Behind Every Mad Man There Is a Mad Woman

Behind Every Mad Man There Is a Mad Woman On Male and Female Representations and Sexuality in AMC’s Mad Men Ana Serediuc Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the Prof. dr. Gert Buelens requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en letterkunde: Italiaans-Engels” 2016 – 2017 Serediuc 2 Acknowledgements When I first started watching Mad Men it had never occurred to me that one day, I would write my dissertation about the show in order to obtain my master’s degree at the University of Ghent – and yet here we are a few years later. This pop-cultural topic of my choice did not always facilitate my research nor my writing process, but it did to a large extent made me greatly enjoy this entire journey. After experiencing some difficulties in finding a suitable subject matter, it was my supervisor who pointed me in the right direction. Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to prof. dr. Gert Buelens, who not only helped me define my subject, but who has also put a lot of work in giving me thorough and supportive feedback. Furthermore, I would like to thank my friends and family for their amazing support not only during the realization of this master thesis, but throughout the entire duration of my academic studies. A special thanks to Kessy Cottegnie and Marjolein Schollaert for being such dedicated proof-readers and supporters. Serediuc 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….. 2 Table of Contents …………………………………………………..…………………….. 3 List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………….… 4 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………... 5 I - Male and Female Roles………………………………………………………………. 10 Chapter 1 • Traditional and Modern Women ……………………………………....... 11 1 ⋅ The Traditional Housewife …………………………………………………..... 11 2 ⋅ Betty Hofstadt ……………………………………………………………...….. 12 3 ⋅ The Modern Woman ……………………………………………………...….... 16 4 ⋅ Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway …………………………………………….... 22 Chapter 2 • Men and Masculinity …………………………...……………………….. 30 1 ⋅ Male Messages ……………….……………………………………………..… 30 2 ⋅ Donald Draper ……………………………………………...………………….. 32 3 ⋅ The Male Employees ………………………………………………………….. 42 II - Sexuality …………………………………………………………………….……….. 47 Chapter 3 • The Birth Control Pill and Women’s Sexuality ………………………..... 48 Chapter 4 • Censorship ………………………………………………...........………... 53 Chapter 5 • Homosexuality in Mad Men ……………………...……………………… 57 Chapter 6 • Donald Draper’s Sexual Transgressions …………………………...……. 66 Conclusion …………………………………………………………….……….…………. 74 Works Cited …………………………………………………………….………………... 79 Number of words: 23 710 Serediuc 4 List of Figures Fig. 1. O’Barr, William M. “Mad Men: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality, and Class.” Advertising & Society Review, vol. 11, no. 4, 2011. Project Muse, doi: 10.1353/asr.2011.0004. Fig. 2. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Het eerste seizoen [the first season], written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, Andrew Bernstein, Ed Bianchi et al, A-Film Home Entertainment, 2012. Fig. 3. “Flight 1.” Mad Men. Het tweede seizoen [the second season], written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, Andrew Bernstein, Ed Bianchi et al, A-Film Home Entertainment, 2012. Fig. 4. “Marriage of Figaro.” Mad Men. Het eerste seizoen [the first season], written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, Andrew Bernstein, Ed Bianchi et al, A- Film Home Entertainment, 2012. Fig. 5. “5G.” Mad Men. Het eerste seizoen [the first season], written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, Andrew Bernstein, Ed Bianchi et al, A-Film Home Entertainment, 2012. Fig. 6 - 8. “The Arrangements.” Mad Men. Het derde seizoen [the third season], written by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor, Andrew Bernstein, Ed Bianchi et al, A- Film Home Entertainment, 2012. Serediuc 5 Introduction On 19 July 2007, American television channel AMC released the series Mad Men (2007 – 2015), a period drama created by Matthew Weiner1. Over the following years the show was released in, among others, Australia, Canada and various European countries. Nicky Falkof explains that Mad Men, “[w]ith its jarring gender and racial politics, sleek visual aesthetic and intricate multi-strand narrative” has been a “significant critical and popular success, both in its home territory in the US and elsewhere in the Anglophone world” (31). To this remark, one could easily add that throughout the years, the show reached much further than the Anglophone world alone. According to Elke Weissman, Mad Men helped define AMC as “a home of quality American TV drama” (91). “After a somewhat slow start when the first season of the series appeared, by the end of Season Two Mad Men emerged as the cornerstone of AMC's programming” (Krouse 187). On the AMC website, the show is described as the