perhaps, that we all secretly carry of our own parents, whatever their lives and marriages may have been.
The tension between the luminous ideal and the unhappy reality is, of course, what the show thinks it’s “about”—reminding us, as it so often and so unsubtly does, that,
like advertising itself
, the decade it depicts was often hypocritical, indulging certain images and styles of behavior while knowing them to be false, even unjust. But this shallow aperçu can’t explain the profound emotionalism of the scene. In a lengthy
New York Times
article about
Mad Men
that appeared as the show—by then already a phenomenon—was going into its second season, its creator, Matthew Weiner, recalled that he had shown the carousel episode to his own parents, and the story he tells about that occasion suggests where the emotion may originate.
Weiner, it turns out—like his character, Don Draper—used hisown family photographs to “stock” the scene: the most poignant image we see as Don clicks through the carousel of photos, a picture of Don and Betty smilingly sharing a hot dog (a casual intimacy that, we know, can now only be a memory), was based on an actual photograph of Weiner’s parents sharing a hot dog on their first date. Interestingly, Weiner made a point of telling the reporter who was interviewing him that when he showed the episode to his parents, they didn’t even remark on the borrowing—didn’t seem to make the connection.
The attentive and attention-hungry child, the heedless grown-up: this pairing, I would argue, is a crucial one in
Mad Men
. The child’s-eye perspective is, in fact, one of the strongest and most original elements of the series as a whole. Children in
Mad Men
—not least, Don and Betty’s daughter, Sally—often have interesting and unexpected things to say. Perhaps the most intriguing of the children is Glen, the odd little boy who lives down the street from the Drapers, whose mother is a divorcée shunned, at first, by the other couples on the block. Glen has a kind of fetishistic attachment to Betty—at one point, when she’s babysitting him, he asks for and receives a lock of her hair—and he occasionally pops up and has weirdly adult conversations with her. (“I’m so sad,” the housewife finds herself telling the nine-year-old as she sits in her station wagon in a supermarket parking lot. “I wish I were older,” he pointedly replies.) The loaded way in which Glen often simply stares at Betty and the other grown-ups suggested to me that he’s a kind of stand-in for Weiner, who had been a writer on
The Sopranos
and, more to the point, was born in 1965—and is, therefore, of an age with the children depicted on the show. That Glen is played by Weiner’s son strikingly hints at a very strong series of identifications going on here.
It’s only when you realize that the most important “eye”—and “I”—in
Mad Men
belong to the watchful if often uncomprehendingchildren, rather than to the badly behaved and often caricatured adults, that the show’s special appeal comes into focus. In the same
Times
article, Weiner tried to describe the impulses that lay at the core of his creation, acknowledging that
part of the show is trying to figure out—this sounds really in-eloquent—trying to figure out what is the deal with my parents. Am I them? Because you know you are.… The truth is it’s such a trope to sit around and bash your parents. I don’t want it to be like that. They are my inspiration, let’s not pretend.
This, more than anything, explains why the greatest part of the audience for
Mad Men
is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts—people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties—but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of
The tension between the luminous ideal and the unhappy reality is, of course, what the show thinks it’s “about”—reminding us, as it so often and so unsubtly does, that,
like advertising itself
, the decade it depicts was often hypocritical, indulging certain images and styles of behavior while knowing them to be false, even unjust. But this shallow aperçu can’t explain the profound emotionalism of the scene. In a lengthy
New York Times
article about
Mad Men
that appeared as the show—by then already a phenomenon—was going into its second season, its creator, Matthew Weiner, recalled that he had shown the carousel episode to his own parents, and the story he tells about that occasion suggests where the emotion may originate.
Weiner, it turns out—like his character, Don Draper—used hisown family photographs to “stock” the scene: the most poignant image we see as Don clicks through the carousel of photos, a picture of Don and Betty smilingly sharing a hot dog (a casual intimacy that, we know, can now only be a memory), was based on an actual photograph of Weiner’s parents sharing a hot dog on their first date. Interestingly, Weiner made a point of telling the reporter who was interviewing him that when he showed the episode to his parents, they didn’t even remark on the borrowing—didn’t seem to make the connection.
The attentive and attention-hungry child, the heedless grown-up: this pairing, I would argue, is a crucial one in
Mad Men
. The child’s-eye perspective is, in fact, one of the strongest and most original elements of the series as a whole. Children in
Mad Men
—not least, Don and Betty’s daughter, Sally—often have interesting and unexpected things to say. Perhaps the most intriguing of the children is Glen, the odd little boy who lives down the street from the Drapers, whose mother is a divorcée shunned, at first, by the other couples on the block. Glen has a kind of fetishistic attachment to Betty—at one point, when she’s babysitting him, he asks for and receives a lock of her hair—and he occasionally pops up and has weirdly adult conversations with her. (“I’m so sad,” the housewife finds herself telling the nine-year-old as she sits in her station wagon in a supermarket parking lot. “I wish I were older,” he pointedly replies.) The loaded way in which Glen often simply stares at Betty and the other grown-ups suggested to me that he’s a kind of stand-in for Weiner, who had been a writer on
The Sopranos
and, more to the point, was born in 1965—and is, therefore, of an age with the children depicted on the show. That Glen is played by Weiner’s son strikingly hints at a very strong series of identifications going on here.
It’s only when you realize that the most important “eye”—and “I”—in
Mad Men
belong to the watchful if often uncomprehendingchildren, rather than to the badly behaved and often caricatured adults, that the show’s special appeal comes into focus. In the same
Times
article, Weiner tried to describe the impulses that lay at the core of his creation, acknowledging that
part of the show is trying to figure out—this sounds really in-eloquent—trying to figure out what is the deal with my parents. Am I them? Because you know you are.… The truth is it’s such a trope to sit around and bash your parents. I don’t want it to be like that. They are my inspiration, let’s not pretend.
This, more than anything, explains why the greatest part of the audience for
Mad Men
is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts—people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties—but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of
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