Deconstructing the apparition of faces in the Mad Men series

Mad Men, the award-winning original series on AMC, is an alluring, postmodern account of the American culture traditionally referred to as the "1960's".

Although this television show has won awards for its historical authenticity, its popular mass appeal may slightly suggest otherwise. It has the ability to deconstruct or to rigorously undo the fictional narratives on which this part of the American culture had been founded. It is easy to point out its unstable and irreducibly complex foundation with creative style which makes this program of value to the canon of 21 century popular art.

Executive producer and creator Matthew Weiner, who was a contributing writer on the HBO series The Sopranos and whom is a recent Golden Globe recipient for Mad Men, has found the perfect venue for the show's script on AMC.

"The Network was looking for distinction in launching its first original series," AMC Networks President Ed Carroll said. "We took bet that quality would win out over formulaic mass appeal."

And that it did. The majority of this television drama is set in the early 1960's at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York City; it is the perfect breeding ground to expose the lies of an idealized well-mannered and civil society. These ad men or "mad men" nurse stiff martinis before noon and blatantly harass the office secretaries in such a vulgar manner that can only be recognized today as instances of sexual harassment. In such an environment, the relationship between the sexes is exploited and then perpetuated in the advertisements they intend to sell.

The show even goes so far as to satirize the phony world of advertising by providing vintage commercials at the break. One of these clips showcases how laundry detergent has been sold through time by playing up the role of the wife and mother as the sole nurturer of the family. A panoramic view showed generations of women doing their family's laundry, with the only constant change being the technology, style and the tools they used to do the work. The commercial ended with a beautiful contemporary woman putting her family's clothes in the laundry basket, pleased and satisfied by the usefulness of the material product. If that isn't an artful means of deconstructing the unchanging female social role in a still current consumer economy, then what is?

Both the men and women in Mad Men understand the masculine and feminine roles that are expected of them; all stereotypes are represented. The men appear assertive, direct and emotionless and the women are maternal pleasers, proper and sweet. Key word: appear. As the show progresses, the careful deconstruction does likewise. The characters realize the gender roles they are expected to uphold are not adding up and they challenge these roles in very interesting, sometimes detrimental ways. So yes, Mad Men captures the historical aesthetics of the time. In fact, the clothing and visual appearance of the series can be hypnotizing to the eye. That may be the initial appeal but the real Mad Men enthusiast is drawn to the deeply embedded social conflicts that plague each and every one of the characters.

Even beneath the program's intentionally provocative layers there exists a meaningful depiction of characterization. The individual is both a part of and very distant from a culture that purports to define them based on their sex, social class, marital status, ethnicity and economic status. It stimulates the viewer, inviting him or her to consider the social conflicts of a culture that remain relevant today.

Lead character, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), creative director of Sterling Cooper, appears to be the typical archetype of late 1950's businessman with his slick parted hair, a thin necked tie and tailored wool suit. In action, Draper is revealed as a capitalist prince, convincing people that a life lived on commodity materialization is a meaningful pursuit. This unraveling of traditional stock characters of the late 1950's exposes new truths and identities that are deconstructed and exposed for an insightful perspective into a not so distant culture.

The characterization of Draper presents a stark contrast to Robert Young's rosy character, Jim Anderson in Father Knows Best. This feel-good 1950's television program, which ironically stopped airing in 1960, the same year the first episode of Mad Men is set, presents a very unrealistic representation of the social attitudes of the time. Unlike Anderson's character that superimposed unrealistic expectations of moral unity as the ideal "family man," Draper distinguishes a lead character that is anything but admirable. As a philandering husband, sexist co-worker and casual alcoholic, he represents a kind of troubled Byronic Hero whose prototype "bad boy" image assumes dark allusions to his troubled past and altered identity.

Dissimilar to conventional dramatic narratives, Draper is not the only character, the audience associates with intimately. All of the characters on Mad Men eventually unclothe their expected stock character personas to reveal their repressed desires in a culture that leaves little room for "otherness".

Take Joan Harris, the office's queen bee secretary who uses her cunning sex appeal to manipulate the male workers at Sterling Cooper and assume power in an otherwise male-orientated world. Or Salvatore Romano, whose closeted homosexuality is challenged in the third season when his client makes a pass at him, jeopardizing his entire career. Mad Men presents a new cultural study lens on the early 1960's, infusing the real nuances of the social world with impeccable storytelling that is far from traditional.

Weiner's characters are not only invariably unpredictable, they are often indefinable. In the beginning of the first season for example, it was easy to classify Betty Draper (Don's wife) as a typical housewife. She was beautiful, charming and aggravatingly compliant to her husband. Yet slowly but surely Mrs. Draper began to question the constraint ideologies that have dictated her life. At the end of season two, she comes to terms about her husband's apparent infidelities and summons the strength to kick him out of the house and begin a new life with another man she really loves.