The Antihero Trilogy, Part 2
There’s a scene midway through season 2 of Mad Men (set in 1962) in which Don and Betty go to a Memorial Day celebration at a country club. Veterans are invited to stand up for a round of applause, and one person who does is an elderly man in a Rough Riders uniform, who invaded Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt in 1898.
In season 4 (1964-1965), the head of Lucky Strike cigarettes, at dinner with Roger Sterling, reminisces about sitting with his grandfather as a child and listening to his stories of the Confederacy and the Civil War.
In that same season, the elderly secretary Ida Blankenship dies at her desk, which is mostly played for laughs. Only her contemporary Bert Cooper offers a serious reflection: “She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.” A few years (and seasons) later, Cooper himself dies immediately after watching people walk on the moon for the first time.
Mad Men is obsessed with generations, and generation gaps. Textually, it follows its characters throughout the 1960s, the birthplace of the most iconic American generation gap (though perhaps not ultimately the most significant; sorry boomers). Then there’s the subtextual friction of it being a show about the 1960s that aired in the late 2000s and early 2010s, all the smoking and sexual harassment and children with plastic bags over their heads so famously signalling, “can you believe the way things used to be?” And of course you can’t escape the added psychoanalytical layer of it being a show made by (mostly) young baby boomers and Gen Xers about their parents. Mad Men may be set in the past, but it is always in conversation with the future.
During my recent rewatch, then, I was surprised to realize how completely the world of Mad Men is permeated by history. I remembered the flashbacks to Don’s childhood in the Great Depression (widely considered hopelessly corny and on the nose when the show first aired), but I didn’t remember the Rough Rider, the Civil War stories, or even much about Bert Cooper, a main character, beyond his existence and his dislike of shoes. If the 21st century is subtextually present in Mad Men via its creators and audience, the 19th century is textually present in the world of its characters. The people implied to have experienced the most dramatic societal transformations aren’t Don or Peggy or even (future) Sally, but the astronauts Bert Cooper and Ida Blankenship. And the most miserable person on the whole show, Don, is the one who continually denies the power of his past, even as he repeats its traumas again and again.
It’s no secret that TV’s most iconic antiheroes, including Don, exist in shows that fundamentally disagree with everything they stand for. That’s what makes them antiheroes. Don’s philosophy is that of the generation gap, which also happens to be the foundational myth of white America: That it’s possible to escape your past, as long as you never look back. Superficially, it can work. Don wrenches himself free of poverty and an unloving home; Peggy professionally soars in a way that was unthinkable to previous generations of women after she takes Don’s advice to repress the experience (and consequences) of her unconscious pregnancy.
But while Mad Men believes in change and transformation, it doesn’t believe that escaping the past is possible. It’s theory of history is not that of the generation gap but of the generational palimpsest, with generations and formative experiences and versions of America continually being layered on top of one other. The top layer—the present—isn’t insignificant by any means, but it only exists the way it does because of all the other layers underneath. And the top layer doesn’t stay on top for very long. Eventually it too will be covered over by the new and turned into the foundation it currently resents. You can see that churn most explicitly in Janie Bryant’s instantly and deservedly iconic costume design. Characters (most obviously Joan and Betty) wear the same outfits again and again, and we watch their favorite clothes—the selves they present to the world—decay into being more and more out-of-date as the 1960s pushes on. (Relatable!) Even during a time of great transformation, the past doesn’t disappear. We carry our histories with us until we die, and until then, that history continues to be just as real, and perhaps even more powerful, than the present.
Since Mad Men first aired, millennials have experienced becoming part of the generational palimpsest for the first time. I started watching Mad Men the year I graduated from college, and my generation was the top layer, the youngest adults. Now there are adults younger than us, and we’re moving deeper and deeper into the foundation. One popular division between millennials and Generation Z is that millennials remember 9/11. Eventually, if we’re lucky, we’ll be the last ones left who do. We’ll also be the last people to remember an offline world and the very beginnings of the internet. The last people to remember when climate change was an abstract notion instead of a daily reality. Soon enough, people will gasp when they find out we were born in the 1900s, the same way we now gasp when we meet an adult born in the year 2000. Like Bert Cooper and Ida Blankenship, we straddle literal centuries and figurative worlds. We’re astronauts.