Mad Men -- Mad Women

I am a Johnny (Joanie)-come-lately to AMC TV’s "Mad Men", having only just recently become a viewer. Blind to the story’s history and characters, my impression after viewing the first time was of excruciatingly slow movement, and I said so in a remark on Facebook. Very quickly, I got a response from a younger woman—probably close to the age of my daughter and her generation of women, who said, “My mother calls it excruciating. I love it!” Her friends had been laughing and throwing around comments about how every time they watched an episode, they felt like “smoking cigarettes and having Martinis”! They were obviously having fun. Which made it all that much more apparent to me how differently I was responding. Now, I had to stop and examine my gut as to what this description, “excruciating”, was all about for me, and how it was that another woman/mother, ostensibly near my age, had used the very same word in expressing her reaction to the series. As I probed through my insides, I began to discover I’d encountered a similar, but stronger stew of feelings when I’d seen the movie, "Revolutionary Road", around the first of the year. I had been drawn into the plot of this movie like a moth to the flame, and had sat, transfixed to its movement, marking the paces of each scene like steps forward in a Russian winter death march. "Dr. Zhivago"—excruciating. But along with the sense of plodding towards a predictable fate, I had felt saturated in an aura of accusation and shame—and bewildered as to why I would be feeling this way.

I was a very young teenager in the late fifties and early sixties, the era in which both of these plots were situated. I suffered all the angst of adolescence characteristic to every generation, but, as a young girl living in this period, I felt stifled. Stifled by its formality and restricted to a narrow locality, like the Chinese girls I had seen in "National Geographic", whose feet were bound at birth so they could never wander too far from home. I felt like any movement forward was agonizingly restrained--like trying to walk underwater. And, now, as I begin to more fully identify the wrappings of this experience, I am likening it to the paralysis of sleep, or the limp powerlessness of being mesmerized in trance. Hmmm, this is beginning to sound archetypal…

These were the days when I was compelled to survive the stultifying culture of conformity while I lived for my future freedom. After all, there were hints of another world out there, somewhere—“somewhere, there’s a time and place for us; it waits for us somewhere”.

I was never an avid feminist later in the sixties, though I reveled in the atmosphere of activism and change. I was in college at U.T. the year the metamorphosis from sorority girl to flower child occurred—just like caterpillar to butterfly, so it was for all of us. It was a metamorphosis from greek signs to peace signs—and it was as if a time wave passed through a the campus, The Drag, The Mayfair House, and we were all changed—in the twinkling of an eye! I was aware of feminism, like I was aware of the shift in music, clothes values, and dating practices; what was cool and what was not; the growing acceptance into our circle of marijuana, LSD, and other exotic hallucinogens--of loosened attitudes about sex. And this was before the Pill—or bordering on the time of its widespread availability without parental consent. These were the times that lit my mind in neon—offering flashes of hope I could be released from the oppressive bondage of the past. But I was also afraid.

Where the rush of potential flight was exhilarating, the fear of free-falling into uncertain space was terrifying, and my alarm was in contrast to my college companions who were reeling forward at a reckless pace. Yes, you heard right, the pubescent one who had dreamed of being Beat like Kim Novak in "Bell, Book, and Candle", and had been dragging herself through quicksand to get here, had reached a point in the turn to twenty where she was compelled to pull her board back from this great wave rising under her—this invitation to ecstasy. My practical nature wouldn’t allow me to go against my early warning system and catch that wave to feel the exuberance of its power. My gut told me that ride could only end with me being devoured by the wild surf. I am adventurous of mind and spirit, but afraid, at core, to act.

My Mother and Grandmother valued boldness; and my family, rugged independence and self-sufficiency. The Mothers also believed in being responsible to their families and placing themselves at the service, not of their men, necessarily, but of their children. The women in my family were not much like Betty or April, but I could tell they felt held back from achievement. They both wanted the limelight, but in different ways. My grandmother wanted to achieve wealth and status, social position and stability--but I believe she resented having to sell herself into marriage to do so. In her later years, she liked walking into the country club dining room at Champion’s and having the pianist abruptly stop the elevator music to play “Alley Cat” while she strutted across the room throwing her head high as she flung one end of her mink stole over her shoulder with flourish. No-one there knew that she spent most of her days sitting frozen on her perch in that trance of lost vision while she gazed out onto the golf course through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, only to awaken ever so often to smoke another cigarette.

