A Question of Identity: AMC's Mad Men
Projected Reality in the Instant Classic TV Drama
Dec 16, 2008
What sets Mad Men, the American Movie Classic (AMC) channel's award-winning drama, apart from other shows is its ability to mirror function with form; the series, now two seasons complete, is about fictional Madison Avenue advertising firm Sterling Cooper, and every aspect—characters, sets, costumes, dialog—mirrors this milieu. By planting the drama in early 1960's New York City, Matthew Weiner, the creator, executive producer, and head writer of the series, is able to simultaneously capture an era with flawless precision while still reflecting on issues that are of the utmost relevance in today's society, as well.
Projected Identity
The primary theme Mad Men deals with is the question of identity; in this way, the advertising firm not only sets the stage but is almost a character unto itself. Sterling Cooper and its employees are obsessed with identity: ostensibly the identities—actual and projected—of their product clients and demographics; in actuality, however, this discussion is just the jumping off point for a deeper investigation of each character and his or her own identities, both internal and external. This conflict is most clearly realized in the series' two leads, Don and Betty Draper (Jon Hamm and January Jones).
Don Draper and Dick Whitman
The most obvious way Mad Men deals with the question of identity is with the double life that has been lead by its lead character. Born Dick Whitman, he escapes the Korean War by switching dog tags with his senior officer—the original Don Draper—when Draper dies in an air attack. The characteristics that allow Don to seamlessly begin a new life as a different person are the same traits that make him such an effective advertising executive and copywriter; he understands intuitively that reality is a construction, and that personality is a role. Concepts such as "real" and "true" are just that—concepts—and aren't moored to any sort of objective, external idea. The implication, of course, is that everybody in the world performs this same act every day, albeit on a different scale for most people.
Betty Draper
Don's wife, Betty, is just as complex and disturbed as Don himself; whereas Don can escape for moments on end, however—most specifically into his work at creating artifice and manufacturing reality—Betty has no such outlets for her immense dissatisfaction with the world. She enjoys riding her horse, but even that act entails a public projection of the calm and content housewife. It is this conflict of external and internal identities—between the reality she feels she must project into the world and the turmoil she feels she must repress—that leads to Betty's despair. Although her and Don's marriage appears to be the epitome of the American dream—young, attractive, well-to-do, beautiful children—each of them, both individually and as a couple, struggles to maintain this illusion against mounting internal issues.
AMC's instant-classic dramatic series Mad Men explores as its central theme the concept of identity—internal versus external, subjective versus objective. The backdrop of a mid-20th century New York City advertising firm acts as the perfect setting for such an exploration: the shift in paradigms that encompass different ways of viewing the world; and the use of advertising and its creation to reflect ideas about perception and projection.
For a further discussion of these issues, including the other primary Don surrogate, Peggy Olson, and the representation of homosexuality in Mad Men, continue on to the second part of this article: Identity Explored.
