transformations of the 1960's, and for thinking about the multiple facets of the character of Don Draper.

When summarizing Riesman, it is necessary to break through the convenient short-hand labels he provides for types of social character -- tradition-directed, inner-directed, other-directed -- and dig a little deeper into the nuance of his descriptions. From the outset, Riesman emphasized that he is describing "social character", not the whole of individual's personality. Riesman indicates that he is interested in the "way in which society ensures some degree of conformity from the individuals who make it up" -- something that every society does. Quoting psychologist Erich Fromm, he notes the connection between social character and the different ways that character is instilled in children in different societies: "In order that any society may function well, its members must acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the way they have to act as members of the society or special class within it. They have to desire what objectively is necessary for them to do. Outer force is replaced by inner compulsion." (Riesman, 5, emphasis in original)

[Riesman was making comparisons with socialization in native tribes, but as I am writing this post on the morning of the royal wedding we have an interesting and extreme contemporary example of this process of instilling social character in the William, the prince and future king, who presumably had to acquire the kind of character to make him "want to act" the way he has to act as a member of a "special class within" British society. Our modern discomfort with the "autonomy" we presume Kate Middleton must be giving up is another indication of how social character has changed.]

From Riesman's starting point -- how does any society develop social character to ensure a degree of conformity necessary for the smooth functioning of that society -- he begins to explore the ways in which American society has developed social character, and determines that the urban upper class of the late 1940's (his book was first published in 1950) were showing evidence of a new type of social character -- the other-directed -- which was becoming the "dominant mode of insuring conformity" in elite circles. (Riesman was largely concerned with male character, and I'll use male pronouns in summarizing his descriptions.)

For American society, the tradition-directed character was of little importance. Riesman felt that for the West as whole the Middle Ages was the last time "in which the majority were tradition-directed" (10), although he acknowledged that there were isolated pockets of American society in which some tradition directed character formation was still present. The vast majority of Americans, instead, were inner-directed. Society aimed to instill conformity in outward behavior, but also instill an inner moral compass that was "rigid though highly individualized" (15). This social character is the archetype of the American pioneer, building a civilization in the wilderness, rugged, individual, and making moral choices (the kind which society would approve of) without close supervision because he conforms to the distant voices of an older generation whose guidance he "internalized in his childhood" (31). As Gary Edgerton points out in his introduction to Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, Don and Peggy are in many ways representative of the inner-directed character type (xxiv), although with a mix of the autonomous type, as I'll discuss below.

Riesman's other-directed American, by contrast, constantly looks for guidance from his peer group, at school when he is growing up, at work and within society as an adult. Because his relationships with other people determine his success, the other directed American must become more sensitive to the inner states of his peers than the inner-directed man. Conformity to rigid abstract standards of right and wrong behavior is less important than determining and conforming to the desires of those individuals who hold power, or stand as gatekeepers in one's particular environment. Riesman summarizes: "The goals towards which the other-directed person strives switch with that guidance; it is only the process of striving itself and the process of paying close attention to others that remains unaltered throughout life" (21). Edgerton singles out Pete and Betty as representative of the other directed social character on Mad Men (xxiv). I would argue as well that the depiction of the advertising business in Mad Men is representative of the phenomenon as well, as the employees of Sterling Cooper strive to stay in synch with the needs (and whims) of their clients and their bosses.

Adjustment, Anomie, Autonomy

With the definition of Riesman's character types as background, we can get to the really interesting part. Recall that Riesman emphasized from the outset that social character and conformity were not the entirety of human character or personality -- "the individual is capable of more than his society usually asks of him" (241). In the relative openness and diversity of American society, there is "room for disparities", tensions between generalizations about social character and "adult social role" which "can be among the important leverages of social change" (240).

Riesman sees society as consisting of a large number of those who are adjusted, "who reflect their society, or their class within the society, with the least distortion". Those who are not adjusted, who do not easily conform "may be either anomic or autonomous." The anomic character would come to the attention of the mass media a few years after Riesman'sanomic, anti-hero outsider and the autonomous, authentic, counter-culture hero, but that is a story for another post.

The autonomous, for Riesman, "are those who on the whole are capable of conforming to the behavioral norms of their society -- a capacity that anomics usually lack -- but are free to choose whether to conform or not." (242). Think of Don Draper in the season 1 episode "The Hobo Code", leaving Midge's Village apartment at the end of the evening that included pot smoking, knowing the police are outside, and having one of Midge's friends tell him that he can't go out there. Don puts on his hat, his symbol of conformity and respectability, and says something like "you can't". Matthew Weiner seems to go to great lengths to show that Don has the ability to conform to almost any group he finds himself in -- the decadent jet set crowd in Joy's Palm Springs, the hot rod guys in Anna Draper's neighborhood, creative types, business types, country club types. Don can move in and out among the different groups and play a role -- not always comfortably, but with some ease -- and still retain an autonomous sense of self who is apart from all of those social roles. Don is not fully at ease with his autonomy either -- his sense of being apart from society contributes to his existentialism, and to his desire to belong to a family in some uncomplicated way.

It is Don's autonomy -- his incomplete but often sincere search for a more authentic self within the constraints of society -- that is the core dramatic tension of the series, and one of the things that makes Don's character arc (I'm starting to think its true shape is an upward spiral) in the series to date representative of a key aspect of social change in the '60s. As the '60s transpire, the autonomous character type finds more cultural room to maneuver, particularly when that authenticity can be successfully combined with a "creative class" work culture.

Time Travelers and Perspectives on Cultural Change

2011-04-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

As I discussed in the last post, one of the difficulties in studying social history -- in engaging historical imagination -- is that we have to find a way to put aside the cultural assumptions that we live with every day in this world.

