It seems to me that the brilliance of Draper, and of Mad Men as a whole, is its ability to make people born in 1974 or 1983 or 1990 nostalgic for a world they never knew, except through a second-hand public school narrative that paints it in the gray flannel and sharkskin tones we've been trained to find so stultifying. Note, I'm not just talking about the Romanticism of a generation of liberals and feminists waiting pins-and-needles for the deliverance of the 60s. It's a bona fide sense that something was lost that we can't ever get back.
I think Foster gets to the heart of the matter - for me at least - in this excerpt. I remember reading a column about Mad Men last year that insisted that if you weren't watching the show as a critique of the era and its attitudes then you were watching it wrong. I felt that was wrong at the time and clearly others, including Foster, agree with me. Certainly one can read the show as a comprehensive critique if one is intent on it. Take for instance Don and Betty's treatment of their children, who are often ignored or told to go somewhere and play. If one is a practitioner of today's smothering, full-court press type of parenting then Don and Betty would indeed seem to be terrible parents. But when I think of my own childhood, contemporary with that of Sally and Bobby, I must admit that my upbringing was similar. We were often told to go outside and play and we didn't expect our parents undivided attention. And while I don't actually recall my mother being overly loving, I certainly never felt unloved - and I adored my mother. As I've argued before, I think Mad Men plays it pretty straight, trying to show the era as it was. It lets us make up our own minds about what's being presented.
So one of the appeals of Mad Men, for me, and as Foster argues, is the sense that we've lost something that those people had. I'm not even sure I can define what's been lost but I'll try. What's lost is a sense of decorum, a sense of style, an agreement on how people behaved in public, the way men treated women in public, a sense of dignity, a confidence, an optimism. What Burke called "the decent drapery of life." Yes, these things were operative primarily in the public sphere but there can be no doubt that they carried over into the private. And while I understand that Don Draper's private behavior is often monstrous, it's his public behavior that we find so attractive about him, the decent drapery. To give you a better understanding of what I'm getting at requires a more extensive excerpt of Burke:
All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland the simulation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
Mad Men shows us the decent drapery and the "naked shivering nature" side by side. It's part of what makes the show so fascinating. Season four will be set in 1964: the president is dead, the war in Vietnam is beginning to escalate, they are marching for civil rights in the south, The Beatles have just arrived in America - here come "the sixties." From our viewpoint we know what that means for America - all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off - but what it means for Don Draper is still to be seen.
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