"Eight Million Stories in the Naked City"
Written by Dana Polan (Cinema Studies, New York University)
For the committed Mad Men viewer, it's easy to have become caught up in the series' production of narrative suspense -- what's going to happen? Certainly, this has seemed all the more the case with the start of the current season given the extent to which the previous one had ended with a big cliffhanger, Don's plan to marry Megan. For many viewers, I would bet, the money was on Megan being "history" by the beginning of the new season, relegated to the past and perhaps not even mentioned again so impulsive and even wrong-headed did these marriage plans appear. Obviously, that's one prediction some of us fortune-tellers (readers of "Tea Leaves," to quote the title of last week's episode?) got wrong.
In television history, astuteness about how to keep narrative going, when to shift its terms, how to generate suspense and new story-lines have all been the province of soap opera and stand indeed one of its formal accomplishments (despite the genre often seeming to the critical establishment to be beneath contempt). Need to reinvigorate your narrative?: have a long-lost brother show up, have a key character get a potentially fatal illness (say, a heart attack or a tumor), have a foreigner who doesn't completely know the local mores move into the locale, have your protagonist turn out to have been someone else in the past, have couples break up and begin anew with other partners, and -- once you've shaken things up in such ways -- just return to the initial set-up and start the narrative again.
Of course, I'm citing narrative conceits from Mad Men as well as from typical soap operas. Like the soap opera, Mad Men is a narrative generator, a game-machine for evolving new moves for the kept-guessing spectator. (For example, its way of starting the machine over is to have a team from the first ad agency decide to initiate a new company. This is a story-line within the world these characters inhabit but it's also, at a meta-level, the series deciding to reboot by simply beginning again. If only they could have figured out a way to get Sal back into the mix, though!)
The ultimate inconsequentiality of any narrative line in multi-character serial drama is amplified in the case of those dramas set in a fictional world that is itself often about inconsequentiality. That is, narrative outcome may not matter if it's in a world where the characters don't take it to matter. Take The Sopranos, for instance: we care about the titular characters and the regulars who assemble around them, and we see the frequent importance of the fiefdoms they are fighting for. But this is also a world of endless replacement -- a capo gets whacked (or dies on the toilet, as happened in one episode) and there will always be someone around to be named to take his place. Somebody dies?: get over it, and just move on. The narrative seems to be stuck?: well, just have some new character released from prison to stir things up. In like fashion, Mad Men's narrative world is one of continued replacement in the workplace (in this week's installment, "Mystery Date" [Episode 4], Peggy tells Dawn that she, Peggy, was once a secretary too; there's always room to move into a new place in the hierarchy and in the narrative) and in the domestic realm as well (we can now compare Don's life with Megan to his with Betty, and Don has enough former girlfriends around so that you can always bring one back for new narrative conniptions).
And, in an intriguing way, the fictional world of Mad Men is also about inconsequentiality -- of seemingly momentous things not always having the impact they should. The men of this world of advertising have to know how to deal with crisis, how not to show their panic in front of a client, how not to break a pose of confidence, and so on (to quote a later famous ad slogan, the goal is to not let them "see you sweat," although Don Draper sometimes seems in violation of that stricture). There are surprises galore in this world, but the guys have to take them in stride. The series indicated its resilience (and the resilience of its fictional characters) toward game-changing crisis in Season 1 [Episode 12 "Nixon vs. Kennedy"], when, faced with Pete's threat to reveal his alternate identity as Dick Whitman, Don immediately called Pete on his bluff and goaded Pete into announcing his discovery to Bert Cooper only to have Pete learn that Bert didn't care. By the first episode of the current season, Megan could casually cite the name "Dick Whitman" as if this once momentous plot twist had now been absorbed into the ordinariness of slowly unfolding everydayness.
The inconsequentiality of narrative -- any story line can peter out, be dropped, be reshaped in relatively random fashion -- has its own consequences for something that's intrigued many viewers of Mad Men especially as it moved toward Season 5: its fictional world's engagement -- or not -- with the larger real-life narrative history of the times. I've used the word "flirtation" several times above, and this week's episode might be said to be about -- or even itself be -- a flirtation with history. If the Don story-line here operates in the realm of fantasy (a sexual encounter and a murder that didn't happen), two other story-lines allude directly to the times: Joan and Greg's fight and break-up has the war in Vietnam as its backdrop, Peggy and Dawn's bonding over beers has the fraught geography of New York for African American women as its theme (and, more remotely, the race riots in Chicago and elsewhere that Peg's boyfriend is covering and that she vaguely alludes to). Here, in a sense, the series flirts with issues of scale and distance: what might have seemed elsewhere and even far away comes confrontationally into the space of domesticity (the pocketbook, for instance, that Peggy glances at, knowing immediately that Dawn will know this glance means racial suspicion; suddenly, civil rights is right there, in the room). But in this slow, even meandering narrative universe, it is hard to know if politics can ever come to mean anything more (this after all is a narrative universe in which one ad executive turns off TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination so that the woman he is about to have sex with won't be put off her game).
But Mad Men does remind us at times that the seeming inconsequential can come back to haunt us (as when, in the first episode of this season, Peg, alone in a hallway, was holding Joan's baby, a poignant but brief allusion to her own child, given up for adoption). No narrative is without its potential for future exploitation, expansion, and elaboration. There have been times in the history of television when a flirtation with the political turns into something more (for me, the supreme case was the transition from Season 1 of The Wire to Season 2 where suddenly entirely new dimensions of urban politics -- for instance, blue-collar labor and unionization, globalization and the traffic in women -- came into play in what had been more a street-corner saga). You never know. I still very much want to see where Mad Men is going to take us.