In some ways, the challenge is particularly difficult for this portion of the syllabus, as we are considering the late '50s culture in which a comfortable suburban conformity was both presented as the aspirational norm, and fretted over as evidence of the softening of the rugged, individual American male, who was supposed to be a bulwark against totalitarianism of all stripes. As Thomas Frank argues in The Conquest of Cool, it was American business and its embrace of a new form of advertising that found a way out of this conundrum -- a way to sell the products of the affluent society as an emblem of a new kind of individualism (what Robert Bellah and his co-authors label "expressive individualism" in Habits of the Heart). American business embraced "hip", Frank explains. "What happened in the sixties is that hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public." (Frank, 26)

The conquest of cool (as a culture, as a way of thinking) has been so complete that it can be difficult to put it aside, and imagine other ways of being in the world. Richard Florida offers a thought experiment in the opening chapter of The Rise of the Creative Class as one imaginative technique:

Take a typical man on the street from the year 1900 and drop him into the 1950s. Then take someone from the 1950s and move him Austin Powers-style into the present day. Who would experience the greater change? (Florida, 1)

Florida runs through the technological change that our first time traveler would experience -- cars, airplanes, supermarkets, home appliances, advances in medicine -- before concluding that the first man would find the "social world of the 1950s remarkably similar to his own" (2). Florida's second time traveler, however, would find a radically transformed social world. There would be obvious social changes -- women and non-whites in position of authority, increased ethnic diversity, same-sex couples in the open -- but also changes of attitude, as "individuality and self-expression would be valued over conformity to organizational norms" and "people would seem to be always working and yet never working when they were supposed to." The second time traveler, Florida concludes, would "continually suffer the painful feeling of not knowing how to behave", would be witness to a "deeper, more pervasive transformation" of society, and moreover would have to learn how to adjust to constant change, to a time when "flux and uncertainty themselves seem to be part of the everyday norm" (3-4).

Mad Men gives us glimpses of these kinds of time travelers -- Peggy's secretary Olive in "My Old Kentucky Home", or Mrs. Blankenship dead at her desk in season four -- "she was an astronaut," Cooper says in describing her passage through transformations in American culture.

My own sense of this cultural transformation, however, comes from a more personal source. Although I was born in 1969, I grew up in a place that retained the vestiges of three distinct traditional cultures (Cajun Catholic, rural African American, Appalachian), with an overlay of a national mass-media culture that was rapidly gaining ground. Lafayette, Louisiana and the surrounding area, known as Acadiana, is one of the least transient places in the country, as this 2002 New York Times article explores. There is a cultural mindset that is more resistant to change than the national culture. The conquest of cool is not complete in South Louisiana.

To the extent that these trends are true today, they are even more pronounced in older generations. My father's father did move. He was born sometime in the late 1910s in a rural area outside of Texarkana, Arkansas. He had a third grade education. His family was so poor that he often did not have shoes. During the Depression, he moved to Louisiana to find work in the oil fields -- physically demanding, dirty, dangerous work. '50s suburban conformity -- a brick house in a good neighborhood, with inside plumbing, appliances, money for vacations -- was a triumph -- an achievement of luck, initiative, and strenuous effort. The value of expressive individualism was utterly foreign to him. He lived until 1991, a time and culture traveler like Mad Men's Mrs. Blankenship, who found some accommodation with technological change, but could not fathom cultural change. Cool had no meaning to him.

Mad Men only offers us glimpses of characters as out of step with cultural change as my grandfather. Instead, it asks us to travel through the transformation with people who are in various stages of transformation, and who are contributing to the transformation through their personal choices, and their work in advertising. I'll explore this more thoroughly in my next post.

Switching Gears

2011-04-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

The initial set of posts on this blog have looked at history through the lens of television storytelling. As I switch gears to write about the next portion of the syllabus, I want to spend a little time talking about historical imagination and historical storytelling, outside of the context of a particular medium.

Several months ago, I came across a book called Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, by Sam Wineburg. Wineburg was a high school history teacher and later got a PhD in cognitive psychology. He has researched how students learn history and people think about, talk about, tell stories about history -- both the history they have experienced in their own lives, and long ago history that have only experienced through books, and in many cases, pop culture.

For Wineburg, historical thinking is a "way of knowing" that involves a particular kind of imagination. By default, he argues, people think about history in terms of the present -- they assume that things that are common sense, practical, natural, etc. for them were also sensible for historical actors. Wineburg labels this default state of mind "presentism" and argues that historical education should aim to challenge presentism by challenging people to consider the ways in which people who lived in the past thought differently -- had different assumptions, a different notion of what was right and wrong. Wineburg sees historical thinking as a "tension between the familiar and the strange, between feelings of proximity and feelings of distance in people we seek to understand."

I want to jump off of Wineburg's word "tension", because as we have been discussing, serialized narrative requires a certain ongoing tension. I would argue that for the viewer of Mad Men, there is a tension between the familiar and the strange as we imaginatively put ourselves in the shoes of different characters and think about the decisions they make. The tension may be most acute with Betty Draper, as we see her struggle with social norms and constraints that are different from our own.

I think its important to keep Wineburg in mind as we think about historical accuracy in Mad Men. Certainly historical accuracy is more than setting; more than references to elections and other big events; more than attention to detail in clothing and set design and period props. Its psychological and sociological accuracy is an opportunity for the audience to engage their historical imagination, as Wineburg conceives it, as part of the imaginative work of following a serialized narrative.