My mother was aware she must fit into the social set in any place we lived, but she was competitive. She worked hard, giving herself to church and community service in the same way as she gave herself to her family. But she was a maiden who wanted to be king—in every club or activity where she became involved, she achieved leadership. She was aggressive, but she loved people and loved their attention and appreciation, so she was often at odds between her need to rise to a position of power and control, and her need to be loved and belong. She was also a natural athlete who taught us girls when we were little, to try and kiss our elbows so we could turn ourselves into boys and play baseball in the major leagues. My grandfather used to say she taught her two boys to be too soft, like girls. But he’s a whole other story…

So, apparently, the “excruciating” feeling I had of being bound up in slow moving molasses the first time I watched "Mad Men" didn’t arise out of viewing it during a slow time for TV on a slow end-of-weekend Sunday night. While my younger Facebook friends were admiring hunky Don, marveling over Betty’s wardrobe, and craving cigarettes and Martinis—enjoying their ride through time from a safe psychological distance, I was being drawn back into dangerous territory. I am in peril of discovering that I have unfinished business—I am still that ingénue—no more advanced than the women who went before me…

Revolutionary Road

I saw the movie , Revolutionary Road (directed by Sam Mendes and screenplay by Justin Haythe) last night and was quite moved. Not only did it bring back personal deep-seated feelings, I could see where they were wrought--from my intensive reading of the literature and my attunement to the film culture of the fifties and early sixties. I remember all the angst of repression built in the fifties surfacing in the sixties, because it became quite personal to me as an individuating teen (with a revolutionary mind and spirit).

Naturally the zeitgeist of the early sixties would light my fire of mind, if not stir my more cautionary nature to rapid response. A fence sitter, I was not, but torn, I was -- between my own two natures. Much has been said lately about American Exceptionalism and about the sense of entitlement of the Baby Boom generation, who came to believe the world was made just for allowing their suns to shine. There may be some truth in that to be seen in the arrogant recklessness we have recently witnessed with the Bush administration's grab for power and the financial markets' rabid excess of financial irresponsibility (though I would attribute the latter more to Generation Jones). But in a field of thought outside this box, there is also some need to question the whole notion of a spineless social conformity that would have us in step with a Stepford wife type mentality. Into this movie (I never read the book, but will now), where we might initially expect romance, creeps the theme of a compelling culture of conformity that so stagnates the human spirit that it becomes overwhelmingly depressed and dispassionate. It is altogether too tempting from a "conformist" mental health perspective to "diagnose" the existential depression of the chararacters in this Tennesse Williams type drama as being caught up in a form of manic-depressive psychosis that is worthy of the electro-convulsive shock treatments given back in those times before the advent of Abilify (or behavioral health care).

Even though the press for freedom, for adventure and free-spirited expression of uniqueness may be considered childish things to be left behind as we accept the limitations of becoming responsible adults caring for our careers, our families and children; it remains important, does it not, to live with passion and with meaning as unique individuals? This is the question Richard Yates in Revolutionary Road (published in 1962), and other writers of the late fifties and early sixties put before us. How do we answer it? In it lies both an internal psychological and an external cultural archetypal dilemma to somehow be resolved. A challenge to the individual, a challenge to human nature.

Clearly, without the newly acquired affluence of a broadening middle class in the fifties and early sixties, this question could never have been asked. Without the security of those conditions, it would have been impossible to risk thumbing our noses at a deadbeat job or a lifeless marriage that didn't allow us to “follow our dreams". And will the freedom to have dreams and desires of expressing ourselves as unique individuals once again have to be set aside as we deal today with an economy (and climate and energy resources) gone critical, a rapidly shrinking and unstable middle-class? In times such as these, the call to the "exceptional" life becomes quite risky. Answering such a call may be threatening to our very survival. In times such as these we plunge to the lowest level of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”. We fall from the level of individual achievement and “self-actualization” to the scrapper mentality of physical survival.
In these times of economic--really, global insecurity, we seem to be called upon to surrender our higher callings and our deepest longings (or is it our foolish illusions?) for a narrow focus on survival which requires personal sacrifice.

Can you feel the pain?