very first series broadcasted on cable television to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in four successive years, that is from 2008 to 2011 (“AMC”). In a 2009 article for The New Yorker, George Packer writes that the period drama is particularly fascinating for the generation that came after the Mad Men characters and for the generation after that (Packer). According to him, the show’s “mesmerizing retro sheen” hides an inversion of morals and manners: “everything forbidden [to] us is permitted to, even encouraged of, these men and women—smoking and drinking to excess, office sex up to and including blatant harassment, parental neglect, a kind of frank selfishness about ends and means” (Packer). Simultaneously, the show depicts its characters in their struggle to conceal some of their hardships including homosexuality, illegitimate children and childhood poverty (Packer). Therefore, Mad Men “is all about repression—every character has a tell-tale tic, and 1 Knowing that the show has been running for seven seasons, this dissertation mostly focuses on examples from Serediuc 6 stiffness reigns over every scene—but it’s also about the license to indulge impulses that would soon be socially forbidden” (Packer). Throughout the seven seasons of the series, the spectator is intimately allowed into the life of protagonist Donald Francis Draper, Don Draper, as he divides his time between his successful career on New York’s Madison Avenue, his house in the suburbs that he shares with his wife and children, and the apartments and hotel rooms where he and female companions of his choice perform Don’s recurring escapades. Much attention is given to Don’s need for the affirmation of his masculinity, which often results in adultery and numerous one-night stands. Don’s complex persona is portrayed in the hyper-male context of a New York ad agency where other men are not afraid to measure their masculinity against Draper’s. A great deal of attention is given to the masculine side of the spectrum, but Mad Men does not forget to also assert the importance of the female characters. This period drama revolves just as much around Donald Draper, Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove as it does around Betty Hofstadt, Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway. The rich female presence on screen can be considered as a present-day aspect in a show that depicts an era in which women had fewer opportunities than men; this will further be extended in Chapter 1. The female characters are given just as much depth as the male characters in Mad Men, which, from a twenty-first century viewpoint is not surprising because, after all, behind every mad man there is a mad woman. Mad Men’s opening episode “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” starts off with the image of a black waiter holding a tray in his hand while moving through the crowd in a busy restaurant filled with smoke and chatter while Don Cherry’s “Band of Gold” blasts in the background. Creative director Donald Draper is sitting alone at one of the tables, scribbling ideas on a napkin as Sam, another black waiter, comes to clear his table. When Draper asks Sam why he smokes ‘Old Gold’, a white waiter comes up to the table to ask if Sam is bothering Mr Serediuc 7 Draper. The setting of the series is immediately confirmed and the spectators understand that everything that will follow hereafter, will be a projection of a time that seems to be far removed from their own, but simultaneously familiarly close. The feeling of going back in time, however, is established much sooner than the opening scene of the pilot episode. In the script for the one-hour pilot, executive producer and writer Matthew Weiner explains the title sequence: Images and sounds from late 1950's and early 60's advertising: Doctors selling cigarettes. Athletes selling liquor. Bathing suit models with vacuum cleaners. And most importantly, proud Dads with their perfect wives and children driving their cars to some green suburban utopia. We get a sense of the time and its ideals. (3) As the episodes proceed, the series’ curious spectators preserve the pretence of watching an authentic sixties show – the seven seasons depict the period from the year 1960 to the year 1971. Every detail that appears on screen, from the secretaries’ hairdo to the toys the children play with, is a means to distract the viewers from their everyday life and into the decade of the Swinging Sixties. While some references and events – such as the presidential election with candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960 – can be recognized as authentically belonging to the sixties, others – such as the explicit mentioning of the recently approved birth control pill – are only possible from a noughties perspective. Even though in general the series gives the audience an accurate representation

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