Conclusions from Character Goal Tracking Exercise

2011-04-19T12:27:00.000-04:00

To recap, we've been talking about techniques in serialized narrative that depict the process of gradual change over time. Characters in classical Hollywood storytelling are goal-oriented -- their goals set the action of the narrative in motion; their goals are well-defined; and changes in goal are generally strongly motivated. From this, I advanced the theory that serialized narrative requires a mixture of strongly motivated short-term goals and less strongly-motivated long-term goals. This mixture provides episodic closure, while creating psychological cliffhangers that carry across multiple episodes, seasons, and the entire series. To examine this theory in more detail, I defined three categories of character goals (beat, episode, and long-term) and reverse engineered a beat sheet for a climatic Mad Men episode to track goal shifts.

As expected, although Don achieves his overall episode goal (to hire Duck Phillips, block Pete, and avoid the exposure of his true identity) the manner in the story is told raises additional questions and further complicates the ongoing question of the series -- who is this guy, and as Rachel Menken says directly in the episode, what kind of man is he (is he now / has he been / can he become)?

Additionally, we see varying degree of goal shift among the central characters of this episode. With the exception of Pete, the other characters Don comes up against in this episode are consistent in their own well-defined goals. Peggy's episode and long-term goals are in alignment and her expression of those goals prompts Don's action in beat 25. Pete shifts his beat goal by deciding to confront Don with the contents of the box, but his episode goal remains the same (his beat goal shift is more of a change in tactic.) Rachel Menken and Bert Cooper articulate their responses to Don in clear terms. Don's goals change and his central conflict is deepened against the backdrop of characters who retain well-defined goals (whether they achieve those goals or not). I suspect that for an episode to work, we need to have some central characters hold on to their well-defined goals, while another character (or perhaps 2) are shifting. (I'll have to test this over additional episodes.)

So this seems like a fruitful exercise for examining character change over time. This particular set of movements for Don is not that closely related to our larger questions of social change in the early '60s, but if I can use this kind of technique to examine the changes over the series, it should yield something interesting related to our larger questions.

Edit April 26, 2011

Clarification on the Idea of Character's Having Long-Term Goals

Following a conversation with Mike Newman and some additional reading, I want to add a clarification to the idea of characters in serialized narrative and Mad Men in particular having long-term goals. I believe my earlier term was too loosely defined, but I don't have a good substitute phrase yet.

Mike has written about characters in indie cinema being portrayed as without clearly defined goals. In his new book Indie, has has this passage, which discusses the movie Lost in Translation:

As spectators we formulate questions about the characters, and this motivates our continued interest. We wonder if each character will stay with his or her spouse. We wonder if they will really fall in love with each other, as seems possible (and desirable to us). But there is no scene in which these outcomes are posed as questions with absolute answers or deadlines by which time decisions must be arrived at.

What Mike calls questions in the passage above, and contrasts in his book with the clearly-defined goals of traditional Hollywood film protagonists (the hero must stop the bad guy, get the girl, win the trial, stop the alien invasion, etc.)

These questions (psychological, philosophical, existential questions) are formulated by the spectator but attach somehow to the character in the narrative, whether or not the character actually expresses them as questions or expresses a goal of answering the question. The questions have no absolute answers (because of the nature of the questions) and no deadline.

The way that the storytelling attaches questions to a particular character is what made me think of them as being long-term goals for the character -- in the sense that the protagonist has to deal with the "who am I, why am I here, what am I doing with my life" question to some provisional extent to bring an end to whatever slice of life story the narrative is trying to tell.

It seems to me that serialized narrative, if and when it takes up these kinds of questions, as Mad Men does (Don raises existential questions with Rachel Menken in the pilot), draws out the features Mike identifies in these kinds of indie films to a much larger degree. If an episode has a resolution that seems to come down on the side of an absolute answer (Don tries to be happy with what he has), that answer may be revised or reversed in a later episode (Don has another affair). And the sense of life going on and on without deadline is certainly much stronger in serialized narrative.

Perhaps the clarification is not that the protagonist "has" the long-term goal, in the same way that they have episode or beat goals, but that the narrative raises a meaning-of-life level question in relation to a character and his or her choices in life and then the audiences assumes a "goal" of having the character answer that question to some extent through the meaning that attaches to the big life choices they make in the narrative.

Reverse Engineered Beat Sheet for Mad Men Episode 1.12 "Nixon vs. Kennedy"

2011-04-19T10:38:00.000-04:00

Reverse Engineered Beat Sheet Tracking Character Goals and Goal Shifts

Following the convention of the beat sheets reproduced in William Rabkin and Lee Goldberg’s book Successful Television Writing, I’m counting a new beat every time the script would note a change in location. I have no idea how widespread this particular way of counting beats is in within the industry – Rabkin and Goldberg’s book is the only place I have seen beat sheets reproduced.

I cannot determine from the DVD where act breaks were placed in this episode when it aired on AMC. I believe this is less important for Mad Men than it would be for other series. In chapter 2 of this interview, Matt Weiner says that he does not like the television convention of writing to act breaks and did not use it on the Mad Men pilot.

For my own purposes, I am describing those action of those beats in terms of character goals, as I explained here. I’m omitting goal descriptions for this episode’s secondary characters and focusing on Don, Pete, and Peggy. I'll draw some conclusion about these goals shifts in the next post.

"Nixon vs. Kennedy"
Episode 1.12
Written by Lisa Albert and Andre Jacquemetton & Maria Jacquemetton
Original air date: October 11, 2007

1 BERT COOPER’S OFFICE

Don enters Cooper’s office and introduces him to Duck Phillips, Don’s choice to be the new head of account services.

