Culture Shocks – Mad Men, Tobacco, and the Conquest of the Past

The past is a foreign country, and like other foreign countries, may be invaded and conquered if sufficient vigour is shown. This is one of the effects of the rash of neo-period dramas over the last decade or so; the past has been more thoroughly recast for our consumption than in any previous period, because the mass media budget is there for it. We see the past a vast treasure trove of stories we can tell - all entirely ours to tell how we wish. But why? In the least historically grounded society in history, why are we so fascinated by the past? (That may be a little too loaded a question, I grant.) And why is there so much smoking?

I do not pretend to be a Mad Men expert. I have watched most of the first season, and I have read virtually nothing about it. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating case study. We are shown middle-class America in 1960; the men are nearly uniformly sexist, the women brittle and oppressed, the children neglected, and every white person is casually racist to black and Jew alike. Our hero is an impersonator, a working boy made good, a serial adulterer, and nonetheless the character who seems to treat minorities and women most decently. He’s a destructive liar, but much more admirable than all the socially conservative villains around him. Also, did I mention, everybody smokes, all the time?

The past was a dark place, it turns out. And yet – and surely this is the theme of most Mad Men long-form essays, statistically speaking – it is all presented so beautifully. Perhaps we are to take away that the beauty and order is sugar-spun and false, as we are to take Betty Draper’s public persona. But if that’s the simple fact of the matter, why does everyone look so cool smoking?

Smoking is ubiquitous in any modern production of anything set mid-century. Yes, there was plenty of smoking back then, but this much? And in every scene, every moment? Mad Men’s creator, Matthew Weiner, was born in 1965; he can scarcely know the habits of the professional class in the office during the 1960s, no matter the voluminous research he and his team plainly undertook.

But of course, that is not the point. The smoking is meant to signal that we are in the past, and it is meant to be part of the glamour, just like the tailored suits and beautiful cars. One of the more prominent ladies in season 1, Rachel Menken, has glossy black hair and smokes using a holder. Audrey Hepburn is not meant to be far from our minds.

I do not know that it is conscious, but the smoking also articulates the view we have of the past, especially as we compare it to the present. Smoking kills, yes – and Mad Men constantly winks at this fact – just as 1960 was rife (in our view) with sexism, racism, and classism. But wasn’t it all more civilised then? Weren’t the cars nicer? Weren’t the outfits just swell? And wasn’t the smoking cool? Mad Men is, as for zeal, a persecutor of the old guard; as to righteousness before the media jury, blameless. But it cannot help but be wistful for the past it is glad to be escaping. You will find the same in any period drama of the last decade or more, I think.

As we float off from our moorings, we look back wistfully; our anxieties about postmodernity are well-founded, but we are sure there can be nothing morally worth salvaging from these prior times. And yet – and yet – for all we know the past is cancerous, it is so appealing. Nothing now tastes so good, or looks so good. Perhaps we’ll get our fix, our passive smoke, by watching programmes with all the right morals, but which titillate us by giving us the external beauty of a former age. (We have no language to comprehend the inner beauties.)

There is an irony to all this, it should be noted. The 1950s – ending as our programme starts, and the morality of which we are asked to gawp at in horror – was a modern decade, not a premodern one. Betty Draper is depressed by the fragility and falseness of suburban community, and left without serious purpose as a housewife – precisely because of her mod cons, not in spite of them. The strange mix of a wife with a serious education at Bryn Mawr and a lack of full-time staff to handle the cooking and children is the result of a booming, growing middle class and a spreading of wealth. And so, too, the smoking – precisely at its peak in the early 20^th century, not beforehand. Our lack of mooring means we long, not for a different world, but our own yesterdays – and we do not realize it.

The world and morality we are called to reject by Mad Men are our own, not that of the distant past. This is not a subtle point being made by the show; it may believe we still suffer from sexism and the rest, but it would hardly deny great progress had been made. It is entirely accidental that it assaults the very society that first affirmed the key values we rely upon now. Comfort, independence, self-realization were the creed of the ‘50s and ‘60s, over against virtuous labour, community, and self-sacrifice. We look at what we believe is the past, and feel uncomfortable with what we see, without realizing that we are in front of a mirror. In our conquest of the past, we have remade it entirely in our image.