[Beat goal and episode goal for Don: he wants to hire Duck]

2 OUTER OFFICE

Pete, Ken, Harry & Paul discuss the after work party to watch the election returns. Discuss rumors of Duck’s history and politics around the hiring decision.

[Beat goal for Pete: he dislikes Duck and learns Duck may be hired soon]

3 PEGGY’S DESK

Pete walks to Don’s office door. Peggy stops him and buzzes Don to announce Pete. Don invites Pete in.

[Beat goal for Pete: he wants to talk to Don. Reminder of long-term goal for Peggy: wanting respect in the office and Pete’s lack of respect for her.]

4 DON’S OFFICE

Pete wants Don to take him seriously as a candidate for head of account services. Don says Pete won’t get the job. Pete makes his case several ways then leaves with recognition of office hierarchy.

[Beat goal and episode goal for Pete: he wants the job. This sets up episode conflict as Don and Pete’s episode goals conflict. Only one of them can get what they want.]

5 OUTER OFFICE

Harry escorts Don out of the office. The party begins.

6 DRAPER HOUSE

Betty and Sally are in the darkened living room watching the election returns on TV. Don returns home and is affectionate with Sally.

[Reminder of long-term goal for Don: wants refuge of a suburban home, good childhood for his kids.]

7 OUTER OFFICE

Party is in full swing. Ken chases down a secretary in way that we would now call sexual harassment. Peggy watches and decides to go home.

[Peggy’s goal reiterated: wants respect in the office.]

8 PETE’S APARTMENT

Pete is brooding and looking at the box of mementos that reveal Don’s true identity. Trudy enters and confronts him about the box saying that she doesn’t want secrets. Pete doesn’t reveal what is in the box. Trudy says he should return it since it isn’t his. Pete doesn’t agree or disagree.

[Pete’s beat goal is to keep his ruminations private. We can assume from beat 4 that the contents of the box are related to Pete’s episode goal, as it has information that is damaging to Don. Pete’s larger motivations remain obscure.]

9 – 14 SCENES AT THE OFFICE PARTY THAT DO NOT INVOLVE DON, PETE, OR PEGGY

Although these scenes have thematic relationships to the rest of the episode, I’m not focusing on them for this exercise.

15 OUTER OFFICE

Peggy enters office as others are waking up and leaving. The office is trashed and Peggy is disgusted.

[Another re-iteration of Peggy’s consistent goal: the others have not treated the office or her workspace with respect.]

16 BREAK ROOM

Ken, Paul and Sal are hung-over. Peggy confronts them over money that is missing from her locker.

[Peggy’s consistent goal: respect from her co-workers.]

17 BERT COOPER’S OFFICE

Don enters and discusses the election results. Cooper says there has been “widespread fraud” in the election but is sanguine about the way the world works. They discuss Nixon’s possible options. Don is less sanguine than Cooper but not upset. Says it “doesn’t seem fair.”

[Thematic link to one of Don's long-term goals, which will be emphasized in later beats. Previously in episode, Pete and Peggy are the ones most concerned with fairness and opposed to fraudulent behavior.]

18 PEGGY’S DESK

Replay of beat #3, but this time Pete is carrying the box. Peggy tries to stop him as before, but he doesn’t stop.

[Box and change of behavior leads us to believe Pete has made a decision from #8, but motivation is not revealed.]

19 DON’S OFFICE

Pete delivers the box and ask for the job again. Don says no. Pete closes the door and reveals that he knows Don is a fraud. Don tries to get him to back down. Pete says he’ll go to Cooper and asks for the job again. Don moves close to him and accuses him of blackmail with subtext of physical threat. Pete says, “It’s not a threat. It’s just a job.” Leaves office.

[Escalation from beat #4. Pete is willing to use blackmail to achieve his episode goal, but we don’t know why he made that decision. Don now has goal of blocking Pete, and long-term goal of maintaining deception moves to the foreground with Pete’s blackmail threat.]

20 DON’S OFFICE

Don is alone and opens the box. No dialogue. Camera pushes in.

21 FLASHBACK: TENT IN KOREAN WAR

Army truck delivers Dick Whitman to the real Lt. Draper. Mistakes mean they are alone in the outpost. Draper asks Whitman why he is in Korea, asks if he is poor. Whitman says he volunteered and that he “wanted to leave”.

[Flashback reveals some motivation for Dick (now Don). Dick was poor. Circumstances of his birth did not make life fair for him or give him a fair shot at success. Wanted to leave old (unfair) life and saw army as a way out.]

22 DON’S OFFICE

Beat to transition out of flashback. No dialogue. He picks up his phone and puts it back down.

23 RACHEL MENKEN’S OFFICE

Rachel knows something is wrong. Don asks her to go away with him and says he doesn’t want to come back. Wants to start over somewhere else. Rachel is practical, says she can’t leave her company, and he shouldn’t leave his children. Realizes he hasn’t thought it through. Rachel says “What kind of man are you?” Rachel tells him it was a cheap affair, and that he is a coward for wanting to run away. Tells him to leave.

[Don’t beat goal is the same as Dick’s in 21. He wants to escape but has become trapped. Needs new escape. Sees new escape as tactic to avoid revelation from Pete, although it would mean giving up on any previous goals for work success or maintaining his family. Conversation brings up cluster of long term goals and previous episode goals as Don pursued Rachel.]

24 DON’S OFFICE

Peggy is in his office crying as Don enters. Explains to Don that her complaint about the missing money (from #16) has resulted in a janitor being fired. Peggy says, “I follow the rules and people hate me. Innocent people get hurt, and other people, people who are not good, get to walk around doing whatever they want. It’s not fair.” Beat ends with close-up on Don.

[Don has returned to the office, so we assume his beat goal of #23, running away, has changed following Rachel’s rejection. He begins interacting with Peggy before revealing a new goal. Peggy’s goal has been consistent for the entire episode (and consistent with what we know of her character and long term goals). Her goal has not changed here, but she has an opportunity to express what the goal has cost her. Her statement “It’s not fair” echoes Don’s words to Cooper in #17 and ties Peggy’s words to the question of fairness in the Don/Pete dispute (which can be construed multiple ways). Last beat with Peggy. Her goals will not be achieved in this episode.]

25 OUTSIDE OF DON’S OFFICE. CONTINUOUS THROUGH HALLWAY TO PETE’S OFFICE.

Don enters Pete’s office and tells Pete he has no character and that he is hiring Duck instead of him. He calls Pete’s bluff and forces Pete to make the next move.

[24 sets up Don’s goal shift, which is revealed here. He goes back to his initial episode goal and his goal of beats 4 and 19, with the additional layering of the more abstract goal that things should be fair from 17, 24 contrasted with the fact that Pete has unfair advantages (from Don’s perspective) by being born rich and having all the right social connections.]

26 OUTER OFFICE. CONTINUOUS THROUGH HALLWAY TO COOPER’S OFFICE.

Continuation of 25 in different setting as way of moving argument to Cooper’s office in a natural way. Theme repeated with shot of victorious JFK from TV screen in the hallway next to Don and Pete.

27 COOPER’S OFFICE

Don tells Cooper he is hiring Duck. Pause as he waits to see what Pete will do. Pete reveals what he knows. Cooper says, “Who cares?” and justifies his position three ways: saying most men who built the country have done worse, citing Japanese philosophy, and drawing Pete’s attention back to the bottom line of the business, “I’d put your energy into bringing in accounts.” After Pete leaves the room, Cooper advises Don that “one never knows how loyalty is born.”

[Payoff of the episode conflict, settled by hierarchy, in a way that sidesteps the question of fairness. Don wins, for now, and achieves his beats goals and episode goals. Cooper’s resolution leaves Don’s long-term goal in a confused and complicated state. If Don cares about fairness (from beat 25), but has committed this fraud, what can we conclude about Rachel’s question, “what kind of man are you?” Last beat with Pete. His goals will not be achieved in this episode.]

28 FLASHBACK: KOREA. SHELLING.

Dick is digging defensive positions. Lt. Draper joins him and they come under fire. Although they survive the first round of shelling, Don drops a lit cigarette lighter that causes an explosion.

[Survival, the most basic of all goals.]

29 FLASHBACK: INTERCUT ARMY HOSPITAL / AFTERMATH OF EXPLOSION

In the hospital scenes, we see that Dick (now called Lt. Draper) is receiving a purple heart. In the aftermath of the explosion scenes, we see Dick trading dog tags with the dead and disfigured Lt. Draper.

[Survival, escape, and the question of honor / truth / fairness. What kind of man would do this?]

30 FLASHBACK: TRAIN STOPPING AT WHITMAN’S HOMETOWN

Dick (as Don) has been asked to return the body to Dick’s hometown. If he leaves the train, he will be exposed. Adam, as a young boy, sees Dick in the train, but his parents do not believe him. Dick/Don does not leave the train and is comforted by a beautiful woman.

[Backstory fills in psychological profile by showing Dick/Don making a difficult moral decision under duress, but does not resolve psychological cliffhanger. What kind of man would do this? Can it ever be made right? Audience wants to Don to survive, escape, but is made painfully aware of the cost. Adam as crux of the flashback heightens the stakes of the psychological cliffhanger. Whatever else this decision meant, it ultimately led to Adam’s suicide.]

31 COMMUTER TRAIN TO OSSINING

Don exits the train with a row of men in grey, wearing hats.

[Carries psychological cliffhanger back to present day, with thematic connection to Lt. Draper’s question to Don in #21 – has escape led to another trap (of men in grey flannel suits on commuter trains)?]

32 DRAPER LIVING ROOM

Don enters to find Betty asleep on the couch in front of the TV. Nixon concedes.

[Carries psychological cliffhanger back to the domestic setting. Don’s survival and escape has costs for Betty and his children. Thematic connection again to Nixon / Kennedy. Don has escaped being Dick, escaped his background, but “won” through fraud. On some level it goes against his own value system, and he understands that it comes at great cost to other “innocent” people. What kind of man is this?]

Tracking Goal Shifts and Character Motivation in an Episode

2011-04-18T10:11:00.000-04:00

Following my line of thought from Friday's post on character motivation, I spent a good part of yesterday thinking about how to itemize and track shifts in protagonists goals within particular episodes. My preliminary notion is that we can track at least three levels of goals for protagonists in serialized narrative -- beat (or scene) goals, which may carry over multiple beats; episode goals, which may undergo some change as complicating action is introduced; and long-term goals, which are often less-clearly defined, rely upon our knowledge of the character over time (we may have to piece together through allusion to multiple previous episodes), and are often in conflict with beat and/or episode goals.

If we track these goals through episodes in which a character has a goal shift, we can gain some insight into the storytelling techniques that deepen characterization and make up the process of gradual character change through the character arc. With a better understanding of technique over multiple episodes, we should be able to say something new about our larger questions for this independent study -- the ways in which storytelling in this series says something about the process of personal and cultural change in the early '60s.

I'm going to reverse engineer a beat sheet for the Mad Men episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy" (1.12) and track character goals and goals shifts beat by beat throughout the episode. I'm choosing this episode because there are a number of goal shifts and places where goals are brought into conflict.

**

Edited 4/19. Here the link to the beat sheet: http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/2011/04/reverse-engineered-beat-sheet-for-mad.html

A Theory on Character Motivation in Serialized Narrative

2011-04-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

Back in the good old days of the mid-'80s, when the series that were the forerunners of shows like Mad Men were in their prime, I was a high school debater. The rhetorical foundation of the form of debate I participated in was called the resolution. The affirmative team would advance a case in favor of the resolution, and the negative team was obliged to tear down that case. In later rounds, teams would argue the other side. In the course of arguing all sides of the resolution, debaters learn the strengths and weaknesses of their evidence and argumentation.

Following that practice, I want to advance a resolution. I'm not prepared at this point to marshal all possible evidence on its behalf, but instead offer it as a focal point for debate.

The demands of storytelling in serialized narrative result in protagonists that are less strongly motivated in their long term goals than protagonists in classical Hollywood film.

Below I'm going to outline an initial set of arguments in support of this theory. In my first three points, I'm going to summarize arguments from Kristin Thompson and then advance my new theory from that foundation.

A. Classical Hollywood narrative favors goal-oriented protagonists who advance the action of the film while pursuing their goals.

Kristin Thompson discusses this point thoroughly in Storytelling in the New Hollywood, writing that "characters provide most of the the motivation in any given film" as they actively "seek out goals and pursue them, rather than having goals simply thrust upon them." Motivations are based on a clear set of character traits and "characters act consistently" throughout the film.

B. When characters shift their goals and/or modify an established character trait to obtain a goal in the course of the film, their shifts are well explained. The characters are strongly motivated.

Characters may change or grow in the course of achieving their goals, but the classical narrative offers a great deal of explanation for the character's growth, as Thompson explains in great detail in her discussion of Michael Dorsey's (Dustin Hoffman) character arc in Tootsie and Phil's (Bill Murray) character arc in Groundhog Day. Narrative structure in film fosters "clear, gradual character change" as there is "time allotted to thoroughly motivate their progress." (43)

C. Television uses techniques of classical cinema.

In Storytelling in Film and Television Kristin Thompson discusses the way in which classical Hollywood narrative techniques are used in television as well. Referencing an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, Thompson describes the way in which in the character's traits are well-defined and the way in which the "causal action" of the episode "arises from the character's goals and traits." (30) Although the Newhart characters do not significantly grow or change (and Bob is a psychiatrist, but that is a question for another time), Thompson does mention other television sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and serialized narratives (The Sopranos, Sex and The City) without taking up the question of how the television narratives motivate character growth and change.

D. Serialized narrative blends well-defined character traits and goals, which are techniques of classical cinema, with less strongly motivated traits and goals, to create more psychologically complex characters who sometimes act in ways that may seem contradictory or difficult to fathom.

Although longer story arcs offer greater knowledge of a character's personality, and often depict a process of slow and gradual change (as we discussed here), the need for continued conflict in the ongoing story (which Ien Ang calls "psychological cliffhangers", discussed here) creates a countervailing pressure to make the protagonist inscrutable on some psychological level. If we can too easily predict what the protagonist in a serialized drama is going to do and why, we have less incentive to continue to tune in week to week. Thus serialized drama creates a mix of strongly motivated short-term goals (generally related to the character's work) and less strongly motivated long-term goals (generally related to their personal life or larger psychological questions of personal growth.)

I'm going to discuss three examples of this process, from different decades in the development of serialized television narrative. I'm going to use series I know well, and include Mad Men as my third example. Hopefully this will open up a debate and folks can offer other examples as well.

1. Early '80s - Character Development and Motivation in Remington Steele

This series, among other reasons why I find it worthy of study, is an early example of serialized character development in a non-soap opera format.

As with Cheers, which also debuted in 1982, it established the "will they or won't they" romantic storyline that was copied by dozens of subsequent series. As I explain in detail here (in a different context) the series pilot used conventions of narrative structure established in romantic comedy in film, but ended with the protagonists, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist) and Remington Steele (Pierce Brosnan) united professionally, while "stuck in the second reel" regarding their romantic involvement. Co-creator and show runner Michael Gleason (who had experience writing serialized narrative as a staff writer on Peyton Place in the mid-'60s) explained that he intended to have both characters and the relationship slowly evolve over the course of the series while never quite reaching the romantic comedy destination of "happy ever after". As this was several years before Moonlighting, the example Gleason and his staff cite as a caution against the romantic happy ending was the '70s MTM sitcom Rhoda, which saw its ratings drop precipitously after Rhoda was married, and pick up again following her divorce.

In the dozen hours of DVD audio commentary between Gleason and his writing staff, the phrase character arc is never used. Instead, the writers give the impression of a writing process in which they were free to write episodes that both explored the characters' back-story and developed some forward momentum as they saw fit, but the characterizations were ultimately subject to Gleason's re-write, as they would be with any show runner. Several of the writers indicate the degree to which they re-shaped their conception of the characters as they worked with the actors in the first few episodes and discovered their range and ability to move seamlessly from procedural to action to emotional drama to broad comedy to witty banter. The writers give the overall impression of a trial and error process that resulted in psychologically complex characterizations by the middle of the first season. Additionally, the series themes of identity -- public identity vs private identity, masquerades vs core integrity -- led to episodes in which the "true" goals and motivations of the characters were always somewhat at question (and thus deferred the ultimate romantic happy ending for another week).

To illustrate the mixture of strongly motivated short term goals, and less strongly motivated long term goals, consider the late first season episode "Sting of Steele". The episode introduces Steele's former mentor (from his mysterious past), re-introduces Laura's mother (from her shrouded and painful past), and turns on questions of false identity, trust and deception. Short term goals, focused on solving the mystery and bringing a murderer to justice, move through a plot that raises new questions of whether Steele can be fully trusted and whether Laura is capable of fully trusting anyone. The case is resolved and Laura and Steele rebuild some trust, but the psychological cliffhanger of both protagonists' long-term motivation and goals is left short of its full resolution. A film would require a more complete resolution, one way or the other.

2. Character Motivation in The West Wing

Aaron Sorkin is much less forthcoming about his writing process for The West Wing than Michael Gleason and his team. However, as Sorkin has written similar narratives for both film and serialized television, we can draw some conclusions relevant to our discussion here despite Sorkin's reticence. In a essay titled "A Scriptwriter's Perspective," included in The West Wing: The American Presidency as Television Drama, Jason P. Vest compares "two apparently identical scenes" in Sorkin's film The American President and in the first season West Wing episode "Let Bartlet be Bartlet" (148). (The DVD set contains no audio commentary for this episode.)

Vest includes a lengthy excerpt from a scene in The American President between President Shepherd (Michael Douglas) and his chief of staff A. J. MacInerney (Martin Sheen) in which they discuss a plot complication in which a political decision has led to professional difficulties for Shepherd's romantic partner. Vest describes this scene as the only one in the movie which offers a glimpse of the personal history between Shepherd and MacInerney, and indicates the way in which it serves as a turning point in the narrative. MacInerney reminds Shepherd of his core beliefs, which provides the clear grounding for his actions in the next scene, in which he reverses a political decision and reunites with his romantic interest. (148-150) The film narrative leads clearly to a character turning point, and his strongly motivated goal shift drives the resolution of the A & B plots of the film.

Vest's essay includes the transcript of a parallel scene in "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet". (151-153) As in the film example, President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his chief of staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer) discuss falling poll numbers and the political advisability of taking an unpopular stance that is closer to the president's core beliefs than his current position. As in the film example, the scene marks a turning point, as Bartlet is reminded by McGarry of the reasons he ran for president in the first place and resolves to express those beliefs. Bartlet's change of goal is strongly motivated -- for the time being.

However, as a serialized narrative, this is not the final word. Additional complications arise that will un-resolve and un-motivate the political advisability of letting Bartlet be Bartlet, particularly in the most significant arc of the second season which concerns the fact that Bartlet has withheld disclosure of a serious medical condition from the public and most of his staff. We gain a more nuanced character portrayal of the president at the expense of clearly motivated action. What are Bartlet's goals for his presidency? What is the proper balance between leadership and political expediency? The answers become contextualized and contingent on circumstance in the serialized television narrative where they were clear and resolute in the film.

3. Character Motivation in the Mad Men pilot

We're going to have a lot of opportunity to discuss character arcs in Mad Men as the class goes along. For my purposes today, I want to make a couple of points about Don's characterization.

It's also important to note that as a cable series of only 13 episodes with lengthy intervals between seasons, Mad Men has more time than network series generally do to plan character arcs, write, revise, and produce episodes. The conditions of production should result in more consistent characterization and plotting and less haphazard or accidental shifts in character goals based solely upon production deadlines.

In an interview for the Archive of American Television posted here, Matthew Weiner discusses Don't character arc in the fourth season, indicating that he had planned all along to have Don marry a secretary by the final episode of that season. He planned the arc and how to obscure the ending of that arc from viewers until it could emerge in more organic and natural way through the events of the season. (I have not watched all seven hours of this interview yet.)

In the pilot we certainly see a mixture of strongly motivated short term goals (Don needs something to pitch at the Lucky Strike meeting. Don needs to make up to Rachel Menken in attempt not to lose her business) and long term goals that are obscured. We don't learn about his existential outlook until his dinner with Rachel. We don't learn until the end of the pilot that Don has a wife and kids at home in the suburbs. The revelations make his character more opaque as the episode concludes, and Weiner gives some indication in the audio commentary for the episode that this was by design -- he says that most shows would have ended the narrative arc with Don's successful recovery in the Lucky Strike pitch. I'm reading between the lines of Weiner's admission and arguing that the design was intended to make Don more of a psychological mystery, to create the psychological cliffhanger that might hook an audience to want to travel on a fairly dark journey with this guy.

So that's my working theory:

The demands of storytelling in serialized narrative result in protagonists that are less strongly motivated in their long term goals than protagonists in classical Hollywood film.

I've not considered it from enough angles yet, looked enough for evidence to the contrary, or though enough about its larger implications, but I think it's enough to start a discussion.

Towards Defining Techniques of Character Development

2011-04-10T15:09:00.000-04:00

In my previous post, I discussed the way in which the slow and gradual process of character revelation and character development common to serialized narrative should, in theory, be ideally suited for exploring questions of social history -- questions of personal and cultural change. Before we examine these techniques in Mad Men, it would be useful to have a baseline understanding of how storytelling techniques in serialized narrative create investment in character. As we saw in the last post, both the length of the narrative and the pauses between episodes play a role, yet specific writing techniques must come into play as well.

Michael Newman examines some of these techniques in his essay "From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative." Newman begins his discussion on character arcs by noting that viewers are not only invested in the outcome of the plot, but in the "characters whose lives these plots define." (Newman, 23) Writers Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin echo this statement in their guidebook Successful Television Writing. "Ask just about anyone in the TV business, and they'll tell you the same thing," they explain. "No one watches their favorite shows for the stories....People tune into NYPD Blue to see how Sipowicz solves a crime and how he deals with it. They don't really care what the crime is, or who did it. They care about how it affects Sipowicz." (Goldberg and Rabkin, 23) Goldberg and Rabkin summarize The West Wing pilot to further their point, concluding that story structure is the platform that leads to "scenes of great emotional impact". Character is revealed through reaction to "challenges, risks, perils, adversities." (Goldberg and Rabkin, 24)

Yet this aspect of character technique is true of non-serialized narrative as well. With serialized narrative, we experience a characters reaction to a wide array of adversity over time, and can compare and contrast their emotional response over time. If a character arc is developed, character reactions and responses to adversity lead (or mostly lead) in a direction. As Newman summarizes, "Continuing stories make characters more likely to undergo significant life events" in which "the characters themselves are more likely to change, or at least to grow." (Newman, 23) In latter seasons of The West Wing, for example, Josh leaves his job as deputy White House chief of staff, convinces an unknown Congressman to run for President, and runs the campaign through a gauntlet of obstacles in the primary and general election campaigns. Adversity over time leads to multiple character revelations (including revelations of backstory relevant to character motivation) and to some level of character growth.

These descriptions of technique however seem like the beginning of an understanding rather than the end. I'm interesting in exploring how the techniques work at a more granular level within scenes and episodes to define character and establish arcs over time. I suspect there are deeper relationships between form and content that may influence the kinds of character revelations and growth arcs that "work" best in this kind of television, and that in turn may affect the kinds of stories that are told.

Writers don't write any story that happens to come along, and don't feel that there are infinite ways to tell each story. They speak, sometimes mystically, of finding the way to choose "the right" stories for their series and their characters and struggling to find "the right" way to tell those stories. I'm interested in those choices and that sense of having storytelling limitations. Perhaps a more granular level of exploration of technique will give us clues as to which stories (or in Mad Men's case which aspects of social history) are best told through these techniques.

Historical Stories and Serialized Narrative

2011-04-09T18:19:00.000-04:00

“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.

Mad Men Class Syllabus

2011-04-06T09:38:00.000-04:00

Mad Men: Serialized Television Narrative and Depictions of Social History in the Early 1960s

The acclaimed cable television drama Mad Men depicts the process of cultural change in early 1960s America through narratives of the personal and professional lives of men and women in a New York City advertising agency.

The series two most central protagonists, creative director Don Draper and secretary-turned-writer Peggy Olson, are attempting to:

re-make themselves and re-tell their own stories,
while working in an advertising industry that defines desires and creates narratives to sell products,
at a time in which the country is re-making itself, re-telling the story of what it means to be an American and who can participate in the telling of that story

In this independent study, we will examine both the social history of the early 1960’s, and the ways in which this serialized television narrative tells the story of cultural change in this period (1960 – 1965).

From that examination, we will also look at larger questions. Contemporary politics and popular culture debate the meaning of “the sixties” through broad symbols and shorthand references. Does this study of Mad Men and the social history of the early 1960s tell us something about the current cultural fault lines that are seen as resulting from “the sixties”? Can it tell us something about which cultural changes have been accepted and absorbed by American culture and which are still up for debate?

A note on reading assignments:

The book Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, a collection of scholarly essays on Mad Men edited by Gary R. Edgerton, will be published April 26, 2011. The essays will be assigned reading and integrated with the syllabus as appropriate.

A note on viewing assignments:

The entire series to date is required viewing (four seasons to date of 13 episodes each). The episodes mentioned below are highlighted for additional examination.

Writing Assignments and Evaluation:

Reading Responses

(Blog posts during each unit of the syllabus)

Book Review

(1500 word review of Mad Men: Dream Come True TV)

Final Paper

(20 page final research paper)

Reading and Viewing Assignments:

Week 1-2 -- Overview of Television Storytelling & Serialized Narrative

“From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative”, Michael Z. Newman

Storytelling in Film and Television, Kristin Thompson

Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, Glen Creeber

Mad Men episodes:

1.6 “Babylon”

2.7 “The Gold Violin”

2.12 “The Mountain King”

3.6 “Guy Walks in to an Advertising Agency”

3.11 “The Gypsy and the Hobo”

4.4 “The Rejected”

Week 3-4 -- The “Crisis of Conformity” in the late ‘50s

The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank, chapters 1-3

The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman

“The White Negro”, Norman Mailer

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich

Mad Men episodes:

1.1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”

1.8 “The Hobo Code”

2.11 “The Jet Set”

3.7 “Seven Twenty Three”

4.7 “The Suitcase”

Week 5-6 – Changes in Advertising and American Culture

Conquest of Cool, chapters 4 – 8

The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard

A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, Lizabeth Cohen

The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, chapters 1-2

Mad Men episodes:

3.2 “Love Among the Ruins”

3.13 “Shut the Door. Have a Seat”

4.5 “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”

4.7 “The Suitcase”

4.11 “Chinese Wall”

Week 7-9 – Feminine Mystique and the early Women’s Movement

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan

A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz

Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, Jennifer Scanlon

Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks, Alice Echols, chapters 1-4

Mad Men Episodes:

1.3 “Ladies’ Room”

1.13 “The Wheel”

2.6 “Maidenform”

3.8 “Souvenir”

4.9 “The Beautiful Girls”

Week 10-12 – Political Change and Social Change / Re-telling the American Story in the Early 1960s

Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin, chapters 1-7

Port Huron Statement

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, Taylor Branch

Mad Men Episodes:

1.12 “Nixon vs. Kennedy”

2.13 “Meditations in an Emergency”

3.3 “My Old Kentucky Home”

3.12 “The Grown-Ups”

4.13 “Tomorrowland”

Week 13-15 -- Final